Before anyone knew the identity of the suspect in the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, the gunman was elevated by some to folk hero status — a class warrior striking a blow against a harmful industry.

Then everyone saw Luigi Mangione’s picture. Suddenly, the Maryland man was more than a folk hero. He was a hot folk hero. Out came literal fan videos, mostly of him being handsome. One Bluesky user posted the now-ubiquitous photo of Mangione shirtless in the mountains with the caption, “I’d let him shoot me.”

I don’t want to be judgmental about your tastes. But y’all.

“I think there is a natural pull toward the shadow side of the human psyche, and different criminals sort of embody some of those shadow parts,” said Rachel Keller, a Baltimore-based licensed clinical social worker and American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists sex therapist.

Mangione joins a group of romanticized rogues that include Lyle and Erik Menendez, jailed for the murder of their parents; serial killers Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer; Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; and Jeremy Meeks, the former gang member and so-called “Hot Convict” whose handsome mugshot led to a modeling career — after his release from federal prison, of course. Even infamous murder-inspiring cult leader Charles Manson at 80 filed for a license to marry a 26-year-old woman.

So what’s this all about?

Keller thinks women, who have traditionally been made to repress their sexuality, have fantasies that “often play with the dark side, the transgressive and the taboo, and eroticism can live there.” Sexual coercion is a popular fantasy for women, she said, “so romanticizing a man who has crossed the boundaries of being a criminal sort of sits with that.”

That explains why some think even joking about getting shot by a dude as long as he’s sexy is OK. (IT IS NOT.)

Of course Mangione’s popularity is bound in more than his looks. Almost immediately after Thompson’s murder, the mysterious suspect became a conduit for people to tell their own stories of clashes with insurance companies. I opened a post on my private Facebook page to give friends a place to vent and got more than 100 comments. People are desperate, and mad. This opened the floodgates for that pain and anger to come pouring out.

Keller’s colleagues emphasized that the accused shooter has been elevated to a “symbol of a class revolution” that puts him “in a different category than the eroticism of other criminals like Dahmer.” Still, that doesn’t explain the thirsty TikToks.

“Progressive women find activism attractive, and of course this would be extreme activism: murder,” she said. “It’s a big question. What does activism look like, and when is it necessary for it to cross certain lines? I would say that Luigi Mangione is possibly the embodiment of those forbidden feelings. All of us have murderous rage or an aspect in ourselves that might cross that boundary to get justice. It doesn’t mean we all act on that, or on things that would be a crime.”

(I must note women aren’t the only ones interested in Mangione. Them, an LGBTQ+ site, acknowledged the response in the community to the suspect’s “almost comically defined washboard abs” and the abundance of “gay thirst tweets.”)

On her podcasts “You’re Wrong About” and “You Are Good,” writer and journalist Sarah Marshall examines historical and pop cultural phenomena, so she’s well-versed in what she calls “a tremendous inflation in white male serial killers historically” in terms of their actual attractiveness. “My vendetta is that Ted Bundy was not hot. He was just OK-looking and wore good sweaters,” she said. “It’s interesting to me that there is a sense of women finding killers hot, but [in Mangione’s case], this is the first time they were right.”

Some women don’t stop at just fantasizing about alleged murderers, but write to them in prison and even date them. Both Menendez brothers married while incarcerated, Lyle twice! “You might think, ‘What’s wrong with women?’ but whether you think someone is guilty or innocent, they definitely need you. Women want to be needed,” Marshall said. “From the moment you start being socialized, as a girl, you learn that love involves teaching a man to be less dangerous than he is. If you were raised on ‘Beauty and The Beast,’ you cannot be blamed for wanting to date a man on trial for murder.”

This leans into the long-held belief in popular culture that damaged men are a project only we can complete. Marshall noted the lyric, “They told me he was bad, but I knew he was sad,” from The Shangri-Las’ doomed boyfriend classic, “The Leader Of The Pack.” “It’s kind of what we train women to do,” she said. “We are told that in every way, we have to compensate for the way that men are, fold ourselves around them.” Reforming a killer, then, is the ultimate challenge.

I remember crushing on David, the hot but murderous vampire played by Kiefer Sutherland in “The Lost Boys.” He was the most dangerous in his gang of leather-clad blood suckers, but he also seemed super sad, and maybe he could be saved? Sigh.

While David is fictional, real-life murderers are always made more attractive onscreen. Dahmer was not nearly as handsome as Evan Peters, who played him on TV in 2022. Ditto actors Nicholas Alexander Chavez and Cooper Koch, the leads in “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story.”

When Charlize Theron played serial killer Aileen Wuornos in “Monster,” they actually uglied her up, so ironically killer women might not get the benefit of the doubt. “But Zac Efron as Ted Bundy?” Marshall asked. “Are you kidding me?”

Keller said those who have made Mangione’s mugshot a thirst trap are ultimately committing “a problematic projection of a part of themselves onto a criminal.”

“I would want to do the work with that person and ask, ‘What is this person carrying for you that you might want to better understand?’” she said. “There’s a lot of projection seeing that we only know what is reported in the news. We don’t even know who he is as a person.”

Maybe that’s the most appealing thing about him. He can be dangerously sexy from afar and fulfill our most subversive crush — because he can’t potentially cause us harm from behind a screen.