Dylan Jones asks why EVERYONE is loving daddies so much at the moment
Lots of words and phrases have taken over the internet this year. Lit. Woke. Shook. Mostly accompanied by a Kim Kardashian gif or a fire emoji. OR that gif of that woman from Big Brother America, opening the door and running into the room with her bag. YOU KNOW THE ONE. But possibly the most prevalent internet phenomenon, especially among the gays of Twitter and Instagram, is DADDY.
The other day, I “stumbled across” (searched for) one of those pics of Justin Bieber when he got papped emerging from the cool, foundation-infused waters of the pool at Donatella’s Miami home. For the record, I’d never fancied Biebs up until those shots. But now I do. Mostly because he doesn’t look like a ten-year-old girl anymore. He’s got some meat on his bones and some tattoos. He’s fit! But in the comments below, someone had written “OMG, Justin bieber is the ultimate daddy!”
Erm, he’s 22. So if Justin Bieber’s a daddy, then that makes Attitude cover star Nyle DiMarco, aged 27, a GDILF (granddad I’d like to fuck). And it makes David Beckham – someone famous for being the husband of Victoria Beckham – basically dead. He’s 41. But come on, we all totally still would!
I mean, OBVIOUSLY people don’t think Justin Bieber is a daddy. Despite broadening shoulders and increasingly ill-advised tattoos, he is still, to all intents and purposes, a twink. Imagine having Justin Bieber as a sugar daddy. You’d feel ridiculous. No, he’s not daddy material. He’s more houseboy material. Just have him around the house, and then when friends come over, put a frozen magherita in his hand and send him out to play on the inflatable pool swan.
There’ve been other, even MORE extreme examples. I’ve seen gay Australian singer Troye Sivan being called “daddy”, complete with that heart eyes emoji. Now, lovely and talented as he is, Troye Sivan looks like a chipmunk crossed with Christopher Robin, and is about as far from a daddy as it’s possible to be.
It just seems that, in the skewed, meme-tastic world of the 21st century internet, “daddy” has become synonymous with “hot” or “sexy”. But WHY. Why are we all so obsessed with daddies? It’s a growing porn trend too. If you log onto Pornhub, you can barely unbutton your jeans without a daddy/son roleplay movie popping up. There are even entire websites dedicated to it, and they’re very popular! They mostly involve Johnny Rapid on all fours on a coffee table surrounded by four or five husky older gentlemen. As you can see, I’VE DONE MY RESEARCH.
This is the thing though. There is, in my opinion, absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying a bit of daddy porn. I think I can safely say that all my friends, and probably you reading this now, have had a daddy fantasy at some point. Sexual fantasies are, within reason, totally harmless. And if we all started analysing all our sexual fantasies, we’d probably go insane. But the daddy thing, and its recent rise into the mainstream, is interesting.
For the most part, 2010 onwards has been the decade of the twink. Gay culture, and also mainstream popular culture, have revelled in the beauty of young boys. One Direction. Tom Daley. Zac Efron. The aforementioned Justin Bieber. If you think about it, being sexually attracted to pubescent boys is potentially WAY more problematic than being attracted to daddies
But now things seem to be swinging back around again. In 2015, David Beckham was voted People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive. And Idris Elba, aged 44, is set to top the list in 2016. Hopefully set to top me at some point too. American silver fox newsreader Anderson Cooper was voted sexiest broadcaster by American audiences in 2015. There’s a twitter account called Twinks4Trump, full of twinks saying “trump is daddy” and topless selfies in Donald Trump baseball caps. I’m not even sure where to begin with that one.
It would be easy (TOO easy) to say that the reason for the daddy fetish among gay men, is because of our relationship with our fathers. Despite changing attitudes, most of us have been let down by our fathers at one point or another. Many gay men have been abused by their fathers, or kicked out of their homes. Some haven’t spoken to their dads in years. So it’s textbook Freudian psychology that we’d try to fill the dadbod-shaped void in our lives by going out and finding ourselves a nice husky hairy older gentlemen to look after us and hug us and give us lifts up to Hampstead Heath in his range rover and cover the check for brunch at Café Rouge.
It’s not that simple though. For a start, the daddy craze is not specific to gay culture. It’s a craze sweeping the whole Western world. Perhaps our generation have ALL been let down by our fathers. It makes sense if you think about it. Our dads were from a weird sociopolitcal epoch. Born in the sixties, young adults in the seventies, and then had us in the late eighties/early nineties. They lived through the reign of Thatcher, a strong, deeply psychotic female figure. They also lived through the AIDs crisis, not to mention 9/11. Confused by the free living of the seventies, the austere bleakness of the eighties, and the mad neon of the 90s, which all came crashing down with the twin towers in 2001, they probably just thought “fuck it” at exactly the time when we were just reaching our most psychologically sensitive.
That’s one theory anyway. It’s all quite tenuous though isn’t it. Basically, I think it’s ultimately something we don’t need to worry about. It’s an interesting trend, but like all trends in 2016, it’ll have its five minutes then fade into obscurity, along with Zara Larsson, Stranger Things and Pokemon Go. Oh, except George Clooney. George Clooney will always be hot, even when he’s in a retirement home with a catheter bag.
