Another kind of buddy

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Wed Jun 13 15:10:10 UTC 2007


At 8:35 AM -0400 6/13/07, Landau, James wrote:
>
>...
>As for "fuck buddy" being a gay male usage, that makes sense.  The word
>"buddy" is usually (though not always) applied to a man's male friend or
>helper, e.g. the "buddy system" in swimming.  (However, one can imagine
>a girl's swimming class using the buddy system.)
>
>Therefore for a woman to refer to a male lover as a "fuck buddy" is odd,
>since women do not generally refer to male friends as "buddies".
>Equally odd for a man (or for that matter a woman) to refer to a female
>lover as a "fuck buddy".  Hence the presence of the word "buddy" implies
>a male-to-male relationship, with the f-word specifying it is a sexual
>relationship.
>
FWIW (not much), there are twice as many google hits for "she's my
fuck buddy" as for "he's my fuck buddy", and previous posters have
indicated that whatever the origins, this is now a unisex term, no
longer implying male-to-male relationships.  That conforms to my
intuition too.

LH

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