A good insult requires no elaboration. We feel it before we understand it. That’s why some slurs resonate even when we’re not sure who or what they’re defaming. Consider the strange case of fuckboy, which plays a central role in Nancy Jo Sales’ controversial article, “Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse,’ ” in this month’s Vanity Fair. Here are two true statements about the word: Everyone knows what fuckboy means. And no one knows what fuckboy means. [...]
This array of meanings is almost certainly a consequence of the complicated uptake and appropriation of fuckboy. Sales nods to the term’s history—“The word has been around for at least a decade with different meanings”—though she fails to explore that history at all. In our conversation, Massey claimed that fuckboy had entered her social world sometime in the past year, but acknowledged that it had a fuzzier past. “I was told that we stole it from gay men,” she told me. “I don’t actually know.” [...]
It’s not uncommon to locate the origins of fuckboy in prison slang, where, according to some accounts, it refers to “men who are ‘gay for pay.’ ” Other sources directly connect the term to prison rape, or suggest that it operates in the space where those two meanings overlap. The word has also been associated with gay male culture—though there too it takes on a variety of specific connotations. I’ve heard it used to refer to men who take a submissive role in sex. But one acquaintance told me that, “to gay men like me it means a rich and powerful man’s kept boy.” [...]
As the Huffington Post’s Sara Boboltz notes, fuckboy has appeared “in a growing number of rap and hip-hop songs” in the decade since Cam’ron first employed it. Unsurprisingly, listeners started noticing the word before journalists did. A 2009 thread in the Hypebeast forums finds users wondering over the word’s derivation while others mock them for arriving late to the party. Significantly, the commenters evince little agreement about fuckboy’s significance or etymology. They propose a variety of possible meanings, all ugly but widely divergent in the specific onus of their ugliness, except insofar as they tend toward a homophobic register.
No comments:
Post a Comment