Am I Chewed Gum or Dirty Water? Unpacking Sexual Euphemisms
BY SIENNA SEWELL
After a wild Saturday night, you probably heard of a few people who “did it,” “got laid,” or “slept around.” From the excitement around “losing your v-card” at prom to the loss of innocence around “that’s what she said” jokes, sex quickly became coded into my slang starting in middle school. No one says “doing the nasty” or “knocking boots” anymore, but sexual euphemisms and slang have been around for centuries. Each new term brings with it some sort of connotation about sex – think about “smashing” vs “lovemaking,” or “cherry-popping” contrasted with “lying back and thinking of England.” Euphemisms have the power to shape our ideas of sexuality, which can be a good thing when we consider something as nuanced as language surrounding sex. However, there’s also evidence that some of the more harmful euphemisms we learned growing up have affected how we see sexuality and reinforce the stigma around it.
There’s nothing wrong with a good euphemism. It can be a powerful literary tool and it can break down complex ideas into a more relatable format. It’s a lot easier to tell kids about the birds and the bees than it is to explain sex, although for the life of me I can’t figure out how “the birds and the bees” became such a popular term for sex! However, the discourse and historical context for sex means that we are dealing with a topic that is anything but simple. Sexual euphemisms can carry with them outdated ideas about virginity, promiscuity, and the “right” way to have sex. Consider high school sex-education. Many people at WashU were fortunate enough to be blessed with comprehensive sex education where they learned about STIs, contraception, and how to put a condom on a banana. However, many people’s most harmful sex euphemisms came from their secondary education health classes. I’ve chosen some popular stories to share with you if you never experienced this sort of non-consensual objectification. First, we have the Tape Metaphor. You stick a piece of tape on your arm, then unstick it and pass it to the next person. The more people the tape sticks to, the dirtier it becomes – it also loses the ability to stick as effectively. This is supposed to represent how someone is dirty if they have relations with too many people and how they lose the ability to “bond” with someone if they have too much pre-marital sex. BUT – wouldn’t the tape get just as dirty if you stuck it to your lawfully wedded partner multiple times? So much for accurate analogies! Variations of this include the chewed gum and spit water euphemisms. In the gum version, people are asked whether they’d prefer the chewed gum or the new piece of gum, which are supposed to represent marriage to people who have had sex before or people who have not. The spit water is the same concept. What a fun, graphic example of the exchange of bodily fluids, right? The more people spit in the water, the dirtier it becomes, and who wants to marry dirty spit water! Another favorite of mine are the Cake, Pie, and Rose metaphors. The common thread of these metaphors is that your sexuality is finite, that you can only give yourself away so many times until you run out of cake or rose petals. (What is this, Beauty and the Beast?) I’m still confused about what the cake represents in this metaphor... and you still have only the same amount of cake to give, whether you’re with one person or many. Better check the expiration date on your sexuality! People have quite the imagination when it comes to sexual euphemisms – I’m looking at you, fire metaphor. This is a new one I learned about thanks to some conservative religious sites. The idea with “sex is fire” is (unfortunately) not to glory in the erotic passion that often accompanies sex. The sex-as-fire metaphor explains that you shouldn’t play with your sexuality because it is dangerous and should be treated with respect. Obviously, you can’t respect yourself if you’re having premarital sex. However, your sexual fire should be used to warm the heart and home of you and your monogamous heterosexual marriage partner. These metaphors are all designed to keep us away from “promiscuous” sex and to promote abstinence until marriage. While there is nothing wrong with choosing abstinence, all of these analogies promote the idea that sex is dangerous, that you are dirty or less-than if you have too much of it, and that there’s only so much of your sexuality that you can safely give away. Now that I’m out of high school, I can think about these analogies with a more critical lens. The ideas perpetuated in these situations tell me that my self-worth is tied up in my dangerous sexuality and that my sexual “cake” decreases every time I have sex with someone. Waiting until marriage is the goal – just wait for the one and things will work out! But what if there isn’t a “one”? What if there’s more than one? What if the one has the same genitalia or gender identity as me? The nuances of these relationships are clearly not captured when you’re comparing me to a piece of tape. Well, if abstinence-only sex education can give us euphemisms to stop us from having sex, teenagers can come up with even more about why we SHOULD have sex. I’m all for taking charge of your sexuality, but even sex-positive euphemisms can carry some problematic weight. I’ve put a few of my favorites below:
I really don’t love thinking of myself as a lock with no key. I am my own key! Actually, scratch that. I’m a person, and I don’t need to be objectified as a rose, a cake, dirty water, a field, or a dangerous fire. I define my own sexuality and will use it in a way that encourages my physical and emotional growth and in a way that enables me to be a trusting and open-minded partner. I still use euphemisms on occasion to talk about sex, because some of them are just funny and lighten the mood. However, I’m much more willing to unpack the feelings I get when certain phrases are used in regard to sexuality. It’s important to realize how much our discourse on sex shapes our attitude towards it, but this attitude can and has been changing for years in the positive direction. My goal with the dialogue surrounding sex is focusing on normalizing the beauty and complexity of different sexualities and that sexual exploration is healthy and fun. Don’t worry about running around some theoretical baseball field, because a healthy sexuality is about having your cake and eating it too, whenever you damn well please. |