I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like (20 page)

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us
than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Chains do not hold a marriage together.
It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads,
which sew people together through the years.

SIMONE SIGNORET

To the family—that dear octopus from whose tentacles
we never quite escape nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to.

DODIE SMITH

This is from Smith's 1938 play
Dear Octopus,
in which the character Nicholas delivers this toast at the golden wedding anniversary of his grandparents.

 

Marriage resembles a pair of shears,
so joined that they cannot be separated;
often moving in opposite directions,
yet always punishing anyone who comes between them.

SYDNEY SMITH

Children are the anchors that hold a mother to life.

SOPHOCLES

In automobile terms, the child supplies the power
but the parents have to do the steering.

DR. BENJAMIN SPOCK

A good many men still like to think of their wives
as they do of their religion, neglected but always there.

FREYA STARK

The matter between husband and wife
stands much the same as it does between two cocks in the same yard.
The conqueror once is generally the conqueror for ever after.
The prestige of victory is everything.

ANTHONY TROLLOPE

In
Myra Breckinridge
, Gore Vidal described it this way: “That long wrangling for supremacy which is called marriage.”

 

Parents are the bones on which children sharpen their teeth.

PETER USTINOV

Take it from me, marriage is not a word…it's a sentence!

KING VIDOR

This is exceptional wordplay—at one level, a simple remark about words and sentences and, at another, a
marriage is a prison
metaphor. The line comes from Vidor's 1928 silent film classic
The Crowd
. It is delivered by the main character, John Sims, who angrily says it to his wife as he storms out the door.

 

Every marriage is a battle
between two families struggling to reproduce themselves.

CARL A. WHITAKER

It is a well-established psychoanalytic notion that six people are present in every bedroom: the couple and both sets of parents. Here, a pioneering figure in the field of family therapy extends the thought by suggesting that, in every marriage, two family traditions war with each other in a battle for survival.

 

Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin;
but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building.

OSCAR WILDE

Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.

THORNTON WILDER

Marriage isn't a process of prolonging the life of love,
but of mummifying the corpse.

P. G. WODEHOUSE

I
n 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.

ISABEL ALLENDE

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.

JAMES BALDWIN

Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results,
but that's not why we do it.

RICHARD P. FEYNMAN

Art is the sex of the imagination.

GEORGE JEAN NATHAN

Hair is another name for sex.

VIDAL SASSOON

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource
which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.

SUSAN SONTAG

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.

WOODY ALLEN

Erotic literature is closely akin to fairy tales,
because everything one wishes or desires is made available.

HENRY ANGELINO

Sex is like air—it's not important until you're not getting any.

ANONYMOUS

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.

ELIZABETH ASHLEY

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.

MARY ASTOR,
in her 1967 autobiography
A Life on Film

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.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

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.

ROSEANNE BARR

At the heart of pornography is sexuality haunted by its own disappearance.

JEAN BAUDRILLARD

This captures what is wrong with pornography—it is sex without sexuality.

 

There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.

JEAN BAUDRILLARD

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.

RITA MAE BROWN

Sexual intercourse is kicking death in the ass while singing.

CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Sex after ninety is like trying to shoot pool with a rope.
Even putting my cigar in its holder is a thrill.

GEORGE BURNS

My mom always said, “Men are like linoleum floors.
You lay them right, and you can walk on them for thirty years.”

BRETT BUTLER

Male sexual response is far brisker and more automatic.
It is triggered easily by things—like putting a quarter in a vending machine.

DR. ALEX COMFORT

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.

DAVID CORT

For flavor, Instant Sex will never supersede
the stuff you have to peel and cook.

QUENTIN CRISP

Having sex is like playing bridge.
If you don't have a good partner, you'd better have a good hand.

RODNEY DANGERFIELD

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.

BETTE DAVIS

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.

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

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.

PETER DE VRIES

A country without bordellos
is like a house without bathrooms.

MARLENE DIETRICH

Sex is identical to comedy in that it involves timing.

PHYLLIS DILLER

He could handle women as smoothly as operating an elevator.
He knew exactly where to locate the top button.

BRITT EKLUND,
on Warren Beatty

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.

HAVELOCK ELLIS

Men want a woman whom they can turn on and off like a light switch.

IAN FLEMING

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.

JOAN FONTAINE

Getting married for sex is like buying a 747 for the free peanuts.

JEFF FOXWORTHY

Men perform oral sex like they drive.
When they get lost, they refuse to ask for directions.

CATHERINE FRANCO

Beauty and folly are old companions.