A Brief Theory of What's Wrong with Being a Fuckboy
Quite a bit, it turns out!
Let’s start outside the realm of the sexual to define the thing at stake. When I was much younger, I worked on a strange enterprise with someone who ended up exploiting me badly, before blowing up at me. Prior to that last bit, though, they asked me to do something curious with the company’s Twitter account: follow a large number of people each day, and then unfollow the people I’d followed the previous day. The goal, of course, was to get people to engage in the prosocial behaviour of “follow-for-follow”, where they’d follow our company’s account back. It worked very well, I’m sorry to say. Humans love to be shown attention, even in this superficial way, and they love to be reciprocal. Especially in that slightly more innocent time on the internet, people followed our company right back. We’d then unfollow them, which they sometimes noticed and sometimes didn’t. The number of followers grew rapidly.
I am not proud of this—it feels icky even to think about. Nevertheless, it worked splendidly. Eventually, I quit the company and ended the quasi-friendship, too. The person in question now has tens of thousands of followers, and I always wonder how many they acquired in this follow-for-follow way.
The point here, though, is that it is this structure of faux attention that is at stake, when it comes to the fuckboy. Someone who loses interest in a relationship isn’t necessarily a fuckboy (especially not if they can tell you that nicely, in a timely manner). The fuckboy is doing something specific: they stimulate your interest, they get what they want, perhaps they do something tricky to keep your attention for a while, then they unceremoniously leave the picture, unwilling to take on discomfort to acknowledge you or what has happened.
Definitions vary, as they often do with insults. But as generally used, a fuckboy is someone who is not just sleeping around, but doing so in a way that harms people. Usually this involves showing interest and then pulling away without meaningful communication. A fuckboy, as one person put it to me, is a person who is only nice to you because they want to have sex with you, and who eventually isn’t nice or even decent to you at all. They’re instrumental (whether they recognise it or not).
There have, of course, been fuckboys from time immemorial, Casanovas, Don Juans, arguably even Hamlet… Given the nature of human reproduction and patriarchy, there has always been a worry about male seducers leaving women deflowered, pregnant, heartbroken, situationship-ed, unwed.
And yet, there is an aspect of the modern fuckboy that might be unique, beyond the new possibilities for their gender. This little essay is about that.
I’ll admit it right away—I feel a little silly trying to theorise about the fuckboy (isn’t this a problem for the self-help column?). But I’m going to plug along anyway and suggest there might be something we can learn from looking at the fuckboy, if we squint. If we can articulate what’s wrong with the modern fuckboy, we might just be able to identify a kernel for a modern sexual ethics that isn’t about 1) chastity 2) monogamy, 3) any particular form of romance 4) sexual health, or 5) reproduction.
I want to do this because the first two phenomena don’t interest me, frankly — though power to you if you happen to enjoy them. I certainly do not believe in chastity or monogamy as universal standards for morality or human behaviour, and I do not think they can be justified as such.
As for the middle phenomena, romance: it’s relevant, as it is so often tangled up with our sexual aspirations. But it isn’t all that great as a norm to impose on others. I don’t see how I could justify telling people they should only have sex aimed at, or within, romantic love, not least since it varies widely by historical context and individual eccentricity.
As for the last two, more practical sexual concerns, STIs and reproduction: these aren’t universal considerations. Nor, for all kinds of reasons, does it generally go well when these are placed as our main ethical considerations when it comes to sex. (That’s why the health classes in so many high schools feel weirdly besides the point, hollow in fact). Of course, of course: we should often use condoms and birth control (etc); but we need a sexual ethics that has more to say about sex than this. Sex is a form of social life, it is an emotional experience, it is a source of power and pain, it goes beyond anything to do with infections and pregnancy.
Finally: I think it’s worth digging a little into the structure and meaning of the fuckboy for reasons that extend beyond sex and love. The fuckboy is interesting because he (or she, or…) is a figure who sits on a spectrum alongside other types of trick-sy transactional actors. Not all of us have slept with a fuckboy; but all of us have probably been hurt by some adjacent phenomenon in another realm: the fake friend, the networker with ulterior motives, the scam artist, the catfisher... We’re all living in an alienated, un-relational, world. Which means there are so, so many ways for us to get hurt. And that’s why this matters. This piece is not about moralizing fuckboy behavior or even analyzing individual motivations, but looking at this kind of behaviour as a relational structure of our times.
You’re just being a prude, my readers might object. I understand the wariness; despite all appearances, we are living in a prudish age. Our culture has somewhat accepted homosexuality, and even carved out a few particular moments in the lifespan where people are acknowledged to be more promiscuous, but “casual” sex is in truth still deemed less mature, less responsible. And don’t get me started on how the world sees people choosing to have multiple relationships.
So let me make this clear, as a polyamorous woman who not only has casual sex but foolishly admits it on the internet: the fuckboy isn’t bad for wanting casual sex. Casual sex can be nice, in both senses of the word! The fuckboy also isn’t wrong because they want to stop seeing someone. We all always have the right to do that. They’re “bad” because they are relying heavily on reciprocal norms and expectations about basic human relationality to get what they want: norms and expectations that serve them, but which they will soon abandon, shrugging and throwing up their hands. And the norms at stake are not, to be clear, about romance or further sexual endeavours with the person in question (we can never owe anyone these). The violation of norms is about a willingness to provide a certain baseline of recognition, kindness and communication.
(Of course, any therapist could tell you that this kind of norm-violation is symptomatic of someone who is unwilling to risk something, even a little vulnerability and effort, to acknowledge another person. But—as I shall emphasise in a moment—it’s not the psychology of the fuckboy that interests me here.)
Ghosting someone after sex and moving on to the next person ASAP is the cliche, and often the reality. (Being ghosted is fundamentally part of this structure, it’s the pulling away that necessarily follows after a faked intersubjectivity). But there are soft ways to ghost; one of these soft ways that one watches over and over in one’s 20s and 30s, either in one’s own life or the life of one’s friends, is a kind of endless waffle about what the relationship is—this keeps people on the hook, giving them just enough attention, all the while allowing the fuckboy to keep their options open and not face loss.
The philosopher Michael Rea argues that an image is sexual pornography when we use it to get the pleasure of sex while avoiding any of the complexities of “physical intimacy, emotional connection and romantic interaction” which is to say: messy mutuality! Building on this, the philosopher C Thi Ngyuen argues that many of us are watching “porn” in non-sexual contexts, too. Ngyuen (who used to be a food writer!) suggests that actually many things on the internet now have this pornographic structure. There’s food porn and real estate porn and poverty porn and so much porn, really. As Ngyuen puts it, “With porn, we get to skip the hard part.”
The fuckboy, I would argue, is the person who has taken on this structure of desire in the rest of their life. They are “watching porn” only without the mediated image. Or, let’s be honest, given the fuckboys I’ve known: they’re doing both—asking you for nudes out the wazoo, but also treating in-person you a bit the same way. They are trying to have the pleasure of sex without the messiness or emotional care involved in even casual sex. They may even pathologise any messiness that arises, because it’s not part of the “game” they want to play, and they’re not interested in the mutuality that is part of most other social interactions, especially not in this sphere.
When people complain and opine about dating apps and the resultant hook-up culture they are really often pointing to this, the way people can be made into porn, even when the screens go away. And the structure of this type of interaction makes us all wary, paranoid, eager to get any attention at all and sometimes scammy in the act of getting it. This exacerbates gendered tensions (more on that in a minute) and makes us all perhaps more cynical that we otherwise would be. The fuckboy hurts the social world, in short, they make the dating pool a less pleasant place for everyone, and it already sucked quite a bit. The stakes for their behaviour are high because the results affect everyone, at least a little.
Again, though, this essay isn’t about how fuckboys are bad people. The point is: of course we’re all structurally tempted to be fuckboys a little bit, because we live in an age of sex porn and food porn and so much other porn.
Where does this swerving of relationality come from? In truth, a sense of basic obligation to people we meet is inherent to any ongoing social structure, and given that we evolved to live in small tight knit-groups, we probably have spent most of human history mostly engaged in relational exchanges, sexual and otherwise, where the relationship (in the broad sense) is more important than any particular exchange, whether sexual or material. If we’re likely to meet someone again in life, our calculus about how to treat them changes, even if we don’t know them very well. Even today, in our huge, alienated world, there are relationships like this: we might do nice things for our next door neighbors (for example) not because we need something specific from them, but because having a good relationship, however casual or even formal, is valuable in its own way. The relationship matters more than any exchange, and recognition is required. This is the point always made by little-c communists and theorists of debt: humans engage in care for each other without keeping score all the time when there’s any form of relationality involved. It’s a normal human behaviour—just not so much under our current economic system.
But in large societies, and in capitalist societies, we have another tool for getting what we want: money. Money allows us to get what we want without even talking to the guy at the front counter of the corner store. This is (part of) why Karl Marx called money “the universal whore, the universal pimp of men and peoples.”1 (He does this regularly in his writings in fact—and notice that he uses these phrases precisely to stimulate the readers’ discomfort with the way money can break down even the supposed sacredness of sexual relating). You can get anything with money, even sex, without having to really see or care about another person. The exchange matters more than the relationship, and no recognition is required.
In a world centered around exchange, we can just walk into a store and bark orders at someone and then never see them again (and we are treated this way at work a lot of the time). We can purchase things online and never talk to anyone. Most people we run into we may never meet again. We do not have to consider relationality very much, if we really do not want to.
Which means that sex exists in a strange place in this modern world. Outside of sex work, sex is an activity where some level of affection and interest is the script for how we get people into bed. (This is probably why sex workers still have to furnish some of this script in many cases, e.g. the “girlfriend experience.”)
So how does this combination of a norm around affection and sex, and the transaction-heavy nature of the modern world, play out? In short, some of us learn that we can give just enough attention up front, faking relationality and recognition, to get a transaction we want (sex) and that after a certain interval we can simply walk away. It’s not all that different from what’s going on with a waiter or a salesperson. The salesperson may well use a faux emotional intimacy to get a sale or a tip; the consumer doesn’t have to.
One way to think about the fuckboy is that they are someone who takes the role of the salesperson to get what they want, and then behaves as the consumer, impersonally, after they receive it.
In sexual relationships, in any case, this is largely still how things go: there’s a kind of affection or charade of relating before sex, if one can’t summon the real thing. (I’m told a very specific culture on e.g. Grindr is the exception, but cannot comment on this). In this sense, we might see the fuckboy as someone who does this fake-relationality in a particularly chronic and predictable way, who has carried over their way of customer-relating-to-the-salesperson into a realm where people are far more emotionally vulnerable, and primed to expect something else: if not romance, a certain kind of care. It’s the logical sexual result of a socially alienated world, where intimacy is regularly commodified for other purposes.
I know that this may sound very judgmental, very moralistic. It’s not really intended as such. I’m not trying to categorise some people as Bad People.
In fact, it’s even possible to pity fuckboys. There are always psychological explanations and sympathetic defenses for this kind of behaviour. They don’t realise it, they’ve been badly hurt themselves, etc. Sure! That’s probably true in many cases. After all, why would one engage in this relatively un-relational activity, in this uneven dynamic, in something that makes people angry at you, unless relational sex (however casual) was somehow even more emotionally difficult?
And how bleak is that?
But (again) my point isn’t that we should hate on, or even feel for, the individual fuckboy. It’s not about any particular person any of us have dated. Many of us have been hurt; many of us also have done this, in ways small and large, for situational or emotional reasons.
No; my point is that we should recognise this structure and avoid it, both ends of it.
And it is a structure that I’m interested in here—a structure of power and attention, and a pattern of behaviour. That’s why it matters very little whether the fuckboy means to harm when they pay lots of attention, then ghost (in the most classic example). They may well believe they have not done anything instrumental; they are just hurting, not ready to settle down, just not feeling it, etc. The point isn’t about the inner life of any particular chronic fuckboy. (Frankly, I’ve done enough fuckboy-analysis over brunch in my life; one of the social costs of fuckboys is they often lead the people they’re involved with, and the friends of those people, to spend endless time thinking about and trying to understand them. This analysis tends to happen with imbalance in any kind of relationship—the person getting screwed over tries to analyse, the person who has hurt them thinks about everything far less.)
The point is the structure of the interaction, and the fungibility it implies for human relationships. This extends to all the adjacent forms of sneakily-non-reciprocal behaviour: to the scam artist, the fake friend, the annoying networker, etc. Motivations may vary; the structure is the core of the problem.
It’s this faux-relationality that gets to the heart of the harm involved. Yes, the harm, and not the hurt. After all, emotional hurt is not harm, in itself. Many valid choices cause hurt; anyone who breaks up with anyone will probably cause some hurt. Hurt is not the same as harm. But with ghosting, and other adjacent fuckboy behaviours, the problem goes beyond hurt: the person in question is being tricked so there is a question of deception, which is a form of injustice. They are being used. And when someone discovers they’ve been deceived, it often makes them more wary and paranoid about the world, taking away from their ability to navigate it well in the future. Look at all the relationship advice thrown up on instagram if you want to see what happens when enough fuckboys behaviour is happening: people become paranoid and fearful about the reality that they are likely to be used.
Plus, this type of behaviour can make one feel dehumanised. Who doesn’t even deserve a response to a text message? (as one friend put it to me.)
And what about gender? Of course, anyone can fuckboy. And yet, (it almost doesn’t need saying) fuckboys are still often literally that: boys, or men, that is, who are soft- or hardcore ghosting women. This places a special grim darkness at the heart of the matter; for women are already often caught in the double bind of doing more relational work and then being pathologised for having strong emotions, as though the first wasn’t a role thrust upon them and the second wasn’t the logical consequence of the first. In a situation(ship) with a fuckboy, both these phenomena come into play: a woman may find herself putting in all the relational work of the interactions and then also find herself being judged as crazy or needy for being upset when there is no reciprocation.
To the archetypal fuckboy, other people are simply being demanding drama queens or just totally overthinking it—the fuckboy cannot figure out, in short, why people who followed them back are now upset when they are unfollowed.
It’s not all on the fuckboys of the world, though. Those who find themselves susceptible to being on the “other” end of this situation have work to do on their imaginary also. Our culture still loves to valorise a woman who can “fix” a man or “finally get him to settle down” and many a person allows themselves to fantasize that that is what they are up to in their “situationship”. If the fuckboy is, at some level anyway, responsible for an unhealthy set of behaviours, one that harms people, then so too are those who regularly deploy the fantasy of “fixing him” to harm themselves. But on the whole, my sympathy lies with the fuckboy’s ghosted/jilted sexual partners, not least because fuckboys often end up taking advantage of those who are deprived or vulnerable in some way. It’s easiest for them to interact with (say) those who only know how to give, or who unconsciously don’t think they’ll get attention any other way.
And this pattern of picking the more vulnerable for this type of dynamic prevails outside of the context of sex and love too—consider the people chosen by (say) scam artists, cults, or even manipulative entrepreneurs. When I was working for the person who had me follow and unfollow people, I was much, much younger than them. I was paid nothing, promised shares in a company that eventually never existed. I was flattered and convinced it was worth my time because I was special, what we were making was special. We never had a romance or a sexual relationship, to be clear. But the structure of the interaction was similar to certain kinds of situationships—and I can’t help but feel that person chose me precisely because I was young and idealistic enough to be uncritical.
The fuckboy presents both a problem and a theoretical opportunity today because even among the avowedly sex-positive (or sex-neutral), it’s difficult to articulate a sexual ethics past the question of verbal consent. And because we already can engage in transactions rather than relationships in other areas of life, it’s difficult to spot this kind of problem that I’ve described above.
Conceptually one can always do the necessary social work to have relatively ethical casual sex. One of my favourite fuck buddies/former fuck buddies is still my friend. What stands out about his behaviour is that he’s deeply mutual and relational, even though there is no romance involved at all. He helps me with various introductions to people, and he tells me what isn’t going well in his life. (Vulnerability isn’t too hard for him.) There are no obligations of any specific form between us. But when someone generally treats you well, this isn’t needed.
In contrast, the fuckboy refuses to see what work could be done, and should be done, to make the sex they have involve acknowledgement of another human being’s equally valid subjectivity.
More broadly, we all need to be on the lookout for fuckboys in non-sexual contexts, for people who will rely on the shredded social fabric’s weak but present reciprocity norms to get what they want and then leave, further shredding social trust in the process. We’re all vulnerable today to this precisely because our social bonds are weaker than they have been historically in a long time. Some of what is at stake with the fuckboy is also at stake in the person caught in an MLM scam with their friends, for example. (Many other examples abound. Tell me about it in the comments). We have to look for people who are trying to get stuff from us without the work and messiness of real relating. Often the people in question don’t have another way of understanding how people could interact. That is sad-and it is dangerous.
That’s the real point about the fuckboy: sex does not need to always be serious, but other human beings always require serious consideration. This is perhaps as close as we can get to a sexual ethics today. It might just be good enough. In any case, the fuckboy can be the starting point for our analysis, our gateway to thinking and doing better when it comes to sex. Let’s thank him—and stop responding to his text messages.
Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 377.
Brilliant read!
Thanks so much for sharing this perspective. Mututality and shared norm exploitation are great lenses for understanding how casual sex seeking turns into fuckboi.