The game of baseball is often used as a euphemistic metaphor for physical intimacy in the United States and other places the game is played, especially to describe the level of sexual intimacy achieved in intimate encounters or relationships.^[1]

Films and television shows too numerous to detail have included baseball metaphors for sex such as "I didn't even get to first base" or "No, I struck out" in a sexual or romantic context.

History

In the baseball metaphor, sexual activities are described as if they are moves in a game of baseball. In the United States from the end of World War II to present, adolescent boys would sometimes use this competitive analogy to describe, usually to boast about, their successes in "making it" with girls.^[2][3].

List of sexual metaphors

Although details vary, the most broadly accepted description of what each base represented is as follows:

• First base is commonly understood to be French kissing, but can also mean any mouth-to-mouth kissing, or to an established romantic relationship in general.^[4][5]
• Second base usually refers to fondling or groping, especially of the breasts, and sexual stimulation of the genitals from outside of the clothing.
• Third base means fingering or giving a handjob or giving or receiving oral sex. Can refer to being in the nude as well.
• Fourth base, Scoring a Run, Hitting a Home Run (or "scoring", "going all the way", "coming home", "beyond bases" etc.) is sexual intercourse.^[4][5][6][7]

Other baseball sexual metaphors:

• Fifth Base or "scoring in the dugout" refers to anal intercourse.
• Striking Out is often used to describe rejection and sexual frustration.^[8]
• Pitcher and Catcher are used to describe the participants in male homosexual anal intercourse.^[8]
• Switch Hitter refers to bisexuals, while a "switch" may refer to someone who takes both a "top" or "bottom" role in domination play.
• Playing Outfield refers to an orgy of four or more people.

Recent changes

This sequence of "running the bases" is often regarded as a 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 phallo-vaginal intercourse, the "home run" has taken on the additional dimension of oral-genital sexual intercourse. Richters and Rissel similarly 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. phallo-vaginal) sex.^[9][10]

Mullaney reports the idea that the introduction of oral sex is in fact a "new teen model", that 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" (i.e. what would in the traditional system have constituted a "home run") are distinguished from those that do not count as "sex" according to whether it is possible to become pregnant, or lose one's virginity, 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".^[11]

Educators have found the baseball metaphor an effective instructional tool when providing sex education to middle school students.^[8] 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'").^[12]

References

External links

fr:Métaphores du baseball décrivant le sexe