Did You Hear About The Girl Who . . . ?: Contemporary Legends, Folklore, and Human Sexuality

Chapter 7: The Peanut Butter Surprise: Fear and Loathing of Women’s Sexuality

7 THE PEANUT BUTTER SURPRISE Fear and Loathing of Women’s Sexuality ❏ There is a girl and she is home with her parents. Well, she is up in her bedroom and she has this hot dog she took from the refrigerator. She is masturbating with the hot dog and it gets stuck. She is freaking out, and she has to go to the hospital to get the hot dog out. So she goes downstairs and tells her parents that she has to go to the hospital. They take her to the hospital and the doctor comes in. She tells the doctor her predicament and he does the surgery to remove the hot dog lodged up in her. There is a clear message in this legend for young women who experiment with sexuality; the result of attempts at masturbation for this teenager is humiliation of the most dramatic kind, involving both her parents and an emergency room visit. In her analysis of the legend, which was popular in her middle school and high school, the student who collected it commented on the girl’s anxieties about sex leading her to masturbate, “which is taboo anyway,” and the embarrassment of talking about sex with her parents. She might have also discussed the fear of objects not only getting stuck, but also disappearing, in the vagina, which is a common fear, especially among young adolescents. Combin114 ing common anxieties about sexuality with lack of basic knowledge of anatomy, the stories have achieved wide circulation. Stories about objects stuck in vaginas are counterparts of the stories of objects in the rectums of gay men, again linking the sexuality of gay men and women. There are many versions of what gets stuck in the vagina and what the consequences are, and it is clear from the comments included with the legends that they do give strong messages to girls in upper elementary and middle school: Several stories I heard growing up which made my vagina frightening to me. I remember one in particular which had several variations. A girl roughly my age (elementary school) stuck a hot dog/pickle/carrot into her vagina and part of it broke off. She was so embarrassed that she couldn’t tell anyone. It rotted and killed her. (The other version ended with the shame she felt when she broke down and asked for help.) A legend I heard in sixth grade . . . At this time there was a girl that supposedly was wondering [what] penetration felt like, so she tried a hot dog. I was told it broke off in her, and they had to take her to the emergency room. Although I can’t remember her name, it was a particular girl. . . . She had large breasts and was teased about being easy with the boys. There was a girl I went to junior high with who had a legend about her. She was an unusual girl who had several unusual behavior problems. She was not well accepted among everyone. It was told that she had masturbated with a hot dog and had to go to the emergency room to have it removed after part had broken off and gotten lost. When I was in California I’d heard this story about this girl who had gotten a frozen hot dog stuck up, up her vagina, and um, ’cause she was like masturbating or something, and it was frozen and she had to go to the hospital and get it surgically removed. THE PEANUT BUTTER SURPRISE 115 And it was this girl who had already graduated or whatever, and it was kind of like I mean when I lived in California you based it, I mean, they used to tell stories to the freshmen all the time. But then I moved to Maryland and I heard the same thing, but it wasn’t a frozen hot dog, it was just a regular hot dog. And the same thing, except for this girl, it was someone who I knew of, I didn’t know really anybody there, but I knew of the girl, and they were like, “ooh, that’s her,” that’s the girl, you know who it happened to. She was so shy she probably wouldn’t have defended herself, but um, I heard a lot of things about her anyway. Then I moved to North Carolina and then I heard the same thing and I...