I found the Blanche Poubelle article:(aside: Blanche Poubelle means "white trash" in French. LOL)
May 2006
'Stemming the Rose'
What It Means Is Up to You...
By Blanche Poubelle
Blanche's friends have been asking her about an apparently new gay idiom from Brokeback Mountain. In the film, there is a scene where the character played by Randy Quaid (Joe Aguirre) refuses to rehire Jack Twist. Aguirre has witnessed Ennis and Jack kissing and wrestling affectionately, and knows what's going on between them.
Aguirre tells Jack, "Twist, you guys wasn't gettin' paid to leave the dogs baby-sit the sheep while you stemmed the rose." People wanted to know-- what on earth is stemming the rose?
This very question has sparked some intriguing debate on the internet, especially among language enthusiasts. One of the best discussions can be found at the site
www.languagehat.com.
Brokeback Mountain is based on a short story by Annie Proulx, and there's a clear consensus among those who have investigated stemming the rose that Proulx invented the term. It's not recorded as an idiom in any of the standard sources, and a Google search only turns up the phrase in connection with the short-story or the movie.
If it is indeed an original idiom, then discussion turns to what Proulx meant. Here there is a much livelier debate. The majority opinion is that it refers to anal sex. There are a number of existing idioms that refer to the asshole as a rosebud, and this makes sense given its shape and (in many Caucasians) its color. Rosebud massage refers to a type of anal massage, and rosebud for "anus" is occasionally encountered in badly-written pornography. One erudite poster pointed out that faire les feuilles d'une rose is a French phrase that is literally "to do the leaves of a rose," but is idiomatically "to give a rim job."
As several other clever posters pointed out, the penis can be thought of as a kind of stem. So stemming the rose could mean "putting a stem to the rose," where the stem is the penis and the rose is the anus. We don't know what Proulx intended, but this fits the context quite well, and is consistent with other English (and French) idioms involving roses and stems.
Another interpretation that also seems somewhat plausible is that stemming the rose refers to masturbation. In this view, the phrase is comparing the penis to a rose with a red head, and stemming it means rubbing it. Terms for masturbation and masturbators frequently do double-duty as terms for jerks and time-wasters. Thus the noun jerk is probably related to the verb jerk off, as are the equivalent British terms wanker and wank. So perhaps Aguirre intends to say "Instead of doing your job, you were up there pulling your pud." That would capture a context in which both sexual activity and goofing-off are intended.
Overly florid?
There were a few other suggestions at
www.languagehat.com that Blanche did not find so convincing. It is claimed florists use the term stemming the rose to refer to removing the thorns from a rose, and that Aguirre's remark to Jack is to be interpreted as meaning approximately "You two were up there on the mountain acting like florists, instead of working." Blanche did not find any evidence that florists actually use stemming in this way. She asked a friendly florist down the street, and was told that florists rather sensibly call removing the thorns dethorning. Florists do have a verb to stem, but it is used to mean "removing the natural stem and adding an artificial stem." (This mostly applies to making corsages, Miss Poubelle was informed.) Is it likely that the ranching foreman intends to insult Ennis and Jack by comparing them to florists making corsages?
Miss Poubelle is strongly of the opinion that stemming the rose is a reference to sex (and not floristry). But whether stemming the rose is more likely to be ass-fucking or masturbation, she cannot say. The only person who knows the original intention is Annie Proulx. But authors' intentions cannot determine how words will be actually used. If the phrase catches on, it will eventually come to mean whatever people decide that it means.
So Miss Poubelle encourages her gentle readers to experiment with the phrase stemming the rose to see which meaning feels more natural. Perhaps in a few years, there will be a generally agreed upon definition. But for right now, English speakers are deciding whether the phrase will be used and what it will mean. Cast your vote by using it in a conversation!
