SOMETIMES A FRUIT is just a fruit. But since the beginning of recorded human thought, we have insisted on fruit as a sexual metaphor. âMarry me, / give me the fruit of your body!â the goddess Ishtar commands the hero in the Sumerian epic âGilgamesh,â which was inscribed in cuneiform, the earliest known writing system, on a baked clay tablet nearly 4,000 years ago. In Genesis, Eve takes a bite of âpâri,â Hebrew for âfruitâ â of any kind: The specification of the apple was a later Latin pun, âmalusâ meaning evil and âmalumâ meaning apple. Notably, in the 16th century the eggplant was called âmala insanaâ (âmad appleâ), as well as âpoma amorisâ (âlove appleâ), a term also applied to the tomato, all these fruits commingling in language as if what mattered were not their individual characteristics but the sheer glory of fruitiness as a category â the abundance, extravagance, juiciness of the natural world, relentlessly flowering and swelling. Everywhere our ancestors looked, on the tree, vine, shrub, on the plate, there was evidence of life perpetuating itself: fertility incarnate.
Still, the eggplant is a relative newcomer as botanical sex symbols go, perhaps because it is not properly phallic across species; it has been catapulted to stardom only in emoji form. No such confusion surrounds the peach, with its telltale cleft. In China, where the fruit was first domesticated, the phrase âsharing the peachâ has long conveyed gay male desire. A story from the third century B.C. recounts how a young man bit into a peach, then handed it to his noble master, who, rather than take this as an insult, understood it as an act of intimacy and sank his teeth into the flesh, too â a theme reprised more explicitly in the Italian director Luca Guadagninoâs 2017 film, âCall Me by Your Nameâ (adapted from the 2007 novel by the American writer AndrĂ© Aciman). The fruit carried similar freight in early 17th-century Renaissance Italy, as the art and food historian John Varriano has noted, when âdare le pescheâ (literally, âto give the peachâ) translated as âto yield oneâs bum.â In 2016, Apple unveiled a redesigned peach emoji with the cleft delicately pushed to the right, almost out of sight. Users expressed dismay. The cleft was restored to its rightful place.
The banana has a similarly louche aura, which presented something of a challenge to prudish sensibilities when it entered the American imagination after the Civil War. (Steamships had started to replace schooners, shortening travel time from the Caribbean so that fruit wouldnât rot before arrival.) So obvious was the bananaâs shape, etiquette manuals demanded that it be cut with a knife and eaten with a fork rather than raised whole to the lips. One importer felt compelled to print and distribute postcards of women sedately eating bananas, as staid as cows chewing their cud, to show that it was socially and morally acceptable to do so. A century later, the banana would become a handy tool in sex ed classes, as a model on which to demonstrate condom technique. Why, then, has the eggplant deposed the banana as the most phallic of fruits, at least in the digital sphere? One emoji user I consulted suggested that itâs because the emoji version shows the fruit half-peeled â although surely that makes it all the franker, gleefully unzipped. Another noted that the curve of the banana emoji wasnât quite right, as if realism were the point.
