Talking dirty: Cocktails with the raunchiest names

Bartender: “What can I give you, ma’am?”
Lady: One Screaming Orgasm, please.

Yikes! For this reason alone a whole lot of women tend to avoid ordering cocktails that have blatantly sexual names. After all, one would imagine that most of them would shudder at requesting for a Slippery Nipple. Aside from the potentially embarrassing position one would find themselves in, there’s also the boyhood snigger one has to deal with.

Yet some of the most famous cocktails around the world are either brazenly sexual or refer to body parts. “A lot of the naming of cocktails has got to do with male bartenders just wanting to have a good laugh. They were never meant to offend women as much as elicit a response from them,” says assistant F&B manager of Bay Leaves, Sandeep D’Silva. Sandeep adds that since bartending for the longest time has been a clearly male domain, the jokes were naturally risqué about women, because, “what else do men with free-flowing alcohol talk about?”

Too sexist? Well, yes and no, feels Aditi Shah, a budding mixologist. “No doubt the profession has largely seen men which is why the innovations have been that of men. But the advent of women in the world of bartending doesn’t mean there will now be more cocktails alluding to male genitalia,” she says.

Considering how many women tend to be put off by the names of the cocktails, it’s ironic how the creators have taken special care to make them “ladies drinks” by conforming to alcohol stereotypes. Conventionally, cocktails for women have conformed to the notion that the fairer sex prefers bright, fruity flavours to robust, earthy ones. “That would in part explain why drinks like Sex on the Beach are just fruity, vodka cocktails. It may sound embarrassing, but its core ingredients include orange juice and vodka, both of which are preferred by women. Take the Fuzzy Navel. It’s a mixed drink made from peach schnapps and orange juice. Even the Screaming Orgasm has Amaretto, Kahlúa and Baileys Irish Cream,” explains Sandeep.

Aditi clarifies that the names clearly have little to do with the drink in the glass, and that has been a part of the long-standing gag. “Thankfully the names and the ingredients are not related in any way much like straightforward non-sexual ones like Cosmopolitan. The Slippery Nipple is a layered cocktail shooter most commonly composed of Baileys Irish Cream and Sambuca.”

She believes that if women really ignored the names, they’d actually opt for the cocktails without batting an eyelid. “The ingredients are so stereotypically feminine, if the names were covered, a lot more women would go for them,” she says. What’s in a name, wrote Shakespeare. Everything, in the bartending world.