Sexy Neologisms

(And some not-so)

concoctulary: noun: the making up of a word for a word that doesn’t yet exist, but should. Coined by American journalist and blogger Jenny Lawson

I saw someone refer to themself as a “klismaphiliac” and I don’t know enough Greek roots, so I had to look it up. The “—philiac” we all know: it was something they like, or turn towards. It turns out a klismaphiliac is sexually turned on by enemas, and it appears to be common enough. That reminded me of an old book I have on my shelves of sundry dictionaries and other word books: Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices, by Brenda Love. I took it off the shelf, blew some dust off, and paged through it, then sneezed a lot five minutes later from the dust. It’s easier to look up words online; it’s much more fun to look them up and read them in dead-tree books. Is klismaphilia in Love? Gawd yea: eight paragraphs of detail, including a fine line illustration. Of course it goes back to the Egyptians, but “was (was?-OG) also popular with the French (of course!-OG), Greeks (natch-OG), Romans, and Americans.” There’s an ancient health practice of enemas which, for reasons most of us can guess, got cross-wired with eroticism. Tobacco enemas? Yea: they gave a “rush to which they soon became addicted.” The olde sex ‘n drugs routine again, gawd bless it, from here to eternity. How about this bit of amusing ephemera: “Enemas have been used by rapists as well. There was one case during the 1960s of a man who would raid a female college dorm and tie up all the students, strip them, administer enemas to them all, and then selected the one to whom he was the most attracted would give her a second enema before leaving.”¹ This brings up a few questions, not the least of which, for me at least, is an apparent Hall Director asleep on the job. Also, I cannot for the life of me visualize this scene without it being extraordinarily untidy. Also, he “would raid”: the word didn’t get around that a guy - The Enema Bandit, as the press would have him, or the Fleet Freak? - might break in, tie you all up (the first to get roused really ought to speak up: sisterhood is powerful), and administer an entire fleet (pun) of enemas? Really? I’m not buying Love here, but it makes for a real kinky scene, eh? It’s rare when you get that in an encyclopedia.

(When I did a search for “dark academia: images” this jumped out at me: it looks like one of my own shelves, although dark academia obviously goes in for much darker wood, and just, ya know, low-key lighting. Also: I wouldn’t have a wicker container as shown here, unless it was holding my cannabis)

Sapiosexuals and Demisexuals

I’ve seen these two terms used quite a lot online, and seemingly most of the people who self-describe themselves as one or the other are under 40, maybe under 30. And now that I’m approaching - not “in” - my dotage - I find I have a fairly immediate reaction: are they overthinking this due to being cooped up with their phones and Covid restrictions and dwindling prospects under kleptocracy? And what do these terms mean, you ask?

Both have Wikipedia entries, but suffice:

• A sapiosexual is attracted to intelligence. I’ve read young sapiosexuals mourning their lack of being able to find a person who can keep up with their own fantastically scintillating conversation, say, on Reddit’s r/sapiosexuals, and I want to be idealistic and take them at their word. Young self-described sapiosexuals get all bothered when someone else goes on in-depth about some topic, possibly etymology or physics or the history of Doctor Who. They get, as my great (?)- great grandmother called them , “the vapors.” But here, as in other places young people write about their desires, this all seems just a tad dubious. I three-quarters suspect hotness is still “all that.” It would be nice that the hottie has a wicked vocab, amirite? I 45% suspect there’s a very strong Venn diagram intersection between those who post pictures of Dark Academia (seems like a weird kink I can’t quite get a handle on) online and those who go on about how they’re all, like sapio now, ya know? It’s an alienative world and this alternative universe that some seem to actually be able to live in just not me, this dream-world and the desire to live there, where people “get ya” and not this dystopian hellhole where you have good enough grades to get into State, but it costs too much and dad says no, ‘cuz there ain’t gonna be no jobs when ya graduate, etc. Or am I reading too much into it? My gawd, I ache for the kids born into Gen Z, or Alpha or Generation Emoji or Gen Duckface, whatever’s going on these days.

  That said, I am a very olde dude and confess my estimation of attractiveness shoots up a notch or two when someone reveals a certain fluency with words, ideas, or wit. I mean…I get it. I’m sapio, too. Comin’ out right now, as you read this. Please be kind? “Sapiosexual” goes all the way back to 1998, when, writing for Live Journal, Darren Stalder called himself this. In 2002, he apparently clarified, writing that he didn’t “care about the plumbing,” a witty way of saying he’s bisexual, but can’t get tumescent unless you’re perspicacious AF. The term caught on by the 2010s, due to dating apps and social media. (I know: shocking!) John Waters’s now-famous admonition: that if someone picks you up at a bar and they take you home and they don’t have any books, then don’t fuck them…seems apt here.

• A demisexual is a person on the asexual spectrum, but will probably be up for all kinds of hot bone sessions once they’ve achieved a fairly deep emotional connection with you first. The OED traces this one back to 2006.

I think I’ve had periodic moments of both sapiosexuality (in the strong sense: she’s hot ‘n ready, but what she said 35 minutes ago, about liking Dukes of Hazzard?) and demisexuality: hey, not all guys are 24/7/365 ready to bonk anything that moves; some of us want an emotional connection. Both if these orientations seem normal enough to me, yet what’s really remarkable is that the words for these feelings toward sex are so new.

Sexual Positions…or “Styles”?

We all know what and why it’s called “doggie style.” So why is “missionary” a mere position, and no one ever says, “Let’s try it missionary style”? My guess is missionary is widely seen as the default position, and so it’s bereft of “style.” Missionary seems like a perfectly fine way to do it, and who says you shouldn’t try multiple styles, perhaps all in one go? It would seem the only limitations on pushing the Kama Sutra to its limits would be 1.) the local conditions: will she run the risk of gashing her shins on that baseboard, near the water heater? Can I stay suspended up here and go at it, while possibly giving myself a concussion on that low ceiling beam? Etc. 2.) How much yoga ya been doin’ lately? ‘Cuz a quick lesson in certain “muscles ya didn’t know ya had” is a real thing, and you can vouch.

Research anthropologist Robert J. Priest concludes the first appearance of “missionary position” was in Kinsey’s 1948 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. But Kinsey appears to have either forgotten this or he wanted to protect himself for some reason, because he attributed “missionary position” to the great anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, in his The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia. But it’s not there. In his 1948 book Kinsey wrote that Malinowski wrote that the Trobriand Islanders referred to the man-astride variation of sexual intercourse as what the missionaries advised them to do. (And why would any self-respecting Trobriander take sex advice from some western meddler?) “According to Kinsey, Malinowski had reported in a 1929 book that ‘caricatures of the English-American position are performed around…campfires, to the great amusement of the natives who refer to the position as the ‘missionary position.’”²

“Premarital” Sex: Problems and Extensions into Neologisms

In The Myth of Monogamy, the Evolutionary Biologist and public intellectual David P. Barash points out we’ve defined sex within the marriage frame: premarital sex, marital sex, extramarital sex. But where are the words for post-divorce sex, or widow or widower sex? Also, what about the 47 year old confirmed bachelor’s sex life? No way is that “premarital.”³ So: we need words…

One of my favorite Sociologists, Murray S. Davis, pointed out our desire to have sex within our own social group, endophilia, seems pretty normal, but why stop there when coining neologisms so we can think about these topics with a bit more flexibility? Exophilia would be the desire to have sex outside your own group. Strataphilia is seeking lovers outside your own social class; Davis has seen sectiphilia: wanting to smash with someone outside your own religion. Further - and what an education Davis provides! - transageism is when a man wants his wife to dress like a young girl. I wonder how much Davis was wingin’ it sometimes: transcegenation is, for example, when a white woman wants her white lover to abuse her while using black ghetto slang. Trans-stratism is when a man wants his wife (or, presumably, girlfriend) to ditch her business clothes for “royal” dress; trans-sectism is when a woman wants her non-catholic lover to dress like a priest; genetism is named after Jean Genet and is role-play involving superior/inferior roles.⁴

Brief on Neologisms From My Own Perspcctive

I might have first become aware that new words were needed when I read Timothy Leary’s Info-Psychology, where, he’s writing about the 5th circuit (Neurosomatic/Hedonic) and how post-WWII hippies lacked a vocabulary for their experiences there.⁵ In Terence McKenna’s Archaic Revival he cites the need of neologisms for expanded perception and consciousness, and I take this as a basic Sapir-Whorfian thing.⁶ This business of psychonauts calling for new words has a long pedigree: Sir Humphrey Davey, experimenting enthusiastically with nitrous oxide with Romantic poets Southey and Coleridge cited the need to develop a “language of feeling” related to these non-normal states.⁷

Philosopher Richard Rorty: “A sense of human history as the history of successive metaphors would let us see the poet, in the generic sense of the maker of new words, the shaper of new languages, as the vanguard of the species.” And “Ironists specialize in redescribing ranges of objects or events in partially neologistic jargon, in hope of exciting people to adapt and extend that jargon.”⁸

Lexicographers have as their proprietary territory: words. And all words are fossilized poems, as Vico and Emerson had it. All words began somewhere, somehow. They were all once neologisms, in the most basic sense. And so, I grab for my favorite consulting dead-tree book dictionary, Webster’s New Collegiate (1979 ed) and look up “neologism”:

neologism: noun: 1. a word, usage, or expression that is often disapproved because of its newness or barbarousness 2. a meaningless word coined by a psychotic

Why the attitude, Miriam? Cannot you extend a bit of cordiality to us barbarous psychotics? We prefer to think of ourselves as creatives. Thank you.

1. Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices, Brenda Love, pp.149-150. This appears to be on the up-and-up. I see on p.vii, the “Editorial Board of Advisors,” a former Berkeley journalism prof’s name shows up who was on my neighborhood email list when I lived there. Small world! At some point, somewhere the question among staff of whether to use the word “paraphilia” in the title was fought out, and it lost. I think it shouldda won, but hey: sales.

2. The Hidden History of Coined Words, Ralph Keyes, p.40. This is one of the better works on neologisms I’ve ever seen. 2021, Oxford. Keyes doesn’t come at neologisms from the same angles that I do, which is what I like. My lifelong interest in newly coined words having to do with altered states of consciousness, drugs, and sex are topics he slightly elides. There’s a page in this book on Joyce’s dizzying neologizing, and he cites some words from Ulysses: mrkgnao, diambulist, poppysmick, bullockbefriending, soliloquacity, etc, p. 140. On this page and at least one other - where he tells us how physicist Murray Gell-Mann got quark from Joyce - he writes Finnegan’s Wake. And his editor(s) at Oxford didn’t catch it. I’m absolutely sure he meant well.

3. Myth of Monogamy, David P. Barash, p.184. This book - like soooo many others - takes a sobering, data and fact-based look at humans as monogamous and concludes: we’re not very monogamous primates. We’re at best “somewhat” monogamous. But my Wilson-Leary colleagues will cite the power and role of the 4th circuit, etc. We keep pretending, for occult reasons most of us aren’t very clear about. This monogamy pretense would be part of our semanatic unconscious. That we don’t seem to be wired for monogamy gets replicated in one study or another every four months or so. It’s no conspiracy among academics. The proof is in the pudding. So to speak. Some 4 year olds believe in Santa. Some 45 year olds believe we’re hardwired for monogamy. I guess what gets me is the amount of guilt over not adhering to a very difficult precept. Why do we do this to ourselves?

4. Smut: Erotic Reality, Obscene Ideology, Murray S. Davis, pp.143-149, but I highly recommend the entire chapter, “Perverted Sex: The Destruction of the Social,”, pp.125-162. Davis posits three basic attitudes towards sex: 1. Jehovanist; 2. Naturalistic; and 3. Gnostic. He’s strongly influenced by ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, and social constructivism. And he’s very funny.

5. Info-Psychology, Leary, p.68

6. Archaic Revival, T. McKenna, pp.213-214. Terence thought consciousness couldn’t evolve faster than language, so this was not an incidental feature of language or consciousness.

7. Psychonauts, Mike Jay, pp.40-41

8. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Richard Rorty, first quote, p.20; second quote p.78 To go deeper than Rorty here, who was influenced by Harold Bloom’s idea of the Strong Poet, see Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson, pp.139-158, on how new metaphors create and structure reality and seem to lie at the heart of that mysterious force we call “creativity.”