"...relax and enjoy it" and manuscript forgery

[Charles Doyle]

Whiting's _Modern Proverbs and Proverbial Sayings_ (#R75) and Mieder's _Dictionary of American Proverbs_ (p. 503) do give as a proverb the phrase "Relax and enjoy it."  However, most of the citations don't refer to rape or sexual activity (one, from 1966 does).

I can't remember whether anyone searched this matter when it came up several days ago, but the ealiest instance of the "rape" version I have found (after a hasty search)--such phrasing as "If rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it"-- comes from the presidential pen of Dwight Eisenhower, writing in the _Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science_ for 1959--what I take to be a parody of the saying (it appears inside quotation marks): "a little inflation is inevitable, relax and enjoy it."

In 1965 Arthur B. Carson, author of _Foundation Construction_, wrote, ""Modern foundation experts have paraphrased an old saying ("When rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it") . . . ."

The "rape" version is ironic, of course: it takes a fixed phrase of general application and applies it to grotesquely INAPPROPRIATE situation.

But what exactly should we regard as PROVERBIAL here?  The advice or admonition to "relax and enjoy" ANYTHING (a meal, an airline flight, the contorted prose of Henry James)--or a longer sentence that contextualizes "relax and enjoy" in reference to rape?

--Charlie
________________________________________

---- Original message ----
>Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2006 08:45:13 -0800
>From: Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM>
>Subject: Re: "...relax and enjoy it" and manuscript forgery
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
>
>I've heard this "joke" (better described as a "proverb") with both "raped" and "screwed" (the latter punning on the sexual and the victimization sense).
>
>  When I heard the "raped" version (in 1972), the context suggested that the speaker (a professor of American literature) had heard it in WWII.
>
>  JL

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