"And indeed the tape--infamous and not proved to exist--has not just provided joke fodder for Twitter and talk-show hosts but has come to occupy a crawl space in our collective imagination, filled with bits and bobs plucked from a variety of sources: pulpy airport Russian-spy novels from the late Cold War era; that episode of 'Sex and the City' in which a brash New York politician wants Carrie Bradshaw to pee on him as part of sex play; the question of whether it's possible that the current President enjoys so-called water sports given his professed germophobia, and whether it would be considered, in today's parlance, 'kink shaming' to fault him for that; that thing a friend once mentioned to us about how much it really costs to deep clean a mattress."

— Fry, Naomi


Author
Date
April 18, 2018
Metaphor
"And indeed the tape--infamous and not proved to exist--has not just provided joke fodder for Twitter and talk-show hosts but has come to occupy a crawl space in our collective imagination, filled with bits and bobs plucked from a variety of sources: pulpy airport Russian-spy novels from the late Cold War era; that episode of 'Sex and the City' in which a brash New York politician wants Carrie Bradshaw to pee on him as part of sex play; the question of whether it's possible that the current President enjoys so-called water sports given his professed germophobia, and whether it would be considered, in today's parlance, 'kink shaming' to fault him for that; that thing a friend once mentioned to us about how much it really costs to deep clean a mattress."
Metaphor in Context
As Jane Mayer wrote in her profile of Steele, Christopher Burrows, Steele's business partner, expressed reservations about mentioning the tape, "worried about the impact that the sensational item might have." And indeed the tape—infamous and not proved to exist—has not just provided joke fodder for Twitter and talk-show hosts but has come to occupy a crawl space in our collective imagination, filled with bits and bobs plucked from a variety of sources: pulpy airport Russian-spy novels from the late Cold War era; that episode of "Sex and the City" in which a brash New York politician wants Carrie Bradshaw to pee on him as part of sex play; the question of whether it's possible that the current President enjoys so-called water sports given his professed germophobia, and whether it would be considered, in today's parlance, "kink shaming" to fault him for that; that thing a friend once mentioned to us about how much it really costs to deep clean a mattress.
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Naomi Fry, "When We Think About the Pee Tape," The New Yorker (April 18, 2018). <Link to www.newyorker.com>
Date of Entry
04/20/2018

The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.