Fleshy and ripe: The erotic semiotics of fruit

Last year, up and down the aisles of Mercadona, a supermarket chain across Spain, upside-down pineapples were left in shopping trolleys and baskets between the hours of 7 and 8pm. Shoppers eyed each other’s hauls with intrigue. For those in the know, it was a clear gesture of desire—a proclamation in pursuit of romance or sex. 

But the pineapple-as-code was nothing new. A whole system of symbology has long existed for fruit—the unrivalled icon of sexual signaling. Over time, each crop has yielded its own meaning and lore, subject to shifting cultural scripts. Pineapples for non-monogamous swingers, cherries for virginity, lemons for smutty fan-fiction, peaches for anal—every fruit symbol containing within its expressive shape the pulp of complex or marginalized sexual desires or identities. 

It’s a sexually-charged lineage as long as it is elaborate. Fruit has historically carried connotations of patriarchal and sexual repression. Perhaps most famously, in the Garden of Eden, it is the ultimate symbol of temptation and desire: an apple, forbidden and drenched in sin, was the source of Eve’s downfall. Similarly, in Greek mythology, while in the underworld, Persephone devours sweet pomegranate seeds in an allusion to a sexual act, binding her to Hades and the dark realm he rules. Skipping ahead some millennia, written in the Victorian era, Christina Rosetti’s poem “Goblin Market” also draws on the metaphor, with protagonist Laura attracted by the Goblin’s sumptuous fruit goods: “Plump unpeck’d cherries / Melons and raspberries / Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches / Swart-headed mulberries / Wild free-born cranberries / Crab-apples, dewberries / Pine-apples, blackberries / Apricots, strawberries,” on which she “sucked and sucked and sucked the more.” The descriptions of fruit phonetically pop with plumpness and sexual innuendo, stirring the appetite. There’s a vivacity to fruit, a tenderness and wetness, that naturally lends itself to stand in for sex. 

This ripe imagery has also been fodder for centuries of visual artists. Take the nineteenth-century painting “The Cherry Girl” by Joseph Caraud, which shows a young woman in white, plucking a cherry from an overflowing bowl of the sumptuous red fruit at pelvis level. There’s a look of knowing in the subject’s eyes, of desire unrealized, of seductive potential. Centuries earlier, in Niccolò Frangipane’s late-Renaissance “Allegory of Autumn,” a satyr lustfully fingers the soft flesh of a melon. The taking of fruit has long indicated desire, an act of appetite, consumption, satiation, and even corruption. Today, Sarah Lucas’s artwork “Au Naturel” uses fruit as a stand-in for genitals, clearly referencing the cultural significance of fruit as sex symbol. There is something about the transient nature of ripe fruit, momentarily at its sweetest, that aptly captures the height of sexuality.  

Contemporary culture, too, has endlessly played with this salacious metaphor, reclaiming fruit as a marker of a more sexually liberated appetite. In other words, sex no longer necessarily leads to some kind of female-coded fall from grace. In Call Me by Your Name, Elio hollows out a sweet, dripping peach to masturbate with; the leftovers are later licked up by his lover. In Beyoncé's music video for the song “Blow,” she sprawls out on all fours atop a car, back curled, beneath flashing neon signage with a single word, “cherry,” a subversion of this virginal symbol. Then there’s pop hit “Watermelon Sugar” from Harry Styles, a veritable fruit-sex anthem, confirmed by Styles to be about the female orgasm. The lyrics are loaded: "Tastes like strawberries on a summer evenin' [...] I want more berries and that summer feelin'", he sings.

According to Umberto Eco’s A Theory of Semiotics, “a sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else.” Fruit has come to stand in for preferences, intricate desires, and sexual identities, relied on by various individuals and groups for sexual signaling—like the recent pineapples of the Mercadonas, where the spiky fruit was agreed upon online to express real life desires, to be recognized by those who knew, and acted upon at will. Certain fruits can better exemplify exactly what you’re after than others. 

Particularly pre-apps, this code system was useful in public spaces and plain sight, at once delicately subtle and salaciously bold. Such semiology is an extension of the act of move-making and flirtation more generally, in which a dance of gestures and small acts signal want gently, in lieu of outright declarations of lust.

Roland Barthes writes in his text on semiotics, “However paradoxical it may seem, myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear.” Distortion is key in the fruitified landscape, setting up a language for those in-the-know. Particularly where outwardly and openly speaking of sexual desire has been forbidden, censored, or considered socially taboo, fruit semiotics have come into full fruition. Here, such code becomes a crucial mode of communication: a system of safety in signs. For example, in polari, the codified language used in the queer community in the U.K. during the legal proscription of homosexuality, “fruit” reclaimed a slur referring to a gay man. Meanwhile, for non-monogamous individuals or couples, the pineapple has been essential for communicating a sexual preference outside of the mainstream, particularly in periods when non-monogamy was more marginalized than it is today. Singer Rina Sawayama chose the symbol of the cherry to signal coming out as pansexual—for those clued into the sign and lyrics—in her song by the same name. It is notable that the same fruit names Cherry Grove, one area of the queer haven Fire Island, a community that still exists today but was a space of rare freedom during the sexually oppressive, pre-Stonewall decades. Fruit, which has long stood in for sexual “subversion” or “sin,” becomes the perfect symbol to reclaim as a tool of identity-forming or bonding for marginalized communities and sexual subcultures.

Fruit language has evolved with the digital era. In an online landscape that is increasingly politicized and censored by the right, fruit-as-code is essential once more, reaching those it needs to, while slipping through the cracks of authoritarian censorship. Sex educators, relying on shorthand to avoid post removal and account deletion, have turned to fruit-as-symbol to communicate in plain sight. Similarly, in the space of smutty fanfiction, where restrictions on certain sites censor pornographic content, lemons step in as a crucial signal. According to fanfiction, “Explicit sex stories in general, especially in anime fan fiction, are known as lemon, a term which comes from a Japanese slang term meaning ‘sexy’ that itself derives from an early pornographic cartoon series called ‘cream lemon.’” There’s even a citrus scale, ranking sexual explicitness. 

Across the internet, fruit as sexual shorthand is prolific. In our social media age, memes and emojis mostly do the work. Fruit semiotics have become mainstream, even commonplace, and the internet is mottled with peach, cherry, and other bright, juicy emojis that speak for themselves. These colorful pixels, embodying in-the-flesh acts, are so integral to our collective language that they have come to transcend the boundaries of subculture. Fruit-as-metaphor has become part of our everyday vernacular.