Cracked, railed, fucked — the modern language of love. A man and a woman walk into a bar: “She let me hit,” he tells his friends. A common epithet is this “he” who acts and “she” who is acted upon. Sexual euphemism is somewhat of a cultural universal, a common pattern or trait — across time, across place. He hit, banged or beat, blew her back out or bred.

In the past, sex was a powerful taboo traditionally banned from the public domain. This taboo bred coded language, ranging from implicit to explicit.

Author Joseph Epstein wrote, “Sex throughout history has perhaps been on most people’s minds, but in this century it has increasingly been on almost everyone’s tongue as well.”

But as the saying by Oscar Wilde goes, “everything is about sex, except for sex, which is about power.”

Society understands the female sex as a passive site for penetration. She is taken to use. And penetration, in so many ways, is a violation of her body. Her social value, her worth, is plundered by the presence of a penis, her being penetrated. If his many women are indicative of his high value, she is degraded by her many men. 

In his activeness, he is rewarded. And this special violence is thoroughly encoded into our language. And in this sea of perhaps violent sexual euphemism, there is a newer trending term among young people. 

I corresponded with Andrea Zemgulys, associate professor of English language and literature, in an email interview with The Michigan Daily.

“‘Cracked’ may just play out the same old binary of violence and fragility,” wrote Zemgulys.

To put it less eloquently: Who’s doing the cracking? Cracked, railed, fucked — my experience with such terms is largely informal. A TikTok, a tweet, a text. Through my research for this article, I found that the study of gender differences and the language of sex is quite lacking in literature. 

But desperate times called for desperate measures, so I turned to the group chat. When I asked friends of mine their thoughts on the word “cracked,” I was sent a screenshot from Hinge:  

“What does the German experience consist of?” my female friend wrote.

“Getting to know what not everyone gets to know,” he responded.

“Give me one example.” 

“Hmm,” he writes. “Getting cracked by a German?”  

“I’m not getting ‘cracked’ by anyone.”   

“…my American friend told me that’s the way to say it.”

Perhaps this special, implicit violence is American.

As per the most reliable of sources, the Urban Dictionary defines being “cracked” as having “very intense, almost violent intercourse, usually from the back.” In sex and violence, where is the line between euphemism and degradation?

I spoke with Robin Queen, Sarah G. Thomason collegiate professor of linguistics, in an interview with The Daily.

“It’s always this interesting question — in what ways is language itself violence?” said Queen. “What are the range of ways people are using this (term), and in what ways does it represent something normative in the culture?”

“The use of terms associated with violence have been tied to sexual activity for a long time. It used to be terms like nail or bang, something like that,” Queen said. “A lot of it has to do with a long-standing reality about how certain kinds of sexual activity are described. It’s especially applied to penetrative sex.” 

If “slang evokes meaning by drawing on the shared cultural knowledge of the users,” as cited by Virginia Braun, what is our totality of learned behavior? Who does our socialization into a patriarchal culture destroy?

I wouldn’t profess that I have my finger on the pulse of common internet slang, but I do frequent TikTok: 

“When I remember that I can’t crack and can only get cracked,” said the text of a video. 

“that’s what straps r made for,” one commenter supplied. 

Here, there is perhaps a consensus. Penetration is necessary because there is interest in power. In the context of heterosexual sex, of phallocentrism, the masculine exists as active and powerful: hit, bang, destroy. If the masculine destroys, the feminine takes it. Us young people, perhaps we have internalized this rhetoric. 

I’d argue that among college students, this language is especially explicit. I’ve learned that I am perceived as a certain type of woman by men in college who don’t know me. Perceived as available through my work, a more liberal woman — one who writes about sexuality, who so obviously takes.

One to inappropriately proposition, one to degrade. Cracked, railed, fucked — if you are passive, you must take. I asked Queen what she thought about this.

“We’re in a moment where a particular kind of tough masculinity has been growing in cultural prominence, at least sort of being presented as something both good and normative, and that goes along with — in some ways — that type of metaphor for sex,” answered Queen.

This is a newer world, not the one of our mothers and fathers, our grandmothers and grandfathers. No longer are men owed a woman at their feet, and a baby in their arms. Perhaps the language of degradation and objectification is by design, an implicit power move.

We women are paradoxically sexed and sexless. I could look at her and she could look at me. “Show me on the doll where he touched you,” we could ask each other. We are but plastic proxies; the language of sexual euphemism remains one of objectification. We are ball-jointed dolls with silicone skin, objects for the taking. 

She is fucked, touched, cracked. If women are the so-called gatekeepers of sex, holding power in our ability to withhold, then we must be broken into like porcelain. He will take as we receive. 

I suppose that one could characterize heterosexual sex, penetrative sex, as a semiotic tool. Cultural meaning can be derived from action, gesture and image. 

What is in an act? Action is decidedly not neutral. To perform a gesture is to repeat it until it feels natural, until the language is normalized, universalized. These metaphors we use for sex — cracking, smashing, railing — are less about intimacy than they are about demonstrating competence in a male/female, active/passive dynamic. 

Common sexual gesture, or penetration, signals membership in a cultural grammar where sex is valued not for connection but for impact. What can you withstand? What can you inflict? Which side of the verb are you on? 

In this landscape, women become the objects that verify male action. The body becomes a site of proof: evidence that he has done something, as seen by his peers — that he has succeeded. 

“I cracked,” or “she let me hit,” the man from the bar will say. “She let me have her.”

It’s not surprising that slang collapses women into body parts — ass, pussy, tits, doll parts scattered across language — fragmentation is a prerequisite for objectification. People, women, hold commercial value; a set of parts can be arranged however the speaker chooses. 

Bodies, bodies, bodies. Our flesh is ripe for the taking. 

“I’d crack him,” she could declare.  

“You’d do the cracking?” 

“… yes.”

In English, the subject performs the verb; the object receives it. The linguistic logic slides seamlessly into the sexual one. Men crack. Women get cracked. 

Even when women flip the sentence — “I’d crack him” — it reads as humorous or shocking precisely because it violates the expected direction of force. It reveals how thoroughly we internalize the assumptions embedded in our words. 

Violent sexual slang isn’t new, but its current visibility feels unique to the age of the internet. TikTok, X, Reddit, pornography — all reward short, sharp, exaggerated language. Release through the act, and then social honor among other men. “Crack,” unlike “sleep with,” is efficient: It signals a specific kind of sex, a specific power dynamic, a specific posture of masculinity — one where men take.

This common framing, in which we are taken from, may fuel the perception of ourselves as women so that we may see a loss in each and every partner.

We are fluent in the vocabulary of impact. Hand to cheek, flesh to flesh. Maybe the violence in the language functions as a substitute for the vulnerability of intimacy — a way to speak about sex without ever approaching its emotional core. 

Or perhaps the language simply reflects the world we inhabit: a culture fixated on dominance, consumption, spectacle. In such a culture, sex is not an equal exchange but a demonstration. Not something shared, but something done. And it is done to women. Men fuck women, subject verb object.

Statement Contributor Allana Smith can be reached at allanans@umich.edu.

The post Doll parts appeared first on The Michigan Daily.