Fuck as a metaphor for male sexual aggression
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v7i2.149Keywords:
obscenities, verbal aggression, sex differences, metaphors, malesAbstract
In contemporary American society, the relaxation of social prohibitions on vulgar language, together with what some have noted to be an advertising culture that appears to demand hyperbole, combine to create an environment where much language that was formerly impermissible is now allowed. Nevertheless, a small number of words have retained their taboo status, most notably the word fuck. The word also displays our cultural ambivalence about sexual expressions and sexual activity, not only because it is considered to be obscene, but because of the question that was memorably expanded upon by comedian Lenny Bruce: If fucking is so great, then why is Fuck you one of the most offensive retorts in the English language? This paper will provide an answer to that question. I argue that the word fuck functions as a metaphor for male sexual aggression, and that, notwithstanding its increasing public use, enduring cultural models that inform our beliefs about the nature of sexuality and sexual acts preserve its status as a vile utterance that continues to inspire moral outrage.
References
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Agha, a. (2007) Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Allen, K. and Burridge, K. (1991) Euphemism and Dysphemism: Language used as a Shield and Weapon. New York: Oxford University Press.
Andrews, E. (1996) Cultural sensitivity and political correctness: The linguistic problem of naming. American Speech 71(4): 389–404. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/455713
Austin, J. L. (1962) How To Do Things With Words. J. O. Urmson (ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Baker, R. (1974) ‘Pricks’ and ‘chicks’: a plea for ‘persons’. In m. Vetterling-Braggin (ed.) Sexist Language: A Modern Philosophical Analysis 161–182. Totowa: NJ: Littlefield, adams and Co.
Balmer, J. (ed.) (2004) catullus: Poems of Love and Hate. Tarset, UK: Bloodaxe Books.
Barber, C., Beal, J. C. and Shaw, P. a. (2009) The English Language: A Historical Introduction (2nd edn). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511817601
Battistella, E. J. (2005) Bad Language: Are Some Words Better than Others? Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bay, a. (2007) ‘Embrace the Suck’: A Pocket Guide to Milspeak. New York: Pamphleteer Press, LLC.
Billig, m. and macmillan, K. (2005) metaphor, idiom and ideology: The search for ‘no smoking guns’ across time. Discourse & Society 16: 459–480. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0957926505053050
Bucholtz, m. (2007) Word up: Social meanings of slang in California youth culture. In L. monaghan and J. Goodman (eds) A cultural Approach to Interpersonal communication 243–267. malden, ma: Blackwell Publishing.
Buck, R. (1997) Words that are their opposites: Noun to verb conversion in English. Word 48(1): 1–14.
Chilton, P. (2005) manipulation, memes and metaphors: The case of Mein kampf. In L. de Saussure and P. Schulz (eds) Manipulation and Ideologies in the Twentieth century: Discourse, Language, Mind 15–43. amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Clark, E. V. and Clark, H. H. (1979) When nouns surface as verbs. Language 55(4): 767–811. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/412745
Corrigan, P. (1993) answering back: Power struggles in story and speech. In P. ahonen (ed.) Tracing the Semiotic Boundaries of Politics 103–120. Berlin/ New York: mouton de Gruyter.
Crabtree, S. (2004) Banning the F-Bomb. Daily Variety, January 14, p. 66.
Crozier, a. (1989) Beyond the metaphor: Cursing in Ulster. Maledicta 10: 115–125.
Cruse, D.a. (1986) Lexical Semantics. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.
Dirven, R. (1999) Conversion as a conceptual metonymy of event schemata. In K. U. Panther and G. Radden (eds) Metonymy in Language and Thought 275–287. amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Dooling, R. (1996) Blue Streak: Swearing, Free Speech, and Sexual Harassment. New York: Random House.
Edington, C. (1994) court and culture in Renaissance Scotland: Sir David Lindsay of the Mount. amherst: University of massachusetts Press.
Editors (2011) Block Quote: The Case against Cursing. The New York Times Sunday Magazine, may 22, p. mm47.
Edmonds, P. and Hirst, G. (2000) Reconciling fine-grained lexical knowledge and coarse-grained ontologies in the representation of near-synonyms. Proceedings of the Workshop on Semantic Approximation, Granularity, and Vagueness, Breckenridge, colorado. Retrieved 29 July 2010 from www.cs.toronto.edu/pub/gh/Edmonds+Hirst-2000.pdf.
Ekwall, E. (1903) Shakespeare’s Vocabulary: Its Etymological Elements (I). Upsala: University Press.
Fairman, C. (2006) Fuck. bepress Legal Series, Paper 1087. Berkeley: The Berkeley Electronic Press. Retrieved 29 July 2010 from http://works.bepress.com.christopher_fairman/1/
Farina, Y. S.-P. (1973) L’expressivité: Essai de definition. Meta 18(3): 315–327. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/002731ar
Fawcett, T. (1970) The Symbolic Language of Religion: An Introductory Study. London: SCm Press Ltd.
Foote, R. and Woodward, J. (1973) a preliminary investigation of obscene language. The Journal of Psychology 83(2): 263–275. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00223980.1973.9915614
Gass, W. (1978) On Being Blue. Boston: David R. Godine.
Görlach, m. (1991) Introduction to Early Modern English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139166010
Gregersen E. a. (1977) a note on English sexual cursing. Maledicta 1(2): 261–268.
Hobbs, P. (2008) Surging ahead to a new way forward: The metaphorical foreshadowing of a policy shift. Discourse & communication 2(1): 29–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1750481307085576
Hobbs, P. (2007) miracles of love: The use of metaphor in egg donor ads. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11(1): 24–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2007.00309.x
Jay, T. B. (1977) Doing research with dirty words. Maledicta 1(2): 234–256.
Jay, T. (1992) cursing in America. Philadelphia/amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Jay, T. (2009) The utility and ubiquity of taboo words. Perspectives on Psychological Science 4(2): 153–161. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2009.01115.x
Jumperz-Schwab, C. (1998) The Development of the Scots Lexicon in the 16th century under the Influence of Translations from Latin. Frankfurt am mein: Peter Lang.
Lakoff, G. (1987) Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, m. (1980) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.
Lambley, K. (1920) The Teaching and cultivation of the French Language in England during Tudor and Stuart Times. London: Longman, Green & Co.
Lass, R. (1995) Four letters in search of an etymology. Diachronica 12(1): 99–111. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/dia.12.1.12las
Logue, C. m. (1976) Rhetorical ridicule of Reconstruction Blacks. Quarterly Journal of Speech 62: 400–409. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00335637609383354
McEnery, a. and Xiao, Z. (2004) Swearing in modern British English: The case of fuck in the BNC. Language and Literature 13(3): 235–268. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0963947004044873
Miller, D. a. (2001) Foutre! Bougre! Ecriture! The Yale Journal of criticism 14(2): 503–511. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/yale.2001.0030
Montagu, a. (1967) The Anatomy of Swearing. New York: macmillan.
Murphy, B. (2009) ‘She’s a fucking ticket’: The pragmatics of fuck in Irish English – an age and gender perspective. corpora 4(1): 85–106. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/E1749503209000239
Musolff, a. (2004) Metaphor and Political Discourse: Analogical Reasoning in Debates about Europe. Houndmills/New York: Palgrave macmillan.
Napoli, D. J. and Hoeksema, J. (2009) The grammatical versatility of taboo terms. Studies in Language 33(3): 612–643. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/sl.33.3.04nap
Orme, N. (1989) Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England. London/Ronceverte: The Hambleton Press.
Parker, H. N. (1997) The teratogenic grid. In J. P. Hallett and m. R. Skinner (eds) Roman Sexualities 47–65. Princeton, NJ: University Press.
Partridge, E. (1959) Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Pearsall, D. (1992) Introduction. In Geoffrey Chaucer. canterbury Tales (ed. a. C. Cawley). New York: alfred a. Knopf.
Pinker, S. (2007a) What the f***? Why we curse. The New Republic, October 8, pp. 24–29.
Pinker, S. (2007b) The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. New York: Viking.
Quang, P. D. (1969) Phrases anglaises sans subjet grammatical apparent. Langages 14: 44–51.
Quinn, K. (ed.)(1973) catullus: The Poems (Second Edition). Houndmills/ London: macmillan.
Rassin, E. and muris, P. (2005) Why do women swear? an exploration of reasons for and perceived efficacy of swearing in Dutch female students. Personality and Individual Difference 38: 1669–1674. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2004.09.022
Read, a. W. (1934) an obscenity symbol. American Speech 9(4): 264–278. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/452191
Richlin, a. (1992) The Garden of Priapus (Revised Edition). New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rothwell, J. D. (1971) Verbal obscenity: Time for second thoughts. Western Speech 35(4): 231–242. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10570317109373711
Sagarin, E. (1962) The Anatomy of Dirty Words. New York: Lyle Stuart.
Saussure, F. de (1916/1983) cours de linguistique générale. Translated by R. Harris as course in General Linguistics. London: Duckworth.
Sheidlower, J. (1995) The F Word. New York: Random House.
Skinner, m. R. (1997) Introduction. In J. P. Hallett and m. R. Skinner (eds) Roman Sexualities 3–25. Princeton, NJ: University Press.
Slobin, D. I. (1966) Grammatical transformations and sentence comprehension in childhood and adulthood. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 5: 219–227. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(66)80023-3
Stapleton, K. (2010) Swearing. In m. a. Locher and S. L. Graham (eds) Interpersonal Pragmatics 289–306. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter mouton.
Sullivan, J. P. (1991) Martial: The unexpected classsic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511582639
Trask, R. L. (1996) Historical Linguistics. London/New York: arnold.
Van Lancker, D. and Cummings, J. L. (1999) Expletives: Neurolinguistic and neurobehavioral perspectives on swearing. Brain Research Reviews 31: 83–104. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0165-0173(99)00060-0
Walters, J. (1997) Invading the Roman Body: manliness and impenetrability in Roman thought. In J. P. Hallett and m. R. Skinner (eds) Roman Sexualities 29–43. Princeton, NJ: University Press.
Watson, F. (1903) The curriculum and Text-Books of English Scholars in the First Half of the Seventeenth century. London: Blades, East & Blades.
Adler, m. K. (1978) Naming and Addressing: A Sociolinguistic Study. Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag.
Agha, a. (2007) Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Allen, K. and Burridge, K. (1991) Euphemism and Dysphemism: Language used as a Shield and Weapon. New York: Oxford University Press.
Andrews, E. (1996) Cultural sensitivity and political correctness: The linguistic problem of naming. American Speech 71(4): 389–404. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/455713
Austin, J. L. (1962) How To Do Things With Words. J. O. Urmson (ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Baker, R. (1974) ‘Pricks’ and ‘chicks’: a plea for ‘persons’. In m. Vetterling-Braggin (ed.) Sexist Language: A Modern Philosophical Analysis 161–182. Totowa: NJ: Littlefield, adams and Co.
Balmer, J. (ed.) (2004) catullus: Poems of Love and Hate. Tarset, UK: Bloodaxe Books.
Barber, C., Beal, J. C. and Shaw, P. a. (2009) The English Language: A Historical Introduction (2nd edn). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511817601
Battistella, E. J. (2005) Bad Language: Are Some Words Better than Others? Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bay, a. (2007) ‘Embrace the Suck’: A Pocket Guide to Milspeak. New York: Pamphleteer Press, LLC.
Billig, m. and macmillan, K. (2005) metaphor, idiom and ideology: The search for ‘no smoking guns’ across time. Discourse & Society 16: 459–480. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0957926505053050
Bucholtz, m. (2007) Word up: Social meanings of slang in California youth culture. In L. monaghan and J. Goodman (eds) A cultural Approach to Interpersonal communication 243–267. malden, ma: Blackwell Publishing.
Buck, R. (1997) Words that are their opposites: Noun to verb conversion in English. Word 48(1): 1–14.
Chilton, P. (2005) manipulation, memes and metaphors: The case of Mein kampf. In L. de Saussure and P. Schulz (eds) Manipulation and Ideologies in the Twentieth century: Discourse, Language, Mind 15–43. amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Clark, E. V. and Clark, H. H. (1979) When nouns surface as verbs. Language 55(4): 767–811. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/412745
Corrigan, P. (1993) answering back: Power struggles in story and speech. In P. ahonen (ed.) Tracing the Semiotic Boundaries of Politics 103–120. Berlin/ New York: mouton de Gruyter.
Crabtree, S. (2004) Banning the F-Bomb. Daily Variety, January 14, p. 66.
Crozier, a. (1989) Beyond the metaphor: Cursing in Ulster. Maledicta 10: 115–125.
Cruse, D.a. (1986) Lexical Semantics. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.
Dirven, R. (1999) Conversion as a conceptual metonymy of event schemata. In K. U. Panther and G. Radden (eds) Metonymy in Language and Thought 275–287. amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Dooling, R. (1996) Blue Streak: Swearing, Free Speech, and Sexual Harassment. New York: Random House.
Edington, C. (1994) court and culture in Renaissance Scotland: Sir David Lindsay of the Mount. amherst: University of massachusetts Press.
Editors (2011) Block Quote: The Case against Cursing. The New York Times Sunday Magazine, may 22, p. mm47.
Edmonds, P. and Hirst, G. (2000) Reconciling fine-grained lexical knowledge and coarse-grained ontologies in the representation of near-synonyms. Proceedings of the Workshop on Semantic Approximation, Granularity, and Vagueness, Breckenridge, colorado. Retrieved 29 July 2010 from www.cs.toronto.edu/pub/gh/Edmonds+Hirst-2000.pdf.
Ekwall, E. (1903) Shakespeare’s Vocabulary: Its Etymological Elements (I). Upsala: University Press.
Fairman, C. (2006) Fuck. bepress Legal Series, Paper 1087. Berkeley: The Berkeley Electronic Press. Retrieved 29 July 2010 from http://works.bepress.com.christopher_fairman/1/
Farina, Y. S.-P. (1973) L’expressivité: Essai de definition. Meta 18(3): 315–327. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/002731ar
Fawcett, T. (1970) The Symbolic Language of Religion: An Introductory Study. London: SCm Press Ltd.
Foote, R. and Woodward, J. (1973) a preliminary investigation of obscene language. The Journal of Psychology 83(2): 263–275. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00223980.1973.9915614
Gass, W. (1978) On Being Blue. Boston: David R. Godine.
Görlach, m. (1991) Introduction to Early Modern English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139166010
Gregersen E. a. (1977) a note on English sexual cursing. Maledicta 1(2): 261–268.
Hobbs, P. (2008) Surging ahead to a new way forward: The metaphorical foreshadowing of a policy shift. Discourse & communication 2(1): 29–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1750481307085576
Hobbs, P. (2007) miracles of love: The use of metaphor in egg donor ads. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11(1): 24–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2007.00309.x
Jay, T. B. (1977) Doing research with dirty words. Maledicta 1(2): 234–256.
Jay, T. (1992) cursing in America. Philadelphia/amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Jay, T. (2009) The utility and ubiquity of taboo words. Perspectives on Psychological Science 4(2): 153–161. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2009.01115.x
Jumperz-Schwab, C. (1998) The Development of the Scots Lexicon in the 16th century under the Influence of Translations from Latin. Frankfurt am mein: Peter Lang.
Lakoff, G. (1987) Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, m. (1980) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.
Lambley, K. (1920) The Teaching and cultivation of the French Language in England during Tudor and Stuart Times. London: Longman, Green & Co.
Lass, R. (1995) Four letters in search of an etymology. Diachronica 12(1): 99–111. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/dia.12.1.12las
Logue, C. m. (1976) Rhetorical ridicule of Reconstruction Blacks. Quarterly Journal of Speech 62: 400–409. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00335637609383354
McEnery, a. and Xiao, Z. (2004) Swearing in modern British English: The case of fuck in the BNC. Language and Literature 13(3): 235–268. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0963947004044873
Miller, D. a. (2001) Foutre! Bougre! Ecriture! The Yale Journal of criticism 14(2): 503–511. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/yale.2001.0030
Montagu, a. (1967) The Anatomy of Swearing. New York: macmillan.
Murphy, B. (2009) ‘She’s a fucking ticket’: The pragmatics of fuck in Irish English – an age and gender perspective. corpora 4(1): 85–106. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/E1749503209000239
Musolff, a. (2004) Metaphor and Political Discourse: Analogical Reasoning in Debates about Europe. Houndmills/New York: Palgrave macmillan.
Napoli, D. J. and Hoeksema, J. (2009) The grammatical versatility of taboo terms. Studies in Language 33(3): 612–643. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/sl.33.3.04nap
Orme, N. (1989) Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England. London/Ronceverte: The Hambleton Press.
Parker, H. N. (1997) The teratogenic grid. In J. P. Hallett and m. R. Skinner (eds) Roman Sexualities 47–65. Princeton, NJ: University Press.
Partridge, E. (1959) Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Pearsall, D. (1992) Introduction. In Geoffrey Chaucer. canterbury Tales (ed. a. C. Cawley). New York: alfred a. Knopf.
Pinker, S. (2007a) What the f***? Why we curse. The New Republic, October 8, pp. 24–29.
Pinker, S. (2007b) The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. New York: Viking.
Quang, P. D. (1969) Phrases anglaises sans subjet grammatical apparent. Langages 14: 44–51.
Quinn, K. (ed.)(1973) catullus: The Poems (Second Edition). Houndmills/ London: macmillan.
Rassin, E. and muris, P. (2005) Why do women swear? an exploration of reasons for and perceived efficacy of swearing in Dutch female students. Personality and Individual Difference 38: 1669–1674. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2004.09.022
Read, a. W. (1934) an obscenity symbol. American Speech 9(4): 264–278. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/452191
Richlin, a. (1992) The Garden of Priapus (Revised Edition). New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rothwell, J. D. (1971) Verbal obscenity: Time for second thoughts. Western Speech 35(4): 231–242. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10570317109373711
Sagarin, E. (1962) The Anatomy of Dirty Words. New York: Lyle Stuart.
Saussure, F. de (1916/1983) cours de linguistique générale. Translated by R. Harris as course in General Linguistics. London: Duckworth.
Sheidlower, J. (1995) The F Word. New York: Random House.
Skinner, m. R. (1997) Introduction. In J. P. Hallett and m. R. Skinner (eds) Roman Sexualities 3–25. Princeton, NJ: University Press.
Slobin, D. I. (1966) Grammatical transformations and sentence comprehension in childhood and adulthood. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 5: 219–227. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(66)80023-3
Stapleton, K. (2010) Swearing. In m. a. Locher and S. L. Graham (eds) Interpersonal Pragmatics 289–306. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter mouton.
Sullivan, J. P. (1991) Martial: The unexpected classsic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511582639
Trask, R. L. (1996) Historical Linguistics. London/New York: arnold.
Van Lancker, D. and Cummings, J. L. (1999) Expletives: Neurolinguistic and neurobehavioral perspectives on swearing. Brain Research Reviews 31: 83–104. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0165-0173(99)00060-0
Walters, J. (1997) Invading the Roman Body: manliness and impenetrability in Roman thought. In J. P. Hallett and m. R. Skinner (eds) Roman Sexualities 29–43. Princeton, NJ: University Press.
Watson, F. (1903) The curriculum and Text-Books of English Scholars in the First Half of the Seventeenth century. London: Blades, East & Blades.
Published
2013-07-12
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Hobbs, P. (2013). Fuck as a metaphor for male sexual aggression. Gender and Language, 7(2), 149-176. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v7i2.149
