Studs, Tools, & the Family Jewels: Metaphors Men Live by

""How we talk about ourselves as men can alter the way we live as men,"" contends Peter F. Murphy in his impressive Studs, Tools, and the Family Jewels: Metaphors Men Live By. Citing the machine ""finely tuned, well-oiled, unemotional, hard, and cost-effective"" as ""the most powerful cultural metaphor for masculinity,"" Murphy, chair of the English and philosophy department at Murray State University in Kentucky and editor of Fictions of Masculinity, traces this and other gendered imagery used to describe men, women, sexuality and sex. Zeroing in on words battle terminology, terms from ""studmuffin"" to ""gang bang,"" sexual slurs and euphemisms this scholarly treatise exhaustively probes the influence of sexual language on human relationship.