(This starts innocently enough, but quickly descends into male body parts and mansex, in very plain language. All this in text, no X-images, but, still, not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Last week, as usual around the beginning of each month, I had my moments of body care: a haircut, to get deshagged (as I think of it); and the services of a neighborhood nail salon, to get pedicured.
Then I thought: I get deshagged regularly, but I don’t get shagged, haven’t been since sometime in the last century, don’t even remember when. Also, I get pedicured, but I don’t get pedicated. I like the sweetly raunchy verb shag and the owlishly learnèd verb pedicate. So different in tone, but they both roll off the tongue. Two ways of dancing.
Latinate moments. Start on the high-cultural end. You can, or at least could, talk about pretty much fuckin’ anything, as long as you do it in Latin. And Latin had a devoted anal-sex verb. From the Oxford dictionary site:
verb pedicate: formal Have anal intercourse with (someone). Origin: Early 17th century: from Latin paedicatio(n-), from paedicare ‘have anal intercourse with’.
Given pedicate from Latin, you get for free:
pedicator ‘insertive partner in anal intercourse, top, bugger(er), butt-fucker’ (fucker for short, in a gay context)
pedicant ‘receptive partner in anal intercourse, (anal) sodomite, bottom, [metonymic] fuckhole’
[Reminder: gay men fuck each other because the act is intensely pleasurable for them, on both sides. (I was pretty much a career pedicant, but I had my pedicator moments, and I’m ready to testify to the satisfactions of the act for both parties. Passionately.) I do understand that other people have startlingly different takes on men ass-fucking, as to what they think it must feel like physically and mean psychologically — takes that make me, by turns, deeply sad, enraged, and fearful. No doubt those takes are projections of some dark, unpleasant beliefs about how men interact with women sexually and about how men interact with other men socially, but I’m here to say that things don’t have to be that way, and that even in what many see as ultimate sexual wickedness things routinely aren’t that way.
I’ve been long out of the fuck market, but not because I’ve renounced it as wickedness; in fact, getting fucked is the central event of my very rich fantasy sexual life. (Insert paean to masturbation here.)]
Demotic times. Shag is street talk, originally British, and more naughty than vulgar, which is why we could get an Austin Powers movie entitled The Spy Who Shagged Me and use Shag off! to convey a slangy ‘Go away!’ (like Fuck off! but without the edge).
The verb’s been well covered on this blog:
on 5/31/11 in “deshagged”
on 5/3/15 in “shag”
In my quaint associative way, I was taken from getting shagged, possibly on a shag rug (this once actually happened to me; my fucker and I both thought it was funny), to a beloved bit of my childhood, The Shaggy Man of Oz, and that led me to some inadvertent sexual word play that I absolutely didn’t get as a child, precocious though I was. From Wikipedia:
(#1) A 1st ed. (c. 1949); I got the book right after it came out, as a Christmas present — a Brand! New! Oz! Book!
(Style note on the Shaggy Man’s clothing — his coat, trousers, and hat. They’re fabulous, all frills and furbelows. The man clearly deserves to front a 60s gay rock band. With the King of the Fairy Beavers — pictured above, named below — on keyboards. Or maybe drums.)
The Shaggy Man of Oz (1949) is the thirty-eighth in the series of Oz books created by L. Frank Baum and his successors, and the second and last by Jack Snow. It was illustrated by Frank G. Kramer.
In The Shaggy Man of Oz as in his previous book, The Magical Mimics in Oz (1946), Snow returned to the Oz books of Baum for his inspiration and his conceptual framework. He avoided all use of characters and plot elements introduced in the Oz books of Ruth Plumly Thompson and John R. Neill, his predecessors in the post of “Royal Historian of Oz.”
For his first Oz book, Snow had relied heavily upon Baum’s The Emerald City of Oz. (Far from concealing it, Snow made the relationship between the two books clear in his text.) For his second venture, Snow depended upon Baum’s 1906 novel John Dough and the Cherub. In both books, the protagonists escape an exotic but risky place (in Baum, the Island of Phreex; in Snow, Conjo’s island) in a borrowed flying machine; they travel to other places from which, in turn, they again need to escape. Baum has a Palace of Romance, and Snow, a Valley of Romance. In Baum’s Hiland, the people are tall and thin and live in tall thin houses — just as in Snow’s Hightown. And in both novels, the heroes meet the King of the Fairy Beavers, who helps them to their final destination.
(#2) The Fairy Beaver King (from Baum rather than Snow)
That’s fairy ‘small’; see my postings on this usage:
on 11/24/14 in “fairy X”
on 6/5/17 in “Fairy gardens”
— which also look at the sexual slur:
noun fairy: informal, offensive a male homosexual (NOAD)
And then sexual beaver, not the animal of the genus Castor. From GDoS:
noun beaver: 5 (orig. US) the female pubic hair, [by metonymy] the vagina, esp. in commercial pornography use … (the supposed similarity between the beaver’s coat and the pubic hair) [citations from 1927-41 in Legman’s The Limerick (1953)] … 7 (orig. US) a woman [further metonymy; 1st cite 1969]
And see my 3/22/17 posting “The news for beavers”, on the language of cunnilingus.
Part 1: fairy. The great reclamation project (for language referring to gay men) rolls on. Gay got in long ago, then queer. Lots of us have been working on the big F-word, fag(got). Now it’s time for the little F-words, the cute ones (fairy, fruit, and flit — on the latter two, see my 4/4/17 posting “Quick, Bruce, the blat!”), and the P-words pansy and poof (and its variants), and the Q-word queen. Oh, and homo.
If you’re a fag, embrace them, wear them proudly: Forever Gay, that’s the way! If you’re not, use them with affection and admiration. Or get out of my way, asshole.
In any case, fairy‘s been on the upswing for a while. Among other things, there are the Radical Faeries; the Peter Cashorali books Fairy Tales: Traditional Stories Retold for Gay Men and Gay Fairy & Folk Tales: More Traditional Stories Retold for Gay Men; and the Riley Hart & Cristina Lee book Ever After: A Gay Fairy Tale.
Part 2: beaver. Then there’s the great genderlang-shift project, allied with the great reclamation project for language referring to women: embracing the use, for gay men, of slang (especially vulgar slang) and slurs referring to women, thus working to reclaim their application to women while exploiting the metaphors in the gay-male uses.
That’s a part of the history of gay (and, of course, queen), and also figures in male uses of, for instance, bitch, slut, whore, diva, and princess. One sign of reclamation in progress is the use of the vocabulary in snowclonelet composites that are bleached of reference to gender and/or sexuality. For instance, from my 5/29/11 posting “Sluts”:
These non-subsective occurrences of X slut [as in Scrabble slut] are very much like those of the snowclonelet composite X whore ‘one who craves X (or something to do with X) extravagantly’ (on this blog, here) and are related to occurrences of X fag (on this blog, here) not attributing homosexuality.
On to body parts. A familiar topic on this blog is, as I put it in the title of a 7/26/13 posting, the ‘male anus viewed as a sexual organ’. In its excretory function, the organ is referred to in everyday slang as a man’s ass, asshole, butt, butthole, shithole, or hole. All can be used as sexcavity labels, but many men would prefer to steer clear of associations with shit, so the vocabulary for a woman’s sexcavity, the vagina, is naturally available for metaphorical extension to the male anus as sexcavity.
My 7/26/13 posting focuses on six N + N compounds:
man / boy + pussy / cunt / hole
four of which use female-reference terms — the everyday vaginal slang terms pussy and cunt — for the male anus as sexual organ. In fact, I’ve become comfortable referring to my own hole (in this function) that way.
But fairy beaver: I’m a fairy. Is my beaver my pubic hair (broadening: gender restriction on the term eliminated) or (by metaphor) my ass hair? I’m a hairy guy all over, and I’m well supplied in both locations, but I’m inclined to option A. (GDoS and HDAS record neither semantic development.)
(If you wanted to get playfully inventive, you could have expressions for both options: front beaver and back beaver, or — my preference — fore-beaver and aft-beaver. Adam nuzzled Steve’s fore-beaver and then licked his aft-beaver.)
Bonuses: at the children’s library. From the Mackin Booktalk site, a 2015 children’s book by Stephanie Shaw, retelling an Ojibwe legend:
(#3) Oh dear: tail ‘buttocks; anus’, also ‘penis’; and also ‘vagina’ and ‘women considered collectively or as sex objects’ (GDoS)
Utterly innocent, of course, but still worth a giggle, or maybe a delighted guffaw.
And the MartinezBeavers.org site, with beaver fairies in a fairy tale:
(#4)
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