The 4/13 Rhymes With Orange brings us the Grim Reaper and his cats (we know from Terry Pratchett that Death is fond of cats):

(#1)

We don’t know if this Grim Reaper is a general operator, reaping souls of many creatures, including mice; or whether this one is a specialist in mice — perhaps of a tribe, or race, of Grim Mousers; or of a professional guild of them. (See below, on the Death of Rats.)

On the pun mouseleum. From NOAD on its source:

noun mausoleum: a building, especially a large and stately one, housing a tomb or tombs. ORIGIN late 15th century: via Latin from Greek Mausōleion, from Mausōlos, the name of a king of Caria (4th century bc), to whose tomb in Halicarnassus the name was originally applied.

So, a bit of eponymy, with the (proper) name of a specific giant tomb building (itself named after a specific person) coming to be used as a common noun referring to any such building.

Death in Discworld. From Wikipedia:

Death is a fictional character in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series [of comic fantasy novels] and a parody of several other personifications of death. Like most Grim Reapers, he is a black-robed skeleton usually carrying a scythe.

(#2) Death as illustrated by Paul Kidby in The Art of Discworld; the small figure at the bottom right is the Death of Rats

… Death is not invisible; however, most people’s brains refuse to acknowledge him for who he is, unless he insists. Under normal circumstances, only those of a magical disposition (e.g. witches and wizards), children, and cats can see him, or allow themselves to see him.

… He is fond of cats, who can see him at all times

… The Death of Rats, also known as the Grim Squeaker, is not, strictly speaking, a personification in his own right but rather an aspect of Death allowed an independent existence. His purpose is to usher on the souls of dead rodents, as well as assisting Death in other ways.

The Death of Jockstraps. By stunning coincidence, the Daily Jocks on-line ad on 4/14 featured a skeletal underwear model that I took to be an inadvertent image of the Death of Jockstraps (y’know, like the Death of Rats):

(#3) Ad copy: “Sleek, stylish and renowned for its powerful designs, Modus Vivendi underwear is a Thessaloniki based brand with a God-like aesthetic”

#3 would appear to be a product of the Modus Morendi division of the company, supplying glistening, sinewy, wild-haired, starvation-doomed models wearing showy jocks that are about to be discontinued. The Death of Jockstraps.

(About gay male presentations of self, but with a fair amount on men’s bodies and mansex in plain language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

Yesterday’s mailing from Daily Jocks, with an ad for Sparta’s colorful fetishwear: harnesses and underwear (in this case, a jockstrap), plus my (parodic) caption (apologies to Rick Blaine):

(#1)
Of all the dungeons
in all the queer clubs
in all the world,
he walks into mine.

Play me, Sam.
Play My Ass Gets Hot.

(The original Casablanca quote:

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine. Play it, Sam. Play As Time Goes By.

And then Sam does. You must remember this.)

The actual ad copy. All fierce and warlike:

30% OFF SPARTA’S HARNESSES

Built and bred for battle, ancient Spartans centred their culture on dedication, discipline and service. Well, when it comes to the bedroom, we don’t think much has changed. Show off your fierce warrior side when you buckle and secure yourself into a Spartan’s Latex Harness.

Well, the men might be fierce and muscular, but their fetish apparel is decidedly fashion-forward, in luscious intense colors and designs. Would straght guys wear such things? Probably not, but then it wasn’t designed for them. It’s butch fagginess, designed for macho queers who flaunt their sexuality.

It’s a homomasculine genre of clothing to accompany a particular brand of homomasculine presentation of self.  A genre that brings us stocky muscle bears in bright pink mini-briefs:

(#2)

And even sweaty scruffy muscle hunks embracing passionately:

(#3) An early stage in the Michigan-Princeton game, no goals yet scored — but their briefs are beautiful

An earlier posting on the company’s harnesses: on 8/14/19, in “Il Leopardo di Sparta”, with a section on butch fagginess

Postings about butch fagginess. Beginning with the 8/14/18 posting “Butch fagginess”, which sets the stage:

Some premium men’s underwear firms advertise to men in general (and women who buy clothes for men), though with a special pitch to gay men, but a few — among them, Barcode Berlin — aim themselves directly at a queer clientele. BB’s crop tees display attractive midriffs, and the models project muscular masculinity — solidly butch — but the tees also convey sociosexual messages in teasing and boastful ways that echo the open banter of queer men amongst themselves, acting faggy: faggy minus fem(me), butch fagginess).

(#4)

The tee above advertises “I’m a slut, honey”, while the rest of the model’s presentation shouts “And I’m all man!” (Others are more outrageous). And if you ask me, that’s just as it should be: we’re men, and we should be comfortable with that; we desire men, so we should value (some forms of) masculinity in other men; however, we reject central aspects of heteronormative sexuality, and our behavior should reflect that (proudly and defiantly, if necessary); and we embrace means of establishing and reinforcing communities with one another, so we adopt (some) ways of behaving that both unite us and set us apart from other men.

… These garments scream “I’m queer! And butch! And that’s wonderful! You too?” They’re advertisements for one specifically gay style of masculinity. There are others: celebratorily fem(me)/sissy styles (about which I’ll have more to say in another posting); gender-fluid styles; “regular guy” homosexuality (attempting to adopt all the trappings of heteronormative masculinity except for the sex of one’s partner); MSM “just sex” configuration of male-male pairing (embracing mansex  as celebratory male bonding while rejecting gay as identity, community, or source of affectional partnership); and hypermasculine homosexuality (Berlin Barcode caters to this audience in many of its products).

Then other mentions:

— on 3/31/19, in “Moon short 1: the Moons”

— on 4/21/19, in Let’s have a kiki … in me

— on 8/14/19, in “Il Leopardo di Sparta” (above)

— on 10/12/19, in  “Butch fagginess, take 3”

— on 10/14/19, in “Space Candy”

— on 10/16/19, in “Adventures in homomasculinity: the pink jock”

— on 4/2/20, in “Astride the jockstrap trail”

(Extremely minimally dressed men, with discussion of their bodies and of mansex in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Annals of men’s underwear, starting with some extremely minimal items, including one that claims to be anti-bacterial; notes on armpit and crotch sweat and its associated bacteria, with their characterstic smells and tastes; and (a surprise bonus) the advertised virtues of merino wool underwear and t-shirts.

Under the fold, I’ll start with two of the more remarkable minimalist items: the Echo Mesh jock pouch (and harness) from CellBlock13; and pro wrestler John Cena in a hot pink banana hammock.

The Echo Mesh jock pouch, in a Daily Jocks ad mailing of 5/13, a cock tease pose that’s so close to the line that the mailing came with a NSFW warning:

(#1) Unabashed homowear; note the model’s erect nipples and his adorable mini tit piercings

But wait — there’s more! Here he is in sideview:

(#2) Displaying a nobly muscular fuckable ass (and black socks to match the rest of his ensemble)

I find these poses incredibly hot (as they were intended to be for queers like me) and simultaneously quite funny, because of their extravagant intensity. (Get over yourself, Butch!)

(The ad copy merely says, rather laconically: “The Echo Mesh Jock Pouch and Harness are made from a sturdy, textured polyester/spandex mesh for length, fit and comfort.”)

The hot pink banana hammock, in contrast, is flagrantly outrageous heterowear, worn playfully by John Cena, who mostly would just prefer displaying his big dick, uncovered even minimally, with boyish glee. (So much cock display by straight guys is earnest, anxious, dick pics, which are really creepy; Cena flaunts his with gusto and a laugh.)

Hat tip from Mark Mandel to this posting on the TMZ site, “John Cena Wears ‘Hot Pink Banana Hammock’ … I Like ‘The Fit'”, on 4/24/20:

Forget boxers vs. briefs … John Cena rocks a BANANA HAMMOCK in his real day-to-day life because he likes the way it fits.

Yep.

The WWE superstar was doing an interview/photo shoot with Men’s Journal when he changed clothes between shots right in front of the reporter … revealing his “hot pink” banana hammock thong.

As the reporter put it … “Picture just some poor spandex holding on for dear life.”

When the reporter asked 43-year-old Cena if that was his usual underwear (and not some special piece for the photo shoot), John confirmed that he’s a hammock man, through and through.

(#3) Cena and his beloved pink thong

“It is [my underwear] … More for the fit, less for the color.”

Hey, if it works for you!!!

Naturally, we did some digging … that’s what we do … and found out this wasn’t just a one-off.

Cena famously rocked a black banana hammock thong during a WWE segment back in the day … while admitting he has a “thing” with nudity.

“I really honestly don’t know my thing with nudity,” Cena said … “It got to be like a joke. Like, I could use it to ease a situation up. There would be some tension and I would get naked. And, people would be like, ‘Alright it’s not that bad.”

(#4) Cena doing a cock tease. From the Gay Male Celebs (that’s male celebs for gays, not necessarily celebs who are gay males) site “John Cena Nude and Sexy Photos” from 4/10/19: “John Cena, a famous American wrestler, loves his body very much and is always happy to flaunt it. Recently he shared a video posing absolutely nude showing off his incredible chest, rippling muscles and big thick dick. And when he leaned over, he showed off his wonderful ass, and it looked very hot and sexy. This man undoubtedly loves to be the center of attention, and he deserves it.”

(The TMZ piece shows a clip with Cena in a huge fake Afro, a black banana hammock, and gold shoes. No good single shot that shows the whole costume, unfortunately. Cena comes off as a straight guy who spent a lot of time developing his body and delights in showing it off, and is cool with being a lust object for some large number of gay guys.)

[Digression on John Cena, who I seem not to have posted about, at least on this blog. From Wikipedia:

John Felix Anthony Cena Jr. (/ˈsiːnə/; born April 23, 1977) is an American professional wrestler, actor, rapper, and television presenter [originally a bodybuilder]. He is currently signed to WWE on a part-time deal. He is also the current host of Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? on Nickelodeon, and has starred in various films.

(#5) Cena in his work clothes

… Outside of his work in entertainment, he is known for his involvement in numerous charitable causes

On RAW, from Wikipedia: “WWE Raw, also known as Monday Night Raw or simply Raw, is an American professional wrestling television program that currently airs live on Monday evenings on the USA Network from 8:00–11:00 PM EST in the United States.”

Cena is famously hard-working and also entertainingly self-mocking. And his causes include campaigns against bullying (which he suffered from extensively as a boy) and homophobia. From Cena’s Twitter on the 7/4/16 [note: the 4th of July] The Independence Day video: “Celebrate the diversity that makes America great”, in part:

What really makes up this country of ours? What do we love? The people. Almost half the country belongs to minority groups. People who are lesbian, African American, bi, transgender, and Native American, and proud of it. After all, what’s more American than the freedom to celebrate the things that make us, us. This year, patriotism shouldn’t just be about pride of country. It should be about love. Love beyond age, disability, sexuality, race, religion or any other labels. Because the second any of us judge people based on those labels, we’re not really being patriotic, are we? Because love has no labels.

Good on him.

End of digression.]

More DJ minimalism. John Cena is lots of fun, but let’s return to our muttons.

From Daily Jocks on 5/12, the DJX Trough [as in pigs feeding] black jockstrap (with matching harness and socks):

(#6) Just the pouch, man; I snap my strap for you, buddy: compare to #1

This one actually seems playful, though he is clearly offering his body. (But I’ve posted a lot about this model, who I’m fond of, and now view as a kind of old sex buddy.)

The general copy from DJ about this line of underwear (sensitive to the current state of the world):

DJX  fetish wear has quickly became must have party wear for guys all around the world. Whether you are getting ready for the end of lockdown or just partying at home DJX has you covered.

The specific copy for #6:

Get party ready with the DJX Trough Jockstrap. Featuring a dual-layered breathable pouch, which is as soft to the touch as it is enhancing. You won’t want to take these off.

Oh yes, you will.

And then the DJ ad offer from 4/20, for the Obviously Apparel company, with not just pouch comfort but anti-bacterial properties:

(#7) An ad for the PrimeMan line of underwear, in several styles (brief, boxer brief, thong) and many colors

A range of the offerings:

(#8) Minimalist thongs and mini briefs; love those pouches

Crucially, this ad copy:

Uncomfortable underwear is more serious than scratchiness or getting a wedgie.

Obviously Apparel’s proprietary anatomical pouch and anti-bacterial material combine for a long-term comfort you’ll fall in love with.

Sex sweat meets skin bacteria. And yields the smell of a body. Which anti-bacterial substances are designed to defeat (and fragrances and deodorants are designed to mask).

I’ll use sex sweat as a technical term here (cruxisudor would have been a Latinate coining for the purpose), to refer to the sweat produced by the apocrine sweat glands in the crotch and the armpit, which is chemically distinct from the sweat produced elsewhere. Then, from my 3/5/17 posting “Body work, Part III: Axillary Delights”, about men’s fragrances and the smell of a man:

when the [sex] sweat hits bacteria resident on the skin, we get an interaction that produces a body odor. … Mostly in the armpit, secondarily in the crotch — magnified some by the axillary and pubic hairs, which trap both the sweat and the resident bacteria.

The axillae (and pubes). The mix of bacteria in these areas is more or less constant. Washing cleans things off, but plenty of bacteria remain — to yield a more or less constant smell for each of us, a smell that others are pretty good at recognizing (even in blind tests). And we have preferences in these smells: some people we’re attracted to, some we’re wary of, some we’re repelled by.

As the Wikipedia article on axilla notes, “These odorant substances [in the axillary region] serve as pheromones which play a role related to mating.”

In a double dactyl, from my 5/25/11 posting “Double dactylic sniff”:

Buggery muggery,
Musk and testosterone,
Masculine scents make a
Great-smelling mate;

Axillar pleasures plus
Cruxiodiferous
Signals send messages
Out to your date.

More than that: these scents — and tastes — can be powerfully satisying emotionally. Pleasures that can be savored by armpit nuzzling (see the 2017 posting) and also as one of the constituent satisfactions of cocksucking. Not only does your man’s cock smell and taste of these substances, in the act itself you’re burying your face in his crotch, inhaling the scent in his pubic hair and covering your face with his sex sweat. Then you get a mouthful of his sweet salty cum.

If the encounter went well, you’ll probably want to avoid washing your face or washing out your mouth, if you can, to hold onto the smell on your face and the taste in your mouth as long as possible, in sweet remembrance — but you should know that other people can detect his sex smell on you, and you might not want to impose that on them.

Lots of complexities here. Tastes, in sex sweat as in everything else, differ, wildly. As I noted in a 2/17/20 posting “Preference labels and little pockets”:

I had a strongly musky scent and taste, sort of like distilled lockerroom, which some men — fortunately, [my man Jacques] was one — found powerfully attractive.

Others were repelled by it. (J’s scent was sharpish, like a wheatfield with a tinge of testosterone. Sometimes more herbal, like coriander with a kick. Yes, though there’s a generally constant body scent, there are variations within a range from time to time.)

Then the bacterial mix can vary. In particular, rogue bacteria can tilt the scent towards a stink.

In the other direction, aggressive washing can’t eliminate the underlying scent, but it can leave an unpleasant soapy residue. Few people want to suck a cock, or lick an armpit, that tastes like soap.

And so I come to anti-bacterial underwear, like the PrimeMan line above. A consumer of dicks for sex would probably be wise to be wary of pubes and dicks suffused with an actually anti-bacterial substance; that’s the soap problem at a higher level. (In addition, the resident bacteria combine with skin oils to make a protective layer on the skin, to hold the line against really nasty microbes, so eliminating the bacteria could be an invitation to medical disaster.).

Now, a thought experiment, based on one of the routines of sex between men, in which a guy bent on sucking cock undoes his guy’s jeans, pulls them down to get at his crotch, in briefs, a jock, a thong, whatever — strokes his guy’s dick through the fabric and then in pointed foreplay mouthes it lovingly through the fabric, bringing it to a full hard-on (and then unveils the prize, the object of his desire, and engorges it). (The sequence can be viewed in thousands of gay porn flicks, and here the porn reflects the practices of everyday gay sex.)

The thought experiment has to do with the stage of mouthing through the underwear: would you do this if you knew the underwear was saturated with a putative antibacterial agent, like triclosan. (What the fuck would that taste like?) I think not.

It’s not easy to figure out what’s going on with the PrimeMan underwear, but I suspect that this isn’t it. I’m guessing that the garments are merely what’s called in the trade breathable: they allow sweat (with its accompanying bacteria) to be rapidly expressed though them, to evaporate in the outside air.

And that brings me to some recent reports from Ned Deily, who was (for no reason he could discern) assailed by on-line ads for Merino wool undergarments, whose great breathability is one of their big selling points.

Maintenant, revenons à nos moutons. Now quite literally; there will be sheep.

First, Ned was offered Woolx boxer briefs:

(#9) Merino wool (finer and softer than regular wool, so: soft and non-wrinkling, but nevertheless wool — it must be washed in cold water and air dried)

From the Woolx site:

Wool is exceptionally breathable and naturally wicks moisture away from the wearer to the surface of the fabric where sweat can evaporate – keeping you cool and dry.  Wool can absorb up to 30% of its weight in water and still feel dry to the touch, ensuring you won’t get the clammy, clingy feeling you can from other fabrics. The Lanolin in wool is naturally antimicrobial, killing the bacteria that creates odor, not only will you feel fresh and clean in Merino Wool underwear you’ll smell that way too!

Lanolin is wonderful stuff, but I see no evidence that it is actually antimicrobial. From Wikipedia:

Lanolin and its many derivatives are used extensively in both the personal care (e.g., high value cosmetics, facial cosmetics, lip products) and health care sectors such as topical liniments [to treat cuts, scratches, and abrasions, and to soften the skin]. Lanolin is also found in lubricants, rust-preventive coatings, shoe polish, and other commercial products.

I also wonder whether I’d find it comfortable to mouthe a cock through wool, even very fine and fabulous wool. Well, I wonder what it tastes like — like sucking a sweater? I wonder if anyone has experiences to report.

Ned was musing quizzically on the Woolx ad when an ad for Merino Unbound t-shirts arrived. He began to feel pursued by sheep.

The ad:

(#10)

From the site:

(#11)

It’s all in the breathability.

But the sheep, nos moutons. From Wikipedia:

(#12)

The Merino is one of the most historically relevant and economically influential breeds of sheep, much prized for its wool. The breed was originated and improved in Extremadura, in southwestern Spain, around the 12th century; it was instrumental in the economic development of 15th and 16th century Spain, which held a monopoly on its trade, and since the end of the 18th century it was further refined in New Zealand and Australia, giving rise to the modern Merino.

Today, Merinos are still regarded as having some of the finest and softest wool of any sheep.

… Merino [have] been domesticated and bred in ways that would not allow them to survive well without regular shearing by their owners. They must be shorn at least once a year because their wool does not stop growing. If this is neglected, the overabundance of wool can cause heat stress, mobility issues, and even blindness.

The miracle, and the curse, of selective breeding.

From two friends on Facebook (lightly edited) on Tuesday (US Memorial Day having been on Monday):

1: What is up with “Happy Memorial Day?” It’s a day to remember the dead … I feel like people have no idea what Memorial Day is!

2: I’ve seen a lot of “happy” Memorial Day comments too. Unfathomable.

For them, such well-wishings are akin to “Happy Yom Kippur” (the Day of Atonement in Judaism) or “Merry Good Friday” (Crucifixion Day in Christianity) as expressions of goodwill — deeply at odds with the solemnity of the occasions.

Their reactions have been shared by many others. There’s a simple response, which I gave on Facebook and repeat below. Then there’s a more complex, messy response. (The topic will eventually lead, given my inclinations, to discussions of homowear and gay porn for the holiday — definitely racy, but not, I think, quite over the line into Not Safe For Minors territory.)

A longer discussion of the negative reactions to Happy Memorial Day — in HuffPost, “The Problem With Saying ‘Happy Memorial Day’: Many Americans see this seemingly harmless holiday phrase as quite the faux pas” by Caroline Bologna from 5/23/19, updated 5/19/20:

We’re nearing Memorial Day, which to many Americans means time off work, permission to wear white, an occasion to fire up the grill, and other fun start-of-summer fare. If you scroll through Instagram on Monday, you’ll likely see a number of sunny (and hopefully socially distanced) photos with the caption “Happy Memorial Day!”

But the joyful word “happy” has rubbed some people the wrong way and caused quite a debate. Indeed, while Veterans Day is a time to honor all those who have served in the military, Memorial Day is meant to pay tribute to those military personnel who died while serving. Thus, the latter carries a more somber tone.

… In 2015, Marine Corps veteran Jennie Haskamp wrote a piece for The Washington Post in which she shared her frustration with the sentiment of “Happy Memorial Day” and the holiday’s transformation into “grilled meat, super-duper discounts, a day (or two) off work, beer, potato salad and porches draped in bunting.” Instead, she argued, it should be more than that.

My Facebook summary:

What seems to be going on here is that there’s an official holiday (roughly analogous to a religious holiday) and there’s a popular, or folk, holiday (roughly analogous to a secular holiday) that has developed from the official holiday. Memorial Day the official holiday is a solemn occasion for remembering and honoring the war dead. Memorial Day the popular holiday is the beginning of the summer season, the day when summer events and practices open up, so a time for celebration, and it has its own customs, which have absolutely nothing to do with the war dead. Compare the Christian religious holiday Halloween (All Hallows’ Eve), the beginning of a three-day observance honoring the dead, especially the saints and martyrs, versus popular Halloween, with its witch figures, trick-or-treating, and all the rest.

Insisting that a holiday can have only its original meaning is a form of irrational Originalism, like insisting that quarantine can be used only for isolation periods of exacty 40 days. But sociocultural practices (including linguistic usages, but also customs of many kinds) alter over time, fracture into several new ones, merge syncretically with practices from other cultures — though the labels used for them are often maintained throughout these transformations, so that they become ambiguous, with several clearly distinct denotations, and often fuzzy as well, with unclear boundaries between the different referents. There’s more than one Christmas, and people frequently mix elements of the religious Christmases (in different Christian communities) and the various folk Christmases indiscriminately. Memorial Day turns out to be a lot like that.

There’s nothing wrong with valorizing one of the uses of a linguistic expression, like Memorial Day, Halloween, or Christmas, but insisting that your use is the only legitimate one is just pigheaded bullying.

Mingled meanings. For Memorial Day, things go well beyond the simple division into an official holiday and a popular holiday: the official holiday has been imbued with associations well beyond the war dead, to take in military service in general (note the careful distinction in the HuffPost piece between the purposes of Memorial Day and Veterans Day, though it’s often elided), and to serve as another occasion for American triumphalist patriotism (largely through prominent displays of the American flag), along with Flag Day, the Fourth of July, and Veterans Day (the last being roughly equivalent to Armistice Day outside the US).

This mingling of associations turns out to be very common. Here’s the whole package, in the posting “Happy Memorial Day, from the USW” (United Steelworkers) on 5/27/19:

(#1) Both “serve” (veterans and current members of the military) and “sacrifice” (the military dead), plus a big American flag: everything for an official holiday, but nothing here about the popular holiday

One point here is that if you widen the official holiday to embrace military service in general and also patriotism, then it becomes a day of celebration, virtually a Fourth of July in May, and picnics and the like are entirely appropriate. (I ritually eat hot dogs — always Hebrew National all-beef, with pickles, onions, and mustard — on two occasions each year: Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. Nostalgia for these occasions in my childhood, though for some years now I’ve eaten alone, rather than in company with family and friends — this year at home rather than at the Peninsula Creamery in Palo Alto.)

Now, you could take the position that it’s just wrong to jumble Memorial Day up with the Fourth of July and Veterans Day. Then you’re a purist, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s just annoying to berate those of more latitudinarian bent for not sharing your purism.

Obviously, with those Memorial Day hot dogs, I’m no purist. Elsewhere on this blog (search under “Maple Donuts”) I’ve expressed my deep disquiet with aggressive displays of the American flag, but picnics and the like, let’s go!

HomoMemorial Day. Any occasion with a whiff of a military theme is an occasion for selling homowear (gay-inflamed premium men’s underwear and other clothing) and gay porn flicks. In the fantasy world of Gayland, it’s all guys; the trappings of masculinity are highly valued (as is only natural, since Gaylanders desire men as sexual partners); and military men are a distillation of young tough masculinity, they handle weapons they can fire off, and so on — so of course they are high-octane fantasy lust objects (for many actual gay men; I don’t really get their pull).

Give me some men who are stout-hearted men,
Who will fight, for the right they adore,
Start me with ten who are stout-hearted men,
And I’ll soon give you ten thousand more.
Shoulder to shoulder and bolder and bolder,
They grow as they go to the fore.
Then there’s nothing in the world can halt or mar a plan,
When stout-hearted men can stick together man to man.
— “Stout-Hearted Men” from New Moon (Sigmund Romberg / Frank Mandel / Laurence Schwab / Oscar Hammerstein II) from 1927

(I note that this was apparently written in total innocence, extolling manly brotherhood. Which can be, by the way, a very good thing. I don’t laugh at the sentiment, but at its extravagant formulation, which encourages alternative readings.)

In any case, Memorial Day is a prime military occasion, so you’re going to see a fair amount of homowear and tons of gay porn flicks (you do have to put death out of your mind to appreciate these works).

On the first, from my 5/30/17 posting “Flagging America”:

A recent Daily Jocks ad, with a N2N speedo-style Stars and Stripes swimsuit for Memorial Day, yesterday, also looking forward to Flag Day on June 14th and Independence Day on July 4th :

(#2)

On the second, a sampling from earlier postings of mine, in the 5/28/18 posting “More porn for the holidays”:

On the 26th, about the Lucas gay porn sale for Memorial Day 2018: “Memorial mansex” on AZBlogX; and “Porn for the holidays, with narrowed eyes” on this blog, about offering gay porn for various holidays (for Memorial Day as a cultural celebration of summer, in particular), and about interpreting narrowed eyes and drooping eyes.

Now, in “More Memorial mansex” on AZBlogX today, two more gay porn ads for the holiday: one from TitanMen featuring Liam Knox; and one from Dirk Yates featuring Rod Peterson. Here I’ll pick up some themes from those ads: from the Titan, Knox’s tats, and what tats convey; from the DY, a note on palming off pros as amateurs, plus reality vs. fiction and the playful invention new cummer.

(#3) Rod Peterson playing a Marine kid who is (in this cropped photo) inhaling a buddy from the base; caption at the bottom: “Starring new cummer Rod Peterson”

The TitanMen has no rationale beyond celebrating summer, while the DY exploits the military origins of the holiday to offer what’s billed as gay sex performed by straight Marines who are amateurs at porn (and so taps into audiences for straight guys as sex objects, for military men as sex objects, and for amateur, real-life sex, as opposed to fantasies crafted by pros).

And then, while I was preparing this posting, there appeared the 2020 Memorial Day sale from TitanMen, offering an assortment of military-themed flicks (and more), including one I’d been unaware of: American Military Grade Bukkake (Joe Gage Private Stock) from Dragon Media (2015). I won’t try to illustrate it here or on AZBlogX, but I have looked at a trailer, which is just a montage of men getting facefuls of cum from their military buddies. Just the sex man, in this case the sex advertised in the title.

Gage, however, is famous for his long-form porn flicks in which the complexities of relationships between men (mostly in pairs) are explored in some detail via their sexual connections, often with subtlety. He’s also been good at unearthing porn actors who are naturals at this, and at coaxing believable performances from others. Not high art — its principal function is to get queers  off, after all (and it certainly works for me) — but within the extraordinarily tight constraints of the genre, it’s very well crafted.

I’m hoping that the new video falls in with the rest of his work, though you can’t tell that from the trailer. Plus, bukkake, many men on one, would seem like a barren ground for Gage’s usual explorations of the emotional world of mansex.

But it certainly has a big bunch of guys framed as military men.

(Lots about men’s bodies and mansex, in very plain language. Not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Poetry inspired by a recent event in my life and by one of my favorite Frank O’Hara poems, “Lana Turner has collapsed!”. That will lead ineluctably to the Persian-born bodybuilder, underwear model, and gay pornstar Arad Winwin. Everything below the fold.

The images have died!

I was negligently watching MSNBC
and enjoying being powerfully
pronged by my hot Persian hunk Arad Winwin, who
models outrageous underwear for Andrew Christian and
also fucks a ton of studs in porn videos,
when the tv shimmered into flickers
and commentator Joshua Johnson, who is
animated and cute and black and gay, the
whole package, fell silent and the screen
vanished into darkness and, so sorry, Arad, you
need to pull out of me, don’t go far, baby, I’m just
going to revive the fucking television,
but, oh no, the phone tech guy says
MY TV SET HAS DIED!
there is no Joe Scarborough
there is no Rachel Maddow
I have nearly died lots of times,
twice recently, which scared the fuck out of me,
but I never actually crossed the line
oh NAXA Arad and I love you come back

(Joe Scarborough of MSNBC’s Morning Joe is distinguished as the only non-gay person named in the poem. I think it’s useful to have at least one token straight in any work, so that straight people won’t feel completely excluded or disregarded.)

(Loosely modeled on the O’Hara, capturing somewhat the feel of his onrushing, discursive poetry — plus the flagrant gay carnality of some of his poems.)

See my 6/6/19 posting “What makes the world go round?”, with a section on Frank O’Hara, including the Lana Turner poem (set in NYC):

Lana Turner has collapsed!

I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

Arad Winwin. A real person. Well, the stage name of a real person. Previously on this blog, in my 9/7/19 posting “Big sexy prime birthday gay ice cream”, about its image #2:

(#1) [Lucas Studios writeup:] Welcome to the pleasuredome: studly and sturdy gay pornstars Arad Winwin, Rafael Alencar, and Edji Da Silva invite dickdevotees to celebrate the changing of the seasons with Lucas flicks, in particular with the recently released barebacking flick All-Star Orgy [fuller coverage in the 9/17/19 posting on AZBlogX, “The boys of the end of summer”]

A rich career in gay porn. And an equally rich one as an underwear model, mostly for Andrew Christian (known for his fabulously faggy, and strikingly fashionable, designs as well as his outrageous ad campaigns). The AC puff for him (reproduced here as is):

ARAD: BEAUTIFUL AND EXOTIC

Sexy, smart,and cool, Arad is the Full-package! From his sexy smile, his strong muscles, and his noticeable Trophy Boy package, Arad will have not trouble getting you going! You’re going to enjoy getting to know this super-hot Persian hunk in and out of his favorite AC briefs.

Then, from the Underwear News Briefs site on 8/7/18:

(#2) Cory Zwierzynski – Dan Yates – Arad Winwin

Pride month may be over but that doesn’t mean you can’t get in the Pride spirit with your underwear. Andrew Christian has the limited edition Love Digital Pride Brief. It’s in the colors of the rainbow and has LOVE on the waistband. It’s a really fun and eye-catching design.

… One more thing, if you go out on the town in this brief, the pair glows under black light. You can strip off the shirt and hit the dance floor knowing that the undies under your jeans will shine brightly for all to see.

And finally, whoa!, bodybuilder Arad in AC’s FUKR line, hand in his briefs, clutching his dick (a porn standard 7″, which looks even bigger, because he’s only 5’6″ tall); oh yes, he’s a dominant, aggressive top:

(#3) FUKR Arad

[On the line:] The FUKR line is a creation of sexy and naughty styles, perfect for the bedroom or a night of lust. The designs feature see-through mesh materials, crotchless styles, open backs, shiny leatherette and rubber-look fabrics and in-built c-rings all for your desire. Many styles have a matching harness or they can be paired up with some socks to give you a full gear outfit

Pure homowear for sexual display, no suggestion that you’d actually wear these items as underwear; they’re for bedrooms and nights of lust. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

In any case, #3 is the Arad who was fucking me in the poem.

Bonus poem, also on my dead TV, Lana Turner, and gay porn. From Chris Hansen on 5/28, on hearing that I was working on a poem combining in some way these three things, this playful take-off on the hymn tune Sine Nomine (“For all the saints”):

My TV’s dead, and all the saints are sad.
Lana T’s collapsed, and that is very bad.
And so we all rejoice, ‘cause gay porn’s still so rad.
Alleluia, alleluia!

On this blog, my 11/4/19 posting “For all the saints” (with the actual music).

(Real-life footnote: a new tv/dvd player will arrive this week. The tv is dead; long live the tv.)

(Men’s bodies and mansex in plain language, so not for kids or the sexually modest. This is a guest column by my sexy alter ego Alex Adams.)

A prequel to AZ’s Pentecost Sunday (5/31) posting “The death of images”, in which “My tv has died” called up Frank O’Hara’s poem “Lana Turner has collapsed!”, and he folded those two things into a poem of his own, with bodybuilder, gay pornstar, and underwear model Arad Winwin as some glue to hold it all together.

But, you ask (quite reasonably), of all the hot musclehunk tops in the whole gay porn world, how did Arnold come to select this particular one, Arad? Arnold had, after all, been being serviced with deep satisfaction by others of Arad’s carnal brotherhood, with Arad barely on his horizon — but then, whoa!, Arad popped up in a 5/25 Daily Jocks cock-tease ad for a Pump! underwear sale, and refreshed our  memory and our desire. So we took him in.

The guy was undeniably really hot. But was he actually Arad, or merely some Aradesque look-alike?

Alex reflects:

— If the latter, I’d have to negotiate a whole new sexual relationship with him. What do you like to / want to do?, as we say in queer trick-talk. (Everybody sucks cock, and I’m enthusiastic about both giving and getting, but fucking is what this is about; I’m mostly a happy pussy boy, but with a guy who’s more of a bottom than I am, or just happens to need to get fucked at the moment, I’m totally up for that. But I have to know. I need to be what he needs me to be.)

But let me show you my man Aradesque. First, a cock-tease shot:

(#1) From a 5/25 DJ mailing

The face struck me immediately as Arad’s, and I knew Arad did a lot of high-homo underwear modeling.

More followed. The third in the series presented him offering his ass:

(#2) In bottomless boxer briefs

And the fourth (from 5/30) has a different cock-tease:

(#3) Tweaking a tit

In comparison, the original Arad, in an Andrew Christian crotchless brief:

(#4) Arad plays with himself

Yeah, Aradesque has the face, with the same facial hair and pretty much the same haircut, but:

• • Aradesque is hairy-chested, while Arad is always completely smooth (I assume this is his natural state, not the product of constant maniacal shaving)
  • Aradesque has elaborate tats, on his chest, belly, thigh, and left arm from wrist to shoulder, while Arad has one relatively modest tat, on his lower left arm
  • Aradesque has nicely fit legs, while Arad has seriously muscular bodybuilder legs
  • Aradesque has a lean athlete’s trunk, making a V, while Arad has a square and solidly muscular trunk
  • Aradesque has earring studs in both ears, while (so far as I can tell) Arad ‘s ears are always studless

Aradesque is definitely hot, and the DJ ads present him so intensely that you can almost smell his crotch (an effect the PUMP! staff were surely aiming for), but he appears not to be Arad. So I’m going to have to negotiate having sex with him from the ground up. Maybe we could arrange a three-way with Arad.

And now I hand this back to Arnold.

Arabesque. Aradesque, Arabesque, let’s go to the beach. From NOAD:

noun arabesque: 1 Ballet a posture in which the body is supported on one leg, with the other leg extended horizontally backward. 2 an ornamental design consisting of intertwined flowing lines, originally found in Arabic or Moorish decoration: [as modifier]:  arabesque scrolls. 3 Music a passage or composition with fanciful ornamentation of the melody. ORIGIN mid 17th century: from French, from Italian arabesco ‘in the Arabic style’, from arabo ‘Arab’.

Sense 2 is the one I’m after. I spent some time in my teenage years creating Moorish patterns using graph paper (with small cells) and high-quality colored pencils. I remember them fondly, but they seem to have disappeared in the five moves I’ve gone through since then. I even composed some Albéniz Iberia-style piano music.

But, from Wikipedia:

The arabesque is a form of artistic decoration consisting of “surface decorations based on rhythmic linear patterns of scrolling and interlacing foliage, tendrils” or plain lines, often combined with other elements. Another definition is “Foliate ornament, used in the Islamic world, typically using leaves, derived from stylised half-palmettes, which were combined with spiralling stems”. It usually consists of a single design which can be ’tiled’ or seamlessly repeated as many times as desired. Within the very wide range of Eurasian decorative art that includes motifs matching this basic definition, the term “arabesque” is used consistently as a technical term by art historians to describe only elements of the decoration found in two phases: Islamic art from about the 9th century onwards, and European decorative art from the Renaissance onwards.

Two illustrations from the Wikipedia piece (there are better available, but only for payment, apparently):

(#5) “Complex Mughal arabesque pietra dura inlays at Agra Fort”

(#6) “The French sense of arabesque: Savonnerie carpet after Charles Le Brun for the Grande Galerie of the Louvre”

Poetic/sexual bonus. In the earlier posting, ths note:

[My own poem is] loosely modeled on the O’Hara, capturing somewhat the feel of his onrushing, discursive poetry — plus the flagrant gay carnality of some of his poems.

But I gave no carnal examples. For this, go back to my 12/25/11 posting “Poet among the painters”, with (among other things) a discussion of “Une Journée de Juillet”, a little hymn to the pleasures of gangsucking and to its restorative powers on a hot sticky summer day in NYC. Notably:

The sun beams on my buttocks
as I outdistance the crowd. For a
moment I enter the cavernous vault
and its deadish cold. I suck off
every man in the Manhattan Storage &
Warehouse Co. Then, refreshed, again
to the streets! to the generous sun
and the vigorous heat of the city.

A postcard from Ann Burlingham back in March, from an exhibition at the Frick Museum in Pittsburgh, with this ghostly vision:

(#1) Nick Veasey’s Boxer Shorts (2008)

From Wikipedia:

Nick Veasey is a British photographer working primarily with images created from X-ray imaging. Some of his works are partial photomanipulations with Photoshop. He therefore works with digital artists to realise his creations.

Born in London in 1962, he worked in the advertising and design industries and pursued work in conventional still photography before being asked to X-ray a cola can for a television show. Veasey also X-rayed the shoes he was wearing on the day and upon showing the finished image to an art director was galvanised by the response it provoked.

The result above, is transparent underpants, of a very different sort from the garments in my 1/11/20 posting “Beach bare”, featuring transparent plastic beach shorts.

Veasey’s x-ray underpants include those of Superman and Batman, in artworks more complex than #1, his lenticular portraits. From his website:

Lenticular is a ribbed lens that refracts light from different angles. When sequential images are split behind the lenticular lens the image looks like it moves or animates. It is amusing that this motion brings our x-ray of cadavers to life.

The lenticular portraits can be viewed on his website. But what’s more easily available are the static images, below:

(#2) Veasey’s x-ray Superman

(#3) Veasey’s x-ray Batman

The underpants chant. The childhood chant, used as skipping (that is, rope-jumping) rhyme, with several variants, plus a name slot to be filled in:

I see London / England / Paris, I see France
I see N’s underpants

With Batman as the N, it’s two nice lines of trochaic tetrameter (the meter of massive amounts of English folk poetry of all sorts), with a short 4th foot.

(Nothing elevating here at all. Men’s bodies and mansex, not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

From the Falcon gay porn studios this morning, some underwear, with a caption of my own devising:

(#1)

Baddest boi

And it’s bad, bad, Chico Down
The baddest boi in the whole damned town
Badder than old Long Dong
And hotter in a tight blue thong

He got a custom line of underwear
He got tats all over too
He got a 7-inch dick in his pouch for fun
He got a tight ass you can screw

The underwear. No, Falcon hasn’t drifted away from its mission to provide suck-and-fuck videos in the service of getting queers off, but it has provided a venue for accessories and accompanying services, in this case the underwear from the Bad Chico company, flagrantly supplying “Sexy Underwear for Gay Men”. A display:

(#2) About the company, from their site: “THE SOFTEST. UNDIES. EVER. Bad Chico was born to provide sexy men’s undergarments, offering the perfect combination of sex appeal and comfort in any setting. Based in Montreal, our collection is available through our online store and retail partnerships across North America.”

The model’s cruise face in #1. The model is a slim twink, and his cruising presentation is a complex one, but more subordinate than dominant: his gaze is intense, but his head is tilted down, and his mouth is partly open in desire.

Well, yes, the parody. The model:

“Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” is a song written by American folk rock singer Jim Croce. Released as part of his 1973 album Life and Times (Wikipedia link)

The relevant parts are the chorus and one of the verses:

And it’s bad, bad Leroy Brown
The baddest man in the whole damned town
Badder than old King Kong
And meaner than a junkyard dog

He got a custom Continental
He got an Eldorado too
He got a thirty two gun in his pocket for fun
He got a razor in his shoe

(Leroy Brown is black, of course.)

You can watch Croce performing the song here (#3), on tv’s Midnight Special (in 1973).

(There’s a passing, but highly relevant, note about male genitals, and an ancient Greek male nude bronze. Just a warning for the wary.)

Yesterday’s Daily Jocks ad, offering khaki Kasper Joggers from Helsinki Athletica, as modeled by a guy with a hugely prominent package, visible in full detail (down to his dickhead) through the stretch nylon / cotton / Elastene blend fabric. Meanwhile, the model is carefully, sculpturally posed, with luminously bronzed skin tones, in a way that seemed hauntingly familiar to me:

(#1) Not at all your ordinary DJ ad

Then I concentrated on just the head, and got a hit in my memory bank: the Ephebe of Marathon, by Praxiteles or someone like him.

The head:

(#2)

About the statue, from Wikipedia:

The Marathon Boy or Ephebe of Marathon is a Greek bronze sculpture found in the Aegean Sea in the bay of Marathon in 1925.

The sculpture is conserved in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens where it is dated to around 340–330 BC. The Museum suggests that the subject is the winner of an athletic competition. With its soft musculature and exaggerated contrapposto, its style is associated with the school of Praxiteles.

(#3)

The upraised arm and the distribution of weight indicate that in his original context, this ephebe was leaning against a vertical support, such as a column

(The DJ model’s posture is completely different from this, which is what led me at first away from recognizing the head.)

Linguistic notes from NOAD:

noun ephebe:  (in ancient Greece) a young man of 18–20 years undergoing military training.
[pronunciations: / ˈɛfib, əˈfib / ]

noun contrapposto: Sculpture an asymmetrical arrangement of the human figure in which the line of the arms and shoulders contrasts with, while balancing, those of the hips and legs.

Then, about the model in #1: his head is a tribute to young masculine beauty in Greek terms, his groin a tribute to young masculine desirability in modern gay terms.

(Largely about men’s bodies — not crudely, but the topic will be uncomfortable for some readers, so be warned that skin and bulges are on the agenda.)

From Romania, through the fabled sensuality of Greek islands in the Aegean, to you: men’s swimwear that embraces playful pinkness while pushing enhancements of male genitals forward. The Elia swimwear company, in a series of ads on the Daily Jocks site.

Starting with the DJ ad from 6/8, for the Kos Titan Swim Short in the Beach Unicorn pattern:

(#1) Real men flaunt their stuff in pink, with little ducks

Color notes. The now-conventional association of pink (in various shades) with femininity (and therefore queerness) means that a man who sports pink clothes — especially in high-masculinity contexts like gymwear and swimwear — will be seen as conveying an identity statement. Either he’s straight and so secure in his heteromasculinity that he doesn’t care what people might think, and might well be asserting his confident heteromasculinity. Or he’s gay and so secure in his homomasculinity that he, too, doesn’t care what people think, because he’s defiantly and openly queer.

Enhancement. In a 6/24 DJ ad, we get an amazingly steamy fantasy hunk rutting on the beach, wearing nothing but the tiny but protuberant Kos Enhancing Swim Brief:

(#2) He stares at you with narrowed eyes and knitted brow; he offers a high-butch haircut and mustache, facial stubble, hairy forearms and thighs, plus those muscles — are you man enough for him? Could you be him?

This ad doesn’t highlight the most salient feature of these swim briefs. This you can appreciate in this display from the company, with its accompanying ad copy:

(#3) “The Kos Enhancing swim brief is a low rise brief featuring front removable enhancement cup. With lifting and accentuating front crotch shaping, as well as a flattering rear shape, this brief with its bronze trim details is one of the sexiest swim briefs to come to market.”

Note that the company doesn’t shrink from potentially faggy colors like Candy Pink and Cherry Red, but enthusiastically embraces them and combines them with protruding stuffed pouches. Another variant of  butch fagginess (first posted on in a 8/14/18 posting here, with a number of follow-ups).

Pouch enhancement. A recurrent theme on this blog. For instance, on pouch-enhancing underwear: “The Xmas package 2” on 12/17/10, “Bulges” on 4/17/11. For many kinds of men’s underwear, the idea borders on the silly. If you’re displaying an apparently big package to attract a sexual partner, then you’re in trouble when the underwear gets pulled down and you turn out to have been wearing a falsie (in the plural, slang referring pads of material in women’s clothing used to increase the apparent size of the breasts; now extended to similar enhancement of the male genitals).

Men’s swimwear is, in general, different, since its bulges are mostly part of a high-masculine presentation of self in public, rather than an immediate sexual advertisement.

One more item of Kos Enhancing swimwear from Elia — the Neon Jungle pattern — in a 6/30 DJ ad:

(#4) Not primarily pink, but with a really obtrusive bulge

The pattern is not, however, without its pink highlights:

(#5)

Elia and Kos.The Elia company is Romanian, mostly providing really hot swimwear for women, but with a parallel line for men.

Now, Romania has its beaches, on the Black Sea, but the company has chosen to situate its men’s underwear in the warmer waters of the Aegean Sea, on an actual Greek island, treated here, however, as a fabulous sensual paradise.

On Kos, from Wikipedia:

Kos or Cos is a Greek island, part of the Dodecanese island chain in the southeastern Aegean Sea. Kos is the third largest island of the Dodecanese by area, after Rhodes and Karpathos; it has a population of 33,388 (2011 census), making it the second most populous of the Dodecanese, after Rhodes. The island measures 40 by 8 kilometres (25 by 5 miles).

(#6) Kos on a regional map; you will see that it’s one of the Greek islands right up against the Turkish coast

… Tourism is the main industry in Kos, the island’s beaches being the primary attraction. The main port and population centre on the island, Kos town, is also the tourist and cultural centre, with whitewashed buildings including many hotels, restaurants and a number of nightclubs forming the Kos town “barstreet”. The seaside village of Kardamena is a popular resort for young holidaymakers (primarily from the United Kingdom and Scandinavia) and has a large number of bars and nightclubs.

Kos is not one one of the famous gay Greek island resorts, but it’s certainly gay-friendly, and it does have, or has had, a flat-out gay bar, with a sex club on an upper floor. All the amenities.

Meanwhile, you can live the fantasy in Elia swimwear. Go for the hot pink; you know you want to.

An excellent line of dactylic tetrameter — Navy flamingos and roseate spoonbills — featuring two strikingly pink birds, and these birds on fancifully patterned men’s swimwear and shorts. Then a bonus item that’s not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.

We begin with yesterday’s Daily Jocks ad, for the Elia beachwear company:

(#1) A not entirely human apparition on the beach, a superreal PlasticMan hunk, staring down fixedly at his big (artificially enhanced) package and at the wonderfully playful pink flamingos on his navy-blue swim briefs (note the typo flip fops, which I’ll get to in the bonus section)

The model has appeared in other Elia ads, looking more carnal and somewhat less like a dream creature, notably in my 7/4 posting “Pretty, and sometimes protuberant, in pink”, about Elia swimwear with enhancement cups:

(#2) Modeling the Kos Titan swim short in the Beach Unicorn pattern

Pink flamingos. Not merely brightly colored and remarkable birds, but also (now) an object of popular culure. From my 7/26/19 posting “On the lawn”, about, among other things, pink lawn flamingos and their cultural significance:

lawn flamingos aren’t presented as authentic flamingos; no one makes claims of flamingohood on their behalf. They are merely flamingoids.

(#3)

Lawn flamingos are “the stereotypical example of lawn kitsch”.

And beyond that, they are icons of camp; it’s now hard to view the actual birds without evoking this cultural context; roseate spoonbills, on the other hand, are just big remarkable pink birds.

(#4) Illustration from the public radio Living on Earth site “BirdNote®: Roseate Spoonbill: Hot Pink”, aired the week of 6/8/18

Delightfully, roseate spoonbills have made it into the world of men’s underwear, most notably in Patagonia’s men’s boxer briefs “Spoonbills” in “big sky bue”:

(#5)

Even better, there are shirts, “men’s lightweight A/C® buttondown shirts” (“Lightweight, relaxed-wearing 100% organic cotton shirt with an airy, open weave for hot and humid climates”). In this pattern:

(#6)

(I note that there are many wonderful other patterns in this collection.)

The typo bonus: flip fops. This section involves discussion in plain language of men’s bodies and mansex, and is not suitable for kids or the sexually modest, who therefore should now leave this posting.

It’s all about and get flip fops (instead of flip flops, referring to footwear). Two parts: fops; and flip fucks.

Fop. The briefest fop story, from NOAD:

noun fop: a man who is concerned with his clothes and appearance in an affected and excessive way; a dandy.

More detail from Wikipedia:

Fop became a pejorative term for a foolish man excessively concerned with his appearance and clothes in 17th-century England.

… The pejorative term today carries the connotation of a person, usually male, who is overly concerned with trivial matters (especially matters of fashion) and who affects elite social standing. The term also appears in reference to deliberately camp styles based on eighteenth-century looks.

… The fop was a stock character in English literature and especially comic drama, as well as satirical prints. He is a “man of fashion” who overdresses, aspires to wit, and generally puts on airs, which may include aspiring to a higher social station than others think he has. He may be somewhat effeminate, although this rarely affects his pursuit of an heiress. [extended presentation of examples from literature]

Fops certainly play at being effeminate, whatever their brand of masculinity (embracing styles of homomasculinity as well as heteromasculinity). Meanwhile, they are extravagantly ornamental.

Just two notes on foppishness. An excellent Ed Koren cartoon:

(#7) Koren’s site dates this as 1/15/13 “Fop’s Corner”

And then for foppishness as stage display, with all of its ambiguities, the performances of Prince:

(#8) Prince at the Forum in Inglewood CA 4/14/11

(Just a personal note to say how much I miss Prince.)

Flip fuck. (Not in HDAS or GDoS, as far as I can tell, and not in Sheidlower’s The F Word.) Sometimes it comes down to Urban Dictionary:

flip fuck: To alternate having the active role when two gays are having anal sex: Bob and Ted flip fucked all night long; every time one got close to cumming they changed positions and the other took his turn. (posted by dcnutzball 12/19/05)

The compound is long familiar to me from gay porn, where its referent is a common practice, often celebrated. It’s clearly based on flip-flop, as in flip-flop sex.

From my 2/20/20 posting “love nest”, about a context from the world of porn — remember that this is a fantasy world — in which flip fucks are not just routine, but an actual egalitarian moral value:

[Damien Crosse]’s porn films (especially for Raging Stallion) in which he seems to have insisted — probably working with pornstar and director Steve Cruz and other staff — that all the scenes be jam-packed with fucking, but framed as really energetic “sweet sex”: sexually democratic and celebratory (everybody fucks, but more importantly, everybody gets fucked, they’re all eager for it,  and they all express deep pleasure in the act), and also (while the characters are nearly unhinged with desire and arousal) sexually considerate and attentive (not selfish).

(Material in very plain language about men’s bodies and mansex, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

This began as a brief follow-up to my 7/7 posting “Navy flamingos and roseate spoonbills”, about enhanced-cup swim briefs (seen in front view) from the Elia company, in the Navy Flamingo pattern: navy-blue with pink flamingos — but it moves into other territory (heavy on anal intercourse). In any case, yesterday the Daily Jocks sale offer featured the Elia enhanced pouch swim brief “Midnight Tropics” (in rear view):

(#1)

A handsome pattern, including the pink flowers (pink is a subtheme in Elia swimwear for men), and clearly designed to highlight the sexual desirability of the wearer’s buttocks (which, in this case, seem eminently pregnable already).

I was initially struck by the image in #1 because the main selling point of this swimwear line is the sexual desirability of models’ genitals, exaggerated by the cup enhancements, so that they’re usually presented in front views — as here, for the Midnight Tropics swim brief:

(#2)

Plain talk. In street talk, #1 frames the model as having a really hot ass, eminently fuckable. Language familiar to me from my days in the sexual marketplace, decades ago, where my really hot, fuckable ass — arse, butt, whatever — was my big draw. Men told me so, and then they fucked me, to our mutual satisfaction, since my sexual preference, as an enthusiastic bottom (well, really, a bitch in heat), fit so beautifully with my physical attractions.

My face is sweet but nothing to draw men in, and I’m far from classically butch, and I have what counts in the gay world as a little dick (a major minus in the sexual marketplace), but my ass brought in the business. If, as often happens in the gay world, my fucker stayed around after the sexual main event, to luxuriate affectionately in our joint post-coital haze, and exchange names and brief bios and talk about our lives, then we came to develop a short-term friendship, in which the qualities of my mind and character, not just my fuckable ass, came to the fore. Two of them fell in love with me — and then of course we did a lot more fucking, meanwhile honing our understandings of each other’s bodies and feelings, which is a great pleasure in itself.

(And, I should add, from experiencing all this and talking to my sexual partners, I collected a lot of information about gay lives and attitudes, which I’ve used for my academic purposes.  No place to stash my famous little notebook while my ass was up in the air taking a cock deep within me and shouting fuck me please oh please fuck me — but I wrote things up not long afterwards.)

But my ass as a desirable bodypart. As it turns out, I have never seen anything like a photo of my ass in its heyday (I now have an 80-year-old wrinkled ass, so that’s irrelevant). I have no idea what its draw for other men was, though I can fantasize that it was something like other wonderfully fuckable asses I’ve posted about (I’m working on collecting a Page on them).

I realize now that my man Jacques, who was pretty serious about his photography, took a lot of photos of me, and was a great fan of my fuckable ass (most of our sex was just gay men’s routine sex, namely cocksucking, but fucking was a special-occasion pleasure). But he never even suggested photographing my body — I suspect he felt that that would have been too intrusive — and it didn’t occur to me to ask him to; I’ve always felt insecure about my body. I’m sorry now that I didn’t, and also that I never got him to pose for nude shots. After all these years — we last shared a bed in 1997 — the memories of his body are fading away.

As close as it gets. What I do have is a delightful photo of me and Gadi Niram (and DC motsser Ed Ricketts) at the 1995 motss.con in Washington DC:

(#3) Ed, me (in an OUT In Linguistics t-shirt), Gadi (playfully in costume for the To Wong Foo Party at the RAMA A Inn)

My comment:

Sorry about the glare off my glasses, cause this is otherwise a pretty good photo of me (I hate almost all photos of me). Damn hot for a 56-year-old guy, if I do say so myself. [Gadi was then 25.] And I manage to look significantly gay, but maybe that’s just by assimilation to Gadi’s character. (Hanging out with a guy dressed like this either causes you to absorb waves of big ol’ fagginess or to present as stone-hard butch, in contrast. I don’t think gay macho is even achievable for me, so what you see is my greybeard fag persona.)

I’ll say more about the occasion, but for my immediate purposes what’s important is my hairy, muscular thighs, as close as we can get to what was then my hairy, muscular ass. This towards the end of my 30 Years of Getting Fucked, which ran from 1966 through roughly 1996. A good run.

Then, two Facebook messages from Gadi.  From 2/26/20:

Today’s my 50th birthday. Something Aric [Olnes] posted reminded me of the 1995 DC .con. I had been on soc.motss for about two years by then, a wet-behind-the-ears little gayling. motss has given me friends, access to knowledge I never would have imagined, flamewars, in-jokes, social venues, a boyfriend or two, and a sense that I belong to a wonderful, insane, intense, intelligent, witty, infuriating, captivating, marvel of a community. Here’s to the next 27 motss.years!

Note that the community embraces men and women, from many parts of the world, of many ages (my 56 to Gadi’s 25 in #3), and so on.

Then from 3/21/20, with the photo in #3:

And me with the splendid Arnold Zwicky!

Strange as it may seem to those who know me well, I am widely regarded as having thrown the best hotel party in all of recorded history [at the 1995 DC Con]. With considerable help from the incomparable Derik Cowan.

It was indeed memorable. And I even managed to work in giving a linguistics paper at Georgetown during the weekend. (Oh yes, and no sex, just friendship. I’d been a regular at the Club Baths for Men in DC for years, but not on this occasion; hanging out with friends was much more important than getting fucked.)

(About men’s bodies, with allusions to mansex, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

The Daily Jocks 7/10 ad for two more items in the Elia beachwear company’s offerings for men: the Titan swim short in the (new) Turkish Tile pattern, worn by a model I pronounce to be a Turkish young man named Yusuf; and the Kos enhanced-cup swim brief in turquoise, worn by a (presumed) Romanian man I am calling Alexandru.

This is the fourth in a series of postings about Elia’s offerings, and I’m going to need to explain how Romania, Greece, and Turkey are all somehow mixed up in this. But first, the ad and a story I have spun about Yusuf and Alexandru in it.

(#1)

Ass pirates of the Aegean

Yusuf and Alexandru always
cruise the beach as a couple, offering
amiable buddyhood or
aggressive dominance,
whatever you need in the dunes

Things about the ad:

— the colors. I probably would have re-posted this ad just to celebrate the wonderfully  intense and eye-catching colors and patterns in the swimwear. Love the Turkish Tile, love the saturated turquoise; praise for the Elia designers.

— the facial expressions. Those narrowed eyes, which might just be from squinting into the sun, but in Alexandru’s case look a lot like a dominance display: it looks, in fact, like Alexandru is projecting a Cruise of Death. More below.

— the setting. On a beach (which could, of course, be anywhere, even just a stage setting in a studio). The Elia company is headquartered in Romania, which has its own beaches, on the Black Sea, but its ads are located in a fantasy world of the warm Aegean, further south: on the Greek isle of Kos, co-opted for the ads; and now on the (immediately adjacent) Turkish coast. In any case, remember this: Romania, Greece, Turkey (RGT, for short).

— the men’s bodies 1.  Elia men’s models in general are impressive examples of the swimmer body type: sleek (low body fat) and well-muscled but not obtrusively so, and so contrasting with the bodybuilder or muscle-hunk type, with the twink type, and with the bear type. (Personal note: I am an enthusiast for the swimmer body type.)

— the men’s bodies 2. Yusuf and Alexandru not only have swimmer’s bodies, those bodies are also utterly smooth and hairless. This despite the fact that a stereotype of men from RGT is that they are hot but mostly on the hairy side. (There is, of course, considerable variation on this dimension: smooth men from RGT are not rare.) More on this below. (Again, a personal note: like Esau, and unlike Cain, who was a smooth man, I am an hairy man. It’s an Alpine thing.)

— the men’s bodies 3. The crotches. Yusuf is just a guy who looks great in swim shorts, but Alexandru, in his enhanced-cup swim briefs, is doing a flagrant dick display. See my earlier postings on Elia’s Kos enhancement cups (listed below).

— Yusuf and Alexandu as a with. People almost never look at an image without constructing some sort of story about what they’re seeing: where is this place? when did this happen? who are these people and how are they related to one another? what’s going on?

So Elia juxtaposes two models, advertising two different new pieces of swimwear, in a single ad, just for the company’s convenience. And viewers will be inclined to see them not merely as happening to be together, but being together together (as in “Are you two together?”), in what Erving Goffman once called a with, a unit (perhaps temporary) of social connection between two people.

And I ran with that instinct, devising a story — using the models’ remarkable bodies, Alexandru’s dick display, their narrowed eyes, the beach context — that treated the two men as a with: two buddies, maybe lovers, cruising the beach together as a couple, each offering his own flavor of sexual connection.

— and then the ass pirates. Yes, the title is a cheap play on Pirates of the Caribbean, but the lexical item ass pirate has a lot of interest on its own, given that its primary use seems to have come to be merely ‘homosexual man’, not specifically the much more transparent ‘insertive partner in male-male anal intercourse’. More below.

Gathering in the threads. Four items from the above, for greater exploration.

Thread 1: narrowed eyes. From my 5/26/18 posting “Porn for the holidays, with narrowed eyes”

Narrowing (or squinting) of the eyes — involving lowering the upper eyelid and raising the lower, often lowering the eyebrow as well — can convey a number of different emotions: anger, ferocity, discomfort. People also squint in bright sunlight. … And they narrow their eyes for greater focus in examining something, so that narrowing can indicate intense attention, or be used as a display of dominance.

Without context, narrowing is often interpreted as anger.

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

Thread 2: hairiness. Guys from RGT are stereotypically hot, but not stereotypically smooth (as in #1), though there are plenty of smooth men from the Mediterranean basin (my man Jacques — South of France in body type, sometimes looking North African — was one, though he had very nicely furry forearms).

Meanwhile, in the RGT gay world, there are movements to celebrate hairy men. For example, the Gay Romania Pride Facebook group, which is very much into hairy men. Two of their treasures, both cock-tease photos:

(#2)

(#3)

In contrast, from the Turkish Men Twitter account, the Turkish model and actor Caner Tanrıverdi (note dotless I in the second syllable),  model-smooth in a Speedo (but of course with facial hair):

(#4)

Meanwhile, back in Greece, the astoundingly steamy, and moderately furred, Greek male model Alexis Papas:

(#5)

(Oh my, the half-open mouth and wrinkled brows.)

Thread 3: earlier Elia postings. Three of them

— on 7/7/20 in “Pretty, and sometimes protuberant, in pink”:

From Romania, through the fabled sensuality of Greek islands in the Aegean, to you [in particular, Kos, right up against Turkey]: men’s swimwear that embraces playful pinkness while pushing enhancements of male genitals forward. The Elia swimwear company, in a series of ads on the Daily Jocks site.

— on 7/7/20 in “Navy flamingos and roseate spoonbills”, on the Navy Flamingo pattern (in swim briefs with enhancement cups)

— on 7/9/20 in “Midnight Tropics”, on swim briefs in the Midnight Tropics pattern, here focused on desirable male buttocks, but also with enhancement cups

Thread 4: ass pirates. From GDoS:

noun ass pirate (also arse pirate): (var. on arse bandit): a male homosexual [cited in dictionary collections from 1989, and other cites thereafter]

noun arse bandit (with other variants): a homosexual male [1st cite from 1962]

My notes: the general sense seems to be that of ‘male who engages in anal intercourse (in either role, not just insertive)’, though surely reference to insertive partners (who figuratively invade and take other men’s assholes, like pirates or bandits) is the basis for the compound; then extended to ‘homosexual male’, presumably in the belief that anal intercourse is the characteristic sexual act of gay men. In fact, fellatio is the routine, everyday, sexual act for most gay men, but for a variety of reasons, anal intercourse plays an outsized role in the public imagining of sex between men, as especially perverse and disgusting (and invasive of the body).

My morning names for 1/26 (yes, my posting queue is absurdly backed up; life has been hard). quiescent came to me first, in connection with popsicles, with deliquescent immediately following. I’ll post about deliquescence first, because there’s less to say; quiescence, on the other hand, plays an important role in some earlier, rather remarkable, postings on this blog (naked male buttocks are involved, so the Creamsicle portion of this posting might not suit all readers).

deliquescence.  Two very similar definitions of the adjective deliquescent:

From NOAD:

[a] becoming liquid, or having a tendency to become liquid. [b] Chemistry (of a solid) tending to absorb moisture from the air and dissolve in it. ORIGIN late 18th century: from Latin deliquescent- ‘dissolving’, from the verb deliquescere ‘to dissolve’).

From the Vocabulary site on WordPress on 7/25/10:

on deliquescent: (especially of certain salts) becoming liquid by absorbing moisture from the air

By its nature, deliquescence is not particularly photogenic, so I have no cool images to show you.

quiescence. From NOAD:

Adj quiescent: in a state or period of inactivity or dormancy: strikes were headed by groups of workers who had previously been quiescent | quiescent ulcerative colitis.

But what does that have to do with food? That would be via ice pops. From Wikipedia:

(#1) An assortment of Popsicle® ice pops

An ice pop is a water or milk-based quiescently frozen snack on a stick. Unlike ice cream or sorbet, which are whipped while freezing to prevent ice crystal formation, an ice pop is frozen while at rest [while quiescent] and becomes a solid block of ice.

Then to ice pops combined with ice cream. From my 10/17/18 posting “PUMP!ing it up”, on the Creamsicle Access Trunk (in the Access line of men’s underwear, so-called because it provides open access to the wearer’s buttocks); and on the Creamsicle — Popsicle-ice frozen exterior, vanilla ice cream interior — originally in orange flavored ice (hence the color of PUMP!’s underwear line), though now in a variety of flavors; with a section on Popsicles, Creamsicles, and Fudgsicles:

(#2) Orange Creamsicles

(#3) The Creamsicle Access Trunk — a Creamsicle realized as an item of men’s underwear (in this case, with chocolate rather than vanilla ice cream filling)

Follow-up on this Creamsicle posting in my 6/19/19 posting “The Magnificent WaterSports”, where I note:

Popsicles are, of course, classic phallic symbols (especially powerful symbolically because you put them in your mouth and suck on them and eat them), and when you add cream (slang for ‘semen’) to the name, you have Gay Delight. (If you like orange ice, as I do, even better.)

… with vivid pops of genital color in their underwear, plus waistbands that celebrate peace and freedom, also exhibiting sharply differentiated roles in their relationship. Lots of stuff packed into just one Daily Jocks ad (for the Modus Vivendi Peace line of underwear) from 7/15. There will be plain talk about men’s bodies and mansex, so this posting is not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.

The ad, featuring two men I’ll call Pink and Blue:

(#1) Both men gaze at us intensely, Blue projecting dominance and control, Pink open-mouthed seductiveness and dependence (meanwhile, both men have absurdly developed and defined abs)

Themes to be developed below: pouches, the waistband design, and b/t roles in gay relationships.

But first, the DJ ad copy:

Colour your world with Peace!

The Peace collection is made from ribbed cotton elastane fabric and features the iconic MV logo on the front side of the elasticated waistband which has the colours of the peace flag.  This vivid pop of colour is sure to make you stand out.

Specifically, to make your dick and balls stand out in some visible detail, in their minimal pouches. Pink and Blue live in Pouchland, where every man’s junk is on display, just barely covered by a thin layer of cloth. And can be used to sell homowear. (This is not a put-down; I myself love to stroll through Pouchland, savoring the junk on display and enjoying the mild arousal it provokes. It’s an innocent pastime. Meanwhile, Pouchland’s obsession with dick can be unintentionally funny, because it’s often so earnestly over-the-top. I say this as a proud avowed peniphiliac.)

From the MV site on the Peace line

Inspired by the colors of peace and freedom of being, the Peace line will make your day. A retro favorite design in a modern palette with updated silhouettes. Hit the gym, beach or the streets in this stylishly colorful icebreaker, featuring the multiple expression of one’s self, the mood for the day and the need for a statement. BRIGHT, BOLD, AND COLORFUL: PEACE RETURNS. Express your true colors. Solo or combined, these new styles feel like old favorites being revamped. The Peace Line comprises of [sic] jockstraps, briefs, boxers, tanktops, t-shirts, kaftans, shorts & pants [in a variety of intense colors].

Flags. The MV waistband is something of a puzzle. First thing: its background color, throughout, is bright yellow, regardless of what the pouch color is. So that provides yellow stripes at the top and bottom, which aren’t stripes in whatever flag is being reproduced in the waistband.

There are then some number of other stripes, with a white one clearly in the middle. I’ve enlarged the waistband in #1 (and other examples on the MV site) without being able to determine how many other stripes there are and what their actual colors are; color reproduction on the net is an iffy thing.

Then I thought to try to find the “peace flag” referred to in the DC ad copy. Many many obvious dead ends, but this is the closest I could find:

(#2)

Of course it’s possible that the flag on the waistband is just something the MV people invented themselves.

The MV company. Two earlier postings on ths blog about the company:

— on 5/8/18 in “My skivvies are my lifestyle”

(#3) Ad copy: “Their name, Modus Vivendi, is their philosophy. From Latin, Modus Vivendi translates to lifestyle or way of life. Their name reflects their design and manufacturing approach to everything they make; it is not just a product or just a brand, it reflects a lifestyle.”

— on 4/16/20 in “The Grim Mouser”:

(#4) Ad copy: “Sleek, stylish and renowned for its powerful designs, Modus Vivendi underwear is a Thessaloniki based brand with a God-like aesthetic”

Yes, they really are that visionary. But as you can tell from #1, also really queer.

b/t roles. Pink and Blue in #1 are not only presented as a gay couple, their roles in this relationship are spectacularly differentiated. To start with, Pink displays his body in the now conventionally feminine color pink, and Blue displays his in the now conventionally masculine color blue.

Then, as noted in the caption to #1, in their facial expressions and the alignment of their bodies, Pink projects open-mouthed seductiveness and dependence (both feminine characteristics), while Blue projects dominance and control (both masculine).

Pink sports a fashionable hair style, while Blue’s is conventionally butch.

Pink is seated, while Blue stands, so that he is physically above Pink.

Pink clutches his man around the waist, while Blue has his arms proprietarily on Pink’s shoulders.

The overall effect is to mark Pink as hugely less masculine than Blue and subservient to him; subservience is a role that many gay men find enormously satisfying emotionally. (Note: these classifications are not value judgments.) The suggestion is that for fucking, Pink is a bottom, Blue a top, though they no doubt trade blow jobs in everyday sex, as most gay couples do. (Again: note that no value judgment is imputed here; remember that my own inclination has alway been to serve as an enthusiastic bottom.)

The larger topic here is developed in my 12/18/10 AZBlogX posting “The Bombardier 4: b/t”,  about scripts for the unfolding of action in gay porn:

Back in 2005-6 I came to appreciate just how pervasive a particular kind of relationship is in male-male pairings in gay porn — so pervasive that you can make pretty good predictions about how a sexual encounter will unfold from various pieces of background information about the men. (The whole topic is vast and subtle; I’m doing just a little piece of it here.)

The pieces of background information are those that have to do with relative degrees of gayness and with relative degrees of masculinity (warning: these are sociocultural properties, not characteristics given in nature.) Also important is who’s “in charge” during the encounter.

… The roles are what i’ll call b (an extension of “bottom”) for the gayer man and t (an extension of “top”) for the more masculine man. The script goes: b takes t’s dick first; sometimes this is the end of it (t doesn’t take b’s dick at all), but things can then go on to t taking b’s dick. t gets serviced first.

And more follows from that. (There’s a Page on this blog listing postings about  b/t roles.) In #1 Pink is massive coded as b, Blue as t.

A final note: these observations are about the fantasy world of Gayland, especially as presented in gay porn (and reproduced as a still image in #1). Real-life gay relationships are much more complex than this.

(No street talk about men’s bodies or mansex, but the topic is men’s genitals displayed flagrantly though covertly — just barely covered — so this posting will not be to everyone’s taste.)

Following on my posting yesterday “Gay couple in Pouchland”, a report on two more pouch extravagances in the world of homo-inclined premium men’s underwear: one from the Austalian brand 2EROS, in their Aktiv NRG underwear line (trunk, brief, jockstrap) with “ventilated mesh panels”; and the other from the Daily Jocks DJX line, in their Amplify “lifting underwear” (jockstrap, brief, and trunk) — with the bonus of a hunky model with a sweetly furry belly (which will lead us to beer in Cleveland OH). (The Aktiv NRG model is extraordinarily, athletically, muscular, but he’s a smooth man.)

From the posting yesterday:

[The men in the ad that I’ve called] Pink and Blue live in Pouchland, where every man’s junk is on display, just barely covered by a thin layer of cloth. And can be used to sell homowear. (This is not a put-down; I myself love to stroll through Pouchland, savoring the junk on display and enjoying the mild arousal it provokes. It’s an innocent pastime. Meanwhile, Pouchland’s obsession with dick can be unintentionally funny, because it’s often so earnestly over-the-top. I say this as a proud avowed peniphiliac.)

Aktiv NRG. From a Daily Jocks ad from 7/13:

Aktiv NRG is designed to improve your enjoyment and output while working out! Ventilated mesh panels keep you cooler and dryer while breaking a sweat and ultimately reducing sweat rash.

It features the CURV Tech pouch which protects from high impact movements and creates a ‘contact-less’ support. It also has quick-dry and sweat wicking properties which reduces moisture and friction.

Three ad panels:

(#1)

Top panel: the high-masculinity model — from his buzzcut to his extreme V-shaped torso (broad shoulders tapering to very narrow hips), and powerful thigh muscles.

Middle panel: the goods — his well-filled pouch, for our viewing pleasure.

Bottom panel: his shapely bottom, ventilated by “strategically placed” mesh.

DJX Amplify. From the DJ mailing of yesterday, this main image of a jockstrap, some sort of Pouchland triumph:

(#2)

From the ad copy:

The DJX Amplify range is designed to give you an extra boost from behind.

From the lift of a classic jockstrap to the more discreet hidden boosting straps in the trunk, Amplify is here to give you that extra edge over standard underwear.

Yes, it’s a push-up pouch. But of course entertaining to observe for someone wth my sensibilities.

And then there’s the model’s sweetly furry belly, which I find very sexy. And, then as a bonus, DJX has provided two more Amplify garments modeled by the man I thing of as Furbelly:

(#3)

(#4)

But enough of penis display. Let’s talk beer.

Furbelly Irish Stout.  From the Forest City Brewery in Cleveland OH:

(#5)

Brewed in the tradition of a true Irish Stout, this jet black beauty bounds with strong roasted malt bitterness and notes of dark chocolate. The low acid, highly aromatic English noble hops impart a medium hop intensity. Oats used in the mash create a nice, smooth creamy body and a thick tan head to round out this creation. A fantastic full bodied drinking experience. Fill up your belly with Furbelly!

(Oh my: “nice, smooth creamy body and a thick tan head”. I’ll just leave that on the table.)

I am mostly a wine person rather than a beer person, but I do like dark beers and bitter beers — I was easily satisfied in British and Irish pubs — and this one sounds like something I would really enjoy.

Plus, the bulge is male and the buttocks are female — well, of course, that’s just projection vs. concavity — though both are imperial.

That would be the Byzantine boxer shorts, recently listed on Etsy, from source TheOldNorth:

(#1) Front view: the Emperor Justinian, in a mosaic of his time

(#2) Rear view: the Empress Theodora, ditto

(hat tip: from Bert Vaux on Facebook yesterday)

The Etsy description:

Everyone’s favourite Byzantine Imperial Couple on your pants… Justinian and Theodora.

These boxer briefs are made from a soft and stretchy material that ensures comfort throughout the day. The boxer briefs have no back seam, and they feature a lined front pouch for extra comfort and support.

Note: what is underwear? If the boxer briefs had a fly, they would be irrevocably underwear, and so not decent to wear in public. These garments have no fly, but they are normally worn right next to the skin, so they would not technically be wearable as, for example, gym shorts, unless you had a jockstrap or some minimal briefs on underneath.

Of course, you could probably get away with these as gym shorts, or maybe swimming trunks, since they won’t inadverently expose any of your dangly bits (and they have a lined pouch).

Justinian and Theodora. And now back to the 6th century. From Wikipedia:

Justinian I (c. 482 – 14 November 565), also known as Justinian the Great, was the Byzantine emperor from 527 to 565.

His reign is marked by the ambitious but only partly realized renovatio imperii, or “restoration of the Empire”. Because of his restoration activities, Justinian has sometimes been known as the “Last Roman” in mid-20th century historiography.

… [One] aspect of his legacy was the uniform rewriting of Roman law, the Corpus Juris Civilis, which is still the basis of civil law in many modern states. His reign also marked a blossoming of Byzantine culture, and his building program yielded works such as the Hagia Sophia. He is called “Saint Justinian the Emperor” in the Eastern Orthodox Church.

And on the Hagia Sophia, from Wikipedia:

(#2) (image from the Independent)

Hagia Sophia, officially the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque and formerly the Church of Hagia Sophia, is a Late Antique place of worship in Istanbul. Built in 537 as the patriarchal cathedral of the imperial capital of Constantinople, it remained the largest church of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, except from 1204 to 1261 when it was converted to a Roman Catholic cathedral.

In 1453, after the Ottoman Empire took over the city, Muslims converted it into a mosque [hence, the minarets in the photo]. In 1935 Turkey established it as a secular museum. In 2020, Turkey re-established Islamic worship here and re-opened it as a mosque [as part of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s larger program to desecularize Turkish society].

Completed during the reign of the eastern Roman emperor Justinian I, the church was then the world’s largest interior space and among the first to employ a fully pendentive dome. It is considered the epitome of Byzantine architecture and is said to have “changed the history of architecture”.

Then to Theodora. From Wikipedia:

Theodora (c. 500 – 28 June 548) was an Eastern Roman empress by marriage to Emperor Justinian. She became empress upon Justinian’s accession in 527 and was one of his chief advisers, albeit from humble origins. Along with her spouse, Theodora is a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church, commemorated on 14 November.

… Her involvement in helping underprivileged women was substantial, being “known for buying girls who had been sold into prostitution, freeing them, and providing for their future.” She closed brothels and made pimping a criminal offense. She created a convent on the Asian side of the Dardanelles called the Metanoia (Repentance), where the ex-prostitutes could support themselves. … [The chronicler] John Malalas … wrote she “freed the girls from the yoke of their wretched slavery.” A century later, John of Nikiu observed its positive impact, noting that Theodora “put an end to the prostitution of women”.

Justinian’s legislations also expanded the rights of women in divorce and property ownership, instituted the death penalty for rape, forbade exposure of unwanted infants, gave mothers some guardianship rights over their children, and forbade the killing of a wife who committed adultery.

Together, Theodora and Justinian did much to advance the rights of women in their time, some 15 centuries ago.

(Scantily clad men flaunting their bodies, so not to everyone’s taste.)

Two representations of the male body, head to thigh, celebrating masculine faces, masculine bare torsos, and the male genitals. HTC — head, torso, crotch — images.

Previously, in yesterday’s posting on this blog, “Portrait of man: the head and bare torso image”, about HT images:

the head and bare torso image: In a painting, a drawing, a sculpture, a photograph: the face projecting a persona, an identity, a character; the naked torso presenting this character as a carnal being: an embodiment of gender, a sexual object, and an assertion of vitality.

Now add to this the crotch, at least minimally clothed, but containing and hinting at the male genitals within — so substantially magnifying the sexual messages of the torso.

The Tomato birthday card. A birthday card — a Tomato® card (from RedtreeStudios.com) from Jeanne Dusseault, dated 9/19/19 (a bit late for my birthday on 9/6), with two entertaining HTC guys (displaying their pecs and abs, looking casual in the crotch):

(#1) The front of the card

(#2) The greeting inside

(Playing on a systematic ambiguity in agentive –er derivatives from verbs: between instrument (a device for toasting, for dishwashing) and human actor (someone who toasts things, who washes dishes).)

Modus Vivendi swim briefs. The Daily Jocks ad from 8/26/19 (marking the 30th anniversary of the Modus Vivendi line):

(#3) An absurdly exaggerated display of homomasculinity: strongly masculine face, butch haircut, and a Dominant Top glare; a comic-book bodybuilder torso; and the briefest of briefs, in fag-neon pink — altogether quite remarkable

Also offered at the time:

(#4) ad copy: “The new Modus Vivendi Bodybuilding Low Cut Brief is the ultimate minimalistic swim brief. It features a full coverage back and front part lining.”

The stylized models (headless, alas) have fantasy swimmer’s torsos — a body type that is, however, fairly often realized in real men. And then there are the well-filled pouches, now the focus of the display.

From the MV webpage:

About Us: The story of Modus Vivendi is the culmination of a Dream. A Dream to go beyond limited choices.

Based in Thessaloniki, Greece, Modus Vivendi launched in December 1989 by the Greek Designer Christos Bimpitsos as a more tailored approach to exclusive men’s underwear, swimwear & sportswear.

All of our garments are designed and manufactured in Greece. From the high quality fabrics, to the exclusive hand-design and luxurious packaging, expect nothing but the best.

The Modus Vivendi team works closely with specially selected partners to ensure that our quality is the best in the men’s underwear world. Throughout the decades we have developed our collections to offer a style to suit every preference, always using the finest fabrics for unparalleled softness and comfort.

Our Vision: The MV World draws inspiration from our Vision: to deliver a new experience in men’s underwear fashion with the Male Way of Life. We want you to set new standards and express yourself and your diversity starting with your underwear. We teetherbreak norms in fashion and bring fun in the design of men’s underwear, leaving behind the traditional and plain boring underwear.

Our Moto [sic] was and always be: `We do what we do because we love it`.

The Male Way of Life: Respecting diversity Modus Vivendi creates Unique Collections of underwear, swimwear, sportswear, loungewear, streetwear and accessories each with its own distinctive character, all designed in spectacular patterns and colors of outstanding beauty.

‘Modus Vivendi Male Way of Life’ redefines men’s underwear with elegance, authenticity and edgy designs, and underpins this with personal care and seamless service.

Highlights from earlier postings on this blog:

— on 5/8/18 in “My skivvies are my lifestyle”, with the ad copy:

Their name, Modus Vivendi, is their philosophy. From Latin, Modus Vivendi translates to lifestyle or way of life. Their name reflects their design and manufacturing approach to everything they make; it is not just a product or just a brand, it reflects a lifestyle.

— on 4/16/20 in “The Grim Mouser”, with the ad copy:

Sleek, stylish and renowned for its powerful designs, Modus Vivendi underwear is a Thessaloniki based brand with a God-like aesthetic.

Yes, they are that earnest and visionary. But they are also really, really queer. Which brings us to (in my estimation) their current high point of outrageous homowear display:

— on 7/20/20 in “Gay couple in Pouchland”, on the MV Peace line of underwear, with two sex-drenched HTC displays, presented not as from two separate men, but as from two men in an intense sexual relationship, moreover one framed as dominant with subordinate. Not your father’s underwear ad, not even close.

From Ann Burlingham on Facebook yesterday, a heads-up:

I’ve been seeing this [Hanes Every Bod] ad, which it seems came out last year, and enjoyed the men singing about underwear in a way that women in ads usually sing about [here Ann extravagizes] birth control or antidepressants.

(#1) The end of the Every Bod ad: assorted body types (very heavy on variants of the young and fit) on the street, exulting in their underwear, every one of them displaying a notable pouch: Vouch for the Pouch! (see the sign)

Just to note that mass-market men’s underwear is rarely so pouch-conscious; that’s the province of premium brands, many of which are uncomplicatedly hawking homowear. More below.

AdAge: “Men sing about their body confidence: Ad from the Martin Agency aims to address male body anxiety” by Alexandra Jardine on 8/7/19 (a video of the ad is on this site):

It’s not just women who need to be more confident about their body size, as catered to by the likes of Dove. A new campaign from Hanes aims to “celebrate inclusivity and authenticity” as it shows men of all body shapes and sizes singing, Broadway musical-style, about how its underwear gives them body confidence.

Created by The Martin Agency, the campaign has a wide range of different types of guy — from muscular “gym bods” to “dad bods” and “average bro bods” — bursting into song about how Hanes’ underwear suits them just right. Hanes says it wants to address the “culturally driven body anxiety often associated with women but also faced by men.”

John Szalay, associate creative director at The Martin Agency, comments: “We felt that music was the best way to bring this idea to life because if you feel confident enough sing in your underwear in random places, you’ve got to truly be comfortable with yourself. We landed on an idea that establishes a fresh, new voice for Hanes that also feels big and thoughtful with a hint of fun.”

Pouchland. All of that is wonderful, as far as it goes, but the pouches are something of a surprise — not what you normally expect in a Hanes or a Fruit of the Loom ad, which traditionally feature Regular Guy models, whose genitals are downplayed, not prominently, obtrusively celebrated, as in #1. The guys in #1 have various body types (though still within a quite narrow range; they are, after all, fantasy characters in a commercial), but they all look like Underwear Gods, highly sexualized. (This is an observation, not a complaint; I am, after all, a great fan of pouches and their contents, and have no objections to men’s bodies treated as sexual objects.)

From my 10/19/10 posting “Underwear gods”, a quotation from Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003):

Eric watched them cross the street, stunted humans in the shadow of the underwear gods that adorned the soaring billboards. … men immortal in their muscle tone, in the clustered bulge at the crotchline.

Which leads us to Pouchland. From my 7/20/20 posting “Gay couple in Pouchland”:

[The two men] live in Pouchland, where every man’s junk is on display, just barely covered by a thin layer of cloth.

And all the junk is really protrusive.

Regular Guy underwear. First, a peek at a Macy’s ad, providing Regular Guys in underwear (briefs and boxers, respectively) for the 21st century:

(#2) More fashionable and colorful than the RGs of 20th-century newspaper ads, but far from Underwear Gods

Men’s briefs on a model necessarily have a pouch, because every guy has junk (even I, with my small penis, make a pouch in my unremarkable briefs). But only in Pouchland do they assert themselves urgently.

From my 11/20/19 posting “A regular festival of ambiguity”:

[regular guy is] mostly used for males and usually conveys normative masculinity (with all that comes with it: athleticism, competitiveness, emotional restraint, toughness, etc. though all in moderation, plus solid heterosexuality), along with openness, friendliness, fairness, and other likeable qualities, and also sociocultural averageness on a number of dimensions (celebrities, conspicuously rich people, artists and scholars, etc. will have a hard time counting as regular guys).

regular guys as objects of desire. The Regular Guy is a stock character of advertising, where he is especially devoted to selling things directed to men, like tools, sports equipment, shaving accessories, and men’s clothing, in particular swim suits and underwear (both highly gendered). This last category is of special interest to me, because such apparel can be invested with not only gender content but also carnally sexual content: the display of the nearly naked male body is available as a source of pleasurable response from suitably minded viewers (of either gender), no matter how innocently it might be intended.

In brief: underwear ads are always available for service as soft porn (for straight women and gay men) — this is not even slightly a novel observation — and models presented as regular guys have figured in such advertising for a long time.

Looks like Hanes might be willing to take things up a level here, moving into an Age of the Pouch.

(All I need to tell you is that this posting takes off from a line of Cumdump jockstraps offered by the Breedwell company in deliberately provocative ads, and you should see that it’s totally not for kids or the sexually modest.)

A Daily Jocks ad from 11/4/19 shows us the jock in red, with a model presented faux-naturalistically as a tough working-class guy in a blue-collar setting (a railyard, shipyard, or truckyard). Ad copy for the jock:

The new Breedwell Cumdump Jock [available in white, black, red, yellow, and blue] is a take on the classic, old-school woven jock.

Features a black centre patch with the Breedwell logo and signature “Dirty By Choice” motto. The back of the jock features ‘Breedwell’ across the entire back.

(#1) The Breedwell Cumdump jockstrap, leading to notes on:

underwear ads as porn; this underwear ad as hard(core) porn; the sodomacho (sodomite + macho), or high-butch receptive (like the guy in the ad), as a brand of homomasculinity; plus linguistic reflections, on various scales with hard denoting the high end of the scale and terminology for referring to intermediate values, especially those near the high end (hard, firm).

Underwear ads as porn. Extended background from my 11/20/19 posting “A regular festival of ambiguity”:

The Regular Guy is a stock character of advertising, where he is especially devoted to selling things directed to men, like tools, sports equipment, shaving accessories, and men’s clothing, in particular swim suits and underwear (both highly gendered). This last category is of special interest to me, because such apparel can be invested with not only gender content but also carnally sexual content: the display of the nearly naked male body is available as a source of pleasurable response from suitably minded viewers (of either gender), no matter how innocently it might be intended.

In brief: underwear ads are always available for service as soft porn (for straight women and gay men) — this is not even slightly a novel observation — and models presented as regular guys have figured in such advertising for a long time …

(#2) Daily Jocks ad for Supawear from 10/27/17: Note the seductive facial expression and inviting open mouth

… Despite all this effort to present the figure of a guy in his underpants as an object of commercial but not carnal desire — you were supposed to want to buy the underwear, not do the model — these ads had a long history of functioning as soft porn for gay boys and men; after all, they showed attractive men in their underpants, their desirable genitals just a thin layer of fabric away.

… Then came the time of the Underwear Gods, as Don DeLillo labeled the giant public-display figures advertising sex-drenched underwear, especially men’s premium briefs (a label easily extended to the models and to the genre of advertising)

… the world shifted, as you can see by looking at my Page of links to underwear postings on this blog; in certain districts of the underwear universe, all the constraints on RG depictions have been thrown out the window, and we now have things like [#2], and crotch-tease shots like [#1, I dreamed I cruised for blue-collar tricks in my hot-red Breedwell Cumdump jock]

Yes, Breedwell is the brand name, “Dirty by Choice” (on the waistband) its motto, and Cumdump the model name; the intention behind the model name is that the wearer is advertising himself as an indiscriminate bottom [a mere cumdump] — for barebacking, if the brand name [with breed ‘fuck bareback’] is to be taken at face value. [more on Breedwell etc. in an appendix below]

#1 is pretty much as close to hard(core) porn as you can get. So I’ll move in a little while to the hardcore/softcore distinction.

Brands of homomasculinity. The model in #1 is presented as a high-butch anal receptive, a macho pussy-ass.

He’s located in a blue-collar environment, a conventionally macho locus, and he’s strongly macho in appearance. But his jockstrap cries out: I want, need, to be fucked, bareback, by a lot of guys, as many as possible; I want, need, my pussy filled with cum.

(This is of course a fantasy, but it pleases me to see it represented and celebrated so openly in advertising. It is, of course, something of a trope in gay porn: Real Men Want to Get Fucked. In particular, muscular body-building types beg for cocks up their asses.)

The combination of conventional masculinity with men enthusiastically taking what is conventionally viewed as the “feminine” role in fucking, and hence as acting “faggy”, is one form of what I’ve called butch fagginess. As in my 10/16/19 posting “Adventures in homomasculinity: the pink jock”, with a wider view (intersections of styles of masculinity with styles of homosexuality). The special case here is what I think of as sodomachismo — a macho presentation of self combined with a preference for the pleasures of being sodomized.

Play on hard/soft. From my 11/18/19 posting “Hard/Soft”, about a:

highly sexualized soft porn DJ ad (for CellBlock 13 Covert jockstrap), but stressing the contrast between the hard polyurethane shell of the jock pouch and the softness of  its “extra-soft fleece” lining:

(#3)

On to the hard-core lexical stuff. Wow, a really big grab-bag, illustrating sense developments of many different types. From NOAD (AHD5 has much longer list of senses):

adj. hard: 1 [a] solid, firm, and resistant to pressure; not easily broken, bent, or pierced: a hard mattress | ground frozen hard as a rock. [b] (of a person) not showing any signs of weakness; tough: the hard, tough, honest cop. [c] (of prices of stock, commodities, etc.) stable or firm in value. 2 done with a great deal of force or strength: a hard blow to the head. 3 [a] requiring a great deal of endurance or effort: stooping over all day was hard work. [b] putting a lot of energy into an activity: he’d been a hard worker all his life. [c] difficult to bear; causing suffering: times were hard at the end of the war | he’d had a hard life. [d] difficult to understand or solve: this is a really hard question | [with infinitive]: she found it hard to believe that he could be involved. [e] not showing sympathy or affection; strict: my father is no longer the hard man he once was. [f] (of a season or the weather) severe: it’s been a long, hard winter. [g] harsh or unpleasant to the senses: the hard light of morning. [h] (of wine) harsh or sharp to the taste, especially because of tannin. 4 [a] (of information) reliable, especially because based on something true or substantiated: hard facts about the underclass are maddeningly elusive.[b] (of a subject of study) dealing with precise and verifiable facts: efforts to turn psychology into hard science. [c] denoting an extreme or dogmatic faction within a political party: the hard left. [d] (of science fiction) dealing with technological advances which do not contravene currently accepted scientific laws or principles: a hard SF novel. 5 [a] (of liquor) strongly alcoholic; denoting distilled spirits rather than beer or wine. [b] US (of apple cider) having alcoholic content from fermentation. [c] (of a drug) potent and addictive. [d] (of radiation) highly penetrating. [e] (of pornography) highly obscene and explicit. 6 (of water) containing mineral salts that make lathering difficult. 7 Phonetics (of a consonant [letter]) pronounced as c in cat or g in go.

5e is the sense in hardcore (vs. softcore).

(In passing, I note that NOAD is missing the sense ‘(of a penis) erect, tumid’ (in AHD, sense 14 of 21).)

More specifically, there is, from NOAD, the:

noun hard core: [a] the most active, committed, or doctrinaire members of a group or movement: there is always a hard core of trusty stalwarts | [as modifier]: a hard core following. [b] popular music that is experimental in nature and typically characterized by high volume and aggressive presentation. [c] pornography of an explicit kind: (as modifier hard-core [or hardcore]): hard-core porn.

The world of hard vs. soft core is a graded one: there are clear examples of hard core material (in my postings, the visual stuff has to go to AZBlogX, though, at least for the moment, I can say pretty much anything on WordPress; Facebook, in contrast,  is erratically, and often extremely punitively, censorious) vs. soft core stuff (like the 1970s newspaper underwear ads), but of course the lines won’t be clear. Sociocultural categories are virtually never sharply discriminated, though for legal or administrative purposes their names might be rigidly defined.

The hard/soft scale. The list of senses of hard provides a rich source for specializations in a great many contexts, all of them conceived in scalar terms. Four examples.

Example 1. Being the person I am, I’ll start with dicks.

From my 8/14/15 posting “Annals of phallicity: the hardness score”, about the:

5-point Erection Hardness Score (developed by specialists in sexual medicine), from 0 (soft, not enlarged) through 4 (“completely hard and fully rigid”); 3 is “hard enough for penetration, but not completely hard”

With some discussion of the British tv show Cucumber, Banana, and Tofu and its 4-point scale: tofu, peeled banana, banana, cucumber.

Example 2. Memories of a scientific childhood. The 10-point Mohs hardness scale for minerals, an absolute hardness scale based on the hardness of diamonds (as #10), with talc on the soft end as #1:

(#4) Discussion in my 10/24/18 posting “Three exercises in cartoon understanding”

Example 3. Sleep comfort. In a jokey Bizarro cartoon about ascetic monasticsm, also from  the “Three exercises” posting:

(#5)

In the same posting, mattress ratings and the like, with firm as the top end of the scale, mattress companies not actually offering boards or board-like beds.

Example 4. Cake textures. Yes, even there. From a food column in the 11/3/19 NYT Magazine (in print), “The Welcome Distraction of Chocolate Cake: Inspired by the one at Landeau Chocolate, in Lisbon, this cake is as simple as it is bold” by Dorie Greenspan; on-line, 10/30/19 as “The Chocolate Cake That Saved My Vacation”:

(#6) (photo: Sarah Anne Ward for The New York Times)

The crucial quote is about cake texture:

Each forkful is a complete composition: The textures go from firm to feathery, the flavors building in intensity.

The cake scale of hardness: from firm to feathery.

The Breedwell cumdump appendix. Some background postings .

— on 1/11/18 in “Electric underwear”:

(#7) Red glow shoulder harness, plain black pouch

The name of the firm (like so many of its garments) can be read as insertive or receptive: with agentive active breed (as in He breeds his boyfriend’s ass / his boyfriend well / with gusto); or with midde-voice breed (as in Joey breeds well ‘Joey is satisfying / easy to breed, Joey is a great fuck’).

— on 5/20/18 in “Blue light special”, with more on Breedwell homowear, including:

(#8) Glowing blue fetish fuckwear

— on 6/2/18 in “Annals of gangbanging: anonymous in Brooklyn”, about a Brooklyn gay sex club with reduced entry price for tops:

(#9)

The ad is intended to attract tops — all the cumdumps you can breed, for one low price — for the benefit, the pleasure, of a corps of bottoms. It’s a scheme to make the (man)sexual marketplace work for everybody.

with cumdump ‘person regarded as no more than a repository for cum (orally, vaginally, or anally)’

In recent gay usage, a cumdump appears to be a man regarded as nothing more than a bareback bottom, used as the object of a gangbang. Hence the verb breed (used for bareback anal sex) in the poster. And the blindfold, worn by gangbanged men who enthusiastically give up control to the tops who use them for sex.