We all know that fuck means to have sex, so what does it mean when a speaker says fuck you?
If fuck me means the speaker is asking someone else to have sex have with them, then what does fuck you mean?
Learn English – If “to f—” means to have sex, what does this idiom mean
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Best Answer
The Original Poster seems to be inquiring about literal meaning of the sentences "fuck me" and "fuck you". The illocutionary force of these sentences is a different issue altogether. This post then is about the grammar of the Original Poster's examples, and how this affects what they literally mean.
My own example, sentence (1) is clearly an imperative, where the phrasal idiom fuck off literally means something like go away. Sentence (2) on the other hand seems to be a case of what some writers refer to as a "subjunctive". It is grammatically similar to phrases such as:
As with imperative constructions, these constructions use the plain form of the verb. Notice that the saying is God save the queen not saves the queen. Also notice that when the verb is the verb BE we see the plain form not a present tense form such as is. However, these are not imperative constructions. When we say peace be upon you this is not a third person imperative such as students unite! We are not giving an instruction to someone called "peace", or to peace itself. The sentence means something like May peace be upon you.
Rather, these sentences are invocations where the act of saying them is presented as an exhortation that will make them hopefully occur. Where the Subject of the sentences is not overtly expressed, it can be thought of as being God, fate, the universe, or some unspecified entity or power.
This is the construction that we see in the phrase Fuck you. It is an invocation that the addressee be fucked by an unspecified somebody. It is not an imperative. Notice while we're here that the illocutionary force of some of the expressions above is that the speaker is very surprised or shocked about something.
Now the Original Poster feels that fuck me is an imperative construction. While this may be true if you find it in the dialogue of a book such as D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's lover, this isn't the case when these words are being used with their idiomatic non-literal meaning.
We noted above that some of these "subjunctive" idioms we've been talking about are used to express profound surprise. One of the pertinent examples being:
This particular idiom has many variations such as well knock me down with a feather!. The idiomatic Well fuck me! is not an invitation to the listener. Rather, it has the same type of literal meaning as fuck you but with a different direct object. However, rather than being used to express distaste at oneself, it is, just like knock me down with a feather, an expression of awed surprise.
References
You can read about this type of usage of the subjunctive in A Communicative Grammar of English by the eminent English linguists Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik (co-authors of the Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language). You can get a snapshot from Google books here.
As Leech and Svartvik don't explicitly mention the more colourful examples dicussed by the Original Poster, you can read a few lines about them in Davidsen-nielsen's Tense and Mood in English, although you should be aware that this is really a comparative grammar of English and Danish.