The dilemma with ‘daddy’: analysis of the erotic myth of the interesting mature that makes Pedro Pascal, David Harbor or Idris Elba sweep

As has happened with so many other things, it turns out that historically discriminated social groups had already invented this daddy thing before the masses adopted it. Thus, the world should recognize that African Americans and homosexuals came first. A daddy, that is, a papi, is a man of legal age, with an attractive physique but not typically muscular, with a protective, serene and decisive character who, in a relationship with a younger person, acts as a protector, mentor and sometimes patron , in addition to (that’s what we came for) sexual partner….

References to a daddy as a romantic partner already appear in jazz and blues scores from the 1910s sung by black artists. It occurs, for example, in the classic I’m Crazy About Your Lovin (I’m crazy about your love), dated around 1919, in which they sang “I have a loving daddy that the truth is that he loves without equal / when he begins with kissing is truly unrivaled.” Another popular theme in the early twenties is titled: How can I be your sweet mom if you are already someone else’s daddy?

In the 1970s, the homosexual community knew that there were many things it could borrow from the African-American community, such as disco music: when it was still forbidden for people of the same sex to dance together in many parts of the world, they discovered dance music, which did not need any couple. This adoption of the daddy would soon arrive, at the beginning in leather subcultures (leather daddy) or in others much less kind (in prison the term jailhouse daddy was used to define the partner who defended you in fights and also gave you sex). This is what the history books say. The psychologist Gabriel J. Martín points to another more mundane reason: belonging to the ghetto. “One of the implications that occurred is that we shared the same spaces for socializing and it was easy to find a 25-year-old boy in the same bar where a 40-year-old man was having a beer.” Among lesbian women, couples with a large age difference are also very common. The case of Sarah Paulson, 48, and her girlfriend Holland Taylor, 80, is the favorite of the internet.

Thus, it is appropriate to start with an act of justice: the term daddy, like so many other things, we have borrowed from historically disadvantaged groups. “In the end, the upper classes have always had a certain inaccessibility and their leisure usually involves more paraphernalia”, explains María Bastarós, art historian, cultural manager and author of Herstory. An Illustrated History of Women and Sexbook. An Illustrated History of Sexuality (both from Lumen). “Think of the opera, for example. However, the leisure of the popular classes is more open to participation, more visible and also more liberated in everything that has to do with bodily and sexual expressiveness. It is normal for us to adopt twerking, for example, for which you only need music and a body, instead of regattas, for which we need… many sailboats”.

The masses, then, would take a while to adopt the daddy, despite the fact that in 1968 there was a small flash: the group The Zombies sang in Time of the Season, one of the defining songs of psychedelia: “What’s your name? Who is your daddy? Is he rich like me? In 1978 Christine McVie wrote Oh Daddy, one of Fleetwood Mac’s most unclassifiable love songs. In 1987 George Michael sang, in the poignant and somewhat haunting Father Figure: “I’ll be your father figure / put your little hand on mine / I’ll be your preacher, your teacher / I’ll be your daddy / Everything you have in your head”. Father Figure, which was number one in the United States and one of the most successful songs of that year, is included in an album that sold 20 million copies. Long before social networks idealized and celebrated the interesting gentleman with gray hair, there were already millions of people screaming in his rooms: “I’ll be your daddy.” Michael would not come out of the closet until 1998, although only in the United States did they seem surprised.

The term has intrigued the public since the beginning of this century. In a 2002 episode of Sex and the City, a man immediately stops a fuck when his younger lover calls him “daddy.” In 2005 The Washington Post dedicated a long article to the word and in 2018 The New York Times dubbed that year “the year of daddy.” Latinos use it with special zeal: Lorna sang Papi Chulo in 2003, Maluma titled an album Papi Juancho in 2020. There have been many papis in recent popular culture: Idris Elba, David Harbour, Jeff Goldblum, Oscar Isaac, Christopher Meloni or John Krasinski are great examples. All of them are men between the ages of 40 and 60, more or less (Goldblum is already 70), they proudly show gray hair, some wrinkles and do not have bodies sculpted in the gym, simply a privileged plant with which they are born and that they do not he can buy. They attract sexually, yes, but also in an intellectual, paternal, empathetic and romantic way. In 2014, the Disneyland DILFS Instagram profile (DILF is the acronym for “father I would like to fuck” in English) was created, which today accumulates almost half a million followers and whose title does not lie: they are photos of gorgeous parents walking around Disneyland. “The happiest place on Instagram”, is slyly announced in its header. It’s not that they’re canonically good, which is often too: they’re only attractive to their followers because they’re parents.

It is Pedro Pascal, thanks especially to his role in The Last of Us (a father tormented by the loss of his daughter from the first episode and irresistibly attractive even after several days without showering or changing his clothes because he crosses a desolate country and taken over by zombies). , which has made the term ubiquitous. TikTok has had a lot to do with it. The terms pedro pascal daddy launched in his search engine yield videos that add up to almost 750 million views. Pascal himself, always solicitous and kind to the press, seems to have had enough. Earlier this month, he was walking the red carpet at the season three premiere of The Mandalorian when an Access Hollywood reporter asked him to read out some risqué tweets about him. After reading them, Pascal says a polite and smiling: “No”.

Pascal tries to stop a game that he gladly played for a while, perhaps thinking that it was innocent and that it was also benefiting his career and popularity. In January, at the premiere of The Last of Us, a reporter told him “You know you’re the internet daddy?” She was then asked to read a fan tweet that read “I refer to Pedro Pascal as a DILF and he is my hot and cool daddy.” “Yes, I’m your hot and cool daddy,” he said to the camera, giving in to the wishes of his fan (and the entire internet).

It is possible that Pascal himself fears that he is becoming a fetish, being reified as other famous men and women have been before, reduced to sex symbols. Bastarós confirms that the obsession with daddy is yet another fetish. “Perhaps it is not as violent as others because the desiring subject, the young girl, is the one that remains in the supposedly subordinate role and not the other way around. I also think that it is a fetish that is very easy to understand, since it is only a translation of how society understands us as individuals and of what erotic capital it grants us: man provides materially and intellectually, brings wisdom, experience, and protection against threats. And the woman youth, freshness, beauty, fertility… I think it can even lead to self-infantilization that limits personal growth. Putting another in the role of provider, protector, or teacher puts you in the role of a child. But yes, I also liked my professors at the university.”

Gabriel J. Martín also warns of the toxic dynamics that can sometimes occur in this type of relationship: “There are gentlemen who are 20 years older than their boyfriends or who are dedicated to looking for boys who are 20 years younger than them because they find them sexually more appealing or, above all, much more manipulable because they have much less experience in life and are very easy to convince to do what they want with them. And there are also young boys who take advantage of the attraction they have over mature men without much self-esteem to have a person who is in charge of solving all their problems and subsidizing all their whims. I have treated one and the other in consultation: victims of older manipulators and victims of brats who wanted to get the money out of them”.

In any case, the enormous popularity of the term daddy or papi has made it lose part of its original meaning to become almost a synonym for hot guy, since it is now applied to men who have neither gray hair, nor strong bodies, nor too resolute looking or too old to still be daddies, as is the case with Zayn Malik, Ryan Gosling or Drake. Could it happen with a woman? The figure of the MILF (“mother I would fuck”) is a constant in cinema from The Graduate to American Pie and just that term, MILF, was the third most searched on PornHub in 2022 according to its annual report (stepmother was the seventh). But could there be a mommy with the connotations of a daddy, who, apart from sexual power, exhibits a protective and intellectual influence, in the style of the motomami imagined by Rosalía? Bastarós fears not. “I think that the woman as a provider does not have erotic capital. Another thing is that there is a sugar mommy, but that is an economic pact. Neither fiction nor experience show enough examples of relationships between a young man and an older woman for us to speak of dry mommys. There are some famous examples, like that of Emmanuel Macron. But he met his wife, Brigitte, when he was 15 and she was 39. A mind-blowing case in many ways, but not exactly the eroticization of an older woman. There is also that of Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore. They got married when she was an absolute babe and he was rich, independent and famous, so the role of provider / protector of her is not what prevails on the table.

Pascal may be a visionary in wanting to step away from his daddy role. “The figure of man as a provider and protector is in decline,” concludes Bastarós. “With the massive incorporation of women into the labor market and even more so with the explosion of feminism, a more critical look has been taking place towards men who are with much younger women, as is happening with Leonardo DiCaprio, although it is still something within the norm”. DiCaprio, by the way, originated the term dad bod (daddy’s body) in 2015, after appearing with some belly in paparazi photos on a yacht. Only then did the world seem to accept that someone without abs is also desirable. In Spain we call it fofisano. Fortunately, no one uses it anymore.

https://elpais.com/icon/2023-03-25/el-problema-con-papi-analisis-del-mito-erotico-del-maduro-que-hace-arrasar-a-pedro-pascal.html

We would like to thank the writer of this short article for this incredible content

The dilemma with ‘daddy’: analysis of the erotic myth of the interesting mature that makes Pedro Pascal, David Harbor or Idris Elba sweep