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In the culture of American adolescents, the game of baseball is often used as a euphemistic metaphor for the degree of sexual intimacy achieved in intimate encounters or relationships. In the metaphor, prevalent in the aftermath of World War II, sexual activities are described as if they are actions in a game of baseball.

Although details vary, a broadly accepted description of what each base represents is as follows:

• First base - mouth to mouth kissing, especially open mouth ("French") kissing involving the tongue.
• Second base - aggressive stimulation between the neck and waist, usually shirtless or under the shirt.
• Third base - manual or oral stimulation of the genitalia.
• Home run (Fourth base) - the act of penetrative intercourse.
• Fifth Base - commonly understood to be the act of placing one’s testicles inside your partner’s anus, after the anus has been propped open by a hoop earring. The earring is then removed from the anus and the testicles are left inside. They can only be removed after excretion by the partner. (This is not true).
• Sixth Base - Murder. (And this is taking the joke too far)

David Letterman has chronicled many of these in his "Top Ten Baseball Euphemisms for Sex," a recurring theme on his Top Ten Lists.

In popular culture

• Part 1 ("Paradise") of the Meat Loaf song "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" describes a young couple's make-out session, with a voice-over commentary, by veteran New York Yankees baseball announcer Phil Rizzuto, of a portion of a baseball game as a metaphor for the couple's activities.
• In the WWE (then WWF), Mankind was throwing a surprise "This is your life" segment for fellow tag-teammate, the Rock. He introduced a mystery guest who turned out to be his old flame from high school. The Rock brought up their past in which they were making out. As Rock was sliding his hand along her thigh, he was cut off at second base. This is also the moment where the Rock coined his famous terminology, "Poontang Pie."
• Political comedian Stephen Colbert mentions an alternative, the "abstinence bases," in his book I Am America (And So Can You!).
• Webcomic xkcd features a comic titled "Base System" with an expanded depiction of where various intimate acts lie in respect to a baseball diamond.
• On Comedy Central stand-up comedian Wayne Federman wrote and performed a personal version because he wasn't as advanced as others in high school. Ex. Kiss a girl: home run. Touching: winning the pennant. All the way: Winning the World Series. Spring Training: practicing with your own team.
• In John Green's novel Looking for Alaska Alaska describes the base system as being "French, Feel, Finger, Fuck."
• In an episode of The Big Bang Theory, Bernadette asks Howard where their relationship is going after their third date. Howard wishes it goes to at least second base. It is later revealed in another episode that Howard doesn't understand the metaphor, when he tells Leonard he reached 8th base with Bernadette. Leonard asks what 8th base is, and he answers "7th base with shirt off... Well, my shirt."

Sex education

Educators have found the baseball metaphor an effective instructional tool when providing sex education to middle school students. 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'"). The bases may be different for different people and sexes.

Recent changes

This sequence of "running the bases" is often regarded as 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 heterosexual penetrative intercourse, the "home run" has taken on the additional dimension of oral-genital sexual intercourse. Richters and Rissel conversely 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. penetrative) sex.

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" are distinguished from those that do not count as "sex" according to whether it is possible to become pregnant 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".

See also

• Glossary of English language idioms derived from baseball

References

Notes

1. Hellermann, Steven L.; Markovits, Andrei S. (2001). Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism. Princeton University Press. p. 66. ISBN 069107447X.
2. Romaine, Suzanne (1999). Communicating Gender. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. p. 210. ISBN 0805829261.
3. Jezer, Marty (1982). The Dark Ages, Life in the United States, 1945–1960. South End Press. p. 248. ISBN 0896081273.
4. Green, John. Looking for Alaska. ISBN 0142402516.
5. Letterman, David (2001-09-20). Top Ten Baseball Euphemisms for Sex. Late Show with David Letterman. Retrieved 2010-04-30. (Search the "Top Ten" archive by the show date here.)
6. Pearlman, Jeff (2007-08-29). "Phil and Meat Loaf will always have "Paradise"". ESPN. Retrieved 2010-01-21.
7. http://xkcd.com/540/
8. Hall, Alvin L.; Altherr, Thomas L. (2002). "Eros at the Bat: American Baseball and Sexuality in Historical Context". The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture 1998. McFarland & Company. pp. 157–182. ISBN 0786409541.
9. Leman, Kevin; Bell, Kathy Flores (2004). A Chicken's Guide to Talking Turkey With Your Kids About Sex. Zondervan. ISBN 031025096X.
10. Juliet Richters and Chris Rissel (2005). Doing it Down Under: The Sexual Lives of Australians. Allen & Unwin. p. 32. ISBN 1741143268.
11. Kohl, James V.; Francoeur, Robert T. (2002). The Scent of Eros: Mysteries of Odor in Human Sexuality. iUniverse. pp. 153–154. ISBN 059523383X.
12. Mullaney, Jamie L. (2005). Everyone Is NOT Doing It: Abstinence and Personal Identity. University of Chicago. pp. 153–154. ISBN 0226547566.

External links

• Dale, David (2004-02-10). "Strike me lucky, it just isn't cricket". The Sun-Herald.

• Metaphors referring to sport
• Sexual acts
• Sexual slang