On October 17, 2017, a major paradigm shift occurred. At 4:09 p.m., @FabDLT_ tweeted, “‘Ew she fuck the weed man for weed’ — a bitch that’s fucking the Text man for Texts.” With this, @FabDLT_ (now @TheBigFucknFab) introduced a phrase that, for the last four and a half years, has served as the definitive thesis of the inherent bartering involved in dating dynamics.
The original tweet has since been deleted, but a screenshot of it has made it immortal. Every few months, it recirculates to remind us of its gospel. “It’s feminist rhetoric. Gender analysis. Dating advice. Class critique. A generational read. Pedagogy,” explained @theMidwhere in response to a tweet calling the original a foundational piece of internet writing. There are now hundreds of tweets referencing “the Text Man for texts,” many of which have thousands of likes. It seems like almost annually, the tweet recirculates, and we’re just as happy to be reminded of it each time.
“Fucking the Text Man for yexts” has been cemented in my mind since that fateful day. It describes any situation in which someone forms a relationship for no real purpose other than the superficial pleasures that come with it. Really, what is someone doing when they cling to a person for nothing more than little blips of intimacy and feel-good hormones? What do they really get from these relationships? For all intents and purposes, they’re fucking the Text Man for texts.
What exactly makes this so iconic, though? For one, it lays out the fundamentally transactional nature of many relationships, a nature that many people wrongly consider themselves to be above. Sometimes, we talk to someone solely because we get a little rush of endorphins when a notification pops up on our phone. It’s as simple as that. It’s the same reason why we might post on social media or swipe on dating apps when we’re not actually all that interested.
For whatever reason, we’ve labeled these shallow connections as morally superior to fucking someone for other benefits, like free weed, shelter or notoriety. Even when we don’t blatantly identify it as a trade of sex for other goods and services, surely many of us have indeed fucked somebody for taking us out to dinner or smoking us up without consciously considering it an exchange. In fact, we’ve probably fucked somebody for less.
And that’s perfectly okay! The point is, there’s no reason to feel holier-than-thou toward a person who does explicitly trade sex for whatever it is they want or need when many of us are tricking ourselves into thinking our behavior isn’t similar. Ultimately, that’s what makes @theMidwhere’s tweet about the line so true — this whole dichotomy is wrapped deeply in perceptions of sex work, class, sexual power dynamics and gender. But in so few words, @TheBigFucknFab managed to distill all of these politics into a now-iconic tweet. Now every time someone begins a new relationship, they have to ask themselves: Am I just fucking the Text Man for texts?
Magdalene Taylor
Magdalene Taylor is a staff writer at MEL. She covers internet culture, sex and the online adult industry. She lives in Brooklyn but is from God's Country, Western Massachusetts.
