Lydia’s Blog

Everybody from Stephen Colbert to William Shatner is using it, and by it, I mean the post-sexual colloquialism: The Reach Around. Talk shows, magazine articles, websites, you name it—America is obsessed. What was once a mere show of bedroom courtesy has mushroomed into a cultural phenomenon, etymologically speaking.

The newness of this trend in street parlance has lead to unfortunate cases of misuse. Allow me to attempt to illuminate the eloquent and correct uses of the term.

Following classic offerings like “dick-slapped” and “tea bagging”, “The Reach Around” finds its roots in the context of homosexual intimacy. During penetrative anal sex in what is currently referred to as “doggie-style”, the fucker kindly obliges his partner by reaching around the buttocks and pelvis to manually stimulate the fuckee (rather than remaining upright). Technically, this could also apply to heterosexual intercourse (anal or otherwise) and even, with the help of certain cylindrical requisites, to lesbian sex. Thus, The Reach Around becomes non-sexuality-specific, although its origins lie in gaydom.

The theory is as follows: sure, your face is being forced into a pillow, where only the growing lack of oxygen begins to block out visions of yourself unable to control your own bowel movements for the rest of your life, owing to the enormous cock that’s sawing your ass in half like a Thanksgiving turkey…

…but hey, at least you get a handjob out of it.

In this sense, a Reach Around can be considered a little bonus that slightly sweetens an unpleasant situation. It’s sort of like the lollipops children get at the end of a dentists’ visit. (Although it might possibly be considered in questionable taste to use the phrase in reference to children. But I digress…)

For example: Say a man ends up getting into a car accident, totally crushing the front end of his late model Volkswagen, the air-conditioning of which, oddly, had never worked. He takes the car in to be fixed, which takes forever and costs him a fortune. After picking-up the rebuilt car, the man discovers that, without charging him for the service, the auto shop fixed his air conditioning.

“…heh…” he chuckles to himself. “…that’s a tidy little reach around…”

The Reach Around is peculiarly class specific. Once can give or receive (figurative) reach arounds from members of one’s own class or the one or two classes below. It would be extremely difficult to find a situation in which giving a reach around to or receiving one from either a boss or a cleaning lady would be at all appropriate (or even possible).

The use of Reach Around is generally positive; regardless of the stinkiness of the pot said reach around seems to be sweetening.

Several days ago, I heard a man use “Reach Around” completely incorrectly. He had just finished screaming into his phone to a tech support worker (though owing to his Bluetooth pickup, it looked like a spastic schizophrenic fit). After hanging up, he shouted (at no one in particular) “that bitch TOTALLY just gave me the reach around!”

Um. No sir, she didn’t. The run around has virtually no relation to the reach around, although one could theoretically enjoy the latter with some irony whilst suffering the former.

I suspect this gentleman misunderstood the origins of the term, mistaking a classic reach around for an UDP (unwelcome digital penetration). Perhaps this could occur, in theory, during heterosexual missionary sex…the female partner “reaching around” for the pinky hook. Still, when one really considers this situation, this would only really be fully possible with an exceedingly tall woman (or petite man). Additionally, it must be argued that with a little astroglide (or popper if totally necessary), many heterosexual men would consider a little backdoor tickle far sweeter than a twenty-minute long argument with the Comcast lady.

Please beware of such wildly erroneous uses of this figure of speech. Think “little bonus” or “buttercream frosting on a shit cake”, and you’ll probably be okay.

So dear readers, conduct your vocabulary expansion exercises at your own risk, still above all, have fun and be creative.

And take heart; even in our darkest hours, that Reach Around might be just around the next corner.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 24th, 2006 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.