CHOCOLATISTE

by The Chocolate Dictionary

Chocolatiste. (image from: http://www.magnetsforfridge.com)

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A chocolatiste is a woman who measures a man’s attractiveness by whether or not he is worth his weight in chocolate – milk or dark, hard or soft. Fans of David Beckham were delighted when, during the 2002 World Cup in Japan, a 9-foot high statue of the soccer star, made entirely of chocolate, was displayed in a Tokyo shopping mall. In 2015, bargain-hunters got a taste of ‘chocobatch’ when a life-size statue of the actor Benedict Cumberbatch, made out of fully edible Belgian chocolate, was displayed in a London mall as part of a promotion for UKTV. How did people react to the chocobatch? Some just snapped a selfie with him, delighted to be close to an image of their idol. Others licked him, took a bite out of him, broke off a finger or, in one case, suggestively kissed his thigh, and probably would have gone further if the statue had not been in a public place.

Chocolatistes consider the men they love as good enough to eat. The singer Madonna wrote in a message to then-boyfriend Jim Albright, “If you were in the middle of a big box of chocolates, I would pick you out, pop you in my mouth and savour every tasty morsel.” Sabrina Bliss, in Carrie Alexander’s romantic novel The Chocolate Seduction, desperately tries to resist her attraction for tempting hunk Kit Rex, but is undermined by the deliciousness of his manly charms: “She pushed off the stool and went to stand next to him. He smelled like bittersweet chocolate, darkly sweet and delicious. Gobble, gobble, slurp, she thought, humming with vibrations at his nearness”.

In French, the expression for a six-pack – i.e. for a well-chiselled set of abdominal muscles in a male  –  is  une tablette de chocolat, a bar of chocolate. Presumably because it’s good enough to eat (or lick and kiss).

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