The Self-Created Legacy of the Doughnut

Last night, I had a terrible anxiety dream about trying to slip a doughnut over a penis without threatening the doughnut’s structural integrity. This is a challenge, as no doughnuts on the market have a hole big enough to accommodate even a tube of toilet paper. I went through several in the dream, which flaked and crumbled everywhere. I absolutely dread crumbs in the bed, so you can imagine how horrific this all was.

I’m laying the blame at the feet of Amanda Hess, who published a piece on Salon yesterday about the sordid history of what has to be Cosmopolitan magazine’s most absurd sex advice ever. According to her arduous research into the topic, the doughnut sex move was delivered to the world in June of 2003, via one of those Cosmo listicles that enumerates anecdotes from thankful anonymous boyfriends and their adventurous anonymous girlfriends.

While not the worst thing Cosmo has tried to sell people (outside the obvious infection risk), the doughnut has turned out to have a pretty long tail. It’s taken all kinds of amusing detours into pop culture, had its porn debut, been recycled by the magazine in subsequent issues including its most recent one, appeared on Cosmo‘s website and graced a couple of its self-help books.

Like a weird self-fulfilling prophesy, Cosmo rule-34’d the bakery and the nation followed suit. The comments on the most recent article suggest that a number of women and men out there are very interested in this erotic treatment, and some have already tried it. I believe it.

The last time I was surprised by food and sex was in 2011, when “sandwich I’d like to fuck porn” and “what is the best sandwich to have sex with” rocked the top 25 queries in my annual analytics review.

My blog was ranking because in 2009, I’d written about a survey by the entertainment destination Heavy.com that had ranked sandwiches around the nation along the lines of “which sandwich would you have sex with?” (Ham and cheese won, with 34 percent, FYI).

Now, mixing sex and food isn’t really a new thing. Over a decade ago, the fearless sensualist and chef Anthony Bourdain would take readers through a wild journey of sensory stimulation in his book A Cook’s Tour, which asked readers to think of the way food transports us, and left them with the thought: “a few beads of caviar licked off a nipple…”

And who can forget that sort of sexy and yet still soul-crushing moment in the 1999 film Varsity Blues when Ali Larter appears in a whipped cream bikini?

And then there is that incredible scene in the 1986 film 9½ Weeks where Mickey Rourke feeds Kim Basinger all manner of things, while The Newbeats’ “Bread and Butter” plays in the background somehow without killing our raging boners.

Then you have 1985’s Tampopo and its delicate egg yolk dance.

But something went horribly wrong on the eve of Y2K. Already we had seen Reddi Whip reduced to an awkward situation, but nothing could have prepared us for what Jason Biggs did to that warm apple pie in American Pie.

Which leads us to the incident this week concerning the man and the pizza. On Monday, a user going by the name @ITK_AGENT_VIGO tweeted to the Domino’s Pizza UK team, reporting that he had suffered grave injuries to his genitals after “making love” to one of their pizzas. “YOUR STAFF SHOULD INFORM CUSTOMERS ABOUT THE DANGERS OF MAKING LOVE TO YOUR PIZZA,” he wrote. “WHY IS THIS NOT IN PLACE?”

(Domino’s responded, apologizing profusely, “Our apologies, we will look for a way to notify customers of this in future. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.”)

So, you know, maybe dialing it back to doughnuts isn’t the worst thing.

Photo by JMiu.