In 468 B.C., an unknown Greek playwright named Sophocles shocked everyone by winning a national drama competition. On the way to victory, he defeated the reigning champion, a popular writer known as Aeschylus. Dramatic writing competitions were all the rage in Athens—a kind of literary Super Bowl—and almost everyone expected Aeschylus to once again emerge triumphant. The victory proved to be anything but a fluke for the twenty-eight-year-old Sophocles, who continued to compete in subsequent years (in the rest of his career, he won more than any other Greek writer, and never finished lower than second place).
Sophocles, who lived to age ninety, produced more than 120 plays in his career. Only seven complete plays survive today, but they include Oedipus Rex, Antigone, Electra, and other classics of Greek literature. Sophocles, an extremely talented writer, was especially adept at figurative language, creating many metaphors—like ship of state—that live on twenty-five hundred years after his death.
A half century after the death of Sophocles, Plato wrote in his Republic that he once overheard a student ask the aging Greek writer, “How do you stand in matters of love? Are you still able to have sex with a woman?” Sophocles put his finger to his mouth and said, “Hush! If you please.” Then, leaning forward, as if he were revealing a great secret, he said:
To my great delight, I have escaped from it,
and feel as if I had escaped from a frantic and savage master.
In his earlier life, Sophocles was typical of Greek noblemen—he had been married twice, enjoyed the services of a concubine, probably had a favorite prostitute, and in all likelihood had more than just a passing acquaintance with a few young boys. If he had framed his answer by means of another literary device—chiasmus—he might have said that he didn’t possess sexual desire, sexual desire had possessed him. But he chose to express himself in metaphorical terms, becoming the first person in history to describe sexual desire as a ravenous monster.
The metaphor clearly resonated with Plato, who wrote, “I thought then, as I do now, that he spoke wisely. For unquestionably, old age brings us profound repose and freedom from this and other passions.” For Plato, as with so many other thinkers after him, the goal of philosophy was to help people gain control of their passions. This has also been the historic goal of religion, as reflected in this metaphorical passage from the Talmud:
Our passions are like travelers: at first they make a brief stay;
then they are like guests, who visit often;
and then they turn into tyrants, who hold us in their power.
Despite centuries of philosophizing and religious training, the wild beast of sexual desire has remained largely untamed. History is replete with examples of intelligent and powerful men—and occasionally women—who have risked everything for a moment of sexual pleasure. This reality shows up in one of the most popular pieces of advice that teenage boys get from their fathers, coaches, and other plain-speaking authority figures:
Never let the little head do the thinking for the big head.
The little head, of course, is a metaphor for the penis. But because sex is such an emotionally loaded subject, people routinely talk about it in veiled metaphorical references. We don’t teach children about sex, after all, we tell them about the birds and the bees. And we don’t have sex, we make love, go all the way, do the nasty, or simply do the deed.
For many centuries, people in the public eye have found ways of communicating in sexual innuendo to people “in the know” without offending those folks—especially those prudish ones—who are not. In the 1983 smash hit Little Red Corvette, the artist known as Prince relates a one-night stand in the back seat of a car with a passionate and promiscuous woman. With lyrics like “you had a pocket full of horses” (code for Trojan condoms) and “I’m gonna try to tame your little red love machine,” the entire song is a huge sexual metaphor (and ever since, the term little red corvette has been sexual slang for a woman’s vagina).
This tradition of covert communication has always been popular in music, especially in the blues. In the 1930s, the great Bessie Smith wasn’t talking about sweeteners and frankfurters when she sang “I need a little sugar in my bowl and a little hot dog between my roll.” Even literary greats have joined in the act. The German man of letters, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, was delicately talking about sexual intercourse when he said:
Women are silver saucers into which we put golden apples.
The great master of sexual allusion, however, has to be William Shakespeare, who was often able to shroud ribald and risqué sentiments in presentable language. In Venus and Adonis, he has the provocative Venus say:
I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale:
Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.
And in Othello, after the lovely Desdemona and Othello become an item, the villainous Iago announces to Desdemona’s father:
Your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs.
Many believe the beast with two backs expression—a metaphor for sexual intercourse—is yet another one of Shakespeare’s verbal inventions, but it first appeared in print more than three decades before Shakespeare’s birth. In his classic 1532 Gargantua and Pantagruel, François Rabelais creatively combined it with a food metaphor when he wrote:
In the prime of his years he married Gargamelle,
daughter of the king of the Butterflies, a fine, good-looking piece,
and the pair of them often played the two-backed beast,
joyfully rubbing their bacon together.
In the world of metaphor, sex is usually compared to other things, but occasionally we find other things being likened to sex, often in fascinating ways:
Writing is like making love.
Don’t worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process.
Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex; you thought of nothing else
if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did.
Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results,
but that’s not why we do it.
Art is the sex of the imagination.
Hair is another name for sex.
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource
which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
In the rest of the chapter, though, you’ll see sex related to dozens of other things. And whether they are done seriously or humorously, the metaphorical observations you will find here may help you look at this age-old phenomenon in new ways.
Sex is like having dinner—sometimes you joke about the dishes,
sometimes you take the meal seriously.
Erotic literature is closely akin to fairy tales,
because everything one wishes or desires is made available.
Sex is like air—it’s not important until you’re not getting any.
Other great sex metaphors from anonymous sources include the following:
“Virginity is like a balloon: one prick and it’s gone.”
“Memory is like an orgasm. It’s a lot better if you don’t have to fake it.”
“Love is a matter of chemistry, but sex is a matter of physics.”
“Sex is like snow; you never know how many inches you’re going to get or how long it will last.”
Sex is just another real good drug…
and it can make a junkie out of you.
Sex as something beautiful may soon disappear.
Once it was a knife so finely honed the edge was invisible
until it was touched and then it cut deep.
Now it is so blunt that it merely bruises and leaves ugly marks.
Woman is a delicious instrument of pleasure,
but one must know the chords, study the pose of it,
the timid keyboard, the changing and capricious fingering.
In his 1829 classic, The Physiology of Marriage, Balzac also wrote: “No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.”
Men read maps better because only a male mind
could conceive of an inch equaling a hundred miles.
At the heart of pornography is sexuality haunted by its own disappearance.
This captures what is wrong with pornography—it is sex without sexuality.
There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.
This may be true for men. For turning on women, though, many would agree with Henry Kissinger’s view: “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Graham Greene weighed in with “Fame is a powerful aphrodisiac,” and Saul Bellow observed, “All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he’s a writer. It’s an aphrodisiac.” But P. J. O’Rourke may have said it best: “There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, especially in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 3890SL convertible.”
Sex is a pleasurable exercise in plumbing,
but be careful or you’ll get yeast in your drain tap.
Sexual intercourse is kicking death in the ass while singing.
Sex after ninety is like trying to shoot pool with a rope.
Even putting my cigar in its holder is a thrill.
My mom always said, “Men are like linoleum floors.
You lay them right, and you can walk on them for thirty years.”
Male sexual response is far brisker and more automatic.
It is triggered easily by things—like putting a quarter in a vending machine.
Comfort was the author of The Joy of Sex, an illustrated 1972 sex manual that was a publishing blockbuster (it spent nearly three months at the top of the New York Times bestseller list and almost a year and a half in the top five).
Sex is the great amateur art.
For flavor, Instant Sex will never supersede
the stuff you have to peel and cook.
Having sex is like playing bridge.
If you don’t have a good partner, you’d better have a good hand.
Similar observations have also been attributed to Mae West and Woody Allen.
The act of sex, gratifying as it may be, is God’s joke on humanity.
Sex pleasure in woman…is a kind of magic spell;
it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken.
Sex in marriage is like medicine.
Three times a day for the first week.
Then once a day for another week.
Then once every three or four days until the condition clears up.
A country without bordellos
is like a house without bathrooms.
Sex is identical to comedy in that it involves timing.
He could handle women as smoothly as operating an elevator.
He knew exactly where to locate the top button.
This is a classic double entendre observation. The top button is not only a building floor designation in an elevator, it is also sexual slang for the clitoris. Also on the topic of Beatty’s magic touch with women, Woody Allen once quipped, “If I could come back in another life, I want to be Warren Beatty’s fingertips.”
The sexual embrace, worthily understood,
can only be compared with music and with prayer.
Men want a woman whom they can turn on and off like a light switch.
For a man, sex is hunger—like eating.
If a man is hungry and can’t get to a fancy French restaurant,
he’ll go to a hot dog stand.
Getting married for sex is like buying a 747 for the free peanuts.
Men perform oral sex like they drive.
When they get lost, they refuse to ask for directions.
Beauty and folly are old companions.
Over the centuries, great beauty has charmed otherwise smart people into doing many foolish things. On the same subject, the seventeenth-century English naturalist John Ray offered this thought: “Beauty is power; a smile is its sword.”
Sexuality is the great field of battle
between biology and society.
It is a crossing of a Rubicon in life history.
There may be no more significant event in a person’s life than losing one’s virginity, and Gephard, director of the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research, chose an apt metaphor to describe it. The Rubicon is a river that, in ancient times, divided Italy and Gaul. In 49 B.C., Julius Caesar crossed the river in a military march against Pompey. He acted in defiance of the Roman Senate’s orders, saying “the die is cast” as he crossed the river. Ever since, “Crossing the Rubicon,” has been a metaphor for taking a step after which there is no turning back.
I think that making love is the best form of exercise.
So female orgasm…may be thought of as a pleasure prize
that comes with a box of cereal.
It is all to the good if the prize is there
but the cereal is valuable and nourishing if it is not.
Despite a lifetime of service to the cause of sexual liberation,
I have never caught venereal disease, which makes me feel rather like
an Arctic explorer who has never had frostbite.
Greer, the Australian author of the feminist classic The Female Eunuch (1970), authored two other metaphorical observations of interest:
“A full bosom is actually a millstone around a woman’s neck.”
“Conventional sexual intercourse is like squirting jam into a doughnut.”
Masturbation is the thinking man’s television.
A woman’s chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats.
Playboy exploits sex the way Sports Illustrated exploits sports.
Female passion is to masculine as the epic is to an epigram.
Since an epic contains many thousands of words, and an epigram generally fewer than a dozen, it is clear who has the most passion, according to this observation.
Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness.
And when beauty fades, problems surface for those who have relied heavily on it. On the fading nature of great looks over time, Joan Collins wrote: “The problem with beauty is that it’s like being born rich and getting poorer.”
As for the topsy-turvy tangle known as soixante-neuf,
personally I have always felt it to be madly confusing,
like trying to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time.
Soixante-neuf is French for the sexual position known in English as sixty-nine.
Sex when you’re married is like going to a 7-Eleven.
There’s not as much variety, but at three in the morning, it’s always there.
I was wondering today what the religion of the country is—
and all I could come up with is sex.
She was our angel…and the sugar of sex came up from her
like a resonance of sound in the clearest grain of a violin…a very Stradivarius of sex.
In the duel of sex, women fight from a dreadnaught,
and man from an open raft.
A dreadnaught is a class of battleship that first appeared in 1906. The ship was so technically advanced and, with its huge guns, so deadly that it immediately made all previous battleships obsolete. A raft, by comparison, is pretty a flimsy craft, so it is clear in Mencken’s view who has the upper hand in this duel.
I love the lines men use to get us into bed.
“Please, I’ll only put it in for a minute.”
What am I, a microwave?
The sex organ has a poetic power, like a comet.
Do they still call it infatuation?
That magic ax that chops away the world in one blow…
Whatever they call it, it leaps over anything, takes
the biggest chair, the largest slice, rules the ground wherever it walks…
People with no imagination feed it with sex—the clown of love.
The kiss is a wordless articulation of desire
whose object lies in the future, and somewhat to the south.
Sex has become the religion of the most civilized portions of the earth.
The orgasm has replaced the cross
as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.
Muggeridge, a controversial English journalist, was a self-proclaimed drinker, smoker, and womanizer who also authored another widely quoted metaphor: “Sex is the ersatz or substitute religion of the twentieth century.” In 1968, after meeting Mother Teresa, he brought her work to an English audience in a television documentary. Meeting her changed him—and the former agnostic shocked many when he wrote Jesus Rediscovered in 1969.
In sex as in banking there is a penalty for early withdrawal.
I like my sex the way I play basketball:
one-on-one with as little dribbling as possible.
Sex—the poor man’s polo.
A century earlier, Charles Baudelaire wrote in his journal: “Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.” Both observations were preceded by a centuries-old Italian proverb: “Bed is the poor man’s opera.”
Sex is power, and all power is inherently aggressive.
Leaving sex to the feminists
is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.
What is an orgasm, after all, except laughter of the loins?
Sex is like art.
Most of it is pretty bad, and the good stuff is out of your price range.
Sex is currency.
What’s the use of being beautiful
if you can’t profit from it?
In the mid-twentieth century, St. Cyr was the best-known striptease dancer in America.
The basic conflict between men and women, sexually,
is that men are like firemen. To men, sex is an emergency,
and no matter what we’re doing we can be ready in two minutes.
Women, on the other hand, are like fire. They’re very exciting,
but the conditions have to be exactly right for it to occur.
I’ve always felt that foreplay should be like a good meal,
going from soup…to nuts.
Anyone who calls it sexual intercourse can’t possibly be interested in doing it.
You might as well announce that you’re ready for lunch by proclaiming,
“I’d like to do some masticating and enzyme secreting.”
The sexual organs are the most sensitive organs of the human being.
The eye or the ear seldom sabotages you.
An eye will not stop seeing if it doesn’t like what it sees.
I would say that the sexual organs express the human soul
more than any other part of the body.
They are not diplomats. They tell the truth ruthlessly.
Men tend to be like microwave ovens—
instantly ready to be turned on at anytime, day or night….
The average woman, however, is more like a crock-pot.
She needs to warm up to the sexual experience and savor the process.
In a related metaphor, actress Sandra Bullock agreed: “Women are like ovens. We need fifteen minutes to heat up.”
On the level of simple sensation and mood,
making love surely resembles an epileptic fit at least as much as,
if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.
In the fifth century B.C., the Greek philosopher Democritus said, “Coition is a slight attack of apoplexy.” Also on the topic of fitful sex, Sontag wrote, “Sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication…but then again may not.”
Most men approach sex a lot like shooting a game of pinball.
We don’t have any idea about the internal workings
or what we should do to win,
we’re just gonna try to keep the ball in play as long as possible.
For guys, sex is like going to a restaurant.
No matter what they order off that menu,
they walk out saying, “Damn! That was good!”
For women, it don’t work like that. We go to the restaurant;
sometimes it’s good, sometimes you got to send it back….
Or you might go, “I think I’m going to cook for myself today.”
I have observed on board a steamer,
how men and women easily give way to their instinct for flirtation,
because water has the power of washing away our sense of responsibility,
and those who on land resemble the oak in their firmness
behave like floating seaweed when on the sea.
The Fifties was the most sexually frustrated decade: ten years of foreplay.
Germaine Greer said the same thing: “The 1950s were ten years of foreplay.” Jerry Rubin, reflecting on the role the automobile played in the process, observed “The back seat produced the sexual revolution.”
The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body…
Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes
are as near the human form can ever come to abstract art.
Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
History is filled with the sound of
silken slippers going downstairs
and wooden shoes coming up.
Throughout history, the privileged classes have snuck downstairs at night to have sex with servants or slaves—and sometimes those same servants and slaves have trekked upstairs for the same purpose.
Sex and religion are bordering states.
They use the same vocabulary, share like ecstasies,
and often serve as a substitute for one another.
An ounce of performance is worth pounds of promise.
An orgasm is just a reflex, like a sneeze.
In the 1980s, Dr. Ruth was the world’s most famous sex therapist, and this was her attempt to portray the orgasm as a natural bodily function. Mason Cooley may have been inspired by her when he offered this definition: “Orgasm: the genitals sneezing.” But a decade before Dr. Ruth, the authors of a 1972 sex manual for children had already discovered the value of the sneeze metaphor in explaining the nature of an orgasm to prepubescent children: “An orgasm is like the tickling feeling you get inside your nose before you sneeze.”
Sex is the Tabasco sauce which an adolescent national palate
sprinkles on every course in the menu.