BDE, Defined
Big Dick Energy is, at its core, an attitude - not an anatomical fact. It describes the kind of person who walks into a room without needing to announce themselves, asks for what they want without apology, and has nothing to prove because they've already settled the argument with themselves. It's confidence without performance. The phrase caught on so fast in 2018 because it gave everyone a single shorthand for a thing we'd always recognised but never named.
A quiet confidence and ease with oneself that comes from knowing you have an enormous penis and you know what to do with it. It's not cockiness, it's not a power trip - it's the opposite: a healthy, satisfied, low-key way you feel yourself.
Yasmin Tayag ·Inverse ·2018
Tayag's definition, written at the height of the original BDE moment, is still the one most cited. The crucial word is low-key. BDE is the opposite of swagger; the second you're trying to demonstrate it, you've lost it. People with BDE don't need to interrupt, don't need to win small arguments, and don't need to mention how busy they are. They've already decided they're enough.
The 2018 Twitter Origin
The internet has spent years arguing over who actually coined Big Dick Energy, and the honest answer is: it was a Twitter relay race. The most credible origin point is a June 2018 tweet by writer Kyrell Grant, who used the phrase while eulogising chef Anthony Bourdain after his death: "We're talking about how anthony bourdain had big dick energy which is what he would have wanted."
In a follow-up Guardian essay, Grant explained she'd been using BDE with friends for a while to describe a very specific type - guys who weren't conventionally great, weren't even technically her type, but were undeniably attractive in a quiet, unbothered way. Grant has been refreshingly self-deprecating about her own credentials, claiming she does not have BDE personally, on the grounds that she owns the Hamilton soundtrack.
Days later, the phrase attached itself to Pete Davidson during the white-hot week of his engagement to Ariana Grande. The internet collectively decided that Davidson - tall, scruffy, comfortably outshone by his fiancée - radiated BDE, and the meme went planetary. Within a fortnight it had escaped Twitter entirely and was being used in Vogue headlines, group chats and stand-up sets.
From Tweet to Oxford Lexicon
BDE didn't just trend, it institutionalised. Oxford Dictionaries shortlisted it for word of the year in 2018, treating it as a genuine addition to the English lexicon rather than a passing slang fad. That recognition mattered: it meant lifestyle editors, brand strategists and even academic essayists could use the term without scare quotes.
The same year, "size queen" - the long-standing slang for a person who openly prefers a well-endowed partner - was formally added to the Oxford English Dictionary. The two terms reaching legitimacy in parallel is not a coincidence; together they signalled a broader cultural shift away from shame about size-related preferences and toward open, sex-positive conversation. That shift is exactly the cultural soil our size queen dating category was built in.
By 2026, BDE is no longer slang at all. It's an ordinary descriptor - used by your aunt, your therapist and your CEO without flinching.
BDE Icons From Idris Elba to Rihanna
The pantheon of BDE is famously gender-blind, age-blind and pec-blind. Here are four of the most universally agreed examples.
Idris Elba
The platonic ideal: deep voice, slow smile, no apparent need to convince anyone of anything. Elba is the name people reach for first when explaining BDE to someone who has never heard the term.
Rihanna
Proof that BDE is gender-blind. The way she walks, the way she runs a beauty empire, the way she looks at a paparazzi camera like it owes her rent - pure unbothered authority.
Stanley Tucci
The unexpected one. Bald, soft-spoken, makes a Negroni on Instagram and the entire timeline goes feral. Tucci is the case study for BDE-as-poise rather than BDE-as-volume.
Jeff Goldblum
A masterclass in being completely, unapologetically yourself. Goldblum laughs at his own jokes mid-sentence and you respect him more for it. That is the entire formula.
Latto, Lambrini Girls and the BDE Soundtrack
Once a phrase enters the lexicon, the musicians come for it. In 2021, Atlanta rapper Latto released "Big Energy," explicitly built on the BDE meme. Talking to Billboard, she said she'd taken the originally "masculine, trendy big dick energy quote" and reframed it as something any gender could carry - "an aura that you carry and a confidence… an overall vibe." A 2022 remix pulled in Mariah Carey and DJ Khaled, cementing the song as the unofficial BDE anthem.
By 2025, Brighton punk trio Lambrini Girls had taken the concept somewhere louder. Their abrasive, sneering takes on masculine bravado on the album Who Let The Dogs Out read like the angry younger cousin of the original meme - using BDE as a yardstick to measure exactly how much Small Dick Energy a given politician, podcaster or club bouncer is currently radiating.
Music journalists love the term because it finally captures something that was previously hard to describe - the difference between a swaggering performer and a genuinely magnetic one. Or, as one of our editors put it: "Mick Jagger has stage presence; Nick Cave has BDE."
The Inverse: Small Dick Energy
Every concept needs an opposite, and the internet promptly invented Small Dick Energy (SDE) - the energy of someone who needs to constantly remind you of their accomplishments, their cars, their gym PR, their follower count. The classic SDE move is overcompensation. The classic BDE move is silence.
The most famous SDE moment in recent history was December 2022, when Andrew Tate tweeted at climate activist Greta Thunberg, listing his 33 cars and their carbon emissions. Thunberg replied with a single line - "yes, please do enlighten me. email me at [email protected]" - and the tweet became one of the most-liked of all time. Tate was arrested in Romania in a separate investigation the following day. The internet considered the symmetry deeply satisfying.
How BDE Translates to Dating Success
This is the part most BDE explainers skip - and it's the part that actually matters if you're single. BDE is the single most predictive trait in modern dating, far more than height, income or even looks. It explains why some people get matches on every app and others get ignored on all of them. The good news: unlike anatomy, BDE is something you can practise.
On XLDating we see this every day. Members who lead with quiet specificity - what they're actually doing this weekend, what they actually want - outperform members who lead with bravado by a wide margin. The men who casually mention their size in one line of their bio and then move on to talking about their dog are the ones whose inboxes fill up. The women who say "I have a preference, I'm not embarrassed about it, here's what I read this week" are the ones who set the pace of every conversation.
Dating apps reward BDE structurally. A profile that doesn't try too hard reads as honest. A first message that doesn't perform reads as confident. A reply that takes four hours instead of four seconds reads as a person with a life. None of this is manipulation - it's just what calm self-assurance looks like when it's mediated by a phone.
If you want a deeper read on what actually moves the needle for women specifically, our companion piece on what women find attractive in men walks through the Prause partner-preference data and the Glamour swimmer-build study - both of which reinforce, with numbers, the same conclusion this article reached with vibes. And if you'd rather skip the reading and start matching, the BDE Confidence Dating category is built precisely for the people this article is about.
BDE FAQ
Who actually coined Big Dick Energy?
The most credible origin is a June 2018 tweet by writer Kyrell Grant, who used the phrase to describe the late chef Anthony Bourdain. The term then attached itself to Pete Davidson during his engagement to Ariana Grande and went viral from there.
Do you need an actual big penis to have BDE?
No. As Inverse writer Yasmin Tayag and rapper Latto have both stressed, BDE is fundamentally about quiet self-assurance and ease with oneself. It applies to any gender and is unrelated to anatomy. Stanley Tucci, Rihanna and Jeff Goldblum are all standard-issue examples.
What does ggg mean on a dating site?
GGG stands for "good, giving, and game" - a phrase popularised by sex columnist Dan Savage. It signals a partner who is good in bed, giving of pleasure, and game to try reasonable new things. It is sometimes paired with BDE in modern dating bios as shorthand for confident, generous and open-minded.
What does ggg mean in dating?
In dating contexts, GGG is a self-disclosure that someone approaches sex generously and without judgement. It is most common on niche and sex-positive platforms, where members tend to be upfront about preferences and compatibility from the start, rather than discovering them awkwardly later.
Is BDE the same as confidence?
BDE is a specific kind of confidence - the calm, low-key, nothing-to-prove kind. Loud confidence, performative confidence and bragging are usually read as the opposite, sometimes called Small Dick Energy. The distinction is whether the person seems to need your approval.
Was BDE really Oxford's word of the year?
Big Dick Energy was shortlisted by Oxford Dictionaries in 2018 as one of the most culturally significant phrases of the year, and is now treated as a legitimate entry in lexical discussions of 21st-century English slang.