Sexual symbolism refers to the use of symbols or objects that represent or suggest sexuality or sexual desires. It is a way of expressing or representing sexual or sensual themes indirectly through images, motifs, or metaphors.
Full definition
Freudian authors find
disguised sexual symbolism and forgotten childhood experiences (e.g., incestual desires or hatred of father or mother) behind every myth.24
Using the subject of sex as an example, when an English professor would
discuss sexual symbolism in various literature, they tended to giggle uncontrollably.
Overt sexual symbolism adorns the graves, and both men and women were buried with wooden decorations representing sexual organs.
It is evident that
the sexual symbolism so fully used by Blake (and so widely felt to be the fullest symbolism for total presentness in the imagination of our time) carries with it this sense of the dissolving of structure, of the loss of self in total union.
At this point the «I - Thou» symbolism of Buber, Ebner, and others is more adequate than
the sexual symbolism.
Offering a comparison with
the sexual symbolism in the landscape of Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) might seem like an unnecessary diversion, but Simmons uses it to strengthen her argument that landscapes, in these films, mirror and exacerbate psychological states.
Best known for his collages that incorporated pre-painted paper into semi-figurative forms and abstract compositions, Bultman drew on years of psychotherapy to explore eroticism,
sexual symbolism, and myth.
Louise Bourgeois (1911 — 2010) invented a new kind of language for sculpture — a language that was essentially psychoanalytic, uniquely capable of expressing oedipal struggle, ominous forces of repression,
sexual symbolism and material uncanniness.
His Avant - Garde Pop Art style images used
the sexual symbolism of advertising and investigated definitions of gender roles in the media.