The Internet’s Boyfriend
Vol. 1: The Hot Priest
The concept of internet phenomenons fascinates me.
We’ve never had more content in the history of the world than we do right now. Or right now. Or now, even. A Content Creator I follow closely, Jon Lovett, once podcasted that social media makes us “next door neighbors to everybody,” which is as horrifying as it is accurate. We hear what everyone is thinking, then we’re linked to further thoughts. As I’m writing this, I’m creating even more content, content about content, which is the worst kind of content possible. My point is, internet phenomenons are fascinating not because they’re of a particular quality or importance, but simply because they break through.
It’s kind of like why there will never be another Beatles. Because there will never be another 1960s, another Vietnam War. We can’t become re-sexually-repressed (as much as some state senators might try). We can’t reinvent pop radio or stereo sound or television. The Beatles aren’t just The Beatles; they’re not even really that good. They — like an internet phenomenon — are the incalculable number of circumstances that had a small piece in creating them, in pushing them to the forefront of attention at that specific point in time.
And no internet phenomenon is more fascinating to me than the Internet’s Boyfriend. If you’ve never heard the phrase, you’ve probably at least had the experience. How many of you besides Buzzfeed Quiz have thought about Noah Centineo in the last four weeks? But back in August 2018 when To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before was released on Netflix, Noah’s Peter Kavinsky was, 100% without a doubt, absolutely my boyfriend.
And I wasn’t alone. People of a myriad of ages who are attracted to men (or even aren’t!) were gushing and cooing at this tiny child all over Twitter and the larger expanse of the internet. He was GIFed, he was quoted, he was somehow never compared to Joey Lawrence despite his penchant for the word “whoa.” We couldn’t stop finding things we liked about him, and he miraculously never seemed to disappoint us. It was absolutely unanimous. We all loved Peter Kavinsky.
I think the reasons I find the Internet’s Boyfriend to be so damn entertaining are twofold. One, I am at my core and in my heart an unrepentant thirsty teenage girl until I die. I’m Tina Belcher in a Madewell tea dress. I love a crush. And two — I just think it’s the fucking cutest! There are so few pure things left in the world, let alone in the world’s id, the internet. No one tries to milkshake duck an Internet Boyfriend. No one “well actuallys” nine reasons why Keanu Reeves isn’t that great y’all (can you fucking imagine). We fawn over the guy, or we leave the people who do alone. We share newly discovered pictures, facts, and personal anecdotes. We write essays about interviews they did for GQ. It’s like you’re gushing to your best friend about your actual new boyfriend and they’re gushing about they’re new boyfriend and you both actually like each other’s new boyfriends and it’s the exact same new boyfriend and no one at all is bummed about it! It’s the only polygamous relationship that works. It’s beautiful.
So, my new task for myself is to try and figure out why. What are the circumstances that push an Internet Boyfriend into everyone’s timelines and hearts? What is it about this person at this moment in time that speaks to us? And what does it tell us about what we’re needing, what we’re looking for out there in the sad real world where Peter Kavinsky will never pull up to our dad’s house and ask if we have anymore of that yogurt?
Our first Internet Boyfriend is The Hot Priest in season 2 of Amazon-by-way-of-BBC show, Fleabag (played by actor Andrew Scott).
[DISCLAIMER: Before we get started, I need to clear the air with some Sherlock fans on Tumblr who have been insisting Andrew Scott was romantic lead material since his first incredibly chilling “hiiii” in season 1’s “The Great Game.” Look. You’re not wrong. And you’ll never understand why Proximity To Benedict Cumberbatch is a divisive topic. But by this point — and speaking as a Doctor Who fan myself — I’m sure you can at least understand that Written By Phoebe Waller-Bridge makes one infinitely more lovable than the Moffat-y alternative. Either way — well spotted, and sorry for the delay.]
[ALSO: It should go without saying that what follows contains spoilers for season 2 of Fleabag. It should also go without saying that if you don’t know what Fleabag is or haven’t watched it, you a million percent need to go do that, go do it right now, and then come back and read this after.
Now.
Go.]
In season 2 of Fleabag our supposedly unloveable (and unwilling to love) protagonist (never referred to by name, listed on IMDb as “Fleabag” which is what I’ll call her here for clarity) meets and reluctantly acquires an affection for the priest who will be marrying her father and his girlfriend. The priest (also never referred to as anything other than “Father” and “the priest”) isn’t just any priest, he’s a cool priest. He drinks, he smokes, he swears, he makes self-deprecating comments about himself and the religion he’s chosen to dedicate his life to. All these are perfectly surface-level reasons to have a crush on a fictional priest and move on.
But we haven’t. No, thanks to the second season’s Amazon premiere on May 17th, this week “Hot Priest” is as prevalent and surprising a phrase on Twitter as “cliff wife” or “that photoshoot where someone has dressed Seth Rogan like an adult.” We are all absolutely batshit mad for Andrew Scott’s portrayal. We’re posting gifs to serve as thirst traps to get our other attracted-to-men friends to watch the show (and it’s working). We’re announcing to everyone that we’re starting the Hot Priest Show and then updating them that we’ve gotten to the Hot Priest and finally declaring when we’ve officially fallen for him as well. We’re quoting his parts of the show not because they’re particularly profound (though they often are) but simply to be that monkey doll holding up its hands as if to say “LOOK AT THIS. WHAT IS THIS?”
We’re goddamn overwhelmed.
And that can’t be attributed to simple smoking and sarcasm. No way.
Here are some reasons that, this week, the Internet’s Boyfriend is the Hot Priest.
1. He is Doing His Best™
We’re introduced to the Hot Priest in the first episode of season 2 at an undeniably awkward (and as the season’s opening shot implies, eventually violent) family dinner. Fleabag is doing her best not to be The Disappointment in front of this stranger by bringing up uncouth things like personal feelings and dead loved ones. But the stranger surprises us by introducing uncouth things of his own. The priest’s parents, it turns out, are both woefully untreated alcoholics. His brother, in a twist of irony only Phoebe Waller-Bridge could pull off, is a pedophile. He himself sneaks outside to indulge in an addiction (the aforementioned smoking), can’t be outside with Fleabag more than thirty seconds without flirting with her, and publicly declares himself as desperately lonely. As the season goes on there’s self-loathing, there’s doubt, there’s the highly suspicious way he drinks often and extremely early in the day (potentially hinting at his own struggle with alcohol). The Hot Priest, we quickly discover, is a total mess.
But unlike the antiheroes of days past, the Hot Priest is not using this fact as an excuse to watch the world burn (nor is he the perfect romantic hero who rises above it). Instead, he embodies a self-awareness that should be familiar to us all. Have literally any conversation with your parents and it’s not hard to deduce our generation is a cool 600% more tapped into our own internal world than our predecessors — we know our strengths, our weaknesses, the elements of our childhood that unquestionably fucked us up. It’s beneficial for understanding when we need to go to therapy (and what to bring up when we get there), but the constant awareness of our flaws can’t be unrelated to the increase in depression in our generation either.
Often the art we connect to most deeply is a reflection of this hyper-aware struggle. When we see a character in our own mess we hope to follow them to a way through. This is why we love Fleabag as a character, of course, but the appeal of Hot Priest is he’s farther along in his journey. He’s gone through shit that we barely understand the volume of, and instead of letting it cripple him, he’s decided to use it to lead others. As he says, “I believe God meant for me to love people in a different way. I believe I’m supposed to love people as a father.” Someone who’s willing to turn their struggles into a path forward for others is 2019’s version of a superhero, and we’re Margot Kidder in his arms.
2. His Intentions Are Just The Right Amount Of Pure
There is a lot to unpack in our protagonist choosing a priest as the object of her affection after a long dry spell scorched so by loss. But the one that I think makes him the most Internet’s Boyfriend is that fact that, because he is a priest, we have to assume his intentions are at least initially pure. If sex is, theoretically, off the table, he must just genuinely enjoy Fleabag’s company, want to get to know her, and (as discussed above) want to help.
This guise of innocence is key to an Internet Boyfriend, because an Internet Boyfriend is, in its definition, juvenile. It’s a pure-hearted crush enjoyed equally by the married and single, reminiscent of a time when we were all teenage frogs looking for a prince. And, in a world plagued by headlines about men trying to make victims of women (and also everyone else), the unthreatening man is king. He wants to come see your small business, laugh at all your jokes, take you to a weird Quaker meeting hall, and yes, eventually fuck you. But only after he’s sure, through the strength of your emotional connection, that you are the one person he wants to fuck more than anyone else in this world. Maybe even more than God.
3. We Have Been Absolutely Desperate For A Hot Priest
Or something like one, right?
Us Twitter dwellers in our ivory walk-ups can pretend we’re well above the quaintness of traditional American life, but there’s a disturbance in The Force, and I know you’ve felt it. Everything is awful, and there’s some part of us deep down that wants things to be simpler in the way that they seemed to be when we were kids. Maybe this is 2019. Maybe it’s just being 35. But it’s coming out in the characters and players we choose to value in pop culture.
Take, for example, the death of the Tortured Genius. We loved him back when we needed an alternative to the Manly Men of the 80s who actually turned out to all be super racist and abusive monsters. But now it’s becoming harder and harder to tell the difference. We probably knew this was coming when The Social Network villainized Mark Zuckerberg, or when Breaking Bad and Mad Men one after the other shuttered their doors. I personally consider 2015’s Steve Jobs as the final nail in the coffin, the “absolutely fuck that guy” heard round the world. It technically has an 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, but I’ve never spoken to a single individual who’s seen it. We just don’t care anymore. I think this is partly why the Chrises have become, if not all the Internet’s Boyfriends, a phenomenon of their own. We want the uncomplicated, the kind. A guy who is affectionate with his dog and willing to run a load of dishes in the dishwasher. The Tortured Genius turned out to be nothing but a disguise, an evolution of the Manly Man who wielded the same domineering power. A Chris, on the other hand, is the strong but gentle myth of the 40s couched in modern knowledge, someone who is capable of wielding the Manly Man’s power but, recognizing its toxicity, chooses to decline it.
The Hot Priest sits at this exact nexus of quaint and woke. After all, religious figures have to be one of the cleanest examples of something that was once comforting and true that is now almost exclusively perverse. Their portrayals in modern pop culture range from the boring at best to the outright evil at worst. The Priest is another thing, in an exhaustively long list of things like the Tortured Genius, that we’ve peeled back the cover of to reveal systemic nightmares. The Hot Priest, on the other hand, embodies the comforts of a simpler time and yet retains none of the ignorances of it, in the same way a Chris will give us his letterman jacket and never try to sexually assault us in the backseat of his car. The Hot Priest has looked all the shortcomings of his position in the face and sought to better them. To choose a life devoted to faith in the year of the Hot Priest’s lord twenty nineteen is a truly radical act of traditionalism. The Hot Priest is both a soothing balm on the anxiety of modern life and a revolutionary.
In this way, we get to have our cake and eat it, too. We get to believe in the ongoing sanctity of belief itself and not feel like we’re setting aside any number of horrors to do so. We can make a little bundt cake for the church bake sale, then get hammered and make good-hearted fun of the church bake sale until one in the morning. The Hot Priest is specifically designed to sit on the other side of a confessional and not to pass judgement on either lifestyle, to in fact give us permission for both. With a G&T and a snarky smile, he makes us a home where we can both be a big old mess and hide away from them.
In other words, he kisses us when we’re on our knees.
