The questions never to ask of TikTok are “why this?”, and “why now?” It marks you out as a person who will never understand, whose very concept of time is a bit last century. So, there’s a trend: if a person in their 40s or 50s, looking fit, ripped, rugged, with a confident bearing, a certain ease in their skin, appears on TikTok, there’ll be a swarm of comments underneath saying “beekeeping age”.
It derives from a Rick and Morty episode three years ago: Summer is hanging with her friend Tricia Lange, who’s watching Summer’s dad tend – or, if you like, keep – bees. She calls him sweet, she calls him dorky, she calls him “beekeeping age, I guess”, she lands on: “Summer, I want to fuck your dad.” A working definition: beekeeping age is anyone who should, on society’s cruel terms, be too old to be attractive, and yet is attractive anyway. Summer’s dad is actually 35, but let’s not dwell on the fact that, to gen Z, people in their 30s, 40s and 50s are pretty much interchangeable.
There are people who think it’s a male-only term, just an update of “zaddy” (fashionable or attractive older man, coined by the singer Ty Dolla $ign, and coming up for renewal, as that was seven years ago). The manosphere insists that there is no female equivalent, or rather, the language cannot exist for it as the phenomenon can’t exist. What can I say, misogyny is still getting great numbers on the socials. It’s more useful as a gender neutral term, saving the hassle of constant translation – Milf to Dilf, cougar to silver fox, mutton dressed up as lamb to beef dressed up as veal. What if you merely want some way to express that a person of, say, 48 isn’t as physically repellent as one might expect, without the freight of masculinity and femininity? This is your moment.
You also have to be quite fit to be beekeeper age, but within quite precise parameters; you’re in shape because you’re outdoorsy, you love nature, you go hiking, not because, petrified by the spectre of mortality, you do a lot of weights. Beekeepers do not wear crop tops.
It conveys a certain solidity and sense of purpose, but it emphatically isn’t about money, which is so often a component of attractive-older-man rubric that it makes you feel bad for men. If anything, Jerry, Rick and Morty’s original beekeeper, carries himself with a certain monastic asceticism. Would a man with a substantial shares portfolio even know what to do with a bee? It seems unlikely, and anyway, an evil version of Jerry, Doofus Jerry, exists in the Rick and Morty universe, and he’s a billionaire; the original Jerry is the living definition of un-billionaire, non-wealth. I like to think of beekeeping age as a post-capitalist reconfiguration, human charisma and attractiveness uncoupled from standardised, time-limited beauty and material assets. But maybe I just woke up on the right side of the bed.
