Arnold Zwicky's Blog

In my e-mail today, a sale on gay greeting cards from the 10PerCent company. Reproduced here are the fronts of four birthday cards, starting with a phallic number (with an ambiguity inside), going  on through two that look more promising (until you get to the sexual ambiguity inside) and one with the ambiguity on the front (and an innuendo inside).

Start with the heavily phallic number (bananas, especially in a mouth, are perennials):

  (#1)

Inside: You’re my favorite fruit. An unsubtle play on the edible fruit vs. fruit ‘a homosexual, queer’.

A slightly more subtle play in this one:

  (#2)

Ah, just the hunk for you. But inside: God knows you’ve had them every other place. A play on existential have vs. sexual have.

And then:

  (#3)

It seems to be promising a dick for you in this card. But inside: Cut along line. Insert penis here …  Instructions for putting your dick into the card.

Finally:

  (#4)

On the front: two readings for boy toy: roughly, ‘a toy in the image of a boy’ vs. ‘a boy used as a sexual toy, as someone to toy with sexually’. And two ways to take play with: neutrally or with sexual intent. (And possibly two ways to take action, and maybe even box as well, given the hands on the buttocks.) So the front is drenched with sexual meanings or innuendos, a fact that then colors the way you take a standard caution for toys (on the inside): Some parts may be a choking hazard.

There are plenty more like this; the sexually suggestive greeting card is something of a genre.

This entry was posted on May 20, 2013 at 7:40 am and is filed under Ambiguity, Gender and sexuality, Language play. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.