To Suck, or not To Suck!

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Here we have a beautiful image of a woman breastfeeding her baby; providing her child with the necessary nutrients to grow. This may seem weird, seeing as though my topic revolves around sex and food, which I naturally thought- seeing this as an act of motherhood- was the polar opposite to my area of research. Little did I know that this purely innocent act was an early explanation for the connection between food and sex.

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Sigmund Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) an Austrian neurologist known as the father of psychoanalysis (wikipedia) created a theory which drew a connection between the mother and baby relationship and sex. 

Freud investigated the behaviour of the newborn child and his argument declared that "the sucking of the infant is the first sexual act of a human being" (Smith Joan, 103), whereby the 'sexual pleasure is first bound up with the action of feeding at the mother's breast' (103).

When first discovering this, I thought it was quite bizarre and a disturbing way to think of such a natural act. I was not alone. Freud had and still has many opponents who refuse to think of "sucking babies as having a sexual life"  (103). Nevertheless, Freud's explanation is not invalid, and it would be unwise to ignore a possible explanation of how the act of eating has become sexual considering its literary support.

Welcome to Sexy Food!

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Welcome to my Literature of Food blog

We often hear people when conversing about potential lovers, refer to them in language more closely associated with food: "He looks so good I could eat him!", "She's a tall glass of water" or "he's like dark chocolate". People are so often described as food when it comes to attraction or flirting and this is not something we ever question. Pick up lines contain more food ingredients than many students' dusty cupboards at university. Sexualised food is everywhere! Take the picture above for instance: it screams sex! 

My food blog will be addressing how sex and food have become sides to the same coin and used interchangeably. It will try to discover or explain where the sexual ideology of food may have originated from. I hope to do some fun things over these few months and explore the sex within food. So stay tuned because we will be getting to the bottom of why you cannot walk down the road eating a banana, without having men gawk at you!

Here are some of the questions my blog will be answering:

• What makes food so sexy?
• Why does one's act of eating, specifically women indicate sexual behaviour? 
• Are aphrodisiacs real or mythological? Do they really improve sexual activity or does this have more to do with individual mentality and fantasy?
• How does literature contribute to this sexual representation of food?
• Why are certain fruits sexual? Fruit and vegetables as male or female genitalia.
• What is food porn?

My blog will use various items of literature to explore the sexual innuendo behind food.

I hope you enjoy!