I recently had a conversation with Taylor “Tim Riggins” Kitsch where we agreed that Friday Night Lights’ grandma’s boy Matt Saracen would be the one you should marry. But the subtext was that Riggins—Saracen’s self-sabotaging, cheating, felonious, exclusively either drunk or hungover, six-packed counterpart—was the obvious hotter choice.

I wish this weren’t true, but being a dick is hot—onscreen. (Real life is another story.) The sexy fictional villain theorem states that there is a positive correlation between how hard it is for a fictive bad guy to be good and how hot it is when he manages do it. When an asshole keeps himself from exsanguinating the object of his desire, or kidnapping her and taking her to Bowser’s Castle, or destroying an entire city while tenderly crushing her in his giant monkey hand, it makes her the exception—the one person the villain can be good for. (This explains the early success of Miles Teller and the fortunes made by the Twilight series and its fanfic follow-up 50 Shades of Being a Dick, as well as James Spader’s entire career—get at me, Sex, Lies, and Videotape heads!) Sometimes, of course, fictional villains just can’t control their dickishness, acting even more horrible in order to catch the attention of their obsessee. In these instances, the extent of their badness demonstrates the depth of their horniness. It would honestly be rude to not respond in kind.

I dusted off my TI-84, and, after discovering “80085” doesn’t look like “BOOBS” on a graphing calculator, came up with a proprietary algorithm to determine which traits—sadism, vengefulness, self-loathing, and self-loving—combine to make the hottest fictional bad guys. It is both unimpeachable and flawless. Thanos is not on it because he is not hot. This is the Sexy Villain Matrix.

The Joker, The Dark Knight (Sadistic, self-loathing)

There’s something about his anarchic torment of Batman that just does it for me—the Joker simultaneously does not give a single fuck and puts a tremendous amount of care into everything he does, like an evil Rihanna. And while I don’t love the Joker’s makeup or dye job, he has Heath Ledger’s bone structure.

Don Draper, Mad Men (Self-loathing, survivalist)

Don Draper is hot because a) look at him with your eyes, and b) he’s in an S&M relationship with both himself (auto-sado-masochism?) and everyone else. Don spends his entire life trying to convince people that he’s great and then punishing everyone who thinks he is. He got Betty to cheat on Henry Francis at camp, had a regrettable threesome with Megan, angry-finger-banged Bobbie Barrett in a bathroom, and locked Sylvia Rosen in a hotel room without clothes or any reading material. He also loves getting negged: remember when he and Megan fought and she said he was too old to get it up and they had sex on the floor after the “Zou Bisou Bisou” party? That was hot. Don sits in the middle of vengeful/sadistic spectrum because he is also petty as hell.