(all about the F-word and its uses, so obviously not for kids or the sexually modest)
Another posting that’s been hanging around for months. I argue that the OED treatment of the semantics of the sexual verb fuck is unsatisfactory, not compatible with the actual usage of English speakers for a long time now — apparently because earlier lexicographers, embracing normative views of sexual behavior, posited a single sense of sexual fuck, centrally denoting an agentive act of penis-in-vagina intercourse but with a large penumbra of vagueness, embracing many other sorts of sexual encounters. Then this inadequate treatment was adopted without comment or critique in Jesse Sheidlower’s The F Word. So that essentially all the authoritative literature on sexual fuck gets things wrong. I will explain; there will be no pictures.
From my 10/3/19 posting “Pat-SU fuck: new visions”:
Pat-SU fuck, background. The historically older, and prototypical, use of fuck is as a transitive verb denoting an event of what I’ll call modal sexual intercourse, an act of penetration into the prototypical sex cavity, the vagina, involving two participants: an insertive participant I, a male who provides the penetrating penis, and a receptive participant R, a female who provides the vagina. … So: John fucked Jane.
Two acts closely analogous to modal sexual intercourse have a long history. In both, the penis penetrates an analogue of the vagina, the anus treated as a sex cavity.
In the first case, R is a man, and the penetration is into the closest analogue a man has to a vagina as sex cavity, his anus. So:John fucked James (in the ass). With a metaphorical extension of fuck to cover mansex.
In the second, R is a woman, and the penetration is into her anus as a secondary sex cavity. In various times and places, such anal intercourse has served as a means of birth control, or as a scheme for maintaining hymeneal virginity before marriage. So: John fucked Jane (in the ass). With a metaphorical extension of fuck to cover anal intercourse.
These three types of intercourse share many salient features of meaning — the penetrating penis, the sex cavity as the site of the penetration, and the accompanying interpersonal relationship — and verbs denoting them regularly share much of their syntax, so it’s natural to treat them as a category of acts. For which I suggest the somewhat playful name penintercourse (conveying roughly ‘penis penetration intercourse’).
(I’m setting aside here two further lines of analogy, and the accompanyng metaphorical extensions of fuck: to insertion of something analogous to a penis (a finger, a tongue, a dildo, a phallic object); and to reception by something analogous to a sex cavity (a mouth, an anatomical cavity or cleft, a hole in an inanimate object, an enveloping material).)
To recap things so far: in penintercourse, participant I provides a penis for penetrating a sex cavity of participant R.
This is a very specific sort of event, whose description is packed with details both anatomical and sociocultural. It would be useful to view the participant roles from a less granular, more abstract, perspective: the perspective of generalized participant roles like Agent (Agt) and Patient (Pat) …
Such generalized roles are then available for stating large-scale generalizations about the alignment of semantics (in terms of the participant roles) and syntax (in terms of syntactic functions like Subject (SU), Direct Object (DO), and Oblique Object (OO)). In particular, we’re then able to state default alignments of Agt with SU and Pat with DO:
the default is for Agt to be expressed by SU, and for SU to express Agt (note: these are just defaults); similarly for Pat and DO
I and R are special cases of Agt and Pat, respectively, so we see the default alignments (Agt-SU and Pat-DO) illustrated in everyday examples like John fucked Jane/James.
But not all alignments are the default ones, and that’s where we’re going next.
Pat-SU fuck, the payoff. The first development, noted in my 7/9/13 posting “Sexual lexical semantics”, is Pat-SU fuck, apparently first in intransitives like Terry fucks like crazy with the SU referring to a woman or a gay man; the semantic development would presumably involve all-purpose intransitive fuck ‘participate in an act of fucking’, where the involvement could be as R as well as I.
But then we see transitives apparently with Pat-SU (and Agt-DO) — well, with R-SU (and I-DO). From my 2013 posting:
I like to fuck, uttered by a man, could mean either that the speaker likes to fuck other people or that he likes to be fucked (by men).
Similarly,
(4) I’ve fucked every man here, including the butler.
spoken by a man, could mean either that the speaker has penetrated all the men in intercourse or that he’s been penetrated by all of them.
These strike me as genuine ambiguities (with different assignments of participant roles), but the OED‘s entries treat them as lack of specification (as to the participant roles involved): I like to fuck in (1) would be OED-glossed as something like ‘I like to engage in acts of intercourse’ and (4) would be OED-glossed as something like ‘I’ve engaged in an act of intercourse with every man here, including the butler’.
But the OED-style glosses are unsatisfactory, since they’re consistent with the speaker’s playing different roles on different occasions. This consequence is especially unsatisfactory for (4), which on the lack-of-specification account is true if the speaker has penetrated some of the men and been penetrated by the others, and I think that’s just wrong. Similarly, this account predicts (incorrectly, I believe) that
(5) I’ve fucked every man here, and so has Jett.
is true if the speaker has penetrated all of the men, while Jett has been penetrated by all of them.
In my survey of the participant roles of subjects (here), I didn’t include Patient-subject fuck (and screw etc.), but I think now that it should be added to other Patient-subject cases.
For some actual examples of Pat-SU fuck (all involving a SU denoting a woman), I turn to the examples collected in Jesse Sheidlower’s The F Word (3rd ed. 2009), p. 84:
1964-66 R. Stone Hall of Mirrors 194: Is she fuckin’ other people?
1985 E. Leonard Glitz 88: Iris was fucking somebody.
1993 L[iz] Phair Flower (pop. song): Every time I see your face…I want to fuck you like a dog…I’ll fuck you till your dick turns blue.
1996 T. McMillan How Stella Got Her Groove Back 145: “Well, I didn’t just fuck him.” “Oh, don’t tell me you guys made love and shit.” “We did. That’s exactly what we did.” “You fucked him, Stella. Get real.”
To which I’d add this exchange from the film script of Cabaret, as reported in my 4/20/15 posting “On the double entendre watch”
Brian: “Max? Fuck Max !” [dismissive exclamatory use]
Sally: “I do!” [Patient-subject use, spoken by a woman; she is the person [penetrated]]
Brian (after pause): “… so do I (laughs)”. [use by a man, which could be Agent-subject, Patient-subject, or neutral as between the two]
In any case, this transitive usage has been around for at least 55 years.
JS doesn’t give any man-on-man examples of Pat-SU fuck, but in my gay world they’re easy to find. In particular, at several places in the tv show Looking and its movie sequel, about the lives of (mostly young) gay men in San Francisco roughly 30 years ago. For instance, in a scene in which the central character Patrick reports that he fucked Kevin up against a picture window — meaning that he was penetrated anally by Kevin. (One of the plot elements is Patrick’s learning to get comfortable physically with getting fucked, and then to become comfortable emotionally with a sexual identity as a bottom, indeed to rejoice in it.)
Conclusions. I gave the arguments back in 2013 (repeated at greater length in 2019, and now rehearsed in 2025) for treating sexual fuck as being ambiguous, not neutral / vague, between several readings. I had hoped to see a revision, eventually, of the misguided OED entry, but meanwhile hoped that new editions of Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word would take note of my arguments, or at least that some linguists would comment on them. Unfortunately, I long ago ceased to be viewed as a practicing linguist, and have retooled myself as a writer of intellectual entertainments on this blog. I’m comfortable in this role — it’s actually a lot of fun — but I still have these moments when I want to play at being a professional linguist again. I don’t think that’s going to go away. So for the moment my nose is out of joint; I’ll have to learn to get over that.
July 27, 2025 at 6:52 am |
I don’t know what the script as written might have said, but in the released version of the film Cabaret the verb is “screw”. The semantics, of course, are pretty much the same. (As it happens, I saw the movie last week, for the first time in many years.)
July 27, 2025 at 7:16 am |
I seem to have been quoting the script in 2015, but now that you say this, I do recall the film as having screw. I suspect that the studio insisted on softening the occurrences of fuck.