BFF

I’m ashamed to admit that, for a very long time, I thought that “BFF” meant “butt fuck friend.” That it was a thing the kids were saying and had somehow become mainstream. I figured I was just out of touch, and was too afraid to ask anyone about it. I like to pretend I’m hip and in the know.

I don’t think I’m too terribly off base with this belief. Remember a few years ago when the news broke that oral sex was on the rise in our schools? Girls saw oral sex as an acceptable way to avoid losing their virginity, so it was this big thing and the media was outraged on behalf of the lazy parents who raised such idiots. This even leaked into our popular culture, namely Dante’s girlfriend in Clerks, a scene that even went so far as to justify, somewhat, the trend.

Now, almost two decades later, I figured the same thing was going on with “butt fuck friends.” Like, maybe it had become the big thing to have anal sex in order to not lose your virginity. Like Nadine in The Stand. I figured one of two things had happened to bypass the media outrage: It was still in some sort of sub-culture infancy stage, too horrible to be believed. Or, maybe, something happened that I missed and it became a massive meme and the joke spilled out through the cracks into the mainstream. But, like the double rainbow guy, was never really newsworthy.

I stopped watching the news, anyway, leading up to 2008 because Obama started to eat the enamel off of my teeth. The only things that punch through now are when a nuclear reactor explodes or a freak earthquake rocks DC. Nature herself has to descend and kick me in the balls to get me to watch regular news.

I took great pride that I didn’t know who or what the Tea Party was until their DC rally fucked up my commute. Then I had no choice but to stop and see what was happening in politics, at which point I screamed and went back into hiding.

Since I’m now in my fourth year of a Total News Blackout, I’ve started to accept that I’m missing some things. That I’ve become unplugged from modern culture and frozen in place. It’s possible to completely miss, say, a new phenomenon where brainless high school girls had turned to anal sex in order to preserve their chastity. They call these casual partners “BFF’s.” Insert shot of indignant newscaster, cut to footage of alarmed soccer mom and other PTA members. Cut to newscasters reading from blogs where teenaged girls are saying it’s no big deal and they have multiple BFF’s, sometimes at the same time.

I think it dawned on me late last year when a character on a sitcom actually defined the term. The need for her to do so, though, sort of suggests that I wasn’t the only one out of the loop.

Looking back, I’m a little bit horrified at my assumptions. I would occasionally hear the term from my own friends, usually when describing relationships. “They’re BFF’s. ” It seemed to be a strange thing to say so casually. But we live in modern times. I tried not to judge, or let strange anal visions leap through my head. But, occasionally, I’d meet some of these people described as BFF’s and think to myself, heh, where’s your butt fuck friend?

Now that I think about this, it occurs to me that I may owe some people an apology… And several others an explanation.