Earlier today, the liberal journal of ideas The New Republic tweeted an extremely liberal idea from its official Twitter account:
Yes, that’s TNR tweeting “Fuck me daddy” at leading GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.
The tweet, which has since been deleted, was composed by writer Patricia Lockwood, who had recently written an enormously enjoyable profile of Trump and his supporters for the publication. “[W]ell that was fun while it lasted,” she wrote shortly afterward on her personal account.
“I hoped he would mistake it for a quote of his, and retweet it with extreme approbation,” Lockwood said when reached over Twitter DM.
For people familiar with TNR and Trump, but not the mores and customs of Twitter, the tweet may be baffling. Why do this? Well, there are many complicated reasons — some social, some political, some economic, some at the intersection of all these fields and many more — ha ha, no, I’m kidding. Teenagers tweeting sexually explicit requests at celebrities has become something of a running gag on Twitter. As Max Read wrote back in February:
[T]weeting rude things at famous people is, well, stupidly funny, in that stubbornly incomprehensible way teen pranks often are. But it’s also an attention-getting strategy. […] If you want people to see you, there’s no better way to do so than with creative obscenity adjacent to a celebrity tweet, like a nude cyclist drafting off a semitrailer truck.
Teens particularly love to tweet it at the Pope, who is celibate.
If you don’t find it funny, it may be because you are old, and the joke registers at a particularly teenage pitch. Nevertheless, here’s a helpful breakdown.
Fuck: Sex, generally speaking, is funny.
Me: Making such a bold proposal, publicly and on social media, is funny.
Daddy: Okay, this one is slightly more complicated, but it has to do with the group of sexual hang-ups generally known as “daddy issues,” which are uncomfortable for some and, by proxy, funny.
There you have it: Fuck Me Daddy, explained.
Trump has not yet responded to The New Republic’s offer.
