Ripping someone a new asshole
This phrase has always troubled me. It is the most visually evocative and spectacularly violent of our many uses of rape as a metaphor for establishing dominance over someone.
It refers, literally, to raping someone so violently that your penis punches a hole in their body in the general vicinity of their anus.
One might think it means "kicking someone's ass" so hard that their ass somehow rips open, but it's easy to see that's not the case. The usage is almost always in terms of assertion of authority—as in being put in one's place, being chastised, dressed down, corrected, punished. The assertion of a hierarchical relationship.
Establishing dominance over someone is often expressed in terms of anal rape. It is even the stock metaphor for being taken advantage of in business.
Sometimes the slang becomes so accepted that it is used as a term for dominance or punishment or getting the better of someone without people thinking what it means.
(As in "punking" someone. "Punk" has been prison slang for generations for a male who sexually submits to or sexually gratifies other male prisoners, and the verb punk means what one would expect. A "punk kid" is also what one would expect. It may be that punk as a term for a young criminal grew into a sexual term in prison, or that the term metastasized from prison culture into general use long ago.)
To expand the "fucking someone in the ass" metaphor for dominance (already perfectly offensive) to metaphorical extremes of violent mutilation makes it among the least funny "funny" phrases in our language.
IMO.
