Fuckboy’s Progress

The parlance of our time

For the villain wishing to slander a woman as promiscuous, our language makes the task all too—well, easy.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an observer in possession of good sense, must be in want of harsher male equivalents.

Enter: fuckboy, n.

God knows we need to celebrate the small victories.

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I could not for the life of me remember the birthday of my Big College Ex.

By senior year, she was sick of it.

One day she turned to me: “Alex, you’re a great writer September 14th. Everyone wants to sleep with you September 14th,” and so on.

It, uh, worked. Apparently.

Excluding that incident and most of the rest of my choices, I was a great boyfriend. If we also exclude the fact that I refused to use the word “boyfriend” or otherwise acknowledge the relationship-ness of the relationship.

My idea of a date was filling a Nalgene with Keystone Light and “seeing where the day takes me.”

We didn’t have the word yet, but this was fuckboy behavior.

At one point she suggested that dishonesty was afflicting our relationship.

I have a painfully vivid memory of my response: “Honesty is a thing. It isn’t the thing.”

Fuckboy philosophy 101.

I’ve since turned over a near-orchard of new leafs. I’m different, now. But not always as different as I hope: it managed to surprise me that I wasn’t invited to her wedding.

My being surprised—disappointed is the word I’m avoiding—it isn’t ha-ha funny. It’s another, darker kind of funny; it’s embarrassing for sure. It’s bloggable, is what it is.

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The wisdom of crowds isn’t always wise. People said Gravity was a good movie.

But new slang always renews my faith in humanity, BuzzFeed’s murder of the phrase notwithstanding.

The word fuckboy is a trochee knockout, a one-two punch. Like “thirst trap,” it boasts remarkable economy.

My friend Andrew took this in New Orleans—Jazz Fest!—at the beginning of the summer. As the best new picture of me in, several years tbh, I tripped over myself to plaster it across the internet (this is literally like the fifth place I’ve posted it—anyone have a login to Jeremy Renner’s app slash fan community?). Thank you, Andrew.

After quitting drinking, a fun and bracing watershed: the first time you watch yourself send the equivalent of a “you up?” text in broad daylight, sober as a judge. What a thing, this being alive, a person.

Shortly after the picture above was taken, I put on the fuckboy hat to text a Friend In New Orleans: “jazzfest lol?”

The response I received was a combination—a gumbo if you will—of What, No, and I’m Actually At A Smaller, More Indie Music Festival Outside The City.

Naturally.

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I’m interested in two phases of the slang lifecycle.

First, the process of initial formation—who first said fuckboy qua fuckboy?

Every new instance of popular slang is a diamond. If you squint into its glinting strangeness, you can almost see the heat and pressure that formed the term: innumerable iterative refractions of social brilliance.

I know I’m losing some of you with this, filthy prescriptivists that you are.

So for the classicists: If we celebrate the elegance of Beowulf naming the ocean “whale-road”—the very phrase blooming into image-petals from the seed of its simplicity—surely we can celebrate “thirst trap” for the same virtues.

I’d like to woo you further by explaining how “fuckboy” marries the gruff Anglo-Saxon of its first syllable with the coquettish Norman French of its second, reflecting the latter language, post-Beowulf, mixing into ours as a coup de grace finishing touch on the (Middle) English we know—but I have no idea if that is real or true, much less trill, and it’s too late to Google if I want to be on time to a thing later. A date, okay!! After all: being late would be fuckboy behavior, irrespective of century.

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Diamonds—heat plus pressure plus time, right?

The other phase of a word’s lifecycle I’m fascinated by is the eventual field reversal.

Wait long enough and your local[?] skaters[??] can flip a word like “sick” into high praise.

(In my Personal Life, I’m trying to similarly flip “hideous” and “gruesome.” Call it a passion project. I’d learn to skate but my shins ache just thinking about it.)

Wait longer and “sick” is once again negative, but still divorced from health: now “sick” is primarily sarcastic, drawing a damning contrast between your interlocutor, a dweeb, and the Arcadian ur-skaters who, improbably enough, still own a non-trivial portion of authenticity-production.

Source-ish

You can’t step in the same river twice: it’s not the same river; you aren’t the same person. (I once started that quote in the presence of Doc Roon, who just said, “Yes, you can.” Which is, also persuasive, actually.)

You can already see the beginning of this process with fuckboy. When a meme-maker calls black Adidas sandals “fuckboy slides,” that early germ of affection is discernable.

Even terms like “slut” are not immune. If it’s the early 2000s, the correct name for your new literary blog—especially as a non-male blogger—is Bookslut.

I fear, though, that feminine pejoratives have a generally longer shelf life than masculine ones. Flux abides, but the shape of culture can be stubborn.

Denouncing a man as a rogue or scoundrel—or RAKE—might once have packed punch, but by the time it’s the 1970s, scoundrel appears more often as “charming scoundrel,” i.e. Han Solo.

In the 18th century, William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress painted a decidedly less than affectionate portrait of the titular rake: he sleeps around, obtains syphilis, and dies insane in an asylum.

Skip ahead to 2009 and Harlequin Regency publishes a romance novel called The Rake’s Wicked Proposal.

By contrast, it’s not my impression that Harlequin publishes titles like “Harlot’s Triumph” or “Eat, Pray, Strumpet,” however warmly those antiquated terms might be used socially this century by those of a literary bent.

Here, then, is my Call To Action.

As an anti-patriarchal gesture, insist on continuing to use “fuckboy” in a mean way this weekend. We’re gonna resist flipping this one. Call someone fuckboy today. Then clarify that you aren’t being nice.

SEE YOU NEXT FRIDAY, DEAR FRIENDS.