It's hard to say goodbye to a boat we got this horny for

Just like the characters in E. L. James's seminal literary classic Fifty Shades Freed wanted to be freed from their demons, the Ever Given is now happily unmoored, floating along towards its intended destination. And just like Anastasia Steele with Christian Grey, for some reason, the entire internet wants the Ever Given to impregnate them. This is the most ridiculous introduction I’ve ever written, but it’s true: People seem to be really horny for the boat caught in Egypt’s Suez Canal, still, days after it’s been memed, fan-fictioned, and dirty tweeted. But y’all, it’s time to say goodbye.

I don’t know if you’ve followed the drama of the Suez Canal, but a quick recap for those who actually go outside on the weekends: Cargo ship the Ever Given, got stuck in the side of the Suez Canal. Specifically, the container ship turned sideways near the southern end of the canal last Tuesday morning, literally right after drawing a penis and balls with their sea route. After several rescue attempts to dislodge the ship failed, the Ever Given lodged further into our hearts. Finally, the ship was partially refloated after a week of immovability on Monday, resuming. While a severe dust storm and poor visibility were to blame according to officials, I personally think the crew was too busy laughing at their maritime creativity and weren’t paying enough attention.

But we were. Perhaps because of quarantine leading to many of us going on our longest droughts we’ve ever had in our sexual adulthood. Or, maybe it’s the fact that we really just needed something with real stakes that has nothing to do with our lung health to latch onto. Either way, people have been deeply horny for this boat.

At the start of the weekend, fanfiction website ArchiveOfOurOwn hosts works with the tag “Suez Canal (Anthropomorphic),” both in poetry and short stories. Jezebel reported on Friday that there were only 27 works, and as of this writing, there are 107, so this weekend was clearly very inspirational for some saucy scalawags. In addition to romantic tales where the canal in the boat are star crossed lovers, there are more sexual stories, calling the boat “dummy thicc,” or in the case of story “In Hot Water,” a “very thirsty channel honks a ship horn,” and whatever that means, I’m sure everyone involved needs a cigarette afterwards.

In addition, comedians like Justin Randall have taken this opportunity to make very prescient jokes on Twitter about the Suez Canal being free, (and while that link is totally safe for work, it doesn’t look like it is, so you’ve been warned.) He’s not the only one with tweets that seem like a cat during its estrous cycle, either — there are so many jokes about this boat (so many.)

In addition, while memes about the situation started out innocent, the after-hours memes started circulating, and many visual jokes revealed the reality that the whole situation is inherently sexual. There’s just something about a phallic object being jammed into a 120 mile long throughway that just screams sex to our sex-starved states, I guess.

Now that the Ever Given is free, I’m weirdly sad about it. While terrible for international trade, the boat getting stuck this weekend was great for comedy. I’m not the only one who is apparently sad that it's free, either. Just take this extremely viral tweet by Twitter user @undeadartclub, exclaiming “PUT IT BACK, PUT THAT SHIP BACK RIGHT NOW.” Human frustration, as you may know, can be born of unfulfillment in other areas, and this tweet’s almost 1,700 retweets and more than 13,000 likes may prove another symptom of our horniness — because, perhaps some of us have not had anything stuck on our canals for quite some time.

Although many more jokes are to be made, the Ever Given saga caused a lot of lost revenue, delayed shipments, and rich person despair, probably. If you think about this in sheer big boy boat terms, that one container ship is 1,312 feet long and 220,000 metric tons, and 400 ships just like it were traffic-jammed behind it, waiting to reach their destinations.

This drama caused severe delays in the delivery of cattle, gasoline, and sex toys, and the latter might explain some of our behavior from the past few days. The president of the Japanese firm Shoei Kisen KK, which owns the cargo ship, told a news conference late Friday how sorry he was, and I would just like to let him know he has nothing to be sorry for, in my book at least. Although it cost commercial losses of almost $10 billion a day, what is money if happiness does not follow? I for one am happy this boat entered our lives.

According to Laleh Khalili, an international politics professor at Queen Mary University of London interviewed by NBC news, the drama that one little ship caused may soon be a distant memory. Barring any unforeseen circumstances, the backlog could be cleared within a week, but as for our sexual backlog, well ... that might take much much longer.