Everything Looks Like Sex
You start noticing it and you can’t stop. A banana in someone’s mouth becomes a joke. A pair of smooth stones catches your eye the wrong way. A gap between two columns at the station is suddenly an optical illusion of something else. The world becomes this constant parade of shapes that shouldn’t mean anything but somehow do. Once you start seeing it, it’s everywhere.
I think it started young, the way these things do—the kind of humor kids make when they first discover that words and objects have more than one reading. A sentence can be phrased innocently but sounded filthy if you put the right pause in. A banana isn’t just a banana once someone’s eaten it a certain way. It becomes a mirror held up to what you’re thinking about. The joke works because it’s obvious and stupid and everyone knows exactly what you’re implying, but pretending not to is half the fun.
The funny part is how automatic it becomes. You’re in a café, someone’s sucking on a lollipop, and instead of just seeing a lollipop you’re seeing… the joke. Your brain does this thing where it looks for the crude reading without asking permission. It’s like visual pareidolia but horny—the same way you see faces in clouds, except you’re seeing something else in everything else. A carrot. Champagne. Two fingers arranged a certain way. The geometry of it matters. The angle. The motion.
There’s something almost innocent about it in a backward way. You’re not being weird or perverse—you’re just playing with shapes and language the same way you did when you were a kid making your parents uncomfortable at the dinner table. It’s a kind of visual literacy, knowing that there’s always a second reading available if you want it. Most people walk around not seeing it. You see it everywhere—strawberries, the neck of a guitar, the architecture of a building’s entrance, the way someone stretches. The world becomes one long double entendre.
What it actually reveals is attention. You’re noticing what’s already there—the geometry of objects, the way bodies move, what happens when you look at ordinary things slightly sideways. Once you’ve learned to see the joke, you can’t unsee it. Someone points out a constellation in the stars and then you can’t stop seeing it, but at least you had a choice. This one just happens automatically. You walk through a grocery store and the produce section becomes a comedy nobody else is in on.
I’m not sure what it says about you, the fact that you read it all this way. Maybe just that you’re paying attention, that you haven’t become numb to the world’s shapes. Or maybe it’s something else—a way of keeping things playful, of refusing to let surfaces be just surfaces. Either way, there’s a laugh in it, and that’s usually enough.