My Favorite Course is the Intercourse

How and why food and sex are related

Food has always been important to me. I love good food — a lot. I go out of my way to find or prepare a delicious meal; I’d rather travel the extra mile to get what I want than waste my appetite on something mediocre.

When eating, I try to go slow and take it all in; I smell, touch and taste, using all of my senses to savor the complexities.

There’s, of course, maintenance food, but even then, I prefer simple and nutritious over bland and processed.

Only when desperate or rushed do I reach for the quick and easy. In the end, when given the option, I’d rather abstain for a bit than settle for sub-par.

Yep, I am still talking about food.

All though, I might as well be talking about sex because my approach to either is basically the same.

It hasn’t always been that way for me though.

Food and sex are intrinsically intertwined, and nowadays, I can’t seem to keep the two separate. Looking back at my own writing, I frequently use one as a metaphor for the other. The proof is in the pudding:

I’ve compared myself to tartare, and both blowjobs and my former lovers to pizza. Once, I had my cake and ate her too, and then, I broke up over chocolate cake.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how food really does have a lot in common with sex, from the anticipation and excitement around it to the way we use all of our senses, and the sounds and expressions we make while enjoying it.

There seems to be a clear correlation between how we relate to both.

Here’s your slice of hot ham, and here’s the tale of how ‘my hot ham’ got slammed up against the wall to conceive your aunt. Bon Appetit!

Looking at how I was brought up, my own connections between two of my favorite topics makes perfect sense:

I hail from a family of foodies and sex witches

Well, that’s not entirely true. My father’s family are frigid puritans who act as if they’ve copulated the exact amount of times required to reproduce, or got pregnant through immaculate conception.

In reality, half of them have been caught with their pants down, cheating on their spouses after decades of repressing their sexualities. I imagine the other half to simply be better liars, as they continue to hide in their closets — the ones in which they also hide their bottles of wine from the first half.

They all know each other’s dirty secrets, but pretend not to: They never talk about it — except behind each other’s backs.

Their relationship with sex is echoed in their feelings around food; it’s viewed as indulgent, and I can’t help but notice the gender-imbalance: The men arrive at neatly set tables expecting to be served, while the women scurry around the kitchen where they sneak-eat spoonfuls, ashamed of how much they really enjoy it.

This side of my family does like to eat, but they’re not the greatest cooks. They’re decent cooks, but there’s no soul in their food — no oomph!

My mother’s food is all oomph!

Her father was a sausage maker, married to a fiery hot-pot; my grandmother. A natural artist, he had a knack for the lush things in life, paired with a distinct lack of self-control.

The two of them birthed a ‘meat & deli’ family business — and four daughters — in five years, causing my grandmother’s doctor to take action: Her petite, barely five-foot frame simply couldn’t take any more pregnancies without proper recovery in between.

— Get a hold of yourselves, you pervs, or have those tubes tied!

Ok, the doctor probably didn’t say those exact words, but something to that effect. As above mentioned, self-control was neither of my grandparent’s strong suits; alas, the tubes were tied.

I was raised on saucy food and even saucier stories

My grandma, who spent her time between running the business, stirring the pots and having her pot stirred (…), served up both in succession as if it was the most natural thing in the world:

— Here’s your slice of hot ham, and here’s the tale of how ‘my hot ham’ got slammed up against the wall to conceive your aunt. Bon Appetit!

No wonder I got the two mixed up, right?

I’d lie if I said there hasn’t always been a distinct gender inequality here too when it comes down to who-does-what in the kitchen—I suppose it’s generational—but the women in my mom’s family have always been a bit more badass; they’ve never been afraid to declare their pleasure—loudly!

What kind of sicko combines food and sex?

After my parents split when I was twenty, my mom had a thing with an energy healer who’d also created and published a few erotic cookbooks.

My dad, of course, hated this guy: — What kind of sicko combines food and sex?

— Well, apart from your ex-wife and her lover, this sicko right here [points at self]…

I never tell him but a fraction of what goes through my mind, so I said something about how this connection is far from a foreign concept; the two are related and always have been.

In our daily language, we use many sex-related words about food; we have ‘mouthgasms’ and look at food-porn. The food-sex innuendos are endless; unless you’ve been living under a rock you know that ‘tossing the salad’ is not just necessarily part of your clean-eating diet. For further examples, google ‘slang words for genitals’.

Biologically, sex and food are linked in the limbic system of the brain, which controls emotional activity, and it’s therefore not arbitrary that going for dinner is the most common way to date.

When we eat mindfully, believing that we’ll become aroused, we’ll be more tuned into the food.

Food and courtship have always been closely associated and could go back to when a man’s suitability as a mate was measured by his ability to provide food. This might, in turn, explain why, according to a study by the University of California, women respond better to romantic gestures when they’ve been sufficiently fed. One of the researchers suggests that “eating could increase sensitivity to rewards like sex”.

Eating food seems to connect us to pleasure.

On the other end, too much food has the opposite effect on both sexes, which makes sense; who wants to get down and dirty with a giant burrito baby in their bellies?

Both too much and too little food are potential libido killers, showing once more that balance is key, and that a sound relationship with one tends to affect and reflect the other.

Miscellaneous foods have been identified as aphrodisiacs, ever since oysters were popularized as one by Aphrodite; the goddess of sexual intercourse, who emerged from the foaming semen of her father’s castrated testicles.

While the real effects of aphrodisiacs are under debate, I suspect there’s some truth in the suggestion that they’re mainly placebos: When we eat mindfully, believing that we’ll become aroused, we’ll be more tuned into the food. We’ll slow down and savor, which in turn makes us feel more sensual.

The connection between shame and pleasure

Sadly, there’s shame related to pleasure, both around food and sex—for women especially.

An article in Women’s Health suggests that “the mixed messages around pleasure and shame become linked from an early age” when girls start picking up cultural expectations around dieting and thereby start experiencing guilt in relation to food. This, combined with coming into age sexually and realizing the body’s potential for pleasure, causing many to fight a lifelong battle with shame in both camps.

Thankfully, the values from my mother’s side had a stronger influence on me than that of my father’s, and as a result, I grew up in a food-loving household that always displayed a healthy amount of physical affection towards one another, and — despite my dad’s occasional sex-negative murmur — a fairly open-minded attitude towards sex.

If we carry the idea that pleasure is something to feel guilty about, we’ll always feel like we’re doing something bad.

But, while I naturally lean more towards indulgence than restriction, it took me until my thirties to release start releasing my shame around either; to drop the whole ‘I’m going to be a bad girl and get the dessert’-bullshit.

Not until then did I fully start exploring sex with the same kind of enthusiasm and openness I’ve always had towards food, and bit by bit, I’m letting go of all guilt in relation to both.

It seems as though the main key to a healthy connection to both sexuality and food is dependent on how we view and relate to pleasure; if we carry the idea that pleasure is something to feel guilty about, we’ll always feel like we’re doing something bad—even when we do acknowledge that it feels so good.

Instead, we can heal our strained relationships with these two essential parts of life by accepting that pleasure good for us, and that letting it guide us can lead us to both better health and vitality!

Sources: Women’s Health, Bustle, Women.com, Psych Central, Quartz