Framing Erotica

Some--too many, by far--of these devices are built-in, as it were, to erotica. It is a rare story, indeed, for example, in which a penis is not described as a ramrod (which "rams"), a sword or a knife (which "thrusts," "penetrates," "pierces," or "stabs"), or, in ejaculation, as a volcano (which "erupts"), a bomb (which "explodes") or a gun (which "shoots" or "discharges"), or according to some other equally familiar metaphor. Attempts to add new tropes to erotica's storehouse of metaphorical images is difficult, and the author who succeeds in doing so is apt to accomplish this feat only infrequently and rarely. (I myself have added "column of flesh," for an erection, and "gum-drop-shaped" to describe the tip, or glans, of the penis. In addition, I have described breasts as "buoyant" and semen as "fecundating fluid." However, these and one or two other exceptions aside, I have, admittedly, added precious little to the treasury of erotic tropes.)

Unless new poetical and rhetorical figures can be created, the old ones will have to do. However, such images and figures of speech have already become clichés, and, as such, they simply reinforce the traditional ideas and feelings that readers and writers have already accumulated concerning sex and all things sexual, including women's bodies (and the substitute for women's bodies that are the physiques of shemales or, more often, feminized or effeminate males). Therefore, we shall continue to think of women in terms of natural objects, as having breasts like apples, pubic hair like forests or thickets, buttocks like mountains, hair like gold or dusk, and men (and the substitute for women's bodies that are the physiques of shemales or butch lesbians and dominatrix, or "phallic women") as technological devices, such as machines, engines, instruments, and tools.

Traditional erotica represents women as natural objects--as the earth, as fields, as fruits, or as ore--to be exploited by men, who plow, pluck, or mine their sexual resources, and to represent males as equally soulless mechanical men.