This ‘Family Guy’ Fan’s Essay on the Show and Male Sexuality Is Sensually Insane
Seth MacFarlane may understand the male libido better than any other comedy writer, so long as that libido belongs to a male who definitely paws through his crush’s trash to steal her toenail clippings.
Despite the lyrics of its own theme song, Family Guy isn’t the kind of show to shy away from mining human sexuality for a bit. Blue humor is the cornerstone of MacFarlane’s comedy empire, but the Family Guy creator’s relationship with the primal urges of the human man are so much more complex than the average cutaway joke, according to one man who is clearly grappling with some very complex urges.
Don't Miss
In the Family Guy subreddit, one fan made an innocent attempt to find other horny men on the internet with which to have a frank discussion about how the show expertly portrays male sexuality, only to find that the rest of the sexually active men in the Family Guy fandom didn’t so much as pop off a “giggity” when they saw Gwyneth Paltrow and Harriet Tubman wrapped up in waxen passion:
In a thread titled, “Seth Captures Male Sexuality So Well Sometimes in Family Guy,” tipoftheiceberg1234 dissected what he believes to be the show’s masterful, nuanced and precise expression of masculine desire in the Season Four episode “Patriot Games.” Began tipoftheiceberg1234, “Idk how to explain but it doesn’t matter if you’re gay or straight or bi, almost every guy can relate to the above moment when Peter gets a wax sculpture of Harriet Tubman doing Gwyneth Paltrow.”
“And obviously it’s not specifically about these two celebrities, but rather the whole ‘feeling’ of it,” tipoftheiceberg1234 stated plainly. “For some reason, Peter really wanted to see this fantasy happen and now he memorialized it and he’s just taking his time with it. Just appreciating it.”
However, the $30,000 wax sculpture Peter commissions after becoming a star football player for the New England Patriots is, as the username suggests, just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how “Patriot Games” handles the complexities of male lust. “The best is when QUAGMIRE casually throws in how much he loves Lois in the early seasons,” tipoftheiceberg1234 continued, then misremembering the scene from the same episode when Quagmire reminds Peter of his high school reunion. “It was that one clip where he was like, ‘Well, I was digging around your trash for Lois’ toenail clippings when I saw that you guys were moving,’ and it’s like, (crying laughing emojis)”
“Okay, obviously no guys are digging in someone’s trash for toenail clippings,” wrote tipoftheiceberg1234, whose own history of hard-dicked dumpster diving remains in question. “But it’s like quagmire is so in love with her. And though obviously exaggerated for comical effect, Seth does such a good job at portraying the simplicity and primitiveness of male sexuality in his show.”
Unfortunately for tipoftheiceberg1234, his psychosexual dissection of “Patriot Games” wasn’t quite as relatable as he’d hoped when he penned the now-viral post. One of the top commenters wrote, “What uhh… what do you relate to here? This moment was meant to be funny not relatable.”
“Quagmire does not go through the trash for Lois’ toenail clippings because he’s ‘in love with her,’ but because he’s a twisted pervert,” another user pointed out. “That’s the joke.”
Many more Family Guy fans in the subreddit expressed varying degrees of shock, confusion and mockery of tipoftheiceberg1234’s not-so-universal take on male sexuality, the latter of which only continued once the post jumped platforms:
It seems that tipoftheiceberg1234’s experience with male sexuality is much further from the mean than he previously thought, which must be an embarrassing and disorienting experience for the wax-figure aficionado. On the other hand, it’s beautiful that MacFarlane and the Family Guy writers accidentally crafted the perfect representation of one uniquely kinky fan’s inner urges. I just hope that tipoftheiceberg1234’s neighbors keep their toenails long and their trash cans locked up.
