Many of my favorite foods have the misfortune of also being shaped like a penis. Bananas, popsicles and burritos are delicious but sometimes embarrassing to eat. It doesn’t necessarily stop me from eating them, but it has given me pause.
Everybody has been in a similar situation; it was a hot day and the cooler at the cookout had popsicles in it. After I licked and slurped the rocket pop, I paused to breathe. Then, I made eye contact with someone and realized they’d been staring while I enjoyed a frozen treat. Depending on the person, they might let out a blushing laugh or a judgemental glare.
What was initially an innocent attempt to cool down and have a snack had been sexualized. Was it my technique? Was I not discrete and demure enough? Or did the onlooker insert their social conditioning into my actions?
Perhaps I could have been less voracious, but I was hot and hungry! The animal instinct inside of me overpowered my polite conditioning without caution. Perhaps that same animal instinct is the reason the onlooker was so engrossed by my snack time.
The mouth serves many functions, such as the portal for nourishment and conduit of verbal communication. It is also a key erogenous zone. There appears to be a spectrum of acts the mouth can do and many of them fall neatly onto either end of “sexual” or “not sexual.”
Phallic foods seem to bridge that gap. Context is often thrown out the window in regards and the middle area on the spectrum becomes filled with bananas and hotdogs. Humans like things to fit neatly into a binary and when they don’t, discomfort usually follows.
One of my top five favorite foods, the corn dog, is a nearly perfect food. It’s self-contained on a stick. The battering offers crunch while the dog inside offers snap. When paired with the right sauce, it provides earth-shattering flavor. Even a vegan corn dog is delicious and it’s better than no corn dog at all.
It is also one of the worst culprits of that gray area discomfort. Nobody looks virtuous eating a corndog. Using the stick to shove as much corn dog as possible into one’s mouth is overtly sexual. It’s almost unifying. How are people concerned with differences when gagging on a corn dog?
The larger societal observation may be the deep rooted obsession with the sexualization of all things. Mass media knows that sex sells and the culture in the United States has been conditioned to interact with many things with that context.
Biologically, sex is a major driving force in humans and so is hunger. They are both processed in the same part of the brain: the limbic system. This entanglement could correlate to why eating food could be considered sexy and when the food resembles a reproductive organ, it’s even more emphasized.
It ultimately doesn’t matter why I like corn dogs and cucumbers. What matters is that I do. It’s up to the observer to disconnect their associations between food and sex. It’s a classic example of “if you don’t like what you see, then don’t look.”