Grilled cheese sandwiches, the euphemism
Two kinda-NSFW items whose juxtaposition amused me:
At some point in the past couple days, I happened across a post in which the Bloggess amusingly suggests a way for women involved in opposite-sex relationships to get their male SOs/spouses to stop bugging them about the women spending too much time online. Note: Not even remotely safe for work.
A few hours after I read the above, Kam sent me a link to an advice column from boston.com about a guy wanting, um, "grilled cheese sandwiches" from his fiancee, who's reluctant to provide them. The columnist introduces the letter thusly:
A disclaimer from Meredith: When this letter arrived in my Love Letters InBox, it was too risqué to post on Boston.com (we're a family website, after all). But because I believe the reader's question is valid and worthy of our discussion, I've decided to post it -- with all of the writer's R-rated phrases replaced by my G-rated euphemisms.
The resulting letter and many of the comments are hilarious. Most of the advice in the comments is essentially the same, but much of it is entertainingly phrased, as the commenters really got into the euphemistic spirit and extended the metaphor to great lengths.
Especially entertaining is the fact that different commenters have different ideas of what "grilled cheese" is a euphemism for. Most of them came to the same conclusion I did—that the letter writer was talking about oral sex. (This was confirmed later when the original letter writer posted a couple of comments under the name "Headless Horseman.") But several other commenters instead assumed that "grilled cheese" was a euphemism for sex in general, leading to exchanges like the following:
174. The thing about grilled cheese sandwiches is... they are never as good when you make them for yourself!
Posted by Justin Richards June 5, 09 10:11 AM
175. If I could make my own grilled cheese sandwich, I would never leave the kitchen.
Posted by Stretch Armstrong June 5, 09 10:50 AM
But I think my favorite response is the one near the end (I skimmed a couple hundred comments in the middle of the thread) that either goes off-metaphor entirely or is extending the metaphor in ways that are entertainingly beyond my comprehension:
230. They have great pannini machines at Macy's and they are not expensive. They make great grilled sandwiches fast and clean up is a breeze. Everything toasts evenly, which is nice, and you can grill anything on them.....this girl doesn't like anything common, so kick it up a notch, buy the machine, and make her a sandwich she'll never forget...........Oh, they have a bridal registry at Macy's too.
On a more serious note, comment #58 makes a good point about responses to gendered needs—apparently the previous week, a woman had written in to say that her emotional needs weren't being met in her relationship, and the general response was to tell her to cope, while a lot of commenters were telling Mr. Grilled Cheese that he should not marry someone who wouldn't provide him with his favorite dish. Though to be fair, it seems to me that many or most of the commenters were saying things like "If it's just that she's unsure, then here are some ways to coax her to ease into it; but if she truly can't or won't do it, then maybe there are compromises that could be worked out; and by the way, you'd better be providing her with as much grilled cheese (or other sandwich of her choice) as she wants, or you have no room to complain."
Anyway. The other reason I'm posting this, aside from pure entertainment value, is that I'm hoping that the Grilled Cheese Sandwiches euphemism (which many of the comments abbreviate to GCS) becomes widespread.
