A return to the subject of my 3/10/16 posting “Male beauty”, on cultural categorizations of attractiveness and masculinity, primarily as evidenced in facial characteristics. Adding to the mix (a) yesterday’s posting on my man Jacques Transue as a young “dreamboat” (“Him, 55 years ago”); and (b) repeated passing references here to the Clint Eastwood of the tv series Rawhide (1959-66) as “young and beautiful, but ruggedly handsome”.

A side by side comparison, understanding that both photographs are posed (though in very different ways) and that J’s photo was adjusted in processing to make it a serious and smoothly generic portrait, while Eastwood’s shows him in cowboy character from an episode of the tv show. J is in an earnest student costume, with accompanying facial expression; Eastwood is in cowboy costume as the young drover Rowdy Yates and (in this photo) is half-smiling, companionably.

(#1) “the guy in the photo has gorgeous eyes, and a long lean face of masculine beauty. A dreamboat, as Virginia [Transue] says.”

(#2) Eastwood (born in 1930) inhabiting his character: also an elegant lean face (though not as long as J’s), with beautiful crinkly eyes

They’re both adorable, but in different ways, in part because they are presented as projecting different personas. And also both strongly masculine.

Also: both tall and lanky, leanly muscular, and with a strong physical presence.

More on JHT. (There will be a good bit more on CE below.) A more candid head shot of J at about the same age as Eastwood in #2:

(#3)

When I confided in a mutual (gay) friend about this time that J and I had become lovers, the friend (who knew about my sexuality but not J’s) was astounded: “You’re telling me that Jean-Paul Belmondo is gay?!”  A reference to the French actor, especially noted for his role in Breathless (1960). The young Belmondo (born in 1933), another exemplar of male beauty:

(#4)

Notes on male beauty. Relevant postings before my 3/10/16 one include:

— a 8/6/13 posting “Seven Supermen and Brad Pitt”

— a 2/29/16 posting “Four mythic hunks”

Among the actors depicted and discussed in these three postings as examples of facial male beauty are Brad Pitt, Robert Redford, Jensen Ackles, and Johnny Depp. I solicited opinions, in a totally unscientific fashion, from a number of women (including two teenagers) and gay men . There was broad agreement over which actors were good-looking, and broad agreement that there were several distinct subcategories of GOODLOOKING-MAN, which they referred to via the labels handsome, cute, beautiful, and hot (with an implicit acknowledgment  that the boundaries were not always clear; with some suggestion that the hot group cross-cuts the other three; and with some inclination to distinguish bad-boy dark beauties like Johnny Depp from sweeter blond beauties like Robert Redford).

It’s clear to me that there’s a rough system of categories here, but one that’s hard to get at through labels in English (and of course exhibits considerable social variability).

There is, in particular, a clearly recognizable subcategory of GOODLOOKING-MAN that has no widely known label in English — unlabeled taxa are in fact fairly common in systems of cultural categories — and it’s relevant to this posting, because it’s the category that Clint Eastwood mostly falls into after his early BEAUTIFUL-MAN period: strikingly tough, even hypermasculine, goodlooking men. Macho hunks, more or less.

You can see the Eastwood Man With No Name character developing in his early years. Here’s the beautiful Eastwood, but shirtless and apparently sexed-up, at 26 (before his success in Rawhide), in a p.r. photo (from the Getty archives):

(#5)

Then comes Rawhide, in which he smiles a lot, usually with his beautiful eyes  wide open, as in #2. But sometimes the smile comes with narrowed eyes (because he is, after all, frequently squinting into the sun, out on the Texas plains), as here:

(#6)

And sometimes, as when he’s confronting some problem or nastiness, unsmiling with those narrowed eyes, as here (still from Rawhide):

(#7)

The beauty has hardened into machismo, and this becomes Eastwood’s default presentation (though the full range of his roles is considerable). From my 5/26/18 posting “Porn for the holidays, with narrowed eyes”:

Narrowed eyes are a regular feature of Clint Eastwood’s characters. Conveying anger, ferocity, intense attention, or dominance, or some combination of these:

(#8) Clint Eastwood Eyes in “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”

We are now a very long way from beautiful. This is one scary dude. Damn good-looking, but whoa!

A generic penguin ban sign (sold on Amazon, a CD Visionary no-penguins button):

(#1) What’s banned? Spheniscid birds. Why? Who knows. (They smell. They steal fish. They get underfoot. Whatever.)

and a ban — in a list of prohibitions against public vice or indecency — on the door of Loretta’s Authentic Pralines on N. Rampart St. in New Orleans (photo from the TripAdvisor South Africa site):

(#2) What’s banned? Who knows. Why? Because they’re a vice (like drinking or smoking) or are indecent (like profanity or nudity), presumably the latter.

From Loretta’s Facebook page:

(#3)

Celebrated as the “Queen of Pralines,” boasting a menu full of delicious creole sweets and treats — pralines, stuffed beignets, king cake, cookies, pies, sauces, and soul food. First Black female chef to own and operate a (successful) praline shop.

(Both pralines and beignets are serious matters in New Orleans.)

Item #2 appeared on Facebook yesterday, with this query from Chris Ambidge to me:

Arnold — you’re our resident penguin expert. Do you have any idea what they [penguins] got up to that this sign had to be posted?

The birds come into it on the metaphor train. What’s being banned is this clothing:

(#4)

And guys like these are said to be wearing penguin pants, or penguins for short (or to themselves be penguins), because of the visual figure illustrated here:

(#5) Dick Van Dyck’s penguin dance from the movie Mary Poppins; you can watch the full routine here (#6)

The use of penguin as a slang term for ‘sagging / saggy pants’ (or for someone wearing such pants) seems to be recent enough that it hasn’t made it into GDoS or even Urban Dictionary.

The sag chronicles. From “Sagging Pants Butt Up Against the Law: Yet the droopy trousers trend lives on”, by Emily Spivack in Smithsonian Magazine on 4/1/13:

Wearing one’s pants really low makes the wearer walk penguin-like.  The person waddles around, maintaining a stilted gait so that the pants stay in place. Cinched with a belt, in extreme cases underneath the backside with boxers visible, the pants make legs look overly short. Oversized shirts elongate the torso leading to skewed, caricature-like proportions.

This passage comes after Spivack’s lead-in:

A campaign in Massachusetts is determined to put an end to wearing saggy pants by enforcing a law enacted back in 1784 and amended in 1987. According to Section 16, “Open and gross lewdness and lascivious behavior,” under the “Crimes Against Chastity, Morality, Decency, and Good Order”:

A man or woman, married or unmarried, who is guilty of open and gross lewdness and lascivious behavior, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not more than three years or in jail for not more than two years or by a fine of not more than three hundred dollars.

Up to three years in jail and a few hundred dollar fine just for wearing your pants low?!

… While the Massachusetts campaign may seem straight out of an Onion article, sagging pants have been a hot topic since the early 2000s, particularly because states, cities and local communities around the United States have tried to enact laws that would provide fines, penalties, potential jail time for those who sag. Memphis, Tennessee, Delcambre, Louisiana, and Fort Worth, Texas are just a few of the cities to try to enforce anti-sagging laws to mixed results, including a successful “Urkeling” enforcement strategy derived from the character Steve Urkel from the television show “Family Matters.”

The enforcement of these laws is controversial because the majority of people who choose to make this fashion statement are young African American males. As a result, prosecution is generally equated with racial profiling, prompting the American Civil Liberties Union to write the blog post, “Why does the ACLU care about saggy pants?”

Note that Loretta’s (in #2) is definitely a Black establishment, but it’s also one with an explicit commitment to what it sees as Christian principles, and that’s where the anti-penguin stance comes from. Loretta doesn’t want nasty dudes in her place.

Some historical background from the Wikipedia article:

Sagging is a manner of wearing trousers or jeans that sag so that the top of the trousers or jeans are significantly below the waist, sometimes revealing much of the underwear.

Sagging is predominantly a male fashion.

… Sagging first peaked in popularity during the 1990s and remained popular into the mid 2000s, but it has recently made a comeback in the 2010s, with celebrities like Justin Bieber, Liam Payne, Ross Lynch, Zac Efron and more bringing back the fashion trend. Sagging in the 1990s usually focused on baggy trousers with plaid boxers, but in the 2010s sagging has become popular with skinny jeans and branded boxer-briefs.

The style was popularized by skaters and hip-hop artists in the 1990s. It later became a symbol of freedom and cultural awareness among some youths or a symbol of their rejection of the values of mainstream society.

It is often claimed the style originated from the United States prison system where belts are sometimes prohibited and there can be a lack of appropriately sized clothing

During the 2000s, many North American local governments, school systems, transit agencies, and even airlines passed laws and regulations against the practice of wearing sagging pants, although no state or federal laws have been enacted banning the practice. US presidential candidate Barack Obama, speaking just before the 2008 US Presidential Election, appeared on MTV and said that laws banning the practice of wearing low-slung pants that expose one’s underwear were “a waste of time … Having said that, brothers should pull up their pants. You are walking by your mother, your grandmother, your underwear is showing. What’s wrong with that? Come on. Some people might not want to see your underwear. I’m one of them.”

(Don’t be crude, dude.)

Sports note. In a Facebook posting, Pittsburgh resident Ann Burlingham was concerned that the prohibition in #2 was aimed at the Pittsburgh NHL team the Penguins. But once you realize that the establishment in #2 is in New Orleans (a city that doesn’t have a NHL team and isn’t particularly devoted to ice hockey), you can see that sports rivalry is an unlikely source of the penguin ban at Loretta’s.

It’s all a matter of context. Ya gotta know the territory.

Contextual semantics. In a related vein: searching electronically on “NO PENGUINS” led me almost immediately to things like:

True or false? There are no penguins in Alaska.

Of course, the “right” answer is True, and sites go on to explain that penguins are Antarctic creatures, not Arctic ones, and that anyway, penguins wouldn’t survive in Alaska because bears would eat them there. But there’s a trickiness to the question (and its expected answer).

In fact, it seems to be something of a historical accident that at the moment there are not known to be any penguins in Alaska — the accident being that the Alaska Zoo in Anchorage has exotic creatures like tigers and Bactrian camels, but no penguins. To see the problem, try these questions on for size:

True or false? There are no penguins in San Francisco.

True or false? There are no snakes in Ireland.

Oh dear, it turns out to turn on what the meaning of are is. Everything depends on what question is being asked in context.

There are certainly penguins in San Francisco. Two colonies of them, in fact: on Penguin Island at the San Francisco Zoo; and in the Steinhart Aquarium of the California Academy of Sciences. And there are certainly snakes in Ireland: the Dublin Zoo has some large and dramatic pythons, in particular.

Ok, the penguins are in San Francisco, but not of it; and similarly for the pythons in Dublin. There are no naturally occurring penguins in San Francisco, no wild penguins in San Francisco; and similarly for snakes in Ireland. And that’s what the true-or-false questions are asking about; that’s what forms of the verb BE convey in the quiz-question context. Even if your kid has viewed a memorable Burmese python at the Dublin Zoo, if they get the true/false question on a quiz in school, the only “right” answer to it is True; there are no snakes in Ireland.

It gets worse. Suppose the quiz question is:

True or false? There are no penguins in Arnold’s house in Palo Alto.

Well, now, the “right” answer is False; Arnold’s house has penguins all over the place. Granted, they aren’t literal penguins, capable of swimming like bullets through icy waters in search of fish to eat, but are instead various kinds of penguin-simulacra (so that you could have a potentially explosive penguin on top of your telly) or penguin-representations (drawings, for example).

So now it depends on what the noun PENGUIN means. Any noun denoting a concrete object can also be used to denote a simulacrum or representation of that object. In some contexts (as in a discussion of the contents of my house), the concrete-object avian understanding of PENGUIN will obviously be out of the question, so if you assume we are talking cooperatively, you’ll look for an alternative understanding of PENGUIN that makes the noun relevant in the context, and that will bring you to the simulacum/representation understanding. And the “right” answer, False.

There’s more, of course. There are no Penguins in Arnold’s house in Palo Alto (with Penguin ‘pro hockey player for the Pittsburgh team’) is True; and There is no penguin in Arnold’s house in Palo Alto (with penguin ‘penguin meat’) is also True. And so on. But these understandings require heavy doses of special context.

It remains that There are no penguins in San Francisco posed in a quiz is True; but the same sentence advanced as a claim about the contents of the city is False; and There are no penguins in Arnold’s house in Palo Alto is also False. Context, context.

It’s Eva Marie Saint Lucy’s Day and, in today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro combo, a Kurt Russell terrier bounds in:

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbol in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there’s just one in this strip — see this Page.)

First, Kurt Russell and the Russell terrier. Then Eva Marie Saint and St. Lucy’s Day. In both cases, a member of what I’ve called the Acting Corps (see the Page on this blog), with a name in a POP (a phrasal overlap portmanteau; see the Page on this blog).

To come in another posting, the morning name for yesterday:  the actor name-chain POP Stephen Boyd Gaines, plus a longer name chain that gets from actor Raul Julia to actor Boyd Gaines in 9 steps, with actors Penelope Keith and Keith David in the middle.

Kurt Russell terrier. The actor, from Wikipedia:

Kurt Vogel Russell (born March 17, 1951) is an American actor. He began acting on television at the age of 12 in the western series The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (1963–1964). In the late 1960s, he signed a ten-year contract with The Walt Disney Company where, according to Robert Osborne, he became the studio’s top star of the 1970s.

(#2) A shirtless young Russell as Jungle Boy in the Gilligan’s Island tv episode “Gilligan Meets Jungle Boy” (2/6/65)

Russell was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture for his performance in Silkwood (1983).

(#3) Russell, also shirtless but considerably more mature, in Silkwood (1983)

In the 1980s, he starred in several films directed by John Carpenter, including anti-hero roles such as army hero-turned-robber Snake Plissken in the futuristic action film Escape from New York (1981),

(#4) Russell as Snake Plissken in Escape from L.A. (1996) — the image you need to understand the cartoon in #1

and its sequel Escape from L.A. (1996), helicopter pilot R.J. MacReady in the remake of the horror film The Thing (1982), and truck driver Jack Burton in the dark kung-fu comedy action film Big Trouble in Little China (1986), all of which have since become cult films. He was nominated for an Emmy Award for the television film Elvis (1979), also directed by Carpenter.

And the dog. From Wikipedia:

(#5) A Russell terrier, as in #1; photo from the AKC site on the breed

The Russell Terrier is a predominantly white working terrier with an instinct to hunt prey underground. The breed was derived from Jack Russell’s working terrier strains that were used in the 19th century for fox hunting. Russell’s fox working strains were much smaller than the Show Fox Terrier and remained working terriers. The size of the Russell Terrier (10″ to 12″) combined with a small flexible, spannable chest makes it an ideal size to work efficiently underground. Their unique rectangular body shape with the body being of slightly longer length than the leg makes them distinctly different from the Parson Russell Terrier and the Jack Russell Terrier of the Jack Russell Terrier Club of America (JRTCA).

The Russell Terrier originated in England, but the country of development was Australia.

(There appears to be some variant usage in labeling the breeds, but this information will do for understanding #1.)

Eva Marie Saint Lucy’s Day. The actor, from Wikipedia:

(#6) Saint in 1990

Eva Marie Saint (born July 4, 1924) is an American actress. In a career spanning 70 years, she is known for starring in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954), for which she won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, and Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959). She received Golden Globe and BAFTA Award nominations for A Hatful of Rain (1957) and won a Primetime Emmy Award for the television miniseries People Like Us (1990). Her film career also includes roles in Raintree County (1957), Exodus (1960), The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1965), Grand Prix (1966), Nothing in Common (1986), Because of Winn-Dixie (2005), Superman Returns (2006), and Winter’s Tale (2014).

Then, on my 12/13/12 posting “Lucy”, information about “Santa Lucia” (the song), St. Lucia of Syracuse, and St. Lucy’s Day (December 13th, a specifically Swedish holiday but more widely celebrated), and its seasonal candles and food. From the Munduslingua site article on St. Nicholas’ Day and St. Lucy’s Day:

(#6) A Swedish girl wearing a crown of candles in memory of St. Lucia of Syracuse; light in mid-winter

From my “Lucy” posting:

And in my little urban garden, along with St. Lucy comes the blooming season of the cymbidium orchids (a stand of patio plants that were gifts from me to Jacques over the years). This year the first appearance was of greenish-yellow flowers

Two greenish-yellow cymbidiums are blooming right now, and some clear yellow buds are opening. The first flower stalks to appear — three brownish-red cymbidiums that are clones of the original gift to Jacques in 1987 — were noticeable on October 1st, with buds that have been hovering on opening ever since but have still not actually flowered. The ways of plants are inscrutable.

In any case, they have until January 22nd, Jacques’s birthday, to burst into bloom. I watch and wait.

From Tim Evanson on Facebook, this image of (literally) horny guys in nothing but pouch-thrusting underwear, sucking suggestively on spicy sticks for Christmas:

(#1)

From Tim, I learn that this entertaining photo — a still from a Xmas beefcake video — was created by the Sellers Dorsey Foundation in 2013 as part of a Full Frontal Freedom / Out2Enroll campaign encouraging gay men to enroll in Obamacare. The full video can be viewed on the OUT Magazine site.

Another still from the video, showing all four of the models dancing together playfully, to the sound of a parody version — “Get Enrolled” — of the seasonal song “Let It Snow”:

(#2)

On the song, from Wikipedia:

“Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!”, also known as “Let It Snow”, is a song written by lyricist Sammy Cahn and composer Jule Styne in July 1945. It was written in Hollywood, California during a heat wave as Cahn and Styne imagined cooler conditions.

Despite the lyrics making no mention of any holiday, the song has come to be regarded as a Christmas song in North America due to its winter theme, being played on radio stations during the Christmas and holiday season and having often been covered by various artists on Christmas-themed albums. In the Southern Hemisphere, however, it can be played during the winter months of June, July, and August

The song is about watching the beautiful snow fall from inside, staying in the warmth to make love, and eventually, regretfully, parting:

When we finally kiss goodnight
How I hate going out in the storm
But if you really hold me tight
All the way home I’ll be warm

About the Sellers Dorsey Foundation. From their website, describing their earnest goals:

The Sellers Dorsey Foundation is a private foundation dedicated to improving the health of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community. The Sellers Dorsey Foundation supports and leads efforts to improve health outcomes among the LGBT community through public education, collaboration, and grant giving.

Towards this end, the foundation partners with various other organizations to reach the audience of sexuality and gender minorities by an assortment of strategies, including (in this case, in 2013) through sexual playfulness. Sex and humor work in mainstream advertising, so the foundation quite naturally uses these hooks to reach their audience.

and Full Frontal Freeedom. From their Twitter account:

(#3)

Full Frontal is the anti-PAC. We are a coalition of independent artists and media folks – who want to use our talents to promote civic engagement

and are happy to advance these purposes by displaying their bodies.

The backlash. From the WND site [Wikipedia: “WorldNetDaily (WND) is an American news and opinion website and online news aggregator which has been described as “fringe” and far right as well as politically conservative. The website is known for promoting falsehoods and conspiracy theories.”], “Obamacare jumps the shark with ‘gay’ Christmas: Stereotypes abound in effort to enroll key demographic” by Jerome R. Corsi on 12/19/13:

In an effort to woo a demographic the White House considers key to the success of Obamacare, a campaign called Out2Enroll has produced a video commercial that will test the sensibilities of many Americans who might otherwise be tolerant of the homosexual-rights movement.

While the Christmas-themed ad sponsored by major left-wing groups may be “gay” in every sense of the word, its aim is serious, as the White House is aware that a disproportionate number of homosexual Americans are uninsured and qualify for premium subsidies under Obamacare.

Out2Enroll launched Sept. 12 with a Washington-issued statement and a briefing at the White House that featured remarks from senior presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius and various LGBT health experts from around the country.

The Out2Enroll video, “Get Enrolled,” tagged as a “Full Frontal Freedom Production,” features semi-nude, muscled young men adorned in Santa Claus hats and reindeer antlers sucking peppermint sticks while prancing about and embracing one another as they decorate a Christmas tree and set out holiday stockings.

(Sucking and prancing and bears, oh my!)

The ad was similarly slammed by Log Cabin Republicans as “promoting harmful stereotypes that gay men are nothing more than sex-crazed lechers”. As if we can’t flagrantly revere dicks and butts and chew gum at the same time. And as if social life and popular culture weren’t thoroughly drenched in straight sex.

Since we’re doing Xmas songs, let me exhibit one of my favorites, the delightful tongue-in-cheek (and Santa-in-chimney) hymn to straight sex traded for valuables, “Santa Baby”, as originally performed by Eartha Kitt (understated, but nevertheless silky and dripping with seasonal sex), which you can listen to here (#4).

From Wikipedia:

“Santa Baby” is a 1953 Christmas song written by Joan Javits (the niece of Senator Jacob K. Javits) and Philip Springer, sung originally by Eartha Kitt. The song is a tongue-in-cheek look at a Christmas list addressed to Santa Claus by a woman who wants extravagant gifts such as sables, yachts, and decorations from Tiffany’s.

Well, let’s be frank: this is about  a woman angling for Santa to be her sugar daddy, offering her sexual favors in exchange for expensive gifts:

Santa baby, slip a sable under the tree for me
Been an awful good girl
Santa baby, and hurry down the chimney tonight

(A chimney is customarily viewed from the outside, in which case it can serve as a phallic symbol. Here it’s seen from the inside and so serves as a vaginal symbol. Oh Santa baby, get down my chimney, all the way!)

Straight people, a bunch of sex-crazed sluts and lechers — shame, shame! (With people like this in charge, it’s no wonder the world is so fucked up.)

Meanwhile, have a playful and pleasurable Xmas.

… is you in your homowear. I just want you for my own / More than you could ever know.

From Daily Jocks ads of the season: Boy offers himself, in his Cellblock 13 Covert jock and harness, to serve his Master; and SeksiMatti lowers his Helsinki Athletica shorts to make his jockstrap-framed pygian orbs available for use.

(A dip into gay male fetish-land, with bdsm, and puppy play as well; and then into the sexual display of the male body, especially the buttocks — so not for kids or the sexually modest, though there will be an entirely innocent digression into the self-deprecating Finnish cartoon character Matti.)

(Apologies to Mariah Carey.)

Boy on the 11th. This Daily Jocks ad, notable for several reasons:

(#1)

chain mail ringing his
vulnerable neck, black
leather strapped on his wrist,
hard shell encasing the
sweet treasures of his
maleness, Boy stands
ready to serve

DJ’s copy on the jock, from my 11/18/19 posting “HardSoft”:

Introducing the Covert collection by [fantasy homowear company] CellBlock13: This jockstrap features a snap off pouch made of luxuriously smooth coated PU [polyurethane] that showcases your goods just right, and extra-soft fleece w/ u-bulge on the inside will feel great against your package. Available in Red, Blue & Khaki.

On the model, known here only as Boy: he’s lean and fit, pleasant to view, but — in contrast to virtually all the other nCellblock 13 models — he has unremarkable biceps, pecs, and abs. Sweet rather than imposing or fierce.

And on the accessories he’s wearing, which code him as a submissive or slave in bdsm play: the chainmail necklace, a common alternative to a straightforward slave collar (and therefore wearable in public without exciting the notice of people outside the scene); and black leather wristbands / bracelets worn on the right (the receptive or submissive) side. Neither of these accessories is available for sale on the DJ site or the Cellblock 13 site, nor do they seem to appear in other Cellblock 13 ads, so they’re quite striking.

Boy in harness. Boy, however, has appeared in at least one other Cellblock 13 promotion — in a different submissive role, as a (figurative) servile dog. (Come, Boy, come!) From the Men and Underwear site on 10/7/19, in “Kennel Club jocks and harnesses by Cellblock13 launch at jockstraps.com”:

(#2)

… The Cellblock 13 Kennel line is yet another collection of fetish wear meets athletic. This collection gets inspired and appeals to fans of Pup Play or those who want to try it.

… The waistband [of the Cellblock 13 Kennel Jockstrap] is elasticated featuring a raised silicone puppy patch front and centre. The brand name appears only on the leg straps, leaving all the rest of the design free from logos and letters. The jocks come in four colour options: black with white, black with green, black with red and black with blue. You can match these jocks with the Cellblock 13 Kennel Harness, sold separately.

The fetish wear in #2 is a symbolic allusion to puppy play, but without most of the trappings of the scene. From my 10/7/13 posting “Puppy play”:

(#3) Master and his dog at the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco

there’s a broad range of puppy play, all involving submission, but ranging from affectionate and playful relationships between dog and master, to frank abuse and humiliation (gratefully accepted).

The gear involved is minimally a collar and harness, and usually a leash, but there can be other restraints, knee pads, fist mitts, hoods, cages, and dog bowls.

SeksiMatti on the 16th. Yesterday’s DJ ad is for Helsinki Athletica, which does indeed offer (well-designed) sportswear for men, but with a decidedly homo tilt, as here:

(#4)

sex canyon of
Helsinki, Matti:
available on
guesthouse landing
daily, noon to 2

his warm welcome, deep blue
jockstrap, and rock-hard
buttocks are famed
Finnish treasures

DJ’s copy on the company:

Helsinki Athletica focuses on bold European styling, quality fabric and sexy design, emphasising the male physique.

The company’s ads tend to focus on the phallic rather than the pygian endowments of their models, but then we have a Matti — an instance of the type SeksiMatti, embodying Finnish male hunkiness — with his amazingly muscular glutes (as well as impressive back muscles). Unsurprisingly, SeksiMattis are muscular all over; here’s one modeling Helsinki Athletica’s Kasper Jogger, displaying biceps, pecs, and abs — plus of course the bulge:

(#5)

Names. From Wikipedia:

Matti is a given name, originated from the Hebrew Mattityahu, meaning “gift of God”. It is a popular Finnish version of Matthew

So popular that it can be used as a name for EveryFinn, as in the charming Finnish Nightmares comics and books:

(#6) One of the books; webcomic here

(#7) Book synopsis

(#8) Matti himself; among other things, he very much doesn’t want to stand out

Then there’s SeksiMatti, who is flagrantly not the stereotypical Finn.

Seksi Matti is a N + N compound in Finnish (which I came up with on my own, knowing the Finnish noun seksi ‘sexual activity, sexual intercourse’, but which has been adopted independently as a handle by several Finns on the net). seksi is based on English sexy, but it’s a noun; and like borrowings into Finnish from other languages in general, it’s spelled according to the values of letters in Finnish orthography, not according to the spelling in the donor language (so Greek/Latin philosophia ‘philosophy’ is borrowed into Finnish as filosofia).

(Note: I don’t actually speak any Finnish; I just have a linguist’s knowledge about assorted bits of the language.)

On the first day of Christmas, in a Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, Jesus seeks therapy for a life that has gotten out of his control. On the second day of Christmas, St. Stephen’s Day, Daily Jocks enlists a hugely overstuffed musclehunk to memorialize St. Stephen of the Sacred Box.

(Note: a certain amount of male flesh, crude wordplay on package and box, and lots of sacrilege. Use your judgment.)

The Bizarro.

(#1) Jesus in an instance of the Psychiatrist cartoon meme (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

Upstaged by Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. And, meanwhile, transformed by the writings of others into a different sort of fictional character, one with a written life story related in some very complex way to the life of a historical person. (Compare, say, the fictional title character in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth (first published in 1623), a creation based on a fictionalized account in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577) of the life of the actual Macbeth, King of Scotland from 1040 to 1057).

For me, a reference to Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny evokes a conference paper Ellen Prince gave many years ago, a stunning, important paper on the referential statuses of NPs in discourse. Partway through the question period, someone (inevitably, I suppose) asked about fictitious characters. “Oh,” Ellen said, with a small confident smile, “Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are in footnote 37” (well, some high number) — and went on to summarize the complex footnote essay briefly and succinctly.

There was laughter, and gasps of delight, and a sense that applause was on the verge of breaking out. (But the time pressure of the question period intervened, and Ellen went on to another question.)

It was just wonderful.

The Daily Jocks ad. And now for something much less elevated. Today from Daily Jocks:

(#2) Ad copy: “BOXING DAY SALE –  20% OFF STOREWIDE! – Shop 600+ products from over 20 brands, in all your favorite styles. From Jockstraps to Wrestling Suits you will be sure to find something you love.”

The model does seem to be wearing a thong. Otherwise it’s all about his remarkably overdeveloped muscles and his St. Stephen’s Day box.

St. Stephen was stoned to death, on what substance we do not know. He was celebrated for his package — said to be of great size and beauty, also available to all who would use it — and his box as well, ditto.

Previously on this blog:

— on 12/29/15 in “boxboys and transitive bottoming”

(#3)

… six naked guys in Santa caps (ohhh, Santa baby!), their genitals covered by the (Christmas) packages and boxes they’re carrying. They’re presented as hot gay men cruising and admiring one another’s endowments — and in the case of one man, Gay 1, reaching into his neighbor’s box to handle its contents.

— on 12/30/15, in “Dick in a Box”, on a Saturday Night Live sketch with that title (and theme)

So we get plays on package and box, with double entendres involving figurative package ‘male genitalia, basket’ and box ‘female genitalia, pussy’, also ‘male anus viewed as a sexual organ; male buttocks’. These associations make St. Stephen’s Day — Boxing Day in the UK and other areas in the British culture zone — an easy source of raunchy humor.

Bonus boxes. There is of course the sporting verb box as well as the uses above. This appears to have nothing to do with the container noun box.  From NOAD:

verb box-2: [no object] fight an opponent using one’s fists; compete in the sport of boxing: he boxed for England | [with object]:  he had to box Bennett for the title. noun box: [in singular] a slap with the hand on the side of a person’s head given as a punishment or in anger: she gave him a box on the ear. ORIGIN late Middle English (in the general sense ‘a blow’): of unknown origin.

The obscure origin of the verb has left room for playful speculation, as in the Bizarro cartoon in my 3/23/11 posting “Cartoon etymology”

(#4)

In any case, from this verb, we get the nouns boxing (referring to the sport) and boxer (referring to a competitor in the sport). So the way is open for jokes about boxing on Boxing Day.

Then there’s the clothing appropriate for boxers engaged in boxing. From NOAD:

pl. noun boxer shorts (also boxers): men’s loose underpants similar in shape to the shorts worn by boxers.

Also, because wrestling and boxing are (sweaty) contact sports done by muscular men in minimal clothing, the sports have high homoerotic potential; there are, in fact, extensive genres of gay porn videos with these sports as themes, and their characteristic clothing items — wrestling singlets and boxing shorts — pick up considerable homoerotic punch on their own as a result. The porn and the boxing shorts together in this vibrantly gold cover for a 1995 video Boxer Shorts (originally from All Worlds Video):

(#5)

Meanwhile, plenty of premium men’s underwear companies sell excellent athletic shorts of the boxer type, and of course boxer shorts, and boxer briefs as well, and the models are often posed in boxing gyms, for high-masculine authenticity. But one company, Pump!, is particularly devoted to presenting its package-displaying boxer briefs in boxing-gym setttings. Two examples from earlier postings on this blog:

— from 11/9/15 in “Pump boys and Trojans”, several Pump! models as boxers, including:

(#6)

— and from 3/17/16 in “Boxing”, the Pump! Cruise Boxer, with a model posing as a boxer:

(#7)

Packages for Boxing Day.

The most recent posting on this topic: on 3/5/19, “Another 100k spams”, where I noted that the number of spam comments here (since the blog started in December 2008) passed 5,600,000 on 3/3. Some were automatically deleted by WordPress software, a great many more were made available for bulk deletion (or individual inspection) by me, and some were submitted to me individually for moderation. In periodic spam attacks, comments spam arrives at the rate of more than one per second (until the software wrestles it to the ground again).

That was 3/3. On 7/23, the count passed 5,700,000. And then, yesterday (12/30), 5,800,000. 6 million beckons! (Probably not next year, but soon.)

Along with the current count of spam comments, WordPress supplies daily reports on views of my blog, and a weekly summary. These statistics are stunningly unhelpful, as I’ve explained in earlier postings. They overestimate some views (from spammers collecting links for their spam) and underestimate others.  If they are to be believed, my readership has been steadily declining for some time, and is now about half what it was a few years ago. If I look at the postings that get comments, likes, or links in other sites, it would appear that most postings attract only 10 to 20 readers, but I know that can’t be right (though I am gratified by the attention I get from an appreciative core readership). So my readership is largely a mystery to me.

Here’s the weekly summary from yesterday (12/30):

(#1)

Notes on the searches: see my 6/17/16 posting on New Yorker cartoonist Anatol Kovarsky; I can’t see that I’ve posted on Brian Dietzen, whether fully clothed or shirtless, but it’s definitely something I might have done (see below); and the symbol with a circle and an arrow is the (phallic) male sign .

Brian Dietzen (born 11/14/77) plays medical examiner’s assistant Jimmy Palmer on the original NCIS tv show. His acting niche is Adorable Young Man, but it turns out that he’s not only cute, he’s muscular and hot:

(#2) From Watch! Magazine for June 2016 “He works hard for the muscle” (photography by Cliff Larson)

Top Posts. An amalgam of three contributions, beyond views of the home page / archives by people searching for things:

— first, a list of postings that WordPress recommends to people because they’re the most viewed postings of mine (thereby pretty much ensuring that they go on being the most viewed postings): “The body and its parts” has been on this list forever, and “Sexting with emoji” is also venerable; “Displaying your nipples” and “Crude japery” have more recently floated to the top. It’s all about the sex.

— second, a few very recent postings that attract readers for a short time after they appear: on the list above, “Hung with care” (sex and recency), “Revisiting 40: Bird X” (no sex), and “Holimanteaus and restaumanteaus” (some sex, in the breastaurant department).

— finally, items that pop up from the past because someone linked to them on the net and that attracted a momentary flurry of attention: above, “#BadStockPhotosOfMyJob for linguists”.

(Plenty of raunchy sex and crude street talk — totally not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Continuing the Yo! theme for today, following “OY/YO at Stanford”.

… with today’s Daily Jocks ads, on the harness and jockstrap beat:  DJX “back for 2020 with their brand new Circuit collection”, charged up with two raunchy shots of (my) verse inspired by the ads: the supremely unsubtle “Yo, Faggot!” and “Yo, Fucker!”

From the ad copy:

Following up the best selling Trough collection [the name suggesting sex pigs gorging themselves], Circuit takes inspiration from the dance parties we all know & love, so get ready to step up your party look with matching Harness, Jockstrap, Shorts & Socks.

Two displays of the goods, framed in red from the front (take my dick), in black from the rear (take my ass):

(#1)

Yo! Faggot!

flash!
my side-eye
on you

snap!
my jock in
yer cock
suckin face

’cause

dude needs
dick

(#2)

Yo! Fucker!

this stud
swings both ways

breed!
my butt,
buddy

Background. From my 12/9/16 posting “The eyes reject”, on

side-eye / side eye ‘a sidelong glance conveying disapproval, contempt, criticism, animosity, scorn; shock, surprise; distrust, disbelief’ (all negative in affect, but in different ways)

(#3) The side-eye emoji

And then, in my 6/22/10 posting “Rivers of Babylon”, see the section on gay circuit parties: giant dance parties, tending to evolve into giant sex (and, often, drug) parties .

You can slip a lot into an underwear ad, yo.

(On appallingly bad taste in menswear, also about men’s underwear and its contents, but without dwelling on the anatomy and without any mansex at all — so tasteless, but not over-the-line raunchy.)

From the bottomless annals of preposterous men’s underwear: transparent polyester beach shorts. To add to see-through mesh underwear and many much more outrageous garments chronicled in my postings over the years (see my Page on underwear postings).

An illustration:

(#1) MaverickSwim brand “Berlin Transparent Waterproof Shorts” ($26.99) with neon orange trim (also available in neon lime trim), shown here worn over  minibriefs for modesty (but in matching orange, as a fashion statement)

They look hugely uncomfortable, whatever their value as crotch display cases. As Ellen Evans advised on Facebook:

plastic clothes: just say no

(Hat tip to Aric Olnes, who pointed me towards this fresh vein of outrageous homowear.)

Ad copy from the MaverickSwim site (reproduced here without editing):

The next generation of transparent beach shorts is here! Berlin waterproof transparent shorts are completely see-through and leave it totally up to you if you wanna wear a colorful statement speedo underneath or just go bare for fun! The polyester shorts come with neon lining that makes you pop out of the crowds! Exclusive limited edition – get yours now!
*the briefs inside are not included! 

Another variant, in white, with pockets:

(#2) More from MaverickSwim: “Ibiza Swim Shorts” ($19.99)

The ad copy (editorial note as above):

Caution alert! These Swim Shorts in sheer material in white are not for the shy fellas! They are completely see through, and it is totally up to you if you wanna wear them just by themselves with the included white lining, which keeps you more private. Optionally you can customise the shorts to your liking, by taking out the inner lining and wear it with a colorful tanga [type of thong underwear] instead, or just bare!

Aric’s alert led me to a New York Post piece “Clear shorts leave absolutely nothing to the imagination” by Zachary Kussin on 8/9/19, who observed that

nothing for sale on the MaverickSwim site — whose styles appear to be marketed toward gay men — is for the modest. Think leopard-print thongs ($9.94) and lace-up mesh trunks ($16.99).

Their offerings are indeed entertaining. Think of it as performance art.

MaverickSwim is far from the only transparent-homowear game in town. The International Jock site (which I’ve written about a number of times), for instance, offers McKillop Ice transparent plastic shorts (in polyester for $38) and Rufskin Nuage translucent pocket shorts (in nylon for $72). Hey, high-end beach bare doesn’t come cheap.

(Uncompromisingly raunchy references to male bodyparts and mansex, so absolutely not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Lincoln Darwin Valentine Day lies in the cleft between Lincoln Darwin Day, February 12th, and Valentine’s Day, February 14th. It is a day of unbridled mansexual excess, coming as it does between the high seriousness of the day that honors two towering figures — two Great Men — of the 19th century and the romantic heterosexual excesses of Valentine’s Day. It’s Carnal Carnival without reference to the religious calendar (actual Mardi Gras can fall any time between February 3rd and March 9th).

The symbol of LDVDay is a red or pink rose bud on its stem, standing simultaneously for a fat erect penis, flamingly engorged — alluding to cocksucking — and for a quivering anal rosette, wet with sexlube — alluding to assfucking.

(#1) In LDV rites, pornstar Angel Rock offers Aaron Shepard his famously big and fat pornstar cock (listed as 8.5″ on men.com, 9″ elsewhere) — his meat  is off-camera in this shot, though the full image can be viewed as #3 on yesterday’s AZBlogX posting “Big dicks, sex roses, and Angel Rock” — and also a red rose, serving as a reinforcing symbol of that big dick (from the DominicFord video “Valentine’s Day Fuck”, from 2/14/13)

The two practices are celebrated, especially in public displays, in the rites of the day, which are at once solemn and weighty, and also ecstatic and transcendent.

The litany for the occasion is enormous and deeply moving. For instance, Psalm 45, “Full of grace are thy lips”:  (free paraphrase) Suck my dick, faggot! Eat it, cocksucker! Or Psalm 54, “An offering of a free heart will I give thee”: (free paraphrase) Oh fuck me fuck me fuck me, oh shit fuck me harder!, whispered, moaned, or shouted, as it moves the pedicant.

More on the Rock and the Shepard. (If you’re keeping track of the LDV roshambo game, in it Shepard sucks Rock and Rock fucks Shepard, so everybody wins. This is not a zero-sum game.)

(#2) Shepard treasures the rose, meanwhile performing a cocktease for us

Consummation, in two parts, with illustrations for the relevant text of the InvoLogue (“the Pervert’s Bible”):

(#3) “He is my Rock and salivation” (InvoPsalm 62, the Shepard’s Paean); full photo on AZBlogX

(#4) “Shepard, the fuck for all of you, serving willingly” (1 InvoPeter 5, the Proclamation of the Rock); unaltered photo, reproduced here because no penises are shown (Rock could just be standing behind Shepard, admiring the view, so I’m trusting that this will squeak through on WordPress — though it would not, of course, on Facebook)

[Sidenote: the anal rosette. From my 1/31/20 posting “Revisiting 41: roses for remembrance”:

Then in my 6/3/18 posting “The rose and the flames”, there’s a section on rose windows and their Christian symbolism; but also a section on the rose as a carnal symbol, quoting my posting from 8/29/13, “Kissing the rose”:

The rose — in particular, in the form of a rosette — appears frequently as a carnal symbol in pornographic writing, sometimes standing for the vagina but very frequently for the anus

(with examples, including a striking anal rosette from gay porn, in an AZBlogX posting). ]

[Sidenote: the photographer’s craft in porn. The DominicFord stills from “Valentine’s Day Fuck” are skillfully composed. The fitting together of the men’s bodies is beautifully represented (especially in the full shot in #3), and the models themselves are attractively posed, in ways that suggest something of their characters’ personas in the story, or perhaps the models’ more enduring porn personas (see below). From snippets of the film that I’ve viewed, it looks like the action is equally well done.

These are products of a complex collaboration between photographer, director, models, and various engineers, and when they’re well done, they’re quality works in a genre of popular functional art. There are admirable tv commercials, sitcoms, cartoons, film noir, horror movies, background music, comic routines, devotional songs, items of everyday clothing, household furnishings, and much much more, including several kinds of pornography. Things can be done crudely, or routinely, or with style. I do like to encourage people to look for style and craft in gay porn.

I intend to say a bit more along these lines when Angel Rock comes around again on this blog, in connection with big-dick flicks. And I hope to write at greater length on a set of fine Raging Stallion porn flicks centrally involving the models Damien Crosse and Steve Cruz (separately and together), with a view to their visual style, their narrative structure, and indeed their moral universe (all stories are moral stories, after all).]

[Sidenote: porn personas, and acting personas more generally. I’m just beginning to get a sense of Angel Rock. Here he is in the (dick-free) top half of the cover of his Big Fucking Dick DVD (one in a long series, featuring a parade of big-dicked pornstars):

(#5) From the AZBlogX posting: A Falcon compilation DVD, with Rock exhibiting a sweet little smile on the cover; he also smiles broadly, fairly often, and that’s quite charming. He’s nicely (but not extravagantly) muscled, and lightly furry: a dreamy Cubano. Meanwhile, there’s that bizarrely long and fat uncut dick, looming at us (to my mind, it’s astounding, but not especially beautiful — I have an aesthetic for such things — though it is nicely veined)

He’s billed as a versatile top, and he’s short, just 5´5″, but very nicely proportioned, all of which makes him one of my types, except for that alarming cock (in real life; though I can always fantasize having a heroically capacious pussy to match that dick thrust for thrust). So I need to investigate. (A writer’s work is never done.)

Meanwhile, from my 3/8/17 posting “In the West Wing”:

On acting personas. This is an idea that I have often blogged about in connection with porn flicks, as in these comments on pornstar Kevin Wiles and his

more enduring persona, his “porn persona”, if you will, that cuts across different roles and indeed, helps to determine which roles he’s offered and which ones he’s willing to accept and how he will realize any particular role

(A porn persona is just a special case of an acting persona, of course.)

[Mark] Feuerstein has already gotten a posting of his own here (on 7/21/15), mostly about his role on the tv series Royal Pains … His acting persona embraces an enormous amount of charm and a significant identity as a Jew. (For [Jimmy] Smits, it’s passionate intensity and a significant Hispanic identity. For [Marg] Helgenbarger, it’s unflappable toughness.)

LDVDay Lite. There are also light-hearted and playful approaches to the day’s celebration of the male body. As in my 2/13/19 posting “Captain of our fairy band”, with a Daily Jocks sale ad for Marco Marco Valentine’s Day homowear:

(#6) A heart-pattern brief with peek-a-boo cutouts, making it a half moon brief

Lincoln Darwin Valentine
Is a cutup friend of mine
Loves the boys with all his heart
Loves them hard in every part

And in this Daily Jocks ad for VDay this year, for a His & His Sale:

(#7) ad copy: VALENTINES SALE: BUY 2 ITEMS & GET 14% OFF. It’s time to treat that special person in your life.

That’s a DJX Trough jock, harness, and socks, all in red — trough as in for pigs. Little piggies. Crawling in the dirt.

Lincoln Darwin Day. Yesterday’s holiday, which turns on the fact that Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were both born on February 12th, 1809. This had led to attempts to explicitly compare and/or contrast the two great men, as in this book (from Wikipedia):

(#8)

Lincoln and Darwin: Shared Visions of Race, Science, and Religion is a 2010 book by James Lander about the lives and views of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin.

Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day, February 12, 1809. Both lost their mother at a young age and, despite their differences in upbringing, both men saw themselves as autodidacts. Lander argues that they also shared an interest in science and a skeptical approach to religion. Darwin closely followed the events of the American Civil War and wanted Lincoln and the Union to prevail, but it is unlikely that Lincoln read Darwin’s work.

Lincoln and Darwin is structured as a series of alternating narratives concerning each man’s interactions with the events and discoveries of the mid-19th century. Lander explores similarities in the intellectual development, concerns, and impacts of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, focusing in particular on the issue of slavery in the United States, which both men influentially opposed.

The effort looks a bit strained, but intriguing. If only to make you think about Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin in more detail.

(This will go, almost immediately, into the weeds of male genitals and mansex in street talk, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Daily Jocks ad on the 10th (with somewhat rocky non-native English):

Limited Edition DJX Party Pocket Sock are here. A Crew length cotton sock with a hidden pocket to keep your goodies! Pick from 7 different styles – Buy any 3 get 1 free:

(#1) TOP, BOTTOM, VERS (sex position, well specifically, fuck position); DADDY, BEAR, TWINK (gay type)

Your goodies are probably your condoms — whatever small thing that, if you’re are a queer, you need to have immediately available when you are at a sociosexual occasion wearing only footgear, and maybe some minimal, decorative undergarment, like a fashion-forward jockstrap.(Queer buddies: this might not be your world, but don’t tell me you haven’t imagined strolling through it; you and I are, after all, the Daily Jocks target audience. A role I happily embrace, by the way.)

Otherwise, these socks are sexual advertisements: this is how I fuck, this is what kind of queer I am. Some guys put this stuff on t-shirts, some who have dispensed with t-shirts proclaim their preferences on the waistbands of their underwear

And then, for the more politically conscious among us, the Pride Party Socks, equally pocketed:

(#2)

I must admit that I covet these socks. But at $13 a pair, they’re very hard to justify (and, alas, I’m decades away from needing the little pockets, though I have some warm recollections).

Preferencewear and pocketwear. Both easily available in separate lines of apparel. From earlier postings on this blog:

— on 2/27/15 in “Color and advertising your preferences”, on the Curbwear Identity line, with preference labels on singlets and on underwear waistbands

— on 1/31/16 in “Cruise Jogger”, on the Pump! Cruise Jogger with pockets

Of course, t-shirts provide plenty of space for text, including preference labels, and they are generally available with pockets. But you might be bent on going out shirtless and pantsless, and then you’re down to your skivvies and your socks as bulletin boards and storage nooks

T-shirts. Now I’ll move to t-shirts with sexual messages, just taking a small sample of types. First, tees for fucking, mostly those advertising a preference for getting fucked and those more directly advertising a desire to get fucked. Then, tees  focused on cock size, mostly the wearer’s proclaiming his own size.

The fuck theme follows on a “Valentine’s Day Fuck” video treated in two of my postings:

— on 2/12/20 in “Big dicks, sex roses, and Angel Rock” (AZBlogX)

— on 2/13/20 in “Lincoln Darwin Valentine Day” (this blog, AZBlog)

and looks forward to a posting, to come, on pussy as self-identification and as taunt.

The big-dick theme gets some working out in the “Valentine’s Day Fuck” postings, especially the first, where Angel Rock, Tate Ryder, and their big rolls of pornstar meat are featured. And that segues into the big-dick section of this posting.

Getting fucked: advertising a preference, advertising an offer. The standard label for advertising a preference for getting fucked is BOTTOM, and it appears on socks (as above), waistbands, and in big bold letters on t-shirts. Ordinarily, a man would wear a BOTTOM t-shirt only in contexts where preferred sex positions are socially relevant — on the streets of gayborhoods, in bars and clubs of the right sort, at Pride events, in cruisy parks, and so on. But I have seen the shirt on guys out on ordinary streets — maybe because they were in transit to or from one of these sex locales, or maybe because they were boldly asserting their brand of sexual identity (like the brassy QUEER, a shirt I have myself worn out in the everday world, when I was much younger, or the even more confrontational FAG or FAGGOT).

One step back from BOTTOM would be the medical / social-services terms RECEPTIVE ANAL or ANAL RECEPTIVE or RAI (for Receptive Anal Intercourse), but I don’t find any tees that far distanced from carnal connection. Though they could be conversation-starters.

But in the other direction, more or less parallel to FAG(GOT), there is the shameless effrontery of CERTIFIED PUSSY BOY, which I truly admire. From an offering on Etsy (available in a range of colors, of which this is my favorite):

(#3)

Now we move from advertising a preference — roughly the message, “When fucking is on the menu, I want to be the fuckhole” — to advertising an offer — roughly the message, “I’m available for fucking, and looking for a guy to fuck me”, that is, FUCK ME.

I would have thought that a message apparently  advertising unconditional willingness to take dick up the ass would be risky, in a world where there are in fact some creepy and scary fuckers out there. But the offer isn’t entirely unconditional. You and your prospective fucker still have to close the deal, by verbal negotiation or exchanging gestures. The t-shirt isn’t enough on its own.

So in fact there are tons of FUCK ME shirts, in all sorts of fonts and colors.

In a separate development, the slogan Kiss me, I’m Irish has been elaborated into the formula V me, I’m Irish (including Fuck me, I’m Irish) and on into V me, I’m Adj (Fuck me, I’m Mexican and the like), all moving FUCK ME into the realm of playfulness and pleasure. From my 3/17/19 posting “V me, I’m Irish”:

(#4) The generic logo, suitable for both anal and vaginal intercourse — but for pleasure

(#5) Banner ad for a story: the specifically gay variant, again featuring pleasure, with smiles (and sharply differentiating the b/t roles for the men: a hole and his adored fucker)

Moving on to flat-out fuckhole offers on t-shirts, here in two inventive variants:

(#6) It’s the please that sets this one apart. Plus the playfully colorful font (from the society6 site)

(#7) I especially admire this one: in effect, a growly boast, “I’m a hell of a whore!” (from the spreadshirt site, available in many colors; the purple is my favorite) — the polar opposite of slut-shaming (slut-flaming?)

The big preference. Cock size. So bound to power, dominance, progenitivity, significance, energy, and of course raw masculinity that it’s hard to know which is metaphor and which is the ground for that metaphor. No man is free of its pull and push.

From my 1/12/13 posting “A matter of size”, on the facts:

the average erect penis is between 5 (on the low side) and 6 (on the high side) inches long, and almost all hard dicks are between 4.2 (on the low side) and 7.5 (on the high side) inches long.

These facts about the real world don’t translate well into perceptions and practices: a 5″ dick is seen (in real life and in porn) as *small* (this is my size range, and I can attest to the fact that men who really care about size find it unacceptably small), and in porn a 6″ dick isn’t notable enough for mention; write-ups of pornstars almost never mention a dick size below 7″, though 7″ is fairly common in these write-ups. Note that 7″ is only a half-inch short of truly extraordinary.

In Gayland [the fantasy world of gay porn], dicks start at this level (7″) and go on up from there, gaining in value with every half-inch. More is better, and much much more is best. Monumentally more is the stuff of dreams. Jack-off dreams.

Put somewhat more fancifully:

the Porn Standard Dick (PSD) is 7″; roughly 5-7 % of American men have cocks at least this big

the Porn World-Class Dick (PWD) is 9″; roughly 1% of American men have cocks at least this big

more than 9 inches is a joke, or a Ripley (Believe It or Not!) Marvel (RM)

Men are willing to advertise themselves on t-shirts as having 7, 8, or 9 inches:

(#8) On the Redbubble site: 7″  t-shirt (using the 7-Up logo turned into a phallic symbol)

(#9) On the Cafe Press site: 8″ t-shirt, just the fact, man

(#10) On the TeePublic site: 9″ t-shirt, an artful offer

Then, at 10″, the jokes appear. Two of them:

(#11) From the tee shirt palace site: Mine is 10-inches! (“10″ chef’s knife”)

(#12) Amazon ad copy for this shirt: “Do you love smoking meats like BBQ, burger, hot dogs, bacon, ribs? Grill master men and women can wear this while cooking barbecue. Grab a beer pint or wine and feel the hot summer on this top! Sausage Barbecue Grill Camping Shirt.”

(Actual big — long and fat — dicks can famously be problematic to manage, in mouth or asshole. Latest bulletin on this front in my 2/16/20 AZBlogX posting “News for big penises: well, it seemed like a good idea at the time”, on an ad for the studio Bareback Cum Pigs’s That Secret We Kept, with big fat dicks and the facial expressions of their recipients. Not remotely reproducible on a WordPress blog.)

RMs. So much for the jokes. On to the RMs, the Ripley Marvels (see the Page on this blog on postings about penis size). A few RM porn actors, arranged by reputed dick length:

10″: Lee Ryder, Rocco Steele, Rick Donovan

11″: Chad Douglas, Ken Ryker

14″: Brazilian phallic monument Caio Amaral (posted about several times on this blog)

Then we come to a 2/8 mailing from Falcon Studios, exhibited in my 2/12/20 AZBlogX posting “Big dicks, sex roses, and Angel Rock”. The dickless half of the mailer, with ad copy:

(#12) BIG DICK: humongous hunks with 9+″: start the year right with these movies featuring massive manhood – over 350 titles with huge meat [showing Australian-born pornstar Tate Ryder, who’s listed on the site as a PWD, with 9″; at this level, I wouldn’t quibble over fractions of an inch]

Here’s more Ryder, in his p.r. shot from Lucas Entertainment (another full-frontal display), again the top half of the photo (with some critique, from AZBlogX, of the images as photography):

(#13) “The photo work on this one is much inferior to [#12]: the pose is stiff and awkward, the facial expression hard to read ([#12] shows a dominant topman), the lighting too bright, the dick way too shiny; just shooting a naked guy with a really long hard cock isn’t really enough, there’s a craft to these things”

Ryder is a man of average height — 5´10″ — so a 9+″ dick seems out of scale (my forearms are just a bit over 9″ long): remarkable, but not necessarily attractive. His length-to-girth ratio strikes me as just about right, so his dick doesn’t appear to be either notably thin or notably fat. His dick is straight, not curved; even in girth, not flanged; and stands forward, rather than angling to one side or the other. All these characteristics make his dick satisfying for many men to look at; there’s an aesthetic for everything.

On the minus side for me is his veining. He has a couple of very prominent veins that (to my eye) look more like growths on his dick than like the bluish tracery of veins that embellish a beautiful cock.

His dickhead is well-formed, but he seems to lack a significant penile raphe, that fleshy ridge on the underside of a dick that (to me) serves as the visible and palpable sign of the cock as sex bone.

Then, in the AZBlogX posting, Angel Rock and his big fucking dick, which Falcon lists as 9″ and men.com as 8.5″, but stands out as more than your standard PWD because Rock is short (5´5″) and his dick is fat. Here’s the upper half of his Big Fucking Dick cover:

(#14) El Gran Cubano. From the AZBlogX posting: “A Falcon compilation DVD, with Rock exhibiting a sweet little smile on the cover; he also smiles broadly, fairly often, and that’s quite charming. He’s nicely (but not extravagantly) muscled, and lightly furry: a dreamy Cubano. Meanwhile, there’s that bizarrely long and fat uncut dick, looming at us (to my mind, it’s astounding, but not especially beautiful — I have an aesthetic for such things — though it is nicely veined)”

Again the top half, Rock offering a red rose in the “Valentine’s Day Fuck” video:

(#15) The dick is an intriguing object, but this is the part that makes the dick pic work, because it infuses the dick with a persona (in this case, one I find powerfully attractive)

I say this as an avowed peniphiliac, but dick pics are static images of disembodied bodyparts, and that’s just not enough to arouse me. A torso provides a bit more context, but it’s the face that gives the dick its character and personality. Just still photos, but now representing a person, an imaginable sexual partner.

And then of course you can add motion and audio. And the dick becomes the embodiment of a man, in all his complexity.

But still available only through two of the senses. But in real life, a gay man experiences, confronts, engages with another man’s dick with his hands and mouth, through the act of cocksucking, either as a focal sexual act or as foreplay to fucking. Cocksucking adds the other senses: it provides mouthfeel, taste, smell, and warmth; in fact, if you hold the cock gently in your mouth for a moment, you can feel the blood coursing through those delicate veins. The cock is a living thing, in your mouth, an intensely male thing (no matter how faggy the bearer’s demeanor) — and a stand-in for a man whose nature you intuit from the way he moves under your hands and in your mouth. Your presumed lover. In the end he can even provide you with a shot of warm, sweet,  sea-salty essence of man.

Real world notes. All this is wonderful, but in real life, genuinely big dicks present a problem, but one that most of us rarely if ever come up against; genuinely big dicks are, in fact, quite rare. Pornstars, however, often need to practice taking big dicks into their bodies and to learn ways to open up for them without pain or injury.

An alternative is to use your hands only, or what I call tipwork (licking and sucking the dickhead and dickshaft), but many men find that utterly inadequate as a substitute for the engulfing of their dick in another man’s body in a blowjob or assfuck.

Personal notes. As it happens, my oral cavity is unusually shallow, so I’m no damn good at engulfing dicks, but back when I whored around, I did just fine with tipwork on almost all my partners. As with most gay men, cocksucking was everyday sex for Jacques and me, and tipwork was what we did for each other. (Jacques was extraordinarily adept at jacking me off — he studied my jacking myself off intently until he could reproduce beautifully what I did for myself, which was way more satisfying than my actually doing it for myself, because it was a physical and emotional connection with another man, in fact the man I loved. I was pretty good at jacking him off, but had some trouble gauging the sensitivity of his uncut dick.)

Jacques’s dick was noticeably longer than mine — I’d guess a bit over 6″ (neither of us ever saw any reason to measure) and proportional in thickness, so it was perfectly easy to handle (and, oh, his crotch, from dicktip on down, smelled and tasted just wonderful — oh dear, I am undone by poignant memories). My own 5″ (which I have measured, in order to write pieces like this one) was once described, by a satisfied t-room partner, as “a perfect mouthful” — big enough to do the job, but in no way challenging — which was meant, and taken, as praise. (Oh yes, I had a strongly musky scent and taste, sort of like distilled lockerroom, which some men — fortunately, J was one — found powerfully attractive.)

Meanwhile, in line with my Germanic heritage on both sides, I am in fact fond of big meaty sausages (see #12 above), but I literally eat them.

(Some totally raunchy text, not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

From Daily Jocks, with mailings on 2/17 and 2/19:

DJX TROUGH PRIDE

The best selling DJX Trough collection is back with a Limited Edition Pride collection. Get ready for Sydney Mardi Gras [2/14/ – 3/1/20] or show your pride wherever you are in the world.

The two shots of the model, with my text, swiped from the Beatles (mostly George Harrison) and degraded into jingly raunch (my apologies to George Martin and everyone else associated with the original):

On the 17th, a front shot, with the model in shorts; he’s apparently trying to look slutty:

(#1) Have you seen the bigger piggies in their starched white shorts?
You will find the bigger piggies fucking around for sport
Always have clean shorts to play around in

On the 19th, today, a rear shot, with his muscular ass exposed and apparently on offer:

(#2) Have you seen the little piggies posing in their jocks?
And for all the little piggies, their aim is getting cock
Always having dick to play around with

It seems that the first appearance on this blog of the DJX Trough collection (harness, jockstrap, shorts, socks) was in my 5/24/19 posting “The ballet of Mango Meshman”, where I wrote:

The trough in the ad will suggest pigs feeding, and gay sexual excess.

— that is, sex pigs. It’s all about sexpiggishness.

And sex pig on ths blog goes at least back to my 9/30/13 posting “Up your alley”, where I wrote about:

the snowclonelet X pig, denoting someone who’s seriously into X (sex pig, involving sex in general or specifically “dirty sex” of various kinds; dick pig; piss pig)

(Meanwhile, if I were into harnesses, I would definitely consider that rainbow number.)

(Male body parts, vividly evoked though not pictured. Not for kids or the sexually modest.)

The spectre of the Daily Jocks Mystery Crotch, which materializes every so often, by commercial magic, to offer DJ’s bargain Mystery Underwear:

(#1)

Around this enigmatically seductive figure there has grown up a rich folk tradition of poetry, song, and visual art, the seminal work being the text Magical Mystery Crotch Rocketman, created by the appropriately mysterious queer cooperative Darts of Desire.

MagMystCroRo

Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side,
Where the colored grrlz go:

Roll up
He’s got everything you need
Roll up for the Mystery Crotch
Roll up
Satisfaction guaranteed
Roll up for the Mystery Crotch

(#2) Eyes on the stars, thoughts on the crotch

And Little Joe goes:

I think it’s gonna be a long long time
‘Till a morning brings me round to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I’m Crotch Rocketman

Crotch Rocketman burning out his fuse in here alone

This is the tradition of the Mystery of Fire. Then, necessarily, there’s a contrary tradition of the Mystery of Darkness. In which the central ritual is

The Unmanning

(#3) Desire and Dread

I slip into
Mystery Underwear and
all the furniture of my
crotch turns indistinct,
unknowable

my handsome ass and its
musty rose of sex
dissolve in mist

my curly dark pubic hair
messenger of male sweat
crumbles to dust

my weighty balls
contract, shrivel, vanish

my sturdy cock
softens and
melts away

I am unmanned

 Notes on the texts and images. #1 is a Daily Jocks image used for their Mystery Underwear sale offers — most recenty, just yesterday.

#2 is today’s DJ image advertising their Mystery Underwear, with the price list replaced by ghostly echoes of the main image. The model appears to be gazing dreamily off into space, or maybe he’s just flouncing seductively. His crotch is notably large — it looks decidedly padded — but it shows no outlines of his cock and balls, crotch features that are usually entertainingly obtrusive in DJ’s underwear ads.

#3 is the image from the TitanMen 2020 Valentine’s Day sale on gay porn, presumably showing male lovers, but I found their facial expressions complex and subject to alternative understandings.

Then the texts. The framing text is somewhat transformed bits — “Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side, / Where the colored grrlz go:” and “And Little Joe goes:” — from Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”. On the song, from Wikipedia:

“Walk on the Wild Side” is a song by Lou Reed from his second solo album, Transformer (1972). It was produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson, and released as a double A-side with “Perfect Day”. The song received wide radio coverage, despite its touching on taboo topics such as transsexual people, drugs, male prostitution, and oral sex.

… The lyrics, describing a series of individuals and their journeys to New York City, refer to several of the regular “superstars” at Andy Warhol’s New York studio, the Factory, namely Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, Joe Dallesandro [Little Joe], Jackie Curtis and Joe Campbell (referred to in the song by his nickname Sugar Plum Fairy).

You can listen to the original recording here (#4). The relevant bits of the song:

… Candy came from out on the island,
In the backroom she was everybody’s darling,
But she never lost her head
Even when she was giving head
She said, hey baby, take a walk on the wild side
Said, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side
And the colored girls go,
Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo …

… Little Joe never once gave it away
Everybody had to pay and pay
A hustle here and a hustle there
New York City is the place where they said:
Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side
I said hey Joe, take a walk on the wild side

Inside the framing bits are two transformed pieces of rock songs and an allusion to a gay pornstar (and his motorcycle).

The first rock song (transformed in MagMystCroRo) is the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour”. From Wikipedia:

Magical Mystery Tour is an English surreal comedy television film directed by and starring the Beatles. It is the third film that starred the band and depicts a group of people on a coach tour who experience strange happenings caused by magicians. The premise was inspired by Ken Kesey’s Further adventures with the Merry Pranksters and the then-popular coach trips from Liverpool to see the Blackpool Lights. Paul McCartney is credited with conceptualising and leading the project.

… The film originally aired on BBC1, in black-and-white, on Boxing Day, 26 December 1967. A colour transmission followed on BBC2 on 5 January 1968. It was poorly received by critics and audiences, although its accompanying soundtrack was a commercial and critical success. The film received an American theatrical release in 1974 by New Line Cinema, and in select theatres worldwide in 2012 by Apple Films.

… The songs in order of their use in the movie, written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney unless otherwise indicated:

“Magical Mystery Tour”

“The Fool on the Hill”

“She Loves You” (played on a fairground organ as part of the general medley of background music during the impromptu race)

“Flying” (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr)

“All My Loving” (orchestrated, as background music, in the style of the “Pas de deux” section from The Nutcracker ballet by Tchaikovsky)

“I Am the Walrus”

“Jessie’s Dream” (instrumental piece, not released on any audio recording)

“Blue Jay Way” (George Harrison)

“Death Cab for Cutie” performed by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band (Vivian Stanshall / Neil Innes)

“Your Mother Should Know”

“Magical Mystery Tour (Reprise)” (credited as “part of the full Magical Mystery Tour”, but this is not the case)

“Hello, Goodbye” (part, finale played over end credits)

You can listen to the 2009 remastered version of the original here (#5). Some relevant bits of the original:

Roll up roll up for the Mystery Tour
Roll up roll up for the Mystery Tour

… The Magical Mystery Tour
Is waiting to take you away
Waiting to take you away

… Roll up
They’ve got everything you need
Roll up for the Mystery Tour
Roll up
Satisfaction guaranteed
Roll up for the Mystery Tour

The second rock song (transformed in MagMystCroRo) is Elton John’s “Rocket Man”. From Wikipedia:

“Rocket Man” (officially titled “Rocket Man (I Think It’s Going to Be a Long, Long Time)”) is a song composed by Elton John and Bernie Taupin and originally performed by Elton John. The song first appeared on Elton John’s 1972 album Honky Château

… The song was inspired by the short story “The Rocket Man” in The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury, and echoes the theme of David Bowie’s 1969 song “Space Oddity” … But according to an account in Elizabeth Rosenthal’s book His Song: The Musical Journey of Elton John, the song was inspired by Taupin’s sighting of either a shooting star or a distant aeroplane.

The song describes a Mars-bound astronaut’s mixed feelings at leaving his family in order to do his job. Rosenthal’s account goes on to relate that the notion of astronauts no longer being perceived as heroes, but in fact as an “everyday occupation”, led Taupin to the song’s opening lines: “She packed my bags last night, pre-flight. Zero hour: 9 a.m. And I’m gonna be high as a kite by then.”

You can watch the official music video here (#6). The relevant part of the original:

And I think it’s gonna be a long long time
‘Till touch down brings me round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I’m a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone

Stringing it all together. The Beattles give us magical mastery. Daily Jocks then provides mystery crotch. Elton John supplies rocketman. The last link we need is crotch rocket, especially where rocket is a metaphor for the penis, and that’s easily supplied.

First, crotch rocket is well-attested in the (metaphorical) sense ‘a motorbike, esp. a dirt bike’ (GDoS, cites from 1975 on): a noisy, explosively propelled device (similar to a rocket) ridden under your crotch. (Phonologically, there’s also a satisfying half-rhyme in the /ač/ of crotch vs. the /ak/ of rocket.) But then the expression is also used sexually, with rocket referring to the phallic symbol, producing the playful penis synonym crotch rocket, referring to the kind of rocket a man carries in his crotch. Not in GDoS, but in many lists of entertaining synonyms for penis.

Gay porn has not been deaf to the attractions of crotch rocket as a way to refer to dicks. In particular, as I noted in my 2/16/13 posting “Crotch Rocket”, it’s

the title of a Titan Men “best of” compendium of scenes with pornstar Trenton Ducati (posted about on AZBlogX, with photos of Ducati in action):

(#7) (Rocket cropped for WordPress; it’s a substantial pornstar dick, a fine exemplar of its kind, but its specific characterstics aren’t actually relevant to this posting, while Ducati the actor is — and the dick is on dsplay in the AZBlogX posting)

The actor chose Ducati as his family name for porn work because he’s a serious motorcycle enthusiast with a special interest in the Ducati make. Put that together with his pornstar dick and you’ve got a title for a Ducati DVD. Also a nice link between mystery crotch and rocketman that exploits the implied (though unseen) penis in the Daily Jocks  mystery crotch.

And now we have MagMystCroRo, with a big dick in the middle of the picture, where it belongs:

(#8)

All this is wonderful, but then it turns out that Mystery Underwear can be the vehicle for two different kinds of magic, of fire (the heat of urgent desire and explosive ejaculation) or of darkness (desire turned to dread, despair, and decay — Cupid’s arrowheads dipped in poison). Choose fire if you can.

A gestural handnote. Actors and models have problems with their hands — where to put them, if they’re not actually engaged in an activity. So portraitists, photographers, and acting directors inherit the problem. On this blog, I’ve looked into one special case, involving men, their hands, and their pants (on 10/5/19). The image in #1 illustrates another special case: the male underwear model, putting (almost all of) his body on display for an ad image. What to do with the hands?

The guy in #1 has been posed performing a hand gesture I don’t recall having seen before: one closed fist on top of the other closed fist. Isolated for your inspection:

(#10)

I could speculate on what the gesture might be conveying — a “cram it, buddy!” gesture, with the top fist pushing down on the bottom one, a gesture aimed aggressively at someone else? — but that’s a foolish enterprise, because gestures are so often conventionalized, and any one gesture could come to convey almost anything, given a long enough history. The question is whether this particular gesture has a conventional interpretation in some sociocultural context — or whether the model just put his hands together that way because he had to do something with them that would keep them out of the fuzzed-over mystery-crotch area.

There are several conventions that involve this hand configuration for two different people — a variant of the usual fist bump, a joining-together on a team gesture, and probably more — but #10 has the two hands of one person. The only thing I found in an admittedly cursory web search was an ASL (American Sign Language) sign, for ‘make, create’.

From the Lifeprint site about this sign:

In one version you put the fists one on top of the other and use a twisting movement.  Do the movement twice. The hands stay in contact with each other.

There is another version of the sign for “make.” In this version, the hands come apart:

(#11)

All the illustrations I’ve seen have the right fist on top, while the guy in #10 has his left fist on top. This might be a handedess thing — also, photos are often reproduced reversed — but I just don’t know. And maybe ASL, or any sign language, has nothing to do with #10.

For gay men of Gen X now achieving their Golden Year: Surfing for Ulysses:

Thing 1, at the top: from the Hawaii Five-0 logo.

Thing 2, the centerpiece: Scott Caan (as Danno) and Alex O’Loughlin (as Steve), shirtless for surfing, packages at the ready, in the tv police drama. From my 3/14/15 posting “Hawaii Five-0 hunks”:

it’s a buddy drama, a bro show — with significant interludes of muscular shirtlessness

Thing 3, at the bottom, a monetary tribute to Grant in his golden years, before he went wandering in a daze through the Land o’ Dublins, watching the Memorial Golf Tournament on the banks of the Liffey, under the giant Ross Dress for Success banner.

(This is a new posting, intended as a reconstruction of and replacement for a “Catalectic trochaic tetrameter” posting of 3/1 that was somehow destroyed by WordPress, in such a way that if you try to access the posting under that name you are now automatically re-directed to my 3/1 “Guy gear” posting, which is intriguing but not the same thing at all. This “In the political news” posting quotes some sexual street talk but isn’t about men’s bodyparts or mansex, so I’m not warning anyone off. But it’s not all sunshine and roses.)

A Facebook dialogue from 2/29:

Gadi Niram: I don’t know what the deeper meaning might be here, but “Klobuchar and Buttigieg” has the same stress pattern as “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern”.

Arnold Zwicky: A line of catalectic trochaic tetrameter – SW SW SW S — incredibly common in folk verse of all kinds, and elsewhere. Including: “Lord what fools these mortals be”. Not to mention one reading of: “Captain of our fairy band”. And, from a recent posting of mine: “Lincoln Darwin Valentine”.

From my 2/13/19 posting “Captain of our fairy band”:

(#1) Captain of our fairy band: Lincoln Darwin Valentine (a double dose of CTT; note that double dose of CTT is itself CTT)

Even better, our drummer, Luis Illades of Pansy Division:

(#1) Drummer of our fairy band: Illades, away from his drum kit to perform a shirtless cock tease

About Pansy Division, on this blog:

— from 12/16/12, in “The gay underwear anthem”: about PD and their song “Groovy Underwear”

— from 4/16/17, in “Out gay male bands”, from a section on PD:

One reference in [the posting title “The gay underwear anthem”] is to [PD’s] song “Anthem”: “We’re the buttfuckers of rock & roll / We wanna sock it to your hole” (the other is to gay underwear). Which sounds aggressive, but is, like almost all their music, cheerful and celebratorily gay.

Trochaic tetrameter, and especially CTT. A few postings on this blog. First, on TT generally:

— from 3/20/14, in “The lure of trochaic tetrameter”:

Trochees are everywhere in English, and tetrameter is the predominant meter for folk verse of all kinds.

And then some CTT postings, leading to the double dose of CTT in #1:

— from 10/13/17, in “Ascending and parting”: the cartoonist’s name

Jason Adam Katzenstein

— from 12/11/17, in “Exercises in high macho style”:

Teddy bears and hand jobs is a nicely parallel coordination, of two N + N compounds, the whole thing making a trochaic tetrameter line with a superstrong [douby catalectic] second half:
S W | S W | S | S

— from 12/27/17, in ” Morning tetrameter naming”:

Xénophón Bellérophón

— from 2/11/18, in “Briefly: edible trochaic tetrameter”:

Thrée Meat Cróck Pot Cówboy Béans

— from 8/11/18, “P-alliterative and tetrametric lines”:

purple rainbow puppy pen (SW SW SW S)

(Men’s bodies and references to mansexual orgies. So not for everybody.)

Yesterday’s offering from Daily Jocks, for a Helsinki Athletica sale. With a bit of AZ free verse interpreting the image:

(#1)

(#2)

The image. Other than the model’s remarkable physique, functioning as a sales come-on, there are two especially salient aspects of the image: his facial expression and the gesture with his clothing.

The face. He’s searching intently (but otherwise without emotion) to his left, into the middle distance. Not gazing at us, the consumers of his display, or at his own body or clothes. He’s fixed on others, and they’re important to him.

The bare facts. I’ve enriched this interpretation by giving the model’s character a name, Stan, and putting Stan onto the sidelines of an orgy of mansex, where he’s looking to find a place for himself.

Orgies are often complex, sometimes apparently chaotic (it’s hard for an observer to keep focused), and they’re organized on several different principles; from my Page on group sex for men, see especially my 7/13/13 posting “More group sex” (focused on gay porn), on simple orgies (separate clusters of men having sex with one another in the same space), fluid (smorgasbord-style) orgies, and many-on-one sex (gangbangs and the like). I note that in real life (and also sometimes in porn), orgies very often involve sexual free agents roaming the space: men stroking their hard dicks and looking for partners to hook up with.

So there’s a lot for Stan to search through on the sidelines, as the orgy unfolds in front of him. No wonder he’s so intent. (More on the orgy scene below.)

The clothing. Stan has already pushed his grey Kasper Joggers down below his hips, and now he has his left hand hooked into the waistband of his bold Finnish-blue jockstrap, getting ready to pull that down, to make hs cock and balls available to the orgiasts. At the ready!

The DJ ad copy that accompanies #1 (as an ad for a 25% off FLASH SALE) focuses on its sexiness:

You’ve worked hard for your body – why not show it off in Helsinki Athletica? With an unmistakable focus on bold Euro styles and quality fabrics that emphasise your physique, the Helsinki Athletica collection is the sexy design you’ve been waiting for.

(The company is genuinely oriented towards athletic equipment, but they’re not unmindful of their big queer appeal.)

At the orgy. We have Stan on the verge of joining into the orgy, presenting himself as a top, looking for ass. There will surely be enthusiastic takers. The event might in fact be catering especially to his tastes; there is, after all, a Love to Get Fucked Blogspot site (with the obvious address: lovetogetfucked.blogspot.com) where you can find images of manpussy orgies (I had one such image, with that name, edited for use here — it shows an event with three slots available for Stan to fill — but decided that it was too crude for this relatively light-hearted posting).

As it happens, on the light-hearted side, I’ve been sitting for some time on a link, provided to me by my long-time reader RJP, to an Imgur gallery on “Men’s Fashion from the 70’s” by janetspots: a gigantic trove of absurd apparel from the period (such as I have occasionally posted on here). Many of the men appear to be, like Barbie’s Ken, desexed, with vacant crotches, but others are laughably oversexed, with obtrusive packages. From the latter set I’ve selected two examples of men — pre-orgiastic, but clearly revved up for the occasion — that Stan might be appraising as targets for his sexual attentions:

(#3) A bottom advertising his ass (also displaying a gumball machine, what could he be trying to say?); two amiable tops, dicks at the ready — but are they willing to share?

(#4) Glitter Boys in Heat: should Stan go for the gold?

(Extraordinarily steamy ad, Mr. Fetish Spain in nothing but a pageant banner, and raunchy mansexual talk, so dubious for kids and the sexually modest.)

Today’s Daily Jocks ad re-uses an earlier flagrantly NSFW image in an offer of “Spanish fetish brand Locker Gear” underwear. Well, besides the hot guys in the ad, there’s the parsing of the nominal expression Spanish fetish brand (as a modifier of the brand name Locker Gear).

And the text of the ad, with another significant bit boldfaced:

The DailyJocks Backroom hand picks the best fetish-wear brands from around the world & brings them directly to your inbox. [directly to your inbox was probably carefully chosen, but let that pass]

Check out our hottest new addition, Spanish fetish brand Locker Gear. Featuring a rugged, classic look on all of their products.

From jockstraps with an open pouch to chest harnesses or unlock your addiction with the zipper pouch jockstrap.

Then these two expressions triggered a chain of associations that led ultimately to the romantic comedy movie All Over the Guy.

From my 10/1/19 posting “Up to the line, and sometimes over”:

(#1) From my 9/24 posting “In the cowboys’ locker room”: a DJ Locker Gear ad, labeled NSFW, with one (naked) model plunging his hand into another model’s open-front jockstrap and fondling his (not visible) genitals

(The Locker Gear guys, in Spain, seem to be willing to push the limits of advertising, even in the high homowear genre, as far as they can go.)

An ambiguous moment. For Spanish fetish brand. Two parsings, with rather different meanings:

A: [ Spanish [ fetish brand ] ]  ‘fetish brand from Spain’

B: [ [ Spanish fetish ] brand ] ‘brand for fetishes associated with Spain’

For whatever reason having to do with the way my mind works, I got reading B first, and was reflecting on what kinds of fetishes associated with Spain might be at issue — bull-and-toreador sex? — when I realized that the Locker Gear people were in fact supplying vanilla fetishwear: harnesses, bottomless briefs, open-front jocks, and the like.

Alex in Associationland. (Alex is my sex name, and Alex is my sexy alter ego. He writes my colorfully queer stuff.) By then the damage was done, and I saw Alex doggedly pursuing unlock your addiction with the zipper pouch jockstrap and Spanish fetish down the rabbit hole of association:

(#2)

unlock leads to unzip, and out of the Locker Gear Zipper Jock (they think of it as a Zippered Jockstrap, but Zipper Jock is just so much better metrically) —

(#3)

— spills Alex’s fetish dick, it comes in Spanish, ¡hola!, his Spanish fetish uncontrollably aroused by the blue-bannered Mr. Fetish Spain:

(#4)

Spanish fetish chimes with Fish Mellish, name of a tough Nazi-hating Jew who dies on Omaha Beach —

(#5)

— who’s played by the usually adorable and quirky Adam Goldberg, who shines as the also adorable Dan Bucatinsky’s best buddy in All Over the Guy —

(#6)

— and we’re back in gay fantasyland, but now in a romantic comedy. Hey, stick your hand down your trick’s flagrant jockstrap to grab his dick and end up palling around with Adam Goldberg (who you might remember as Chandler Bing’s crazy roommate Eddie in Friends).

Meanwhile, Alex fucked his trick and came all over the guy — and then, the sonofabitch, he was all over the guy, done with him, no longer gave a shit about him.

Notes. Of course there have to be some notes. Alex is a sexy fuck, but I am an academic and a writer.

— #3, the Locker Gear Zipper Jock, in deep blue. The Alex there is Mr. Anonymous, never shows his face, just his handsome and impetuous dick.

— #4,  Mr. Fetish Spain 2019, who sometimes poses in Locker Gear jocks of various styles, but often in more fetishcore gear, and sometimes (as here) in nothing but his blue banner.

— Spanish fetish called up Fish Mellish for me, taking things in a dark direction. From the Saving Private Ryan wiki:

Private Stanley “Fish” Mellish [in #5] was a supporting character in the film, Saving Private Ryan. He was a Jewish-American soldier, and a member of Miller’s Squad during the later stages of World War Two. He had a strong dislike for the Nazis due to their public persecution and slaughter of his fellow Jews.

And he dies in hand-to-hand combat on Omaha Beach.

— Mellish played by Adam Goldberg. From Wikipedia:

Adam Charles Goldberg (born October 25, 1970) is an American actor, director, producer, and musician. Known for his supporting roles in film and television, Goldberg has appeared in films such as Dazed and Confused, Saving Private Ryan, A Beautiful Mind, and Zodiac. He has also played leading roles in independent films such as The Hebrew Hammer and 2 Days in Paris.

Goldberg tends towards quirky, highly strung, but charming characters. Wikipedia doesn’t mention it, but he also played an adorable character in the gay romantic comedy in #6 — he’s straight, but then nobody’s perfect — with a fine cast:

— from Wikipedia:

All Over the Guy is a 2001 American gay-themed romantic comedy film directed by Julie Davis and written by Dan Bucatinsky.

All Over the Guy is about Eli (Dan Bucatinsky) and Tom (Richard Ruccolo). The film is told mostly in flashback, with Eli recounting his side to Esther (Doris Roberts), an HIV clinic worker as he waits for test results and Tom to a guy he meets at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Tom is the son of emotionally distant alcoholic WASP parents who never quite accepted his sexual orientation and as a result is a heavy drinker himself and has a penchant for random hookups with different men. Eli’s parents are both Jewish psychiatrists who raised him to be emotionally open but ended up making him neurotic.

… Tom and Eli are set up on a blind date by their best friends, Jackie (Sasha Alexander) and Brett (Adam Goldberg), who think they would be a perfect match. [Tom and Eli are] both looking for ‘The One’, but don’t recognize it when they find it.

Two of the cast, on this blog

— from 4/20/15, “Doris Roberts”

— from 9/3/18, in “Goldenrods and Boston cops”, a section on Sasha Alexander

And then Dan Bucatinsky. From Wikipedia:

Daniel Bucatinsky (born September 22, 1965) is an American actor, writer and producer, best known for his role as James Novak in the Shonda Rhimes drama series Scandal... In 2014, Bucatinsky starred on NBC’s Marry Me, as well as the newly revived HBO series The Comeback, which he also executive produces.

Bucatinsky is openly gay; he’s married to screenwriter Don Roos.

— finally, the ambiguity in all over the guy: Alex came all over the guy — and then he was all over the guy. From NOAD:

prep. over: … 4 expressing passage or trajectory across: she trudged over the lawn.

phrase be over: no longer be affected by: we were over the worst.

(Little kids, but I pursue them into the weeds of sexual anatomy, though without the photos or raunchy talk. Take appropriate cautions.)

The One Big Happy cartoon from 2/9:

(#1) Once again, about the kids finding a word (un)familiar in a particular sense: the apparel noun hood

And the OBH from 2/17:

(#2) And minute ‘extremely small, tiny’

The two cases are interestingly different, but both turn on ambiguities in expressions: /hᴜd/ hood (apparel or neighborhood) and /majnút/ minute / my newt.

James and the hood. Relevant entries from NOAD:

noun hood-1:1 [a] a covering for the head and neck with an opening for the face, typically forming part of a coat or sweatshirt. [b] a separate garment similar to a hood, worn over a college gown or a surplice to indicate the wearer’s degree. [c] Falconry a leather covering for a hawk’s head. 2[a] a thing resembling a hood in shape or use. [b] British a folding waterproof cover of an automobile, baby carriage, etc. [c] North American a metal part covering the engine of an automobile. [d] a canopy to protect users of machinery or to remove fumes from it. [e] hoodlike structure or marking on the head or neck of an animal. [e] the upper part of the flower of a plant such as a dead-nettle.

noun hood-2: informal, chiefly North American a gangster or similar violent criminal. ORIGIN 1930s: abbreviation of hoodlum.

noun hood-3: informal, chiefly US a neighborhood, especially one’s own neighborhood: I’ve lived in the hood for 15 years. ORIGIN 1970s: shortening of neighborhood.

noun hoodie (also hoody): a hooded sweatshirt or jacket: outerwear is either a denim jacket or a hoodie.

And from Merriam-Webster online:

noun riding hood: an enveloping hood or hooded cloak worn for riding and as an outdoor wrap by women and children [almost transparent ‘hood for riding’, with the basic sense, 1a, of hood-1, and with just  a bit of specialization]

The remainder of the NOAD hood-1 entry is a collection of metaphorical uses of this hood in various special contexts; more on these below. We are to suppose that James is unfamiliar with “Little Red Riding Hood” and with hood-1a, presumably knowing only hoodie and associating that with hood-3 (maybe with a hint of hood-2 as well), as in Boyz n the Hood, rather than hood-1. From Wikipedia:

(#3) (DVD cover)

Boyz n the Hood is a 1991 American teen coming-of-age drama film, written and directed by John Singleton in his feature directorial debut, and stars Ice Cube, Cuba Gooding Jr., Morris Chestnut, Laurence Fishburne, Nia Long, Regina King, and Angela Bassett. Boyz n the Hood follows Tre Styles (Gooding Jr.), who is sent to live with his father Furious Styles (Fishburne) in South Central Los Angeles, surrounded by the neighborhood’s booming gang culture.

A fashionable hoodie — in fact a red running hood:

(#4) From the Tracksmith site: a men’s hooded Trackhouse sweatshirt (in red)

The OBH character James, as examined in my 3/4/19 posting “Hard tundra”:

James seems to be presented here as a generic working-class American kid (of uncertain race, ethnicity, or regional origin).

… [His speech is presented as projecting:] Toughness. Lack of education. Disrespect for “proper behavior”. Ignorance. Dirtiness. Loutishness. And more, possibly in combination.

To put the best possible face on this suite of attributions, I’ll refer to the fictional type James represents as the Tough Kid (thereby making glancing allusions to the Dead End Kids, the Bowery Boys, the Little Tough Guys, the Wild Boys, (the older) Boyz in the Hood, the Sharks and the Jets, and the rest of the young and rugged).

In #1, he’s painted as so immersed in street life that he doesn’t even know about ordinary apparel hoods. Well, it’s a cartoon, not real life.

The symbolic potentials of hoods. From Wikipedia:

(#5) Illustration by J.W. Smith (from Wikipedia)

“Little Red Riding Hood” is a European fairy tale about a young girl and a Big Bad Wolf. Its origins can be traced back to the 10th century to several European folk tales, including one from Italy called The False Grandmother (Italian: La finta nonna), later written among others by Italo Calvino in the Italian Folktales collection; the best known versions were written by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm.

The story has been changed considerably in various retellings and subjected to numerous modern adaptations and readings.

… Besides the overt warning about talking to strangers, there are many interpretations of the classic fairy tale, many of them sexual.

Some features that contribute to the sexually tinged interpretations: the girl, of course (variously represented as anything from the age of innocence, roughly 8, through puberty, to nubile young adulthood, roughly 18); the dark male beast figure of the wolf; the color red, blood red, possibly connoting sexual passion, pain, danger, or menstrual blood; and the three symbolic objects — the basket (or in some representations, purse); the cape; and the hood.

The hood is easily understood as a symbol of the clitoral hood or, especially if it’s fur-lined, the vulva or the entire vagina. A RRH with fur-lined red cape:

(#6) On the Halloween Costumes site: a fur-lined hood as a RRH accessory

And then, standing uninhabited on its own, a dramatic fox fur parka with hood:

(#7) From the Beyond Shopping site, a demonstration that the symbolic potential of hoods, especially fur-lined ones, isn’t limited to the red riding variety

Indeed, if you can summon up the clitoral hood from the wearing apparel, you can summon up its anatomical homologue in men, the foreskin. (Foreskins and clitoral hoods taken together are prepuces — prepuce /ˈpriˌpjus/ is a word I almost never have occasion to use in speech, so I have to look up its pronunciation every year or so.) And in fact, hood is a fairly common, and not especially racy, slang term for the foreskin, less inventive than colorful terms like turtleneck or (lace) curtains, but also less obtrusive.

Two cites, both entertaining. First, from The Reflector site of 9/19/13 by sex columnist Lynn Don, “It was like a shar pei (There was so much skin)”:

Studies have claimed that those who are uncircumcised are more likely to contract STIs, where other studies have claimed the opposite: the little penis hood (aka foreskin) actually protects against STIs.

The shar pei image is a bonus here.

And from VICE magazine: “I Made One of My Guy Friends Wear Fake Foreskins for a Week: I helped my friend solve a penis problem I never knew existed” by Laura Bell on 11/5/18:

In a more innocent time, before I knew foreskins were something men protested over, I could not have named even one penis problem allegedly caused by circumcision. Then I stumbled across a company that makes fake foreskins for men. That is, mini sleeves for your penis. Needless to say, my world has never quite been the same.

(#8) Finger play: two colorful ManHoods (photo by Shannon Elmitt)

The company is aptly named ManHood (the best part of this whole experience is that pun by the way, it’s all downhill from here). ManHood is a company dedicated to solving problems I never knew existed; mainly because I am without any penis myself, but also because I don’t tend to discuss matters of penile dryness with my friends.

… The main issue faced by ManHood wearers seems to be a loss of sensitivity in the “glans” (that’s the head of the penis usually covered by the foreskin just FYI) as it’s exposed to all manner of horrifying things like the air, clothes, or bedsheets. According to Randy, the founder of ManHood and herewith the Foreskin Expert, this exposure and irritation from clothing can cause dryness, less pleasure during sex, and generally a not so great time for your Johnson. So the ManHood is designed to keep the bless’d thing warm and snug, helping build up moisture so the glans softens over time.

Or a man could just use one of the many cock socks (or willy warmers) available on the market; see my 6/26/17 posting “Put a sock on it in parade season”.

minute / my newt in #2. Even more of a stretch than James’s ignorance of ordinary clothing (not to mention “Little Red Riding Hood”). Granted, Ruthie might well be ignorant of minute ‘extremely small, tiny’, but it stretches the imagination painfully to suppose that she does know about newts.

(Well, I actually did know about newts when I was her age, but then I was an ridiculously inquisitive child, into (among other things) insects and crawly things I could find under the rocks or beneath fallen logs in the woods. Click beetles and salamanders were my friends. (I also collected wildflowers and saved them in a flower press.))

But I’ll grant Rick Detorie his jeu d’esprit, and just press on with the newts. Which are of interest to me both linguistically and toxicologically (toxicologically, a wonderfully doubly dactylic word).

The linguistic background, from NOAD:

noun newt: a small slender-bodied amphibian with lungs and a well-developed tail, typically spending its adult life on land and returning to water to breed. ORIGIN late Middle English: from an ewt (ewt from Old English efeta: see eft), interpreted (by wrong division) as a newt.

The newt / eft pairing is what passes for famous in linguistics (well, historical English linguistics, anyway), as a surprising example of metanalysis, or recutting. From NOAD:

noun metanalysis: Linguistics the process by which the division between words or parts of words is changed, resulting in the creation of a new word (as in the development of an apron from a napron)

More detail, with an extension of the concept out of historical linguistics, in my 11/19/09 posting “Ask AZBlog: metanalysis”.

And then on newts the creatures rather than newt the word, from my 5/13/17 posting “Toxic moments”, about “the rough-skinned newt, the most ridiculously poisonous animal in America”. A further note from Wikipedia:

(#9) “The rough-skinned newt or roughskin newt (Taricha granulosa) is a North American newt [found throughout the Pacific Northwest, and south as far as Santa Cruz] known for the strong toxin exuded from its skin.”

I haven’t encountered Taricha granulosa, and  that’s fine with me. I also assume that it’s not one of Ruthie’s newts, since she keeps on appearing in my comics feed. (Though I have considered the possibility that Ruthie’s actually one of the species of snake that can eat T. granulosa without harm. Does she look reptilian to you?)

(Well, it’s crudely jokey men’s underwear, so not to everyone’s taste.)

As advertised on the cheap-shopping site Wish recently, these remarkable boxer briefs with a pattern showing a black bear peering out from an open fly, surmounted by a belt:

(#1) He comes in colors / You can tell him from the clothes he wears

(Hat tip to a net friend who came upon this item among pages of teaser offers on the Wish site. I spent an hour or two trying to find the listing on the site, hoping to see how it was described, but without success.)

I was moved to break out boldly in anapests:

Bearfly boy with cheek of orange

The belt is as faux as the fly
And the bear is a trickstery dick;
The buckle can’t prong any hole
And the bearfly is minus a prick

And then I discovered that there was an entire genre of cheap men’s underwear with simulated belts or joke pouches or (very often) both, in lots of colors.

Two further items in the genre:

(#2) From AliExpress, belt-print low-rise briefs in various colors — here, in pink

(#3) From the DressLily site, faux belt and faux button fly, advertised as “funny belt printed button design boxer briefs” (also available in many colors)

Say “Hi!” to the pouchbear; you can’t always see him, but there’s one nestled in every package.

(Intended as an entertainment in tough times. There will, however, be male bodyparts and mansex, in sometimes very plain language, so in general not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

It starts with a regular feature of this blog: advertisements for premium men’s underwear that treat men’s bodies simultaneously as the engines of vigorous athletic pursuits and as the loci of hot sex between men. And, correspondingly, that view the underwear — especially the quintessentially masculine undergarment, the jockstrap — as simultaneously a piece of sports gear and a vehicle for sexual advertisement, displaying a man’s package prominently in front and his bare buttocks behind.

Exhibit #1 is a Daily Jocks ad from 3/31 for a jockstraps sale, featuring a muscular model with a remarkable bubble butt, who is sporting a handsome deep red jockstrap with matching harness and socks, while poised midway between the position for doing pushups and one offering his ass for sex.

The accompanying jockstrap sale catalogue then takes us on a jaunt from Surry Hills, near Sydney NSW in Australia (where the Supawear company has its headquarters) through Hawaii and northern California (Berkeley and Sunnyvale) to San Pedro Town in northern Belize. And then back by plane from San Pedro to Sydney.

But first, below the fold, the world-class bubble butt on display, with a fanciful caption of my own devising:

(#1)

Sporking

from Buttpush,
Versatilio can
pivot in seconds to
Pushup or to
Humped Up in Heat

responding to the
exigencies of the
occasion

The point is that what Versatilio is doing is neither a good pushup nor a good humping up to get fucked, though he can move from the position in #1 to either of these pretty easily. Well, he’s a jock; he’s good with his body.

For comparison, first, an illustration of good form for pushups:

(#2) From the site of POWER: Chiropractic Health Center in Longmont CO (I note, but will not comment on, “maintain a perfectly flat position when going down”)

When doing a pushup, it’s no butt in the air.  If you’re humping up to get fucked, that’s pretty much the whole point.

So, from my 12/30/18 posting “Sexual displays > offers: prone, supine, lateral”, in a section on prone displays of the naked male body, focused on the model’s buttocks (this is a version of a more explicit AZBlogX piece):

Many gay men, responding to their predilections and desires, would look upon these butts and find them arousing, would be inclined to view them as implicit offers; but they’re just posed bodies. Sometimes, however, the offer is explicit: the subject spreads his legs and humps up his ass, making his asshole available (and his cock and balls visible), as here:

(#3) Richard Vytniorgu, spread and humped up…

Spread and humped up, … in a variant of the prone position, but now offering his body. He could be easily fucked in this position, or he could raise himself up on his knees, offering himself for a doggie fuck

That’s all about exhibit #1. Intrigued by the jockstrap there, I went to the Daily Jocks sale page to see what other jocks they had on offer. And found some wonderful stuff.

The Jockstrap Trail. The DJ ad copy:

Don’t hide your best assets – feel sexy and confident in our designer range of men’s jockstraps underwear … guaranteed to turn heads and enhance all of your best features.

(Note that no athletic functions of the jockstrap are touted here. It’s confidence, fashion, and attractiveness to other men.)

The first station on the trail: Sydney. Just one row of jocks from the Supawear company (headquartered near Sydney), in two different lines:

(#4) Two jocks from the Galaxy line, featuring intense bright colors; and two from the POW line, with fancifully patterned pouches — notably the Fruit Punch jock, with a variety of colorful fruits (you can see a strawberry and part of a pineapple)

The Galaxy jocks look like they would actually work as athletic supporters, albeit dramatic and fashion-conscious ones. The POW jocks have thinner bands and straps and strike me entirely as items of a costume rather than as functional jocks to sweat in. That’s not a complaint — I get a big kick out of the POW line — just an observation that they’re symbolic, not actual, gymwear. Their function is as homowear, to provide an entertaining wrapper for a guy’s dick and balls, one that an audience can appreciate, while making his ass available.

[Late-breaking addendum: a 4/2 mailing from DJ, with this ad featuring a Supawear POW Dessert pouch (you’re so sweet I could just eat you up):

(#5) A pouch of sweets (note to model: no teeth on that sucker, sucker! lick it and mouthe it, don’t bite!)

End of addendum.]

Surely fruit punch was chosen intentionally as a pattern and a name, evoking the slur fruit (now defiantly reclaimed by many of us fruits), and combining faggy fruit with aggressive punch — butch fagginess is all over the place. (Imagined dialogue: “Hey, dude, cute jock; can I fondle your fruit?”)

The second station on the trail: Hawaii. The power of associative thinking then kicked in and fruit punch led me to the commercial powerhouse of fruit punches: Hawaiian Punch:

(#6) (from the Hawaiian Punch company site)

Note that Hawaiian Punch is symbolically, not actually, Hawaiian; it incorporates some ingredients from Hawaii to create a southern California product that evokes Hawaii. Some official company history:

In 1934, A.W. Leo, Tom Yates, and Ralph Harrison developed the first Hawaiian Punch recipe in a converted garage in Fullerton, California [in Orange County]. They wanted a tropical-tasting syrup to add to their line of ice cream toppings sold under the trade name Pacific Citrus Products Company. “Leo’s Hawaiian Punch,” as the brand was called at the time, was sold to area restaurants, soda fountains, and ice cream manufacturers. The “Leo’s” was dropped from Hawaiian Punch several years later. The main ingredients of the first Hawaiian Punch recipe were shipped from the Hawaiian Islands, thus the origin of the name.

The graphic in #5 shows the company mascot, Punchy, who was the central figure in a famous ad campaign of the 1960s and 70s, exploiting a simple pun on punch:

From the Cartoons Plus site:

In 1962, the Atherton-Privett ad agency created a 20-second commercial to advertise Hawaiian Punch drink.

You can see the 1962 commercial here (#7).

The commercial was produced by John Urie and Associates in Hollywood. Jean Guy Jacques was the director; Bob Guidi and John Urie designed the two characters, Punchy and Oaf. Ross Martin did Punchy’s voice, “Hey! How ’bout a nice Hawaiian Punch?” and John Urie did Oaf’s line, “Sure”. Rod Scribner animated the commercials. Sam Cornell also worked on the later versions. Oaf never learned to say “No” and he was always punched. The commercial ended with Punchy leaning on a can of Hawaiian Punch, saying, “Wasn’t that a refreshing commercial?” The commercial won many awards.

The third station on the trail: northern California. The Hawaiian Punch ads turn on a pun on the punch of fruit punch. But then there’s a whole world of word play that turns on a pun on the fruit of fruit punch — employing the anti-gay slur fruit, now wielded, defiantly and also playfully, as an affirmation of queerness in a hostile world.

Two notable examples from northern California: gay radio in Berkeley, gay comedy in Sunnyvale.

From Wikipedia on the slang term fruit:

Fruit Punch was the first gay radio show in the United States, and possibly the world, which aired weekly from 1982–1987 from Berkeley radio station KPFA, the first listener-supported radio broadcaster in the United States.

(My first resonse was surprise that this came so late, given that Stonewall happened in 1969, and energized a series of defiant gay activist groups virtually immediately. But of course the commercial media were generally as least as hostile to lgbt folk as the wider culture.)

Meanwhile, KPFA 94.1 endures.

Then, south and on the peninsula, there was comedy. From the site of the Rooster T. Feathers comedy club in Sunnyvale CA, the show for 6/6/12:

FRUIT PUNCH! An Evening of Gay and Gay Friendly Comedy is back at Rooster T. Feathers Comedy Club. It’s a diverse evening of stand up comedy featuring gay and gay friendly comics from the Bay Area and beyond! All are welcome- Whether you’re Gay, Lesbian, Straight, Bi, Questioning or just like to get drunk and make out with everybody you see. San Francisco’s favorite fierce comedic tranny tart Pippi Lovestocking hosts with appearances by Natasha Muse, Beth Schumann, Jennie McNulty, Ronn Vigh and headliner Scott Silverman!

Rooster T. Feathers also endures.

The fourth station on the trail: San Pedro in Belize. Go back to #4 and look at the first two jocks in it — with SPRSYD on the waistband. Mystery initialism, not explained anywhere on the Supawear site, so far as I could see.

Was it a secret slogan — Show Prodigious Rear, Show Your Dick? SPRay SYDney? — or what?

Ah, SYD isn’t just an abbreviation for Sydney, it’s specifically the code for Sydney airport. Could SPR be an airport too?

Astonishingly, yes: San Pedro, in Belize (yes, Belize, the country on the Caribbean coast of Central America, in between Mexico and Guatemala). So a flight between SPR and SYD, halfway around the world (ca. 8,650 mis.) would be a SPRSYD flight. There don’t seem to be any actual flights, so we have to treat this as a flight of the imagination, merely evoking exotic Caribbean shores.

San Pedro, originally a small fishing village settled mostly by Mexicans, is now a very popular tourist destination, especially for scuba diving. Most San Pedrans speak both Spanish and English fluently, so it’s congenial to English speakers.

Besides the diving, San Pedro is famous for its annual Gran Carnaval, celebrated a week before Ash Wednesday. This turns out to be a festival of transgressive sex and gender, with a bonus of face and body painting. From Wikipedia on El Gran Carnaval de San Pedro:

It is meant for people to indulge in bodily pleasures that they will avoid during Lent. Men dress as women, and perform dances for money in the street, with a competition to see who performs the most outlandish dance. On the last day of the carnival people flood the streets to paint one another.

Well, you could do all of this at Mardi Gras in Sydney. Or you could do it in a more intimate and exotic location, and get the plus that you’re taking part in a genuine folk festival.

When you’re done, exhausted but refreshed (as one hopes to be after a ritual of sexual excess), you can take a SPRSYD flight of the mind back to Oz, completing the loop of the trail.