“Reno As Fuck”

The comparison “X as fuck,” as Jesse Sheidlower tells us in  The F Word (soon to be updated!), has appeared in print since at least 1978. [UPDATE: 1970! See Jesse’s comment, below.] By 2010 or so, the abbreviation “AF”—as in “elegant as fuck”—had begun cropping up in public settings, especially Twitter. When I first wrote about it in 2015, AF was still pretty much under the radar commercially, relegated to Etsy jewelers and festival T-shirts, but over the next few years it began going mainstream. In my most recent post on the subject, from July 2019, I noted that a product called Down There Wipes was being sold at Target with the prominently displayed slogan “FRESH AF.”

AF was one thing. Surely, though (I said to myself), the spelled-out “As Fuck” would never appear on supermarket shelves.

Well, I was wrong as fuck.

“Rena As Fuck” in the wild (Berkeley Bowl Marketplace, Berkeley, California, March 2023)

Mainstream AF

It’s been just about four years since I published my first post about commercial sightings of “AF,” the abbreviation for the intensifier as fuck. And my, how far we’ve traveled since 2015: from festival T-shirts and Etsy geegaws to subway ads, a Netflix movie, and a surreal bidet commercial. We went back and forth on pronunciation: one-syllable word or initialism? (The latter, it would seem.)

And now we find ourselves, and AF, in the middle of Main Street, USA.

To be precise, the personal-care/feminine-hygiene aisle of Target.

Down There Wipes in “Sensual Seduction.” They’re FRESH AF, says “Rachel S.”

“Trust me, I’m an asshole”

You’ve invented a new kind of bidet for the American market: an inexpensive, easy-to-install attachment that replaces toilet paper with a water stream. You’ve given your invention a cheeky name: Tushy.

Now you need a mascot to give your product a face. Naturally, you choose … an asshole. And you give it a starring role in a nearly three-minute-long advertorial.

“But like literally: Poop comes out of me.”

Sort of a manic pixie dream asshole, actually, with a potty mouth that cheerfully emits English swears and English-inflected Yiddish scatology along with a generous dose of social shaming.

The further adventures of “AF”

In the two years since I first wrote about seeing “AF” — the abbreviation for the intensifier “as fuck” — in various interesting places, I’ve kept track of its spread from the fringes to the mainstream, or at least a major tributary of the mainstream, of popular culture. In April of this year, when I noted its use in New York subway advertisements by the food-delivery service FoodKick, I speculated that this was the first time AF had appeared in a commercial context. Well, I was wrong. It wasn’t the first. And it certainly hasn’t been the last.

“I’m feeling myself because my boobs are swoll AF”

Commercial as fuck

Back in July 2015, when I wrote about the spread of “as fuck” and its abbreviation, “AF,” my sightings were limited to tweets, rap-album titles, and small-batch consumer goods sold on Etsy and other online marketplaces. In a comment on my post, “Y” predicted a bigger future for “AF”: “It’ll be co-opted by the mainstream. In fifty years, Modern Maturity will have recipes for Scrumptious-as-Fuck Cupcakes, and Midwesterners will tell their minister that his sermon was def as fuck.”

Fifty years? Try 22 months. That’s how long it took for New York–based FoodKick to launch its cheeky-as-fuck ad campaign in subways and social media.

AF is officially dead AF. pic.twitter.com/u7IqzLNcDH

— Matt Zoller Seitz (@mattzollerseitz) April 9, 2017