The Foxes Are After Me
Don’t read this if you haven’t watched Fleabag season two on Amazon, which you should do.
It's weird, the way the universe works. You might call it God, or fate, or wyrd.*
A couple weeks ago I was talking with some friends about how I could use a crush right about now. A really good crush. You know—the kind that sends your stomach tumbling and your synapses firing madly. The kind that sees you staring at the back of his neck, falling in love with the one lock of his hair his barber always seems to miss, curling right above his shirt collar. The kind that occupies your mind with dozens of tiny schemes to get him to say your name organically in a sentence. I don't get the opportunity for that kind of crush much anymore, because I work from a desk in my 600-square-foot apartment and my social skills have subsequently disintegrated into a fine dust that coats that aforementioned desk.
But so anyway just a week or so after wishing for this, miracle of miracles: out comes the second season of Fleabag, delivering not just a crush in its Hot Priest** (played by Andrew Scott), but the deepest understanding of "crush" that I have ever seen in television. Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag is immediately attracted to the Priest, as is the audience, and her asides to us in this crush phase are painfully accurate: "Arm touch." "Knuckle brush." "His arms." "His beautiful neck."
Andrew Scott is of course an attractive person—perfectly so, as a priest, because the shape of his eyebrows implies some mischief, some devilry, something slightly wicked, and that makes it all the more fun to see him in a cassock. But that isn't what makes the Hot Priest hot. Sure, Scott's Irish accent is part of the gestalt, that lovely Dublin purr that wraps each English word in velvet before giving it to you; and of course there's the character layer of a theoretically unobtainable person. But even that isn't quite it.
The largest factor in this hotness, at least on a surface level, is his eyes. The Priest looks at Fleabag with a hunger that in a whole lot of other contexts would be inappropriate or creepy, but in Scott's hands, that hunger is at least as much spiritual as it is physical. It's the kind of hunger that likely drove him into the priesthood in the first place, that need for connection so vast that perhaps not even God's love is enough to satisfy. It's as a result of this hunger that the Priest sees Fleabag—a miracle in and of itself.
But then he almost immediately sees us as well, Fleabag's invisible friends. The Priest catches on to the fact that she goes somewhere, away from him, when he's speaking to her and she turns to us to offer commentary. He sees this coping mechanism for what it is, instantly, and offers her an alternative. He not only sees her, and us—he loves her for it. Not in a priestly way, wherein you love because you are commanded to—but in the way in which we choose to love, without instruction, the people dearest to us. It is dazzling.
And yet it goes deeper still than that. The bedrock of the Hot Priest's hotness is that he's a fully realized person. I didn't understand exactly why I was reacting to strongly to this performance until I was talking about it with a straight male friend, who told me he'd been looking for this kind of permission all his life: to be as open and genuine and vulnerable and gleeful and fucked up, in a non-performative way, as the Hot Priest is. There's no guile here, no suppressing of emotions, no blank lack of understanding Fleabag's rather complex emotions—there's the denial of desire, sure, but the Priest is just so completely empathetic and alive in a way that I've seldom seen straight men portrayed on TV.***
Women's emotions are policed constantly; and yet, if you're raised female, you also tend to be ingrained with a sense that emotions are the province of women, our home turf. I never really thought much about that until my friend told me how fenced-in he felt, and now I can't help but think all the time about what a tragedy it is that so many straight men will never be as hot as the Hot Priest—not because they suffer from any physical lack, but because they suffer from the impression that they are only desirable when they betray no desire at all.
Also, this.
*If you were living in the same area as Old English speakers. I centered my 9th grade paper on Beowulf on the closeness of the words “faith” and “fate” and the influence of “wyrd” on them.
**I never thought about having a crush on a priest, because I'd never seen a hot priest and also because I stopped going to mass around age 16.
***I have a theory that Andrew Scott is the (gay) Irish version of Walton Goggins, who's maybe the only straight man I've met in person that fits this description.