Rubbing the little onion

I really didn’t want to post about yet another form of deviant sexual behavior - after the motorized bed dude and the most unfortunate drive-by wank inicident I witnessed the other day - but I really think I am on to something. With the arrival of these torrid summer months, lusty, uninhibited behavior is becoming more and more a topic of relevant interest. Whether you like it or not, whether your mom or your dad think it is taboo or unworthy of “proper” conversational topic, something, yes something, is in the air. So fuck it, here’s another bit of titillating trivia from the annals of Guirilandia. We can call it rubbing the little onion, or, in Spanish argot, frotando la cebolleta. This is a real term, used by Spanish folk, for describing a common form of deviant sexual behavior.

No, rubbing the little onion is not a vanguarista cooking technique (with all due respect, maestro Adria). It is a form of frotteurism, which is a technique that viejos verdes - literally green men, in Anglo-American parlance dirty old men - use to garner fifteen or so seconds of glory with young and normally indifferent women. It happens on crowded buses or subways, and the frotador’s technique is to move close to a young woman and discreetly rub his groin area on her person. The frotador does this in a casual way, while looking distractedly in another direction. The young woman usually doesn’t say anything because a) she’s not sure if the heavily breathing man next to her is really doing what she’d rather not even think about, and b) she doesn’t want to make a scene, thereby attracting attention to the most disgraceful event of which she is unwillingly a part of. The frotador stalks, in serial fashion, the bus lines and subway labyrinths, in search of potential victims for his unwanted advances. Basically, they’re pervs who’ll do anything to get close to a young woman, even if it’s just a fleeting caress of their crotch area.

Frotar mean to rub, and cebolleta, according to the La Rousse’s Gran Diccionario del Argot, is slang for penis. Now, cebolleta – and I don’t have an expert on hand to corroborate this – most likely comes from cebolla, which means onion. By adding the suffix eta, you are basically a saying little onion. How that came to mean penis I don’t know. This could very likely be a conspiracy by frotteurism adepts in Spain to euphonize their disgraceful habit. Because, in all honesty, rubbing the little onion doesn’t sound like a very offensive thing at all. Previously, if someone had told me they were going to rub little onions, I would have thought they were a little strange, but never one of those sneaky individuals serially rubbing themselves on strangers. Thank you Miguel at work for confirming the usage of this Spanish phrase. Ah, frotando la cebolleta! What grand schemes I have for today!

I’m not making this up, and I’m sure many women can confirm similar experiences. Furthermore, El Periodico ran an article today about the arrest of a serial onion rubber.

Okay, I’m going to try to aim for “high seriousness” in my next posts. Seriously. Ciao.