I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like

by Mardy Grothe

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.

  BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

  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.

  NANCY FRIDAY

  It is a crossing of a Rubicon in life history.

  PAUL H. GEPHARD, on one’s first sexual intercourse

  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.

  CARY GRANT

  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.

  MADELINE GRAY

  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.

  GERMAINE GREER

  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.

  CHRISTOPHER HAMPTON

  A woman’s chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats.

  NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

  Playboy exploits sex the way Sports Illustrated exploits sports.

  HUGH HEFNER

  Female passion is to masculine as the epic is to an epigram.

  KARL KRAUS

  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.

  D. H. LAWRENCE

  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.

  HELEN LAWRENSON

  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.

  CAROL LEIFER

  I was wondering today what the religion of the country is—

  and all I could come up with is sex.

  CLARE BOOTH LUCE, in a 1982 column

  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.

  NORMAN MAILER, on Marilyn Monroe

  In the duel of sex, women fight from a dreadnaught,

  and man from an open raft.

  H. L. MENCKEN

  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?

  BEVERLY MICKINS

  The sex organ has a poetic power, like a comet.

  JOAN MIRO

  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.

  TONI MORRISON, from her 2003 novel Love

  The kiss is a wordless articulation of desire

  whose object lies in the future, and somewhat to the south.

  LANCE MORROW

  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.

  MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE

  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.

  CYNTHIA NELMS

  I like my sex the way I play basketball:

  one-on-one with as little dribbling as possible.

  LESLIE NIELSON

  Sex—the poor man’s polo.

  CLIFFORD ODETS

  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.

  CAMILLE PAGLIA

  Leaving sex to the feminists

  is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.

  CAMILLE PAGLIA

  What is an orgasm, after all, except laughter of the loins?

  MICKEY ROONEY

  Sex is like art.

  Most of it is pretty bad, and the good stuff is out of your price range.

  SCOTT ROEBEN

  Sex is currency.

  What’s the use of being beautiful

  if you can’t profit from it?

  LILI ST. CYR

  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.

  JERRY SEINFELD

  I’ve always felt that foreplay should be like a good meal,

  going from soup…to nuts.

  CYBILL SHEPHERD, from her 2000 memoir Cybill Disobedience

  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.”

  ALLEN SHERMAN

  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.

  ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER

  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.

  GARY SMALLEY

  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.

  SUSAN SONTAG

  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.

  TIM STEEVES

  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.”

  WANDA SYKES

  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.

  RABINDRANATH TAGORE

  The Fifties was the most sexually frustrated decade: ten years of foreplay.

  LILY TOMLIN

  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.

  KENNETH TYNAN

  Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

  JOHN UPDIKE

  History is filled with the sound of

  silken slippers going downstairs

  and wooden shoes coming up.

  VOLTAIRE

  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.

  JESSAMYN WEST

  An ounce of performance is worth pounds of promise.

  MAE WEST

  An orgasm is just a reflex, like a sneeze.

  DR. RUTH WESTHEIMER

  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.

  MARY DAY WINN

  chapter 11

  Old & Young, We Are All on Our Last Cruise

  John Quincy Adams became the sixth president of the United States in 1825, the first son of a president to be elected to the nation’s highest office. At the end of the campaign, none of the candidates—which included Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay—had garnered enough electoral votes, and the election was decided in the House of Represen
tatives. When the new President Adams went on to appoint Clay as secretary of state, Jackson cried foul and complained of “a corrupt bargain.” With serious political opposition from the Jacksonians and a weak political base, the Adams presidency was not a happy—or a particularly distinguished—one.

  But Adams was an interesting guy. He often began his day by taking a vigorous early morning swim—often in the nude—in the Potomac River. In a famous anecdote, a female journalist once snatched his clothes from the riverbank and returned them only after Adams agreed to give her an interview. He served one term, defeated in 1828 by his old nemesis, Andrew Jackson. He returned to Massachusetts to lick his political wounds and write his memoirs, but in 1831 he returned to the U. S. Congress, the only former president to do so.

  In the middle of an impassioned 1848 speech in Congress, Adams suffered a stroke and fell unconscious to the floor. His health had been failing in recent years, and some previous heart problems had limited him severely. He died two days later, at age eighty.

  In a eulogy, Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster recalled his last meeting with the deceased former President. While visiting Adams at his home in D.C., Webster overheard a man ask the aging politician how he was doing. Adam’s voice was weak, but his words reflected a mind that was still strong and vibrant:

  I inhabit a weak, frail, decayed tenement;

  battered by the winds and broken in upon by the storms,

  and from all I can learn, the landlord does not intend to repair.

  Webster, one of the great orators of his era, admired eloquence whenever it surfaced, and he was deeply moved by this powerful—and poignant—metaphor. Happily for lovers of language, he recorded Adam’s reply for posterity.

  Observations about age and aging have appeared with great frequency over the centuries, but until I began work on this book I didn’t realize how many of them are metaphorical. Many, like the Adams observation, have come from elderly people contemplating a death that is soon to come. Others have been written by younger people as they begin to imagine death. In 1728, at age twenty-two, Benjamin Franklin began tinkering with a possible epitaph for himself. He went through several possibilities—some serious, some clever—before composing this metaphorical masterpiece: