I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like
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W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS
After the chills and fever of love, how nice is the 98.6º of marriage!
MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN
Marrying is like enlisting in a war or being sentenced to a form of
penal servitude that makes the average American husband into a slave.
H. L. MENCKEN
More recently, actor James Garner reflected, “Marriage is a lot like the army; everyone complains, but you’d be surprised at the large number that re-enlist.”
If I ever marry, it will be on a sudden impulse—as a man shoots himself.
H. L. MENCKEN
Mencken was one of history’s great misogamists (marriage haters). He once wrote, “Whenever a husband and a wife begin to discuss their marriage, they are giving evidence at a coroner’s inquest.” In 1930, he married Sara Haardt, a college professor eighteen years his junior. Given his well-known views, the marriage made headlines. Always ready with a quip, Mencken wrote: “Getting married, like getting hanged, is a great deal less dreadful than it has been made out.” Mencken finally found love, but sadly, it was not to last. His wife died of meningitis five years later.
Children are messengers to us from a world we once deeply knew.
ALICE MILLER
The American educator Neil Postman offered a similar thought: “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.”
Today, while the titular head of the family may still be the father,
everyone knows that he is little more than chairman,
at most, of the entertainment committee.
ASHLEY MONTAGU
People commonly educate their children as they build their houses,
according to some plan they think beautiful, without considering
whether it is suited to the purposes for which they are designed.
MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU
Marriage is based on the theory that
when a man discovers a particular brand of beer exactly to his taste
he should at once throw up his job and go to work in the brewery.
GEORGE JEAN NATHAN
Anybody can have one kid. But going from one kid to two
is like going from owning a dog to running a zoo.
P. J. O’ROURKE
Quarrels are the dowry which married folk bring one another.
OVID
A dowry is money or personal property brought to a marriage, often in a chest or piece of baggage. This observation from Ovid’s The Art of Love (first century B.C.) may be history’s first metaphor on bringing “emotional baggage” to a marriage. Harriet Lerner said it in another way in The Dance of Anger (1985): “Underground issues from one relationship or context invariably fuel our fires in another.”
Getting married is a lot like getting into a tub of hot water.
After you get used to it, it ain’t so hot.
MINNIE PEARL
Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst clothes.
J. B. PRIESTLEY
Alcoholism isn’t a spectator sport. Eventually the whole family gets to play.
JOYCE REBETA-BURDITT
Marriage: a souvenir of love.
HELEN ROWLAND
A souvenir is a memento of something in the past, so this is a variation on the theme of marriage being the death of love. It comes from Reflections of a Bachelor Girl (1909), which also contains this simile: “Marriage is like twirling a baton, turning a hand spring, or eating with chopsticks; it looks so easy until you try it.”
A husband is what is left of a lover,
after the nerve has been extracted.
HELEN ROWLAND
A woman who takes her husband about with her everywhere
is like a cat that goes on playing with a mouse long after she’s killed it.
SAKI (H. H. Munro)
A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.
CARL SANDBURG
Parents teach in the toughest school in the world—
The School for Making People.
You are the board of education, the principal, the classroom teacher,
and the janitor.
VIRGINIA SATIR
Marriage is like pantyhose. It all depends on what you put into it.
PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY
Big sisters are the crab grass in the lawn of life.
CHARLES M. SCHULZ, from Linus, in a 1952 Peanuts cartoon
Men are April when they woo, December when they wed:
maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, in As You Like It
Combining a calendar and a weather metaphor, Shakespeare describes the changes from courtship to marriage—fresh male fervor begins to cool, and the sunny disposition of women is quickly replaced by cloudy and rainy days. Another popular calendar metaphor is the May-December marriage, commonly used to describe an age disparate couple, generally one in which the wife is in the spring of her life and the husband in the winter of his.
A married man forms married habits and becomes dependent on marriage
just as a sailor becomes dependent on the sea.
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 ma
ke 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
chapter 10
Sex Is an Emotion in Motion
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.
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.”
“Lov
e 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.”