In the previous post about fuccbois I mentioned that a lot of people here are confused about the term "fuckboy" and how women use(d?) it. People generally seemed to assume it was directly synonymous with "player" but in my experience and listening to how my friends and I used it to talk about guys, that isn't necessarily true. Allow me to explain:

I said it was a specifically millenial term because it kind of sprang from the cultural context of the early/mid 2010s. During that time a huge cultural shift happened: smartphones and social media hit young adult culture and the impact was immediate. There were a lot of new behaviors that were happening that young people were trying to make sense of and characterize. One was the rise of the "fuckboy."

The fuckboy was born specifically from the popularity of smartphones and IG. These were guys who shaped their looks off of popular aesthetic trends at the time (they all started sporting undercuts and athleisure/streetwhere out of virtually nowhere, so they kind of had a similar "look"), they had a peculiar social media behavior (pouting selfies, smoldering eye squints, showing off their bodies, basically posting things that were considered pretty gauche for a male at the time), they would post statuses and tweets along the lines of this, just vague psuedo romantic nonsense that seemed ripped out of John Green novels. Their IG captions were always similarly try-hard.

In private communication, they would come on super strong when they were trying to be romantic, letting girls think they were super into them before suddenly "leaving them on read" when he got bored. (Some people will say they were being actively deceptive, but I actually think they were really confused about what they wanted themselves. This new sort of easy attention from girls probably felt good and they didn't know how to stop themselves from playing into it.) In my experience, this actually wasn't typical "player" behavior up till this point. Oftentimes it seemed like fuckbois were more hungry for attention than they were hungry for sex. They seemed to crave validation, which felt like a pretty new desire coming from young men for girls at the time.

When they were trying to be sexual, they were actually quite the opposite of a typical "player" who generally played it cool. They were quite openly thirsty. Desperate actually. Literally begging for nudes. Cannot underscore the amount of begging. There were a bunch of stock phrases at the time that girls used to make fun of fuckboys. You tell him you're going to take a shower? Him: "haha, without me? ;)" ... Just traded numbers with a boy? Him: "Lets play 20 questions haha" Tell him you're getting ready for bed? "Haha, let me see your pajamas :)"

I don't really hear my friends talk about fuckboys much anymore, but were 28ish now and most guys give up "that" by their late 20s and the ones who don't are like peak cringe. As for younger girls I can't say for sure but my impression is that they deal with their own peculiar dating shit and the fuccboi arechtype are like cheesy relics from the early social media boom. And from browsing urbandictionary, fuckboy and fuckboy adjecent terms peaked in inquiries around 2015 and fell dramatically over the years so my impression is that its not as popular in general anymore.