Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Reuters
Last November, after a screening of The Banshees of Inisherin, I ran to Twitter to do what any professional entertainment writer would do upon seeing a movie they really liked. No, I didn’t draft a 140-character review. Instead, I went to my search engine and typed in “colin farrell fancam,” to celebrate one of my favorite underrated actors’ emergence into the Oscars realm in a now-deleted tweet. (OK, maybe it was just me thirsting over his specifically Irish brand of sexiness.)
Scrolling through fancams, I was bombarded with tweets referring to the 46-year-old actor as “babygirl,” a term of endearment I’m obviously familiar with, but have never called a man. Like most internet jargon, coated with a level of irony, it immediately made sense. Colin Farrell, with his big, sad puppy-dog eyes, is “babygirl.” And apparently, so is Paul Mescal, Pedro Pascal, Succession character Kendall Roy, Jeremy Allen White, Jacob Anderson, and a bunch of male K-pop artists, according to Twitter and TikTok.
This led me to wonder what exactly does it mean for a grown-ass man to be “babygirl,” and why is this term so goddamn infectious?