Comments on: Bad Words: the Language of Sex

By: Bonnie

Bonnie — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 16:49:21 +0000

In some human cultures though, sodomy has been used as you describe. In ancient Rome (not really that ancient, when you look at the larger scale of things), you could sodomize a man who committed an offense against - or, even worse, force him to perform oral sex on you. You point out a very interesting link, one that derives anxiety and “badness” from homosexual energy instead heterosexual. Considering the current stance of our society on homoeroticism, that would sure make sense.

By: MDÂ²

MDÂ² — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 12:27:02 +0000

A bit late to the debate, but I’d rather say that the vast corpus of sexual vocabulary have to do with the fact that we inject a lot of our sexual desire (i.e: desire as an energy) as fuel to other social activities.
As some ethnologist noted (I think it was Claude Levi-Staruss) there’s nothing as homo-eroticised as the actual process of distributing women among men.
Think of the vocabulary of confrontation: you “fuked” your defeated opponent… intersesting when you compare with the way some other mammals deals with confilcts of power (the winner actualy sodomise the loser, see with dogs). Human males do not do it anymore, they’ve learned to channel the sexual urge that was used to fuel confrontational desire into words, much more economic.

In a way, I can’t but think that’s part of why homosexuality is so decried: the energy that should have been used to advance/protect community has been used for personnal pleasure only (see how, I think in Foucault’s Les Anormaux, the extreme devellopment figure of the monster becomes the masturbator…).

Anyway, this won’t explain everything, but I think it might prove a useful tool.

By: matt

matt — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 21:01:39 +0000

Worded much, much better, but yes :)

By: Bonnie

Bonnie — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 20:15:28 +0000

I see (I think.). You’re saying that, in the same way myths compartmentalize the unexplainable and the unconfrontable in order to make them more managable, porn removes sex and the guilt we carry with it and places it into a contained, distinctive space, one that we can tuck away as if separate from our “meaningful”, emotional relationships.

By: matt

matt — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 18:38:48 +0000

Yeah, I guess I wasn’t very specific :)

I mean that the things that are unknown or are mysterious to us naturally stir the imagination–particularly if they are Verbotten. I’m theorizing, I suppose, that much in the way people create myths and believe in them in order to explain the non-understandable workings of the universe, pronography is a “myth” of sex–a myth that carries all the baggage of sex being perceived as an impure and corrupting act. Sex can’t be in the same room as love because sex is evil. Mechanical, bestial and primal. Porn.

I don’t mean to imply that porn is “wrong” or should be banned or something, just that it’s a popular, mythical outlet the springs forth from our persitently supertitious ideas about sex. If our culture were far more sex-positive I don’t think we’d see less porn, but that it would certainly be of higher quality :p

By: Bonnie

Bonnie — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 15:13:55 +0000

For sex, I think those myths spring into form as pornography.

How so, Matt?

By: matt

matt — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 00:05:02 +0000

Huh, I’ve never thought about it that way (in regards to your reference of Foucault’s book).

I can’t ever think of anything that I was forbidden from exploring or knowing that didn’t result in my actively exploring or researching it. What is forbidden is automatically exotic, I think, and springs forth myths of its own. For sex, I think those myths spring into form as pornography.

By: James Schend

James Schend — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 22:26:20 +0000

The Straight Dope is funny, but they also ruthlessly research all their answers. Like the column says, the way their language is structured, you could come up with a thousand ‘words for snow’ if you spent enough time at it.

By: Bonnie

Bonnie — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 18:30:39 +0000

When completed, this sentence will proclaim: “Look at all this freaking snow.” At present it means: “Observe the snow. It fornicates.” This is not poetic, but it is serviceable, and I intend to employ it at the next opportunity.

That made Scott and me laugh like idiots for a good two minutes straight. Thanks for the link! Though I admit I have heard tell that the whole “fourteen words for snow” bit is really just an exaggeration/simplification/whatever, and somehow racist against the inuit, as opposed to “eskimo”, people. Who knows…

Matt, you raise a really good point, that, since we associate automatically with the bad, since we repress it and consider it sinful, the language that surrounds it follows suit. Your discussion itself, to me at least, is almost more interesting however. You spend a good amount of time talking about how repressed and suppressed sexuality is in our culture. I’ve been spending some cosy nights with Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality lately (I’m in a class on the subject at the moment.), and he argues that in the last three hundred years we’ve moved from being turned on by sex, to being turned on by the idea of sexual repression. Sex, in and of itself, is only so interesting. The repression of sex, and the modes we use to go about uncovering it, make things far more fascinating. It gives us an excuse to use discourse to uncover sexuality. Like what we’re doing here. Just something to ponder…

By: James Schend

James Schend — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 18:08:02 +0000

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_297.html