The Salesforce Tower Looks Like a Giant Butt Plug
This piece is featured in my new limited edition zine Slouching Towards Neverland: 20 Years of Writing About San Francisco. Find out how to get a hand signed copy right here.
Photo by Yanay Rosen
This originally appeared in my Broke-Ass City column for the SF Examiner.
As I look out my window, I see it stretching toward the heavens. The large glass windows are filling in, reflecting the fog and the Bay. At night, it’s illuminated like a beacon, screaming, “I am the symbol of a company so powerful that, if they want to, they can completely alter The City’s skyline. And by God, they want to.” Similarly, at night, the little cranes at the top make it look like the building is throwing its arms in the air with victory.
The Salesforce Tower has been climbing skyward for months, but we’re finally at the point where you can see it from almost anywhere in the Bay Area. It is huge. It is imposing. It is the ultimate symbol of the role tech has played in the transformation of San Francisco.
And to be honest, it kind of looks like a butt plug.
Yes, dear reader, the soon-to-be second tallest building this side of the Mississippi looks like a sex toy designed to be inserted into the rectum for sexual pleasure … only, you know, bigger. And so, because of this, I am hereby giving the Salesforce Tower its new nickname: The Butt Plug. Salesforce can call it anything it wants, but us, the citizenry of the San Francisco Bay Area, will call it what we damn well please. And that’s The Butt Plug.
There are plenty of famous buildings around the world that have legendary nicknames. A big building in London that kind of looks like an egg is called “The Gherkin,” because it kind of looks like a cucumber, too. The new addition to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam is called “The Bathtub,” because people saw it and said, “Huh, that sure looks like a bathtub.” And the Centre Pompidou-Metz in Metz, France, is affectionately called “The Chinese Hat,” because the architects were said to be inspired by the wonders of the Chinese hats.
Now, I’m not saying the architects of The Butt Plug were inspired by the wonders of butt plugs, but I’m also not saying they weren’t …
This is San Francisco, after all. We’ve been on the forefront of every sexual revolution, so it’s only fair that we become the first city in the world to have a building named after something you or your partner puts in your butt. This is our legacy. This is who we are as a community. We deserve this. Plus, it’s pretty fitting considering how many things we’ve had rammed up our asses these past few years.
The City of San Francisco should get behind this, too. Think about the revenue it could make by selling butt plugs that looked like The Butt Plug! They could raise millions of dollars to help fund important projects locally or donate the money to colon cancer research. Can you imagine how many butt plugs could be sold at Folsom Street Fair? Wouldn’t you be so proud of our city if they were the reason colon cancer was wiped off the face of the earth?
I can see it now: Butt plugs celebrating The Butt Plug for sale right next to the San Francisco fleece jackets in the tchotchke shops on Powell Street. Plus, it’s not like this is the first sexual looking building in San Francisco. I mean, come on, Coit Tower is about as beautiful of a phallus as you can find in the world of architecture.
So please join with me in the christening of this new building. From now on and in perpetuity, we shall call the large skyscraper at 415 Mission St. The Butt Plug. Say it with me now: “The Butt Plug!” Feels good, doesn’t it?
Thank you, Marc Benioff, for once again giving so much to the people of San Francisco.
*Please note that I took a little creative license here. It looks a bit more like a dildo, but butt plug just fit so much better. Plus who knows, maybe it does have a base at the bottom to stop it from getting stuck in your butt.
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