Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

194 Forbidden Words
Food as a metaphor for the sexes
In earlier chapters, we touched on the linguistic ramifications of the close
connection between the alimentary and the sexual, and we now explore it
further. Even our ordinary, everyday language reminds us of the link between
eating and sex: a good looking person is a dish or dishy. And look in a
thesaurus at the entries under desire; the overlap of vocabulary is striking:
appetite, hunger, hungry look, craving, greed. Both food and bodies whet the
appetite, stimulate the juices, make the mouth water, activate the taste buds,
excite, smell good, titillate, allure, seduce. Mouths are sexual organs, of
course; usually the first point of contact in early sexual activity. Comparisons
between the mouth and the vagina – images of the vagina dentata ‘toothed
vagina’ – are widespread in myth and folklore and implicit in many slang
epithets: box with teeth, nether mouth, snapper, snatch, penis fly trap, mangle,
organ grinder and so forth. In many languages, euphemisms for copulate are
the equivalent of eat, and this is also used occasionally in English for both
copulation and oral sex. Certainly, the talk between lovers is sometimes
strikingly cannibalistic – I could eat you up; I want to suck you dry. Women,
particularly, are depicted as the carnivores, e.g. in the lyrics of Bob Dylan,
‘She’s a man-eater, meat-grinder, bad loser’ or of Hall and Oates, ‘Watch out
boys, she’ll chew you up . . . She’s a man-eater.’
Throughout the history of English slang, we find a strong food/eating
metaphor for sex, with both sexes depicted as edible objects – tasty morsels
or bonne-bouche (‘pleasant taste’, literally ‘good mouth’). From early times,
the meat metaphor has provided one of the strongest images for these slang
expressions. The male sex organs, and the body that goes with them, have for
centuries (perhaps millennia) been depicted as meat. This image continues to
spawn new slang items: beat one’s meat ‘masturbate’, meat injection ‘sexual
intercourse’ and meat and two veg ‘penis and testicles’. Many slang epithets
play on the meat metaphor, with the penis described as beef bayonet, mutton
dagger, pork (sword), gristle, hambone, tubesteak, white meat, dark meat
(depending on race), joint, marrowbone, marrowbone and cleaver, marrow
pudding, (live) sausage and older pud and pudding. The early expression
butcher ‘penis’ (the instrument of deflowering) has also given rise to
butcher’s shop and butcher’s window ‘vagina’. Newcomers are British English
lunchbox ‘penis and testicles’ (lunchbox has also been used for ‘vagina’;
see below) and Australian English he’s packing a good lunch. Also striking is
the recent flourishing of brawn terms for males, including expressions like
beefcake, 44 hunk (of meat), piece of meat and dog meat.
For centuries, women have been described as food objects, and the
meat idiom has also featured strongly here. Both the nineteenth-century