Raw-Dogging: The idiom that only a Y chromosome could have written.

I mean, would a woman think of raw-dogging as a challenge Or call it “raw-dogging?”

Warning: This post acknowledges the existence of sex and of extreme book reading.

Let’s get the sex out of the way. (That’s what she…no, we won’t go there.) Raw-dogging is slang for having sex without a condom. Some competitive male travelers created a metonymy out of the idiom, turning it into a competitive “sport.”

A “rawdogger” endures a long flight while doing nothing but staring at the map. He’s disqualified if he consumes any form of entertainment, talks to anyone, uses the restroom, or even drinks water. Having completed his awesome feat of sensory deprivation, he then employs what’s left of his IQ to brag on TikTok and other fine social media. Woof!

We’ll be dealing with the metonymy and idioms in later posts. Just know for now that the metonymy is the trickiest, least detected, and most powerful of all the tropes. And an idiom is a multiple set of words that together form a kind of semantic molecule with its own separate meaning.

Raw-dogging started two years ago with a single tweet:

the dude next to me on the plane just absolutely rawdogged this entire flight… he got on a TEN HOUR FLIGHT to europe in jeans, no headphones, no book, no neck pillow, literally just a paper cup of coffee without a lid like sir are you ok

Some years ago, I personally flew from LA to Hong Kong, a twelve-hour flight in a row with a guy who did exactly the same thing without any drink or food and not once using the restroom. It didn’t occur to me to post a viral tweet or to call the poor man’s passivity “raw-dogging,” and the empty-souled influencer in me feels ashamed.

Talk about the power of words. Young men instantly thought raw-dogging sounded even cooler than the Saltine cracker challenge! An Australian music producer named Torren Foot (yes, his real name) posted on TikTok:

Just rawdogged it, 15 hr flight to Melbourne. No movie, no music, just flightmap (I counted to one million twice)

So, why label competitive boredom with an unsafe sex act? The figure qualifies as a dysphemism. The opposite of a euphemism, the dysphemism paints a nasty veneer onto an otherwise trivial, ordinary, or crushingly boring phenomenon. Other dysphemisms:

Extreme sports: “Extreme” implies something you shouldn’t do on purpose or competitively. But Red Bull found it to be the perfect dysphemistic adjective for a testosterone-challenged market.

Getting shredded: The gym rat’s term for achieving big muscles with low body fat. Synonyms include “peeled” and “ripped.” Someone new to weight training and steroids would understandably be appalled by terms that seem to imply self-flaying. But these dysphemisms add a fillip of danger to the practice of lifting a piece of iron over and over. (Lift that iron twenty times, and you have performed a “widowmaker.”)

Insane, sick: What man doesn’t want his leisure activities to betray his mental disorder?

Hella: Short for “hell of a…” . Heckuva qualifies as one of the oldest dysphemisms.

Comedians “kill” with their jokes and surfers perform “outrageous” tricks. Am I wrong in thinking that males came up with every one of these terms—troubling only when you use the left side of your brain?

Personally, I wouldn’t mind if we rhetorically extremified the Luddite practice of reading paper books on airplanes. What if we applied a hella sick dysphemism, such as:

Deepthroated Lincoln in the Bardo from Logan to Heathrow. Seven hours 190 pages #deepthroatreads

Teebagged Marylyn Robinson LAX-OGG. No snax 237 pages #teebaggbooks

Total bareback on paperback Moby-Dick. Sucked up 64 chapters all the way to first dead whale #barebacknovels

Got any other appropriately horrible ideas that might get young men scrambling to airport bookstores? Let me know in the comments.

Oh, and here’s a bonus term. Donald Trump seems pretty dysphemistic, doesn’t he? What do you call the rhetorical character of someone who loves to use nasty language?

A cacozeliac.

Sick, dude.