Baseball Metaphors for Sex. Lol.
Baseball metaphors for sex
In the culture of American adolescents, the game of baseball is often used as a euphemistic metaphor for the degree of sexual intimacy achieved in intimate encounters or relationships. In the metaphor, prevalent in the post-World War II period, sexual activities are described as if they are actions in a game of baseball.
Although details vary, a broadly accepted description of what each base represents is as follows:
§ First base - Kissing up to and including the open-mouth variety and intermittent breast fondling.
§ Second base - More aggressive stimulation above the waist paired with manual stimulation of genitalia.
§ Third base - Oral stimulation of genitalia.
§ Home run/Fourth base - the act of penetrative intercourse.
An alternative delineation of the bases is as follows:
§ First base is commonly understood to be any form of mouth to mouth kissing, especially open mouth ("French") kissing involving the tongue. Thus, if a person complains that s/he "can't get to first base," it means that the partner spurned advances or is not interested, although this is not necessarily a specific reference to a spurned attempt to engage in kissing.
§ Second base most often refers to stimulation of a woman's breasts, either through clothing or directly skin to skin.
§ Third base is manual or oral stimulation of the genitalia.
§ Home run/Fourth base is the act of penetrative intercourse.
Other baseball terms commonly used for sex include:
§ To Score is to have sexual intercourse.
§ A Strike Out occurs when there is no success at all.
§ A Homerun occurs when the couple goes "all the way" after a relatively short courtship.
§ Batting for the other team refers to homosexuality whereas Switch hitting is bisexuality.
§ The pitcher is the active or top partner in (especially homosexual) anal sex or sexual intercourse.
§ The catcher is the passive receiver or bottom partner in (especially homosexual) anal sex or sexual intercourse.
A number of other baseball related euphemisms and variations on the original metaphor exist. David Letterman has chronicled many of these in his "Top Ten Baseball Euphemisms for Sex," a recurring theme on his Top Ten Lists.
§ Part 1 ("Paradise") of the Meat Loaf song "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" describes a young couple's make-out session, with a voice-over commentary, by veteran New York Yankees baseball announcer Phil Rizzuto, of a portion of a baseball game as a metaphor for the couple's activities.
§ In the WWE (then WWF), Mankind was throwing a surprise "This is your life" segment for fellow tag-teammate, The Rock. He introduced a mystery guest who turned out to be his old flame from high school. The Rock brought up their past in which they were making out. As Rock was sliding his hand along her thigh, he was cut off at third base. This is also the moment where the Rock coined his famous terminology, "Poontang Pie."
§ Political comedian Stephen Colbert mentions an alternative, the "abstinence bases," in his book I Am America (And So Can You!).
§ Webcomic xkcd features a comic titled "Base System" with an expanded depiction of where various intimate acts lie in respect to a baseball diamond.
§ In John Green's novel Looking for Alaska Alaska
Educators have found the baseball metaphor an effective instructional tool when providing sex education to middle school students. Levin and Bell, in their book A Chicken's Guide to Talking Turkey With Your Kids About Sex, make use of it to aid parents in the discussion of puberty with their children, dividing the topics into "first base" ("Changes from the neck up"), "second base" ("Changes from the neck to the waist"), "third base" ("Changes from the waist down"), and "home plate" ("The Big 'It'"). The bases may be different for different people and sexes.
Recent changes
This sequence of "running the bases" is often regarded as script, or pattern, for young people who are experimenting with sexual relationships. The script has changed slightly since the 1960s. Kohl and Francoeur note that with the growing emphasis in the 1990s on safe sex and efforts by the feminist movement to expand sex beyond heterosexual penetrative intercourse, the "home run" has taken on the additional dimension of oral-genital sexual intercourse. Richters and Rissel conversely point out that "third base" has since become seen, by some people, to comprise oral sex as part of the accepted pattern of activities, as a pre-cursor to "full" (i.e. penetrative) sex.
Mullaney reports the idea that the introduction of oral sex is in fact a "new teen model”, which is replacing the “traditional base system”, in part as an “unintended offspring of ’abstinence-only education”. In this new model, sex acts, including many that were not included as part of the traditional "base" system, are classified in a wholly different way. The acts that count as "sex" are distinguished from those that do not count as "sex" according to whether it is possible to become pregnant from them. Thus oral sex, anal sex, and "a variety of other acts" are reclassified in the new model as "not a big deal" and "part of the realm of abstinence". Mullaney states that "obviously, not all teens subscribe to this revised model of classification".
The bases are now defined colloquially as "French, feel, finger (or fellate), fuck".
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