Have you painted DL trade lately? If you have—or if you’ve joked about it in a group chats or online—you’re not alone. On TikTok, the idea of painting DL trade has transformed from an inside joke to bonafide meme. One video of a clip from Spongebob with the phrase “Me laughing at DL trade I just painted” captioned in has nearly 29,000 views. Another, incredulously bemoaning the trend has more than 200,000. An engagement bait tweet, “do you support painting DL trade?” racked up 25,000 likes.
The joke is a natural born internet star. It’s both a shocking idea—shitting on someone on purpose and not caring, a universal event that everyone is too embarrassed to admit to, and a niche, if-you-know-you-know amalgam of queer slang and the smelly reality of anal sex.
If you don’t know, we’ll break it down for you. Painting, as in, you know, accidentally shitting on his dick while you’re bottoming. DL, as in, down-low, as in, a guy who currently identifies as straight but maybe still fucks around with other guys from time to time (or all the time, who are we kidding). Trade, as in, a self-identified straight guy—one who, as the original term was meant, would mess around with a queer person for cash or in exchange for material goods. Now trade is used more loosely to refer to hypothetically heterosexual guys who have sex with queer people, or sometimes just to refer to a masculine seeming guy.
Like many memes, it quickly became divorced from any actual meaning. Saying the phrase in literally any context became the joke. Reading through comments and replies, you almost get the feeling that everyone is relieved it’s something we’ve finally made a joke out of. Painting is something that no one plans for, but accidents happen—especially if sex is spontaneous, and neither party has time to prepare. It’s embarrassing, but to understand that it happens to everyone, or nearly everyone, makes it feel less shameful.
The spirit of the meme, though, is about reclaiming some kind of power—as ridiculous as that sounds. DL trade hold so much sway over us; they’re sexy, they’re unavailable, and, almost necessarily, they couldn't give a shit whether you live or die—it’s part of their schtick as a kind of Great Dark Man. But painting DL trade, especially when it’s (supposedly) on purpose, even as a joke, dents that sexy, DL image. It’s a way of saying, even in the form of a joke, that these guys are worth being shit on—literally. It’s the same spirit behind the recent trend of outing: a means of taking back power.
It’s also, obviously, simply not that deep. Go ahead and paint DL trade if you want. Who cares? As many a commenter will point out, he won’t be able to tell anyone about it anyways.
