Skip navigation! In the back of a 20,capacity venue that smells like Pepsi and body spray, young girls are shouting PG smut. The lights from the stage shine on every forehead, cheeks and grin with the same luminosity. One of them howls 'Fuck me, Pete! None of the girls around them notice or at least seem to care. At the end of the show, I walk out and see these two girls bound over to their mums, who have been watching safely at the back of the show. The mum, clearly used to her nonsense, ignores this.
Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy is an objectively attractive man. His painfully white teeth are distracting but the real distraction is his face. Unprofessional to say, but to deny it would be absurd. When I was thirteen and obsessed with the band, he was one of my many husbands. I am now in my mid-twenties and he has three children and a current wife and ex-wife, neither of whom are me.
Conveniently for these new fans, Pete enjoys taking photos of himself and he posts a lot of them on social media; sometimes close-up videos of his face with eyebrow raised or curling a lip to show teeth. Written underneath his selfies are comments by dozens of his other 'children', chirping like little hens. Calling people 'daddy' or its variant 'zaddy' is an internet joke that got out of hand and became part of popular culture by — now no longer a reference to your literal sugar daddy or your other half in a sexual real-life relationship, but a meme, a pet name to jokingly refer to older attractive masculine people, especially celebrities.
The commenters are near-exclusively in their teens, mostly early teens, twelve to fifteen. One sixteen-year-old girl is a daddy commenter. In the way that teens do when a month goes by and they feel full of wisdom and weathered by the world, another lifetime of experience under their belt, she grew out of this endeavour 'ages ago'. She pre-empts the paranoia around the sexualisation of young girls by telling me: 'Adults think it's inappropriate and crazy what kids are saying these days.
But honestly it seems like a phase every teen goes through but they grow out of some time or another. They are not imagining it, or meaning it with any more depth than that of just being attracted to a man. Another girl tells me, 'I think that it is OK for people to comment on how attractive a "famous" person is, but there is a line with that kind of stuff that has been crossed many times'.
