THE GLORY OF WINNING AND THE SHAME OF DEFEAT – THE SEX IS WAR METAPHOR AS A CREATIVE RESERVOIR AND A TOOL FOR ESTABLISHING MASCULINIZATION, POWER, AND DOMINANCE

This article investigates the relationship between language and ideology and provides an account of the representation of sex as physical contact in contemporary American men’s magazines, as well as the specific role that metaphors play in perpetuating the view that men are constructed as the aggressors and women as the victimized and attacked. The method applied to retrieve the data is manual searching. The analysis is carried out in the spirit of Cognitive Linguistics, with particular emphasis on the notion of Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor framework. It is based on the assumption that in many cases, the overall view of sex seems to be one of hostility, violence, and dominance, where the SEX IS WAR (but also SEX IS PUNISHMENT) metaphor functions as a device of masculinization since war is still typically perceived as a male activity, which, in turn, may lead to certain detrimental psychological consequences.

https://doi.org/10.7862/rz.2021.hss.04

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