Illustration: Esme Blegvad
Welcome to 'Introducing', where we get acquainted with Britain's weird and wonderful new subcultures.
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That's another trait of the e-boy: being generally gross. It's something they've cribbed from Billie Eilish, queen of the e-boys (and their female counterparts, e-girls, who i-D wrote about here). But alongside that grossness, they also rival 2007 Myspace kids in the pouting stakes. It's a fine line, really: a load of posturing to show everyone how beautiful they are, with just enough purposefully manky stuff to remind their audience they really don't care about looks.Sort of related: the surprising amount of references made to BDSM sex (dom, sub, switch, etc). Which makes sense, because really the arrival of the e-boy is the culmination of an online culture maintained by grown adults who refer to everything from pop stars to pens as "daddy".The sexual undertones of the e-boy / girl culture have already gone mainstream. In Billie Eilish's video for "bad guy", the 17-year-old sings: "So you're a tough guy / like it really rough guy" while pouring milk into a guy's throat. This is art, of course, and there's a power attached to Eilish's work and her reversal of traditional gender roles – but it's slightly harder to make a case for a teenage boy on TikTok pretending to choke, and then kiss, his iPhone.If history has taught us anything, it's that most of these guys are just a haircut and bin-full of jewellery away from being normie nine-to-fivers – in the same way that every single former Hawthorne Heights fan now works in a strip-lit office, their droopy ear lobes the only giveaway of the life they once led.But, for now: long live the e-boy.@ryanbassil / @esmerelduh