More News for Penises. About three men who make a living by “bodywork”: Jack Vidra, Seth Fornea, Hayden Clark. About their penises as the driving elements of their livelihoods; their penises as cultural and aesthetic objects; and especially about their penises as elements in their presentations of self.

It’s a lot of dick, all of the time, and thoroughly unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest. Most of this material appeared first in my AZBlogX posting earlier today, “Vidra Fornea Clark” (though actual dicks don’t appear here, to satisfy WordPress modesty).

The subjects. Three men from the gay province of the “male bodywork” world (male models, porn actors, gogo dancers, strippers, escorts, rentboys, and so on — men who make their livings in part through the carnal attractions of their bodies): two — Jack Vidra and Seth Fornea — together here because they appeared in St. Patrick’s Day photos, for their Irish good looks; two — Fornea and Hayden Clark — sharing notable fireplug / kielbasa dicks (relatively short but relatively thick — solid fistfuls).

The Irish lads. First, Vidra, in the Falcon Studios ad for St. Patrick’s Day (cropped; full image in #1 on AZBlogX):

(#1)

Note the red hair and green eyes. On the Raging Stallion site, he’s listed as relatively short (5′ 7″), with a pornstar cock (7.5″, cut), versatile, with a gymnast body; he also escorts, in Chicago. In action, he can be seen getting fucked by Matthew Bosch in TitanMen’s Pool Service in #2 on AZBlogX.

Then Fornea. From Tim Evanson on St. Patrick’s Day, this, um, charming composition (#3 on AZBlogX):

(#2) Atlanta-based gogo dancer (and model) Seth Fornea (Louisiana native, now apparently in Brazil), in leprechaun hat, sweet smile, and crucially placed playful Lucky Charms (photo from Adon Bryson’s AdonisMale site); I’ve suggested blowing the cereal off and going right for the pot of gold

On the cereal, from my 8/1/16 posting “Cereal mascots”:

These are all cereals advertised to kids, with memorable mascots and an astounding amount of sugar in them. I’ve also posted (here) on the (sugary) cereals Quisp and Quake and their mascots. And there are more sugary cereals: Lucky Charms, with a leprechaun mascot (the cereal reported to be 41% sugar by weight, here); (Post) Golden Crisp, with Sugar Bear as the mascot (52%); Honey Smacks, with Dig’em Frog as a mascot (56%); Frosted Flakes, with Tony the Tiger (”They’re gr-r-reat!”) as mascot; and Honey Graham Oh’s, with a honey image rather than a mascot.

Now compare #1 and #2. #1 is a pretty crude gay porn ad; it’s mostly about cock, in the context of mansex, and the rest of Vidra’s body, including his Irish looks, is essentially a vehicle for delivering cock. And Vidra has a cruise face on; he means business. #2 is male photography, which aims to display beautiful male bodies and to capture a persona for the model; it’s about forms of masculinity — focused on male sexiness, rather than male sexual organs or mansex. And Fornea’s facial expression is playfully amiable, not cruisily intense.

This is not to say that male sexual organs are not in play in male photography. They might happen not to be visible, while being implicit in a display of masculinity. Or they might be flagrantly concealed (in some form of cock tease). Or they might be right out in front, but as just one aspect of a beautiful body. Fornea is a particularly good subject for male photography — he displays his handsome body with open enthusiasm, self-confidently and unself-consciously — and he’s appeared in photographs of all of these types.

(Caution: I am not putting Vidra down by appearing to say that he’s cheap and dirty while Fornea is elegant and arty. As performers, they’re not much different.

In particular, Fornea revels in his work pleasing crowds of gay men with his gogo dancing; he appears in sexy pairings with his male partner (Jared Bradford LeBlanc, who often models under the name Jared Bradford); he talks with relish about loving to be fucked and by what kinds of dicks (really big ones, especially) in what positions; and generally presents himself as a hypersexualized figure, quite comparable to any manslut pornstar off the street. The difference is that Fornea is unusually beautiful and projects a kinship with his viewer, and so has been taken up as a photographer’s model — while Vidra is a reasonably good-looking Irish working-class guy making a living having (what Falcon hopes is) hot sex with other men on-screen. When they have any clothes to speak of on, Fornea dresses much better than Vidra; it’s a class thing, but also a job thing. Vidra’s sex work is straightforwardly utilitarian, aimed at getting queers like me off — an enterprise that can be carried out with great skill and style or almost none — while Fornea’s has an aesthetic purpose — at which it could, of course, fail.

Meanwhile, Fornea has blurred the lines between his real-life identity and his stage presence, while Vidra’s off-stage identity is pretty much a mystery (as is common with pornstars). It’s not even clear that Vidra sees himself as gay (rentboys can be all over the map on the matter): he might see himself as a straight man who’s discovered that he can make something of living by having sex with other men for money, on-screen or in tricks; or he might see himself as an MSM, a (straight) “man who has sex with men”, as an act of male bonding and a celebration of masculine identity. The emotional world of mansex is complex.)

In any case, Vidra in #1 looks all hard-cruisy, while Fornea in #2 is engaging. But even when he’s just staring intently into the camera (as below), he doesn’t look tough, confrontational, or dominating:

(#3) Male photographer Rick Day’s camera caresses Fornea’s body in a photo from the Project Q Houston site on 10/24/12

Here, his cock just happens not to be visible, but you know it’s there, and significant; well, the man is sitting up, completely naked, in bed.

With much the same facial expression, in a formal portrait, again from Adon Bryson’s AdonisMale site:

(#4) In the top half we see a fabulously hot self-possessed muscle-hunk (with, I note, erect nipples), presented as Man Transmuted to God; below that, briefs pulled down in a cock tease, with a flagrantly obtrusive moose-knuckle — the sort of thing that has made SF famous as a Bulge Boy

I’ve spent most of a day searching through photos of SF — what better, more humanly satisfying, thing for a queer to do in the midst of a pandemic? — only appreciating him more and more, occasionally thinking I can smell him, he’s that good at presenting himself. Tim Evanson wrote to me a few days ago, in reaction to my writing about SF’s “unself-conscious but entirely self-confident persona, which is enormously attractive”:

None of the studied arrogance of most incredibly handsome men. He projects a feeling of “anyone can have me, I love sex with everyone” rather than an off-putting exclusivity of “look but don’t touch me unless you’re gorgeous”.

But, yes, his cock, surely that’s where all of this has been going (though I have to confess that at this point I really just wanted to see what else he and his photographers would do with his face and stance; of course he has a cock and he’s implicitly offering it to us, but is there really anything fresh to mine down there? (Actually, it turns out, yes.)). From a Loverboy magazine spread on SF by photographer Venfield8 (again, his cock cropped; full image on AZBlogX):

(#5) SF strolls, completely naked, down Canon Blvd. (yes, Canon, not Canyon or Cañon) in Los Angeles: “Top of the morning to you”, open and happy, sure of himself, pleased to see you, evincing little notice of his fully erect dick jutting out proudly

Meanwhile, the Loverboy site exclaims:

Scorchio! Here’s something that will totally burn up your screen – an exclusive shoot by one of our favourite photographers, Venfield8 of one of the hottest gogo dancers in the game right now, Seth Fornea.

SF’s dick, which makes such a substantial weighty bulge in his briefs, is not in fact particularly long. Actually, it’s only about as long as his hand is wide, 5″, maybe 5.5″, and you can verify that in the other images in the photo shoot. Ordinarily, such a dick — I have one myself — gets derided (at least in the US) as small, often rejected in the gay world as too small (though I once snagged an encomium for mine as a perfect mouthful, big enough to be satisfying but not so big as to be challenging). But SF’s dick is thick, and that makes it both weighty and notable, capable of making a big bulge in the briefs and entirely satisfying to look at. (Well, I think it suits him just fine.)

But before I pass on to The Third Man (Hayden Clark), one more SF photo, of him with his partner Jared Bradford (LeBlanc), just because I think it’s really hot (I will never tire of photographs of affectionate male couples):

(#6) SF and Bradford, fitted together

Short but thick. A relatively short — roughly a hand’s width — but signficantly thick penis is sometimes known as a kielbasa (after the Polish sausage) or a fireplug.

(#7) From the Burgers’ Smokehouse site: Polish kielbasa sausages

(Astoundingly, all the suitable fireplug images I found on-line seem to require a fee for use, so you’ll have to supply the fireplug from memory. [addendum: see Mark Mandel’s comment, with an image from Wikipedia])

Sometimes, as I noted above, a dick like this is derided because of its length.

So we get, on The Sword site from 12/29/11, the piece “Is this the most disproportionate penis you’ve ever seen?”, about the Randy Blue pornstar Hayden Clark. The dick they’re so contemptuous of can be viewed in #8 on AZBlog, in which Clark views his fireplug dick with affection.

Clark is slim and cute, and I view his cock as beautiful, mouth-wateringly so: now, that’s a cock you could really enjoy sucking — meaty but not gag-inducing (have I mentioned that I have a shallow oral cavity?). And in #9 on ABlogX you can see him having his cock orally appreciated, with my caption

My beamish boy! / O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

(In this photo you might note Clark’s affectionate, supportive, and also directive hand on the back of his cocksucker’s head.)

There aren’t many like him in the porn business; I believe that a yen for dicks like Clark’s is viewed as a kind of kink, harmless but incomprehensible to most American queers. I say Up with Kielbasa! (see #7).

(There will be mansex, talked about in blunt language and with racy (though not actually X-rated) images; not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

From The Economist‘s 2/20/20 issue on-line, in the Science and Technology section, “Do not rely on facial expressions for how people are feeling: A smile does not always mean someone is happy” (in print on 2/22, as “Face blind: Facial expressions are not usually a reliable guide to how people feel”):

(#1) Michael Haddad illustration for the piece; interpret this!

(I have a long-standing interest in facial expressions in two contexts: during mansex, and in cruising for sex beween men. In both, I’ve noted how difficult it is to interpret the emotional content of facial expressions — whether as emotional state of the source or as emotional state perceived by an audience. Meanwhile, the expression itself just is; it’s a gesture, and that’s all. It’s just stuff, as I’m fond of saying.)

From the Economist:

Aristotle reckoned the face was a window onto a person’s mind. Cicero agreed. Two millennia on, facial expressions are still commonly thought to be a universally valid way to gauge other people’s feelings, irrespective of age, sex and culture. A raised eyebrow suggests confusion. A smile denotes happiness. A frown indicates sadness.

Or do they? An analysis of hundreds of research papers that examined the relationship between facial expressions and underlying emotions has uncovered a surprising conclusion: there is no good scientific evidence to suggest that there are such things as recognisable facial expressions for basic emotions which are universal across cultures. Just because a person is not smiling, the researchers found, does not mean that person is unhappy.

As Lisa Feldman Barrett, one of the authors of the study, published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, told the AAAS meeting in Seattle, “We surprised ourselves”. Dr Feldman Barrett is a psychologist at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and along with her colleagues she found that, on average, adults in urban cultures scowled when they were angry 30% of the time. Which meant that some 70% of the time they did not scowl when angry. Instead, they did something else with their faces. People also scowled when they were not angry. “They scowl when they’re concentrating, they scowl when someone tells them a bad joke, they scowl when they have gas, they scowl for lots of reasons,” says Dr Feldman Barrett.

A scowl, the researchers concluded, is certainly one expression of anger. But it is not the only way people express that emotion. The ambiguous nature of facial expressions was not restricted to anger, but seemed valid for all six of the emotional categories that they examined: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise.

The piece goes on to stress the importance of other non-verbal cues (like posture, hand gestures, and the like; and especially the importance of the context in which the facial expressons occur. And it casts a deeply dubious eye on attempts to use AI programs to “read emotions”.

A particular example. (This is where the carnal guy-on-guy stuff comes. A friendly warning.)

This blog has two Pages on my postings about facial expressions in sexual interactions between men: a Page on “Facial expressions in mansex”; and a Page on “Cruising for sex”, including material on cruise faces. One example from the former, from my 11/25/17 posting “Pillowtalk”, about what I call

… the Ecstatic face, with muscles tensed, mouth wide open or clenched, and eyes shut or unfocused.

The open mouth of the Ecstatic can arise in several other ways: there’s the open mouth of surprise or astonishment, and also the open mouth of the Man in Pain. Without further evidence, it’s hard to tell one from another.

[I provide three illustrations.] The photos are all from gay porn, and all three depict fucks that are presented as deeply pleasurable to the bottoms. … What might look like pain to an outside observer, you’re experiencing as an oceanic wave of intense pleasure.

Detail from the third of these examples: Man at Work fucker, Ecstatic hole, except that the hole could easily be taken to be crying out in pain:

(#2)

In a number of my gay porn examples, the facial expressions are pretty much inscrutable if you don’t have a lot of context. There are a fair number in which you’re shown what appears to be two guys having an intense friendly conversation while embracing each other, but then it turns out that they’re in mid-fuck, with one of them impaled on the other’s cock. Or you simply can’t figure out what the relationship is like, except that they are heavily into a fuck.

As it happens, one of these puzzles appeared in my e-mail today, from Lucas Entertainment, trying to make hay out of social distancing and sheltering in place during the pandemic. Headers:

Allow the Lucas Men to keep you company during this difficult time!

Don’t Be Stuck Home All Alone [instead, you should subscribe to gay porn from Lucas]

with an arresting pair of men, seen here in a cropped version (they both have excellent standard-issue PSDs (7″, give or take), so you can imagine that part):

(#3) Hole on left, fucker on right (it’s a sit-fuck, a reverse cowboy)

Damned if I know how to read those expressions, but it’s entertaining to imagine captions. Certainly a scene of some drama.

(To inject some real life into this, after some e-exchanges with a straight friend of mine, who also enjoys porn — he’s into pussy, I’m into dick, this isn’t an issue — but who finds, as do I, that the porn is hugely less satisfying at the moment. We both understand that the videos are just fodder for fantasy, when actual bodies aren’t available, and that’s fine, but now if you can’t even touch people, can’t get close enough to people to smell them, the sense of loss is so acute that it’s hard for the porn to do its job.

I suppose we’ll get used to that too. We adjust to deprivation. It’ll take a little while.)

(A diversion in difficult times.)

Back on the 15th, Tim Evanson recognized the 3/16 birthday of Ares, um, actor Kevin Smith, writing on Facebook, “We miss you” (Smith died, at age 38, in 2002, from an accidental fall). A (female) reader commented on FB:

I miss that smouldering look.

Referring to this smouldering look, which KS was a grand master of:

(#1) “Kevin Smith as the studly Ares” (the Greek god of war, in tv’s Xena: Warrior Princess), as I put it in my 6/23/17 posting “Typo time”: the smouldering look, plus (among other things)  a masculine plunging neckline, muscular arms, a confrontational stance, a huge phallic dagger, and a well-filled crotch dramatically displayed in leather

As I said on FB:

Oh my, yes. Steamy, studly Kevin Smith (especially as Ares in Xena). Is there a term for that look when directed at a woman? (I have often thought Smith deserved an Emmy for Best Cruise of Death from a Straight Man.)

The Smoulder. It seems that there’s no widely used term, so I’ll follow the FB commenter and call it the Smoulder (using her spelling, which is also the one I prefer). From NOAD, where sense b is the relevant one:

verb smolder [AZ: also smoulder]: [no object] [a] burn slowly with smoke but no flame: the bonfire still smoldered, the smoke drifting over the paddock. [b] show or feel barely suppressed anger, hatred, or another powerful emotion: Anna smoldered wth indignation | (as adjective smoldering): he met her smoldering eyes. [c] exist in a suppressed or concealed state: the controversy smoldered on for several years | (as adjective smoldering): smoldering rage.

Note the lack of specificity in “anger, hatred, or another powerful emotion”  (including sexual desire, but also intense attention, dominance, disdain, and more). There’s discussion of this indeterminacy in my 3/28/20 posting “Reading faces”, on how facial expressions in isolation aren’t usually reliable guides to how people feel: people do judge emotional states (though imperfectly) from facial expressions, but from these expressions  plus other non-verbal cues (posture, hand gestures, and so on) and aspects of the context in which the facial expressions occur (including, very significantly, knowledge of the person exhibiting the facial expressions and how they customarily behave, though I didn’t treat this in the posting). I noted there:

(I have a long-standing interest in facial expressions in two contexts: during mansex, and in cruising for sex beween men. In both, I’ve noted how difficult it is to interpret the emotional content of facial expressions — whether as emotional state of the source or as emotional state perceived by an audience. Meanwhile, the expression itself just is; it’s a gesture, and that’s all. It’s just stuff, as I’m fond of saying.)

The portrait of KS/Ares in #1 packs in lots of this other stuff. Tim Evanson posted two head shots and a head + naked torso shot so that you can better attend to the Smoulder by itself:

(#2) Ares Smoulder with lots of romantic hair

(#3) Basic Ares Smoulder (cf. #1)

(#4) High-intensity Ares Smoulder, plus muscular manly torso

These are, of course, still shots, so they’re missing two more components of the Ares Smoulder: (a) narrow focus: Ares’s gaze is narrowly focused on the object of his attention, not taking in a wider scene; and (b) fixity: his gaze is fixed and unmoving for a significant period of time. The Ares Smoulder shares both of these features with the gay Cruise of Death; indeed, fixity is a major component of gay cruise faces in general, which are held for significantly longer than a normal gaze exchange. Gay cartoonist Rick Fiala’s depiction of a Cruise of Death:

(#5) For some reason, the cartoon lacks a prominent jutting package on Cruise Man

(See the CofD references in the Page on “Cruising for sex” on this blog.)

The anatomical details of the Smoulder and the CofD are not entirely clear to me, but one one significant feature is a partial, a slight, narrowing of the eyes (combined with some lowering of the eyebrows and a neutral positioning of the lips). On narrowing of the eyes, from my 5/26/16 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

Kevin Smith. About the actor, rather than his character. The very basic facts, from Wikipedia:

Kevin Tod Smith (16 March 1963 – 15 February 2002 [from an accidental fall]) was a New Zealand actor and [rock] musician, best known for starring as the Greek god of war, Ares, in the TV series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and in its two spin-offs – Xena: Warrior Princess and Young Hercules.

KS was a serious athlete, hoping for a professional career playing rugby, when he was sidelined and took up acting as a kind of diversion, something he more or less fell into.

This is where Tim Evanson comes in, saying how much he misses KS, who was a lot of fun to watch (the Hercules/Xena shows were wonderfully cast, and were scripted and directed with notable playfulness). A FB exchange between Tim and me:

Tim: Everyone who worked with him said he was the most gentle, sweet-natured guy they had ever met. While on the set of Xena, he saw a homeless person watching the production. He took his lunch from the catering truck over to her.

Lucy Lawless [who played Xena] once said he had the most dry, … self-deprecating wit of anyone she’d ever met. He was most effective when using his own looks and sultriness to extremes, and could crack everyone up doing it.

Arnold: Yes, apparently it was something he could just turn on deliberately. A remarkable talent.

Tim: He apparently really didn’t care that he was good looking. [Television producer] Rob Halmi said that he found it very funny that fans thought they knew him, when all they did is think he was handsome or sexy.

Well, he was handsome and sexy.

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

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

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

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

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

(#1)

Sporking

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

responding to the
exigencies of the
occasion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Jockstrap Trail. The DJ ad copy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

End of addendum.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Cartoons Plus site:

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

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

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

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

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

From Wikipedia on the slang term fruit:

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

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

Meanwhile, KPFA 94.1 endures.

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

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

Rooster T. Feathers also endures.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Men’s bodies and mansex, in very plain language, so not for kids or the sexually modest. There will be a surprise detour into literary analysis.)

You can get anything you want at Alex’s Locker Room, including Alex. As depicted on the front cover of the DVD for Falcon Studio’s gay porn flick Tales From the Locker Room (2020):

(#1) Four heavy cruise faces, which is what caught my eye and led me to this posting. Dick (one barely concealed, one fuzzed out here) and ass. Black and white. Muscles. Plus a pair of icepick-erect nipples. Something for everybody. (The full photo in my 4/5/20 AZBlogX “In the fantasy locker room”)

You don’t often get to be the object of four industrial-strength cruises at once. (On cruise faces, see my 7/19/18 posting “Get your cruise face on”. And on those nipples, see my 2/25/17 posting “Displaying your nipples”, with its section on nipple erections.)

There’s more on the back cover. With the sex scenes — very heavily asshole-oriented — cropped (the full display is in my AZBlogX posting):

(#2) Add a foot/shoe fetish to the themes. (And note the wonderful porn name Jesse Zeppelin.)

The beginning of the ad copy from Falcon (unedited). The writer chose to go with the dependable jocks / socks / cocks rhyme right up front:

Ripe jocks, musky socks and throbbing cocks are all part of the supercharged sports fantasy, ‘Tales from the Locker Room’. In this bareback gym fuck fest directed by award-winner Chi Chi LaRue, there’s nothing like the distinctive scent and manly aroma of an all-male sports facility. Eight ripped athletes make up this stunning cast to play out every guy’s secret fantasy of being seduced by the coach or dribbling the balls of hot teammates. [The text — in my AZBlogX posting –then goes on to describe the encounters in four couplings between the men.]

There’s a smell theme here — musky socks and funky jocks. And of course the attractions of athletes and coaches as masculine exemplars.

Thematic overview. We have here a gay porn flick, which is by utilitarian convention episodic — divided into a series of scenes, each providing the viewer with material to fuel his erection and ejaculation. The scenes are held together through some shared element: all the scenes focus on the same sexual act (a gangbang, say, or watersports); they all take place in the same place (a specific hot tub, say, or a particular dirty movie theatre); they all involve characters sharing some trait (Israelis, say, or tattooed men, or sailors, or gigantic muscle-hunks); they all take place in the same high-masculinity milieu (fire stations, say, or locker rooms); they follow a specific central character or pair of central characters over some time period, perhaps with side digressions.

So here we have a locker room flick, set in the high-masculinity milieu of men’s sports, and, even more than that, a milieu where genital exposure is an intrinsic part of the scene — locker rooms sharing this with shower rooms, steam rooms (and saunas and hot tubs), and mensrooms, all of which can be repurposed as scenes of sexual activity.

On the milieu, three postings:

— on 8/16/10 in “The triad: jockstrap, locker room, shower room” (on AZBlogX), with an overview

— on 8/4/13 in “Gang showers” (on this blog):

Cultural context. Guys being naked together (especially in showers or locker rooms) sets up a potential context for men to cruise men — a potential that’s sometimes realized in life and is massively realized in gay visual materials.

… The number of gay porn flicks set in shower rooms and/or locker rooms is enormous.

(More discussion in “The triad…” (above) and, with a shower room fantasy of French rugby players, in “Keeping clean” on this blog.)

— on 8/4/13 in “Gang paintings” (on AZBlogX)

X-rated images from painter Rick Chris, to go along with a posting on my regular blog [above] on gang showers. Five homoerotic images of naked hunks in showers, locker rooms, or other communal places

An auxiliary theme: smell (and taste). Background on this blog:

— on 3/5/17 in “Body work, Part III: Axillary Delights”, on the apocrine sweat glands, producing characteristic body odors:

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.

Especially at home in jockstraps.

episodic vs. itinerary. Tales From the Locker Room is, like most gay porn, merely episodic; there is no overarching story line, merely one scene happening after another, the scenes held together by some (perhaps quite minimal) theme. Some gay porn flicks, however, are long-form itinerary tales, knit together like a journey, even an odyssey, a progression in time towards some end point.

On this blog, a notable gay itinerary tale is analyzed in considerable detail in my 1/24/17 posting “A day with Danny Vox in the ultimate fantasy t-room”, about Joe Gage’s Titan Media production Mens Room Bakersfield Station (2004) and its star, Danny Vox. Gage is a master of long-form porn, and this is a especially complex example of his work. More on Bakersfield Station below, but first some background about merely episodic vs. itinerary works.

Three well-known episodic tales: One Thousand and One Nights (the Arabian Nights stories, aka the Scheherazade tales); the Decameron (by Bocaccio); and the Canterbury Tales (by Chaucer). All have framing stories, providing some thematic unity, but the tales themselves do not make any kind of story (in the Canterbury Tales, the framing story is a journey, but the tales themselves are separate episodes pointing towards no end.

The Odyssey is, however, a set of episodes depicting adventures of a variety of types, unified as stations on the journey of Ulysses back from the war in Troy to his home in Ithaca; it’s an itinerary tale. From this work, English gets the

noun odyssey: a long and eventful or adventurous journey or experience: his odyssey from military man to politician. (NOAD)

The Bildungserzählung. The itinerary tale takes on a deeper meaning when the journey is seen as the development or education of a protagonist towards towards some desirable mental state — as a Bildungserzählung, a tale of development.

Compare the Bildungsroman, a novel depicting the moral and psychological growth of a protagonist), in English the novel of development.

About chapter 3 “The Novel of Development” in Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction by Patricia Meyer Sparks (Yale Univ. Press, 2006):

This chapter focuses on novels of development. Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones is the perfect example to explain this type of novel. It has in it that vital and sexy appeal, following the career of a single human undergoing a process of growth. Such a process, however, implies certain formal consequences, as novels of development are shown to be more robust because of their leisurely pace. Most are written in third-person narrative in order to create opportunities for narratorial reflection, giving more attention to the momentous events in the character’s lives rather than their inner thoughts. Employing the use of a large cast of characters, these novels try to embody how social life operates and how it affects and influences particular individuals. In effect, novels of development mainly focus on character growth — which differs from simple change in the sense that it implies self-discovery rather than a radical alteration of one’s character.

This is in fact the form of the gay porn flick Bakersfield Station: a tale of development through self-discovery, set in a fantasy mensroom in the Bakersfield CA bus station. Excerpts from my 2017 posting:

A posting about a gay pornstar and his best video performance. About identities and personas; the negotiation of sex in public places; the structuring of gay porn flicks; with several linguistic notes.

… [Set in] a fictional world, the fantasy world of gay porn, which I’ve sometimes called Gayland — more recently, Pornlandia, because I like the play on words. Pornlandia embraces a number of sites, locales, or (speaking figuratively) neighborhoods, among which are t-rooms, public mens rooms devoted to man-on-man sex.

… Thirteen men pass through the action [in the Bakersfield t-room], a number in more than one encounter (DVMens [Danny Vox’s character in this flick] is a participant in, or at least visible in, every single encounter), and the flick allows for cautious sizing up, negotiation, and competition among the participants. … DV puts his hard cock on offer a number of times, sometimes in scenes in which a number of men are performing the same routine, everybody’s eyes on all the others: every man is a competitor, every man is a potential sexhole, every man is a potential cock you need to service. DVMens never gets a taker, but he ends up being pretty much everybody’s sexhole; the message of the script seems to be that this is DVMens true nature, his destiny, and that during his day in the fantasy t-room he slowly comes to recognize that and embrace it. A Pornlandia Bildungsroman. (In the end, he might even have found love.)

… porn characters are perfect sexual beings, free of the imperfections of real-life sex, living in the perfect sexual world of Pornlandia. And in Pornlandia you can get anything, even if it’s being fucked in mid-air by a winged man, even if it’s something that would totally disgust or frighten you in real life.

And in Alex’s Locker Room, you can get anything you want, including Alex.

The second of two entertaining Easter egg postings on material that came in my mail today. Ee2020.1 (“Mussorgsky chicken with crocuses”) was sweet and playful; this one is raunchy and homoerotic (NOTE: warning for kids and the sexually modest). There’s a lot you can do with eggs.

The centerpiece is this remarkably homo-heavy ad for a Daily Jocks sale (involving extra price savings if you find an Easter egg in the catalogue for the sale); I’ve cropped details about the sale (but nothing crucial about the model):

(#1) Cruise face, body stretched out in display for the viewer, cock tease using an item of underwear or sportswear (its actual identity isn’t important in the context)

The placement of his hand and the word EGG lead, inescapably I think, to the use of eggs in English to refer to testicles. See my 7/24/19 posting “Conventional and creative metaphors”, with its discussion of the English creative metaphor eggs ‘testicles’, compared to the Spanish conventional metaphor huevos and the German Eier; the English conventional metaphors are nuts and balls.

From the rear. In #1 we get the front view. In the DJ catalogue, we get this flagrant rear view, which is billed as an ad for sportswear:

(#2) The butt offer: it’s all yours, buddy!

Apparently, HomoEaster ths year is taking place on stairs:

On the stairs, on the stairs,
Where nobody cares what he wears

In the mail today, lovable pop-up penguins! In laser-cut kirigami!

(#1) From Gadi Niram: “I figure it never hurts to send you penguins” (there’s a Page on this blog on my postings about penguins)

From the company’s site:

Lovepop creates beautiful laser-cut pop-up cards designed on ship-building software and handcrafted in the ancient art form of kirigami.

Some of the cards are wonderfully elaborate, little kirigami treasures.

The penguins. More from the Boston-based company’s site, about this particular card:

Penguins in Love 3D card: A happy penguin and his fish dinner are laser-cut onto the front of this deep blue card. Inside, two 3D penguins sweetly embrace on a heart-shaped glacier beside their fish meals. A beautiful Antarctic paradise filled with purple and green hues sets the backdrop for this loved-up pair!

Inspiration for the Penguins in Love Card: Our designer Cindy was inspired by a fact she read that penguins mate for life and share a special penguin call to find each other when they are in their large colonies. She charmingly calls penguins “nature’s true romantics.”

Occasions for the Penguins in Love Card: The Penguins in Love card is the perfect Valentine’s Day gift for your mate for life or a special someone who loves these wonderful antarctic animals.

The penguins themselves are studiously identical in gendering. Both have eyelashes — often signifying female vs. male in cartoons — so that’s pretty much a wash. You can buy this card for a beloved in any sort of pairing with you, or merely (as Gadi did) for a friend (like me) who’s into penguins, allowing for an interpretation in which the penguins are a couple of whatever kind suits you. Sweet.

The lovepop guys. More from the company’s site:

(#2) Sweetly geeky buddies Wombi Rose and John Wise

Our Founders: Wombi Rose and John Wise became best friends at Webb Institute training to become naval architects. On a Harvard Business School trip to Vietnam, Wombi and John discovered the incredible paper art form of kirigami and were inspired. The duo took their engineering background and combined this ancient art with the sliceform structure used in ship design to develop Slicegami, and Lovepop was born.

Background 1. From Wikipedia:

Webb Institute is a private undergraduate engineering college in Glen Cove, New York. Each graduate of Webb Institute earns a Bachelor of Science degree in naval architecture and marine engineering.

Background 2. Kirigami is, roughly, a hybrid of origami (artistic paper folding) and paper cutting as an art form.

Background 3. Same-sex friendship. Rose and Wise are straight buddies, and it’s nice to see them unself-consciously displaying this relationship. I write a lot on this blog about affectionate and sexual same-sex relationships, especially between men, but (with luck) we all thrive within a set of different intersecting networks of social relationships: among them, family, same-sex friendship networks, and affectionate and sexual pairings. These networks are largely independent of one another.

The quick point here is that it would be silly to look at #2 and see a pair of queers. (Not that there’s anything wrong with pairs of queers; in fact, I chronicle that world.)

lovepop in the larger world. The company sees itself as seriously committed to its neighborhoods (in Boston and Cambridge) and also to  the larger world. So, in plague time, this 4/13 Twitter posting:

Lovepop putting our first batch of 10,000 face shields into production. Working on gowns, head covers, coveralls, and shoe covers next with commercial lab testing this week.

They’ve been repurposing their production facilities. Good on them.

Today’s Rhymes With Orange cartoon, “Tea Time”:

(#1)

You are expected to recognize, from the title and from the drawing (showing a teapot, teacups, sugar bowl, and 3-tiered tray of fingerfood) that this depicts an afternoon tea — not tea plants in the afternoon, or merely the beverage tea taken in the afternoon, but (from NOAD):

noun tea: … 3 chiefly British a light afternoon meal consisting typically of tea to drink, sandwiches, and cakes.

But that won’t help you with the text, in which one tea sandwich asks of another (identified as female) why the latter brought Joe — Joe clearly referring to the one discordant element in the drawing, who appears to be a hamburger bun overstuffed with a meat filling, some of which has spilled out onto the table. Messy, messy Joe, who “just can’t pull himself together”.

Clearly, that one line, in conjunction with Joe’s appearance, is somehow the crux of the joke. But how?

For this, you have to know a bit about vernacular American foodstuffs, in particular the sandwich known as a sloppy joe. So it’s a pun on the name — and also, it turns out, a gender joke.

On the sloppy Joe, from my 5/16/13 posting “Manwich and Beefaroni as portmanteaus”, including discussion of the opposition between the high-macho sloppy joe and the feminine or effete tea sandwich:

Manwich: “a canned sloppy joe sauce … The can contains seasoned tomato sauce that is added to cooked ground beef in a skillet” to yield a filling for hamburger buns.

… On the sloppy joe:

(#2) From the Food Network site, with a sloppy joe recipe by Ree Drummond

A sloppy joe is a sandwich originating in the United States of ground beef, onions, tomato sauce or ketchup and other seasonings, served on a hamburger bun. (link)

The sloppy joe is at one end of the masculinity / manliness scale of food (in the sandwich world, it shares that end of the scale with the Dagwood sandwich): it’s meat, it’s messy, and you hold it in your hand to eat it, no utensils needed — man’s food.

Digression on the other end of the  scale: the cucumber sandwich [the quintessential tea sandwich]:

The traditional cucumber sandwich is composed of paper-thin slices of cucumber placed between two thin slices of crustless, lightly buttered white (or wheat in some cases) bread. (link)

This is a sandwich for ladies’ teas or for effete men. And it figures in one of the great works of English literature, Oscar Wilde’s comic play The Importance of Being Earnest.

On tea sandwiches more generally, from Wikipedia:

A tea sandwich (also referred to as finger sandwich) is a small prepared sandwich meant to be eaten at afternoon teatime to stave off hunger until the main meal.

The tea sandwich may take a number of different forms, but should be easy to handle, and should be capable of being eaten in two or three bites. It may be a long, narrow sandwich, a triangular half-sandwich, or a small biscuit. It may also be cut into other decorative shapes with a cookie cutter.

The bread is traditionally white, thinly sliced, and buttered. The bread crust is cut away cleanly from the sandwich after the sandwich has been prepared but before serving.

… Fillings are light, and are “dainty” or “delicate” in proportion to the amount of bread. Spreads might include butter, cream cheese or mayonnaise mixtures, and the sandwiches often feature fresh vegetables such as radishes, olives, cucumber, asparagus, or watercress. The cucumber tea sandwich in particular is considered the quintessential tea sandwich.

Nearly minimal classic cucumber tea sandwiches (amended only by the addition of some watercress (of which I am inordinately fond):

(#3) From the Williams Sonoma website, cucumber-watercress tea sandwiches: thin slices of white sandwich bread, unsalted butter, thin slices of peeled cucumbers, watercress leaves, salt

Now, on that 3-tiered tray in #1. Afternoon tea is not a matter of browsing on lots of finger food (as you might with, say, tapas), but is highly ritualized, including a division into courses, represented by the three tiers of the traditional tray. From the “oh, how CIVILIZED” website on “Afternoon Tea Course Order”

Traditional afternoon tea is served in three courses and usually on a three-tiered tray alongside a pot of tea. This illustrated guide shows what order afternoon tea should be eaten.

(#4)

Finally, then, the (female) tea sandwich’s comment in #1 about the sloppy joe represents a woman’s annoyance at the intrusion of a big messy guy into the ordered, genteel, elegant, and restrained world of the tea tray. How like a man, rudely taking up a whole lot of space and negligently dropping his stuff all over the place!

It’s the first of the month, which I have learned to greet with three rabbits — by starting the day saying “rabbit, rabbit, rabbit”. More than that, it’s the first of May — by some cultural reckonings the beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere and also (in some countries) International Workers Day, so: dance around the maypole, set bonfires for Beltane or Walpurgis, prepare for outdoor bo(i)nking (rabbits again!), break out the lilies of the valley (muguets pour le premier mai), cue the choruses of L’Internationale, and march in solidarity with the workers. (Feel free to choose from this menu, as your taste inclines and your schedule allows.)

Into this rich multicultural stew, Julie Taaffe forwarded to me a Facebook posting for the day by John Forti, “the Heirloom Gardener”, whose centerpiece is this leporine re-working of Botticelli’s Three Graces from La Primavera (Spring):

(#1) Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit: Melinda Copper’s Dancing Graces

Forti’s comment (posted yesterday):

In order to usher in a month of good luck, remember to say ‘rabbit, rabbit, rabbit’ when you wake tomorrow. And while you are evoking ancient folk traditions of the Celts and Britons, make sure to get outside before you utter any other words, and wash your face in May dew to refresh and renew your beautiful face. Happy May and Happy Beltane friends!

… and rabbits symbolized fertility/abundance/luck

Now to elaborate on a few of these themes.

Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit. From my 5/1/17 posting “Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit: three cartoons for the 1st”:

It’s May Day, an ancient spring festival — think maypoles and all that — so, the beginning of the cycle of the seasons. (Everybody knows the Vivaldi. Try listening instead to the Haydn, here.) And it’s the first of the month, an occasion for still other rituals, including one that calls for everyone to greet the new month, upon awakening, by saying “rabbit, rabbit, rabbit” (or some variant thereof [there are a number]). There’s even a Rabbit Rabbit Day Facebook community, with this page art (not attributed to an artist):

(#2)

The three-rabbit variant is the one I’m familiar with. (I got it as an adult from Ann Daingerfield Zwicky. Since she was from the South, I thought it was a specifically Southern thing. But today I learned, from an astonishingly detailed Wikipedia page, that that is very much not so.) [material from this page follows in my posting]

The Botticelli. My 2/28/18 posting “POP on the half shell”, on Botticelli’s  The Birth of Venus, has a bonus section on his (La) Primavera:

(#3) On the left of the painting the Three Graces, a group of three females … in diaphanous white, join hands in a dance. (from Wikipedia)

Basics from Wikipedia:

Primavera (“Spring”), is a large panel painting in tempera paint by the Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli made in the late 1470s or early 1480s (datings vary). It has been described as “one of the most written about, and most controversial paintings in the world”, and also “one of the most popular paintings in Western art”.

The painting depicts a group of figures from classical mythology in a garden, but no story has been found that brings this particular group together. Most critics agree that the painting is an allegory based on the lush growth of Spring, but accounts of any precise meaning vary, though many involve the Renaissance Neoplatonism which then fascinated intellectual circles in Florence.

And on the Graces, from Wikipedia:

In Greek mythology, a Charis (Greek: Χάρις) or Grace is one of three or more minor goddesses of charm, beauty, nature, human creativity, and fertility, together known as the Charites (Χάριτες) or Graces. The usual roster, as given in Hesiod, is Aglaea (“Shining”), Euphrosyne (“Joy”), and Thalia (“Blooming”).

They’re embodiments of aspects of cultural femininity.

Melinda Copper. Copper’s web studio is her Animal Masterpieces site, in which great works of art are affectionately re-conceived with anthropomorphic animals in the place of their human figures. The animal figures are drawn in rich detail, projecting strong personalities, so that her best works are not only witty commentaries on works of art but also character studies.

Her site comes in three galleries: cats; dogs; and frogs and friends (everything else, including rabbits). Occasionally, she re-does  an artwork with other animals, as in her frog version (Botticelli Frogs) of the Three Graces:

(#4) The rabbits were edgily sexual; the frogs are grave and thoughtful, stepping through a formal dance pattern (as around a maypole)

muguets pour le premier mai. That was the trois lapins, now for the rest. From my 5/1/19 posting “The May flower”:

(#5) Convallaria majalis

Yesterday, the flowers of the season were still yellow — les jaunes d’Avril — but today they are white — les muguets pour le premier Mai — also (on the plus side) delicately pretty and highly scented but (on the minus side) both poisonous and rampant, while conveying beginnings, affectionate respect, and the power of unions marching in the streets.

Ths posting has a section on the plant, its association with May 1st, and its use as a token of affection for family and loved ones on that day.

And so: three rabbits for May Day!

(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”

Not particularly about language, but it tickled me, and these days I can use some entertainment.

From the New Yorker cartoon caption contest #708 (in the 5/18/20 issue), a pair of men — one a fuming cook, the other a man in full armor, who’s the speaker in the cartoon — confront one another during a major kitchen disaster:

(#1) (I haven’t been able to identify the artist’s signature; suggestions welcome — now identified as Sofia Warren)

The caption choices:

A “I heard dinner needed rescuing.”
B “The round table is set.”
C “Fine–next time you slay the dragon and I’ll cook.”

These are consistent with various relationships between the two men, but the last one (which especially tickles me) assumes they’re some kind of (domestic) couple: they’ve divided the household tasks — which seem to include dragon-slaying as well as dinner preparation — between them.

The drawing juxtaposes two different worlds: the mythic world of heroes in armor performing noble deeds, and the everyday world of hot stoves and overflowing pots. The task of the caption writer is to surmount the absurdity by treating the juxtaposition as if it were routine and unremarkable.

In any case, caption C reminded me of William Haefeli cartoons on the division of roles between two coupled gay men. One already posted on here, on 4/25/11 in “marriage equality”:

(#2) ‘equality within a marriage’ rather than ‘equality to marry, equal rights with respect to marriage’

The other, from the New Yorker of 12/26/05 (but new to this blog), is about the division of roles in sex play:

(#3) A Brokeback Mountain joke, playing on the fact that sexual partners sometimes do role-playing, in which they negotiate who takes which role

In caption C, it’s about which guy slays the dragon (in full armor, of course) and which one does the cooking (in an apron). The cook in C is clearly pissed that in this round he got kitchen duty.

(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.

(Men’s bodies and mansex discussed in very plain language — not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

Bro Buddies, a recent gay porn flick from Falcon Studios, with three topics plucked from it: a bit of sexual slang; facial expressions communicating sexual messages and expressing emotions during sex; and detached body parts that take on a life of their own. Two images (way over the line for WordPress) are stashed away in a posting today on AZBlogX, “Cock run amok”; they’ll be described below.

Sexual slang. The premise, which isn’t intricate:

Tucked away in the Las Vegas suburbs, is the ‘Bro Buddies’ house rigged at every corner with cameras and bareback hunks fucking with zero abandon at every chance they get.

The Falcon description goes on with breathless scene-by-scene summaries. And concludes:

when you need to bust a nut, log on and tune into the studs in the ‘Bro Buddies’ house as they suck and fuck their way to drained balls, live on camera.

I’ve boldfaced the sexual slang to bust a nut ‘to ejaculate, orgasm’, based on nut ‘testicle’. (As it happens, both to bust and to nut are attested as synonyms.)

From Dictionary.com’s slang dictionary, which also supplies the inevitable bad-taste squirrel joke:

(#1)

Originally, to bust a nut meant “to ejaculate” but also ”to work hard,” perhaps a variation of a similar expression bust your conk, meaning “to work hard at a task.”

Use of bust a nut to mean “ejaculate” was popular in 1970s Blaxploitation pornography, although it’s likely that the expression was in oral use amongst black Americans prior.

Facial expressions 1. On the cover of the DVD, from AZBlogX:

(#1) Four of the buddies, each with a different facial expression (but none doing a heavy cruise); one offering his ass, three their dicks (each with its own angle: up, out, and down)

The facial expressions, with the ass and dicks cropped out:

(#2)

The men are trying to communicate some sexual connection with the viewer, consistent with the flick’s theme of being sex buddies: hot and available for sharing.

Facial expressions 2. Also on AZBlogX, a pair of posed stills from the flick, both illustrating the inscrutability of facial expressions out of context. The bottom one appears, most entertainingly, to show a fat cock run amok, threatening one of the characters by seeming to crawl across his cheek like a giant slug, so he views it with apparent panicked horror (though that was clearly not the makers’ intent). I find this image hilarious and am truly sorry I can’t show it to you on WordPress; the slug-like cock consumes about half the space, so there’s no way I can crop it or fuzz things out. My caption there:

(#2) In the bottom frame: “Oh my god, it’s creeping across my cheek! It’s going to spray me with death jizz! Aieee! I am undone!”

No doubt his expression was intended to be one of open-mouthed uncontrollable desire to suck that fat cock. Facial expressions, however, are notoriously open to multiple interpretations.

Detached body parts strike out on their own. The ominous creeping penis is in a long line of body parts that have taken on lives of their own, sometimes disastrously, sometimes comically, sometimes pointedly. A few highlights. (This is in no way intended to be an exhaustive survey, just a few notable items.)

Hands. A particularly rich vein. From Wikipedia:

(#3)

The Beast with Five Fingers is a 1946 mystery horror film directed by Robert Florey from a screenplay by Curt Siodmak, based on a short story written by W. F. Harvey and first published in 1919 in The New Decameron. The film stars Robert Alda, Victor Francen, Andrea King, and Peter Lorre.

And then, still in the horror vein, also from Wikipedia:

The Hand is a 1981 American psychological horror film written and directed by Oliver Stone, based on the novel The Lizard’s Tail by Marc Brandell. The film stars Michael Caine and Andrea Marcovicci. Caine plays Jon Lansdale, a comic book artist who loses his hand, which in turn takes on a murderous life of its own.

But then in the comic vein. From Wikipedia:

(#4)

Thing T. Thing, often referred to as just Thing, is a fictional character in The Addams Family series. Thing was originally conceived as a whole creature (always seen in the background watching the family) that was too horrible to see in person. The only part of it that was tolerable was its human hand (this can be seen in the 1964 television series). The Addamses called it “Thing” because it was something that could not be identified. Thing was changed to a disembodied hand for the 1991 and 1993 Addams Family films.

Breasts. Two items from 1972. First, the comical. From Wikipedia:

(#5)

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) is a 1972 American sex comedy film directed by Woody Allen. It consists of a series of short sequences loosely inspired by Dr. David Reuben’s 1969 book of the same name.
… segment 6 Are the Findings of Doctors and Clinics Who Do Sexual Research and Experiments Accurate? … The segment culminates with a scene in which the countryside is terrorized by a giant runaway breast created by the researcher. The first part of this segment is a parody of Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster, while the second part parodies The Blob.

Then the pointed and reflective. From Wikipedia:

The Breast (1972) is a novella by Philip Roth, in which the protagonist, David Kepesh, becomes a 155-pound breast. Throughout the book Kepesh fights with himself. Part of him wishes to give in to bodily desires, while the other part of him wants to be rational.

Another wayward penis. From Wikipedia:

“Detachable Penis” is a song by avant-garde band King Missile. It was the first single from the band’s 1992 album Happy Hour

After a night of heavy drinking, the narrator awakens to find his penis is missing, which has happened on similar occasions. Despite his best efforts, he is unable to recover his penis.

Depressed, he goes to Kiev Restaurant for breakfast. He encounters a street vendor who has possession of the missing penis. He negotiates the price and buys his penis back. He reattaches it at home.

Detachable everything. The Mr. Potato Head children’s toy, in which the characters can be disassembled into their body parts, is a rich source of humor in cartoons. For some postings of mine on these cartoons, search for the Potato Head cartoon meme in my Page on comic conventions.

(Consider the title: not for kids or the sexually modest.)

(#1) Josh Rider and his baking pan; his half-hard dick has been cropped for WordPress modesty, but can be viewed in my AZBlogX posting today, “Josh Rider bakes raw”

Into the baking frenzy of coronovirus lockdowns strides utterly naked gay pornstar Josh Rider, for the NakedSword division of Falcon Studios, with a charming video about making brownies. While he earnestly prepares the batter, sporting enthusiastic smiles (and gives an entirely serviceable recipe), he occasionally plays negligently with his pornstar dick (half-hard in this portion of the video), but the focus is on the cooking. His delivery of the recipe sounds like someone chatting with a friend, not like an actor’s line readings, and not at all like the wooden readings porn actors often provide.

When the batter goes into the oven, he strokes his cock to its full 9 inches (uncut) and jacks off for us, his intense blue eyes firmly staring into the camera, locking his gaze with his viewers’. Then an admirable cumshot, with intense come face; crucial moments in screen shots below. Somehow it’s all sweetly light-hearted. A gem of a piece, worth watching as performance art.

(#2) Just before coming

(#3) Just after coming

(#4) A taste of cum as a further reward

(He doesn’t deal with anything sizzling or boiling or otherwise threatening to the body, so he excites no anxiety over his naked torso and exposed dick. But in general, there’s a reason why people wear aprons (and sometimes mitts) in the kitchen.)

The Falcon ad copy, relatively restrained for the genre:

Falcon Exclusive Josh Moore whips out his favorite brownie recipe and dives into the quarantine baking craze, but he does it better than anyone: NAKED! The devilishly handsome British beauty greases pans, sifts flour, cracks eggs and whips them, and his viewers, into a frenzy, all the while playing with his enormous uncut cock. Once the pan goes in the oven Josh finds himself with some time to kill and dives into everyone’s other favorite pastime, a hot J.O. session. So sit back and jack along in this sexy scene that will leave you asking “Brownies? What brownies?”

In celebration of Masturbation May, which ends in a couple of days, the short video is available free until the end of the month. (Other porn studios have other offers for the occasion,  but nothing quite like this one.)

My own contribtion to the month is a new Page on this blog on Masturbation postings.

Notes on Josh Rider aka Josh Moore. The persona he presents in Naked Baking is charming, playful, openly and apparently uncomplicatedly gay, utterly at ease with himself, and engaged with his audience (look at me, buddy! I’m doing all this for you). It takes a moment to get accustomed to his almost entirely untouched working-class English variety from Dover (in the southeast of England), and then that becomes part of the charm. He loves displaying his body and getting all sexed up, and some of it is intense, but none of it comes across as dirty, not even deliciously so. After a couple of minutes it just seems natural that he should be cooking naked, while occasionally playing with the foreskin of his cock. As any young man might.

His first porn work was for Lucas Entertainment in 2016, and since then he’s worked for a number of studios. Here he is in a rear shot for UK Hot Jocks:

(#5) A publicity shot of the man offering his ass for fucking. Rider is labeled Versatile in studio writeups, but in interviews he expresses a strong inclination to bottoming (a masculine bottom with a really big dick is some sort of ultimate lust object for a fair number of gay men; yes, the psychology is complex)

On his dick size, in my 2/17/20 posting “Preference labels and little pockets”, I provided the fanciful labels Porn Standard Dick (PSD) for 7″ and Porn World-Class Dick (PWD) for 9″ (possessed by only about 1% of American men). Rider’s stated position is that with a cock that big, he should use it to fuck other guys (big dicks being a common fetish) at least once in a while.

At least he’s 6 feet tall, so his cock isn’t completely out of scale with the rest of his body. That body is an athlete’s, not a bodybuilder’s, so he just looks like a guy who’s in really good shape.

Well, yes, I do find him enormously attractive. And of course I jacked off with him.

(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.)

(Today’s posting showing that I’m Not Dead Yet. Tough day, the eve of my man Jacques’s death day, 17 years ago. Watching the funeral service for George Floyd. In a California heat wave.)

Recently in the (physical) mail, a pair of cards from Ann Burlingham from her last Australian visit. She saw them as a diptych, to be viewed in sequence. The cards are about, though she didn’t say this, the presentation of gender.

On the left:

(#1) A greeting card by Lilly Perrott, illustrator and designer for La La Land (cards and gifts)

And on the right:

(#2) Patience Hodgson of The Grates, with Straight Arrows + Pleasure Symbols, performing at the Corner Hotel, Melbourne,  August 15, 2015 (photo by Kristen Ashton) – from the Life Music Media site

In #2, Hodgson performing extravagant but aggressive Feminine. In #1, the cartoon figure of a merman (NOAD on the noun merman “the male equivalent of a mermaid”) performing sexually compliant Feminine, in the form of an odalisque (NOAD on the noun odalisque: “historical a female slave or concubine in a harem, especially one in the seraglio of the Sultan of Turkey”). With, as a lexical extra, the portmanteau mermazing, merman + amazing.

Yes, he’s amazing, for the gender cross, but there’s a lot more than that. #1 is a take-off on an extraordinary painting:

(#3) The Ingres odalisque

From Wikipedia:

Grande Odalisque, also known as Une Odalisque or La Grande Odalisque, is an oil painting of 1814 by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres depicting an odalisque, or concubine. Ingres’ contemporaries considered the work to signify Ingres’ break from Neoclassicism, indicating a shift toward exotic Romanticism.

Complete with a turban in #1. But displaying his big belly rather than his buttocks.

(This posting is light-hearted, to entertain in terrible times, but there’s no denying that it’s substantially about men’s bodies and mansex in very plain language, plus images that are right up against the line, so it’s not for kids or the sexually modest.)

We’re into Pride Month, so everybody who sells things for lgbtq people has stuff on sale. Especially the gay porn studios, flogging videos. That presents an occasion for reflecting on (among other things) how gay personas are projected in this material, how emotional and sexual relationships between men are presented, and how gay men communicate via facial expressions during mansex and in cruising for it.

Exhibit 1: this Pride Month ad for Next Door Studios, a nicely posed composition featuring Justin Matthews (proprietary top) and Nic Sahara (enthusiastically receptive bottom), flashing two different sorts of buddy smiles (using both their mouths and their eyes):

(#1) Closed-mouth half smile, open-mouthed wide smile, both gazes directed at the viewer, rather than one another (p.r. shot for the studio’s Auditions – Part 2)

A still shot, clearly meant to depict foreplay to fucking, but quite charming: the actors are projecting comfortable happiness in one another’s company and friendly engagement with their audience, and that’s such a pleasing scene that you could easily background the knowledge that Matthews’s cock is moments away from being plunged into Sahara’s asshole, to their mutual satisfaction (a near-future underlined by the cheap double entendre in “COMING SOON”).

(I note, as I have on other occasions, that I am a fool for images of really hot guys who are smiling. Especially if I can imagine that they’re about to kiss.)

Background. From my 3/8/20 posting “Where is the fishmonger?”, about:

Next Door Studios (specializing in regular-guy boy-next-door types — twinks and swimmer-body young men — enthusiastically engaged sexually with each other, covering a range of acts from vanilla mansex on out to moderately kinky stuff) …

[eventually, in a section on facial expressions in mansex and in cruising for it]: Alex and Dakota, [in a Next Door Studios ad] … [are] doing some kind of buddy cruise, together inviting the viewer to engage (imaginatively) with them sexually — as a voyeur of their couple sex; in a three-way; or in a pairing with one of them (while the other one engages with a fourth man).

So it is with #1: Matthews and Sahara are inviting us in (yes, to get us to buy the video, but it is, after all, an ad).

On the pornstars: Matthews and Sahara fit the gymnast/swimmer body type that Next Door Studios traffics in. Both are sexually versatile, with pornstar dicks (Matthews cut, Sahara uncut). Sahara’s porn name presents an interesting interpretational puzzle, since it carries echoes of the Arabian Nights, suggesting (or inventing, I don’t know) some Arab ancestry.

Sahara is new to me, and I find the persona he projects very attractive. In a p.r. shot, with his characteristic smile (he smiles a lot):

(#2) With an angled smile. Ok, he’s also deep into tattoos, but then nobody’s perfect

Then a conventional p.r. shot. Most often in these, the subject’s expression is neutral, inscrutable (so that the viewer can read into it whatever he will), but not infrequently it’s challenging, or aggressively dominating (reproducing the Cruise of Death). But then the central feature of these shots is usually the display of the actor’s hard dick.

Here, Sahara is (uncharacteristically) inscrutable, verging on challending, while performing a butt tease, with his jeans pulled down and his shirt lifted (see the Page on this blog on shirt lifting):

(#3) Delicately balanced between presenting Sahara as receptive or insertive — which seems to be his natural state as a pornstar (we have no idea what the actual man’s desires are like) — all praise to the photographer for arranging this pose

Then to Matthews, who appeared on this blog a while ago in an exploration of, yes, facial expressions in gay porn. In my 11/24/18 AZBlogX posting “November facework”, we saw Justin Matthews paired with Arad Winwin — in two different settings, differently presented. One is framed as a Conversation between buddies (while, as it happens, Matthews is sitting empronged on Winwin’s dick); the other as a more conventional fucking, with Winwin as Craftsman and Matthews as Ecstatic. And then with shots of Matthews displaying his sexual body at three different points in his career.

The Conversation encounter, cropped for modesty and focused on the men’s facial expressions:

(#4) “I hear you like opera; that’s cool. I always wanted to know more about opera. And, oh yeah, man, your cock feels fantastic in me.” (Dialogue reconstructed from actual conversations during mansex.)

(It’s important to remember that all of us are simultaneously many different people. Back in the ancient days, when I was a fuckwhore slut, it was not uncommon for an encounter to end with my holding my partner’s cock in my asshole while he cradled me in his arms and we talked about linguistics. I  mean, that’s what I do; I’m an actual authority.)

As a bonus, one of Justin Matthews’s p.r. photos, presenting him not with his hard dick jutting out (there are any number of these), but performing a cock tease for his audience, with his jeans unbuttoned while he fixes his audience with narrowed lustful eyes:

(#5) From early in his career, when he had romantic hair (compare the close cut in #1); the killer abs are long-standing

(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).

(Well, it’s Tom of Finland, so pretty much saturated with the worship of men’s bodies, especially their genitals, and allusions to, or outright depiction of, incredibly enthusiastic mansex. But no actual genitals are shown or described here, or any mansex either; use your judgment.)

In yesterday’s mail, a 2020 Pride postcard from Ryan Tamares, from the Tom of Finland store:

(There’s a Page on this blog about  my postings on Tom of Finland drawings and cartoons, and his cultural significance.)

(#1) “River Duo” from Physique Pictorial in 1966

A ToF-fantasy version of a lumberjack/logger couple — a duo, nicely contrasted as black-haired vs. blond — dueling atop floating logs, using their pike poles as weapons. You know that, when one of them has won, they will fall into flagrant mansex, probably still balancing on those logs, and then kiss affectionately.

ToF is so dramatically over the top in every way, but with a vein of playful sweetness shot through his material (his characters almost always take visible pleasure in whatever is happening to them), that it’s hard to stay offended by him, even if gigantic male bodyparts and extravagant male sexual couplings aren’t your thing.

#1 drips with all of ToF’s obsessive preccupations (turned into an art form of its own), plus those high-phallicity logs and poles (both log and pole are well-attested as slang synonyms for the penis). Without anything that’s technically immodest. Nothing there to offend the USPS.

The lumberjack/logger stuff. The cultural context of the drawing might not be familiar to many of my readers (I only dimly remembered it, and then had to refresh my knowledge). First, from a section of the Wikipedia article on lumberjack:

Before the era of modern diesel or gasoline powered equipment, the existing machinery was steam powered. Animal or steam-powered skidders could be used to haul harvested logs to nearby rail roads for shipment to sawmills. Horse driven logging wheels were a means used for moving logs out of the woods. Another way for transporting logs to sawmills was to float them down a body of water or a specially-constructed log flume. Log rolling, the art of staying on top of a floating log while “rolling” the log by walking, was another skill much in demand among lumberjacks. Spiked boots known as “caulks” or “corks” were used for log rolling and often worn by lumberjacks as their regular footwear [ToF’s loggers don’t seem to be wearing them, but then they’re hyper-realistic creatures; however, I certainly wouldn’t want to walk on logs in ordinary slippery-soled boots, without any gripping mechanism]

So much for the logs. Then the poles, in a photo from ca. 1945 on the Columbia Basin (which is primarily in WA, but also OR and a bit of NV) Institute of Regional History site:

(#2) [notes on the site:] “Logger holding a Pike Pole standing on the log pond at Mineral Lake”: …  In lumbering they are used to control logs floating on a river in a log drive and constructing log rafts. Pike poles used in log rafting were originally made of wood, typically spruce or fir. In the mid-1960s they began to be made of aluminum tubing plugged with a wooden knob to maintain buoyancy.

(Most commonly, a pike pole has a  metal hook at one end for grabbing onto logs.)

They would naturally be made into jousting sticks. It’s a guy thing: pretty much anything that can be pressed into service for symbolic warfare probably will be. Yes, that includes penises. From my 9/6/11 posting “Penis-to-penis”, with some discussion of

mock play (referred to metaphorically as swordplay or a swordfight, with the figure of penis as sword)

In any case, if you’ve got poles (including pike poles), sooner or later, guys are probably going to fight with them, especially if they’re in high-masculinity contexts. (I was an anomalous boy in a vast number of ways, but I enjoyed mock fights with sticks and the like. Though I certainly knew other anomalous boys who weren’t attracted to this sort of rough play at all. It’s obviously a complex topic.)

(Adapted and expanded from a Facebook comment of mine a while back. Some coarse sexual language, notably from American newsmakers, but also enough about sexual bodies and mansex from me to make the posting dubious for kids and the sexually modest.)

Every so often, MSNBC commentator Ali Velshi tartly notes — alluding to the Imperator Grabpussy’s smears of President Barack Obama as a Muslim born in Kenya — that he is a Muslim who was born in Kenya (though he grew up in Canada).

There’s a linguistic point here, having to do with relevance and implicature. Why does Velshi say this? Yes, it’s true, but then “The freezing point of water is 32F” is true, but if Velshi had said that it would have been bizarre, because it would have been irrelevant in the context. So Velshi’s religion and nativity are relevant in the context. Cutting through a whole lot of stuff, I would claim that Velshi is implicating something like “Being one myself, I know from Muslims born in Kenya, and I know that Barack Obama is no Muslim born in Kenya”. And THAT brings me to a piece I’ve been wrestling with some time, about Grabpussy Jr. jeering at Mitt Romney, taunting him by calling him a pussy. (I have a Velshian response of my own to that.)

Hang on; this will go in several directions.

Note: smearing and taunting. Grabpussy’s fabrication about Obama and Grabpussy Jr.’s jeer at Romney. From NOAD:

verb smear: … 2 damage the reputation of (someone) by false accusations; slander: someone was trying to smear her by faking letters.

verb taunt: [a] [with object] provoke or challenge (someone) with insulting remarks: students began taunting her about her weight…

The way the taunt definition characterizes the purpose of the insult — provocation or challenge — seems too mild to me. The Wikipedia entry captures harsher purposes:

A taunt is a battle cry, sarcastic remark, gesture, or insult intended to demoralize the recipient, or to anger them and encourage reactionary behaviors

Grabpussy Jr.’s intent in “Mom Jeans. Because you’re a pussy” was pretty clearly to demoralize Romney and to degrade him in the eyes of others. The 2/5 Instagram posting:

(#1)

Pussies. The rest of my FB comment:

(Yes, schoolyard bullying, insulting a boy by indirectly calling him a fag, a mere receptacle for anal penetration, doing that by referring to him as a girl, and doing that indirectly as well, by treating her as merely a projection of her vagina, her pussy.) To which I want to say, Velshi-style, “Why, I am a pussy”. (This is fact.) Implicating something like “Being one myself, I know from [male] pussies, and I know that Mitt Romney is not one”. It’s also true that by mentioning it explicitly, Ali Velshi is conveying that he’s not ashamed of his identity. And I do the same.

In my 8/19/12 posting “The pussy patrol”, there’s a digression on on the tangled semantic web of the word pussy. A summary of material in OED3 (Dec. 2007):

— “colloquial” senses including ‘a girl or woman exhibiting characteristics associated with a cat, esp. sweetness or amiability’

— “slang” senses (chiefly North American) including ‘a sweet or effeminate male’;  ‘a weakling, a coward, a sissy’;  ‘a male homosexual’ (OED takes these to be historical developments from the feline sense, but current usage suggests that they are now primarily viewed as related to the genital senses (Note that historical sense developments do not necessarily align well with the sense clusters of the contemporary language; knowing the etymology doesn’t necessarily tell you a lot about current usage.)

— “coarse slang” senses including ‘the female genitals’; ‘a woman, or women collectively, regarded as a source of sexual intercourse’; in male homosexual usage: ‘the anus … of a man, as an object of sexual penetration’; also: ‘a man or boy viewed in this way’

The last two of these bring me to my own usages.

First, in the vocabulary of the anus, I distinguish my asshole, which is the anus viewed as an organ of defecation; and my pussy (or sometimes cunt), which is the anus viewed as an organ of receptive intercourse, an organ of sexual pleasure. Pussy is just a metaphor, not an assertion of identity; you want a word for the anus as a male sexual organ, you look for parallels, and vaginas are obvious analogues. That doesn’t mean you think your anus is a vagina, or that by using such language you are identifying as a woman.

(Bit of a digression. There are alternatives to metaphorizing. For instance, the N + N compound fuckhole lit. ‘hole for fucking’ — which has the advantage of being usable for both sexes, and having the powerful noun fuck in it.)

Second, in the vocabulary of reference to persons as sexual beings, there’s the part-for-whole metonymy, or synecdoche, in referring to someone via a term for their sexual parts, specifically in referring to a man who takes the receptive role in anal intercourse via a lexical item for his anus viewed as a sexual organ: pussy, cunt, or fuckhole. See my “Why, I am a pussy” above.

From my 2/17/20 posting “Preference labels and little pockets”

(#2) “the shameless effrontery of CERTIFIED PUSSY BOY [on a t-shirt], which I truly admire”

(On occasion, I have described myself as a full-bore pussy.)

And then, from my 5/17/18 posting “Deshagged and pedicured”, a note on the basis for this self-identification:

I’ve been long out of the fuck market, but not because I’ve renounced it as wickedness; in fact, getting fucked is the central event of my very rich fantasy sexual life. (Insert paean to masturbation here.)

“I know from X”. An idiom I used above twice, the second time in: “Being one myself, I know from [male] pussies, and I know that Mitt Romney is not one”. Heidi Harley admired my FB comment, adding that she loved my deployment of to know from. Indeed, it was carefully chosen; what I said to Heidi:

One of many gifts of Yiddish to English. The first time I heard it (long ago, when velociraptors scrunched up smaller creatures) I saw that it had a wonderful subtlety to it, a meaning component of great utility.

The history is wonderful. From HDAS:

[not] know from nothing [Yid tsu visn fun gornisht ‘to be ignorant’; lit., ‘to know from nothing’] to know absolutely nothing. Hence know from to know about. [1st positive know from example from 1977 (the film The Boys in Company C) He knows from baseball like I know from polo; later 1992 (in The New Yorker) Mr. Perkoff knows from bar-mitzvah parties … He has played at over a thousand bar mitzvahs

So, from the negative idiom to know from nothing, a syntactically back-formed positive to know from, loosely glossed ‘to know about’, but as you can see from the examples above, it conveys ‘to know about from personal experience’, and that accords exactly with the way I use the idiom: I don’t just know about male pussies (say, from having read the literature on male homosexuality), I know about them from my own experience.

More taunting. Around the same time as Grabpussy Jr.’s Instagram taunt, the folks on ADS-L were discussing a childhood game and its many names. From Wikipedia:

Keep Away, also called Monkey in the Middle, Piggy in the Middle, Pickle in a Dish, or Pickle in the Middle, or Monkey, is a children’s game in which two or more players must pass a ball to one another, while a player in the middle attempts to intercept it. The game could be considered a reverse form of dodgeball, because instead of trying to hit people in the middle with the ball, players attempt to keep the ball away from him or her. The game is played worldwide.

I suppose this game must have been played on the grounds of the West Lawn Elementary School when I was a student there, but I don’t recall it. What I do recall is the taunting variant of it, in which a pack of boys abuse a boy they perceive as inferior to them — geeky, artsy, unathletic, insufficiently masculine (probably a fairy), friendly with girls, small, unmuscular, funny-looking, wrong race or ethnicity, the list is endless, so many ways to be inadequate — surround him, grab some belonging of his (classically, a cap), passing it from one to another while he tries to snatch it back, all the time abusing him verbally. The immediate aim is to make him beg, if possible reduce him to tears. The long-range goal is to prove that he is worthless and contemptible in comparison to them, who are lords of their world.

Rarely does the target get his object back undamaged; sometimes it’s literally destroyed. And then the kid has to try to explain that away.

There are lots of good things in the world of boys in packs: cooperation in sports teams, all sorts of friendly but tough competitions, buddies doing all sorts of things in groups for companionship (and protection from the world). And then there’s the world of bully boys.

(These days I have trouble enduring any appearance by Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, who strikes me as a hateful grown-up version of a bully boy, with political power to boot.)