Twink isgay slang for a male who is usually in his late teens to twenties whose other traits may include a slim physique, a youthful appearance, and little or nobody hair.[6][7][8] The age range for twinks is generally considered to be from around 18 to 25 years old.[9]Twink is used both as a neutral descriptor, which can be compared withbear,[10] and as apejorative.[6][11]
Look uptwink ortwinks in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
The exact origins of the termtwink are disputed. It may be derived from an older Britishgay slang termtwank, which means: "The quarry of a homosexualprostitute (male); a man willing and ready to become anydominant man's 'partner'".[12]
Another possible origin of the term may be a derivation from the American snack cakeTwinkie, commonly regarded as the quintessentialjunk food. The food is described as "littlenutritional value, sweet to the taste, and creme-filled";[13][14][15] by comparison, the young men are described as "short, and blond, and full of creme",[14] withcreme being aeuphemism forsemen.[14][16]
Abackronym has been constructed[by whom?] fortwink, according to which it stands for "'teenaged,white, into nokink", although these specified traits are not universally accepted as either necessary or sufficient to classify an individual as a "twink".[17][18] The gay slang termchicken is considered a British equivalent totwink.[9]
In his bookNever Enough (2007), about a murdercommitted in 2003 in Hong Kong, described byThe New York Times Book Review as hard-boiled clichés with a cartoonish first impression,[22]Joe McGinniss describes a court case in whichtwink was defined as a gay slang term used to denote an attractive, boyish-looking gay man between the ages of 18 and 22, slender and with little or nobody hair, often blond, often but not necessarily Caucasian.[23]
The term was derisively used on online message boards to describe YouTuberCara Cunningham, then known as Chris Cocker, after her video "Leave Britney Alone!" went viral in 2007. It had reached widespread usage in media by 2013, according to Thomas Rogers ofThe Awl, who pointed as proof to its usages in the television seriesGirls andHappy Endings and by television personalitiesJWoww andAndy Cohen, the latter of whom apologized for using it to refer to the boy bandOne Direction. Rogers also identified various television and film characters of the time, includingMaxxie Oliver ofSkins,Kurt Hummel ofGlee, and Elijah Krantz ofGirls, as "more nuanced twink characters" than had previously appeared in media.[9] It has also been used to describestraight male celebrities who are skinny and have a youthful appearance, likeTimothée Chalamet[24][25][4][26][27] and youngLeonardo DiCaprio,[28] although some object it to being used to refer to non-gay men.[29][30]
Grindr survey asking users whatsubculture they identify with prior to its update in 2017, usingtwink as an example
The termtwink serves to identify asubculture withingay culture for which members of the community may self-identify, but their stable assurance mostly comes from acceptance by other members. The subculture, as examined now, serves as a purely physical marker for attributes any one person may hold and/or acquire, highly dependent on normative society's take onbeauty standards as a whole and what the community puts forth and prescribes to.[32]
The "Castro clone" look fell out of favor after the 1980s, partly due to its association with the rise ofHIV/AIDS, and, according to Shaun M. Filiault and Murray J.N. Drummond of theUniversity of South Australia, had largely been supplanted by the twink as the ideal look among Western gay men by the 1990s and early 2000s.[9] Studies of young gay men in the mid-2000s showed that the markers they deemed most attractive were slim and slightly toned figures, little to no body hair, and youthfulness.[33] wrote in his 1997 bookThe Bear Book that twinks were representative ofhegemonic masculinity and thatbears were a "counter-statement" to it. Peter Hennen similarly wrote in 2005 for the journalGender & Society that the twink had become "the dominant ideal of gay masculinity" and acted as an "oppositional anchor" for bears.[34]
Grindr, a populardating app for gay men, lists the term as one of many "tribes" for users to "identify themselves with a niche group and filter their search to help find their type of guy".[35]
Essayist Zeb J. Tortorici notes that gay twink porn thrives on the production and performance of "consumable and visually/anally receptive masculinity."[38] A twink is "memorable for his outer packaging", not his "inner depth".[14] Twink can be seen as a popularsubgenre in gay porn widely consumed across the globe.[39] In gay pornographic content, a twink usually, but not in all cases, plays the role of the submissive and receiving character commonly known as abottom.[citation needed]
Susan Driver characterized the wordtwink as relying on "ageist andracisttropes of youth and white desirability".[39][12] In regards to the concept, Driver describes it as "a young, white, and performedmasculinity that can befetishized, consumed, ... clearly coded in terms of race and age",[39] thus establishing the intersection for which race and age come together to create a hyper-sexualized denomination, often associated with sexual acts and thepornographic industry.[39] Rogers considered the term to have morphed from "a cutesy, mildly negative stereotype" into "easy shorthand for a lot of vicious stereotypes about gay people" and a way to generally mock one's "gayness" by 2013.[9]
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