A recent tv commercial ‘Clean Underwear’ for Charmin Ultra Soft toilet paper, featuring the four Charmin bears and their mother, skirts direct mention of feces stains on underwear (colloquially referred to euphemistically as skidmarks), while including a very slightly concrealed allusion to skids. A performance that some viewers found funny-cute and others found offensive. By going to this site, you can access a video of the commercial that loops through the thing again and again, until you shut it off.

Background. Toilet paper presents a serious challenge in engineering and design: it has to disintegrate in water, so as not to clog toilets; be strong enough to withstand vigorous wiping; and be soft enough not to irritate the user.

Meanwhile, as I’ve noted on this blog (for instance, on 12/12/12, here), underwear serves two central purposes:  protecting the body from assault by outer clothing, which is often rough; and protecting the outer clothing from the discharges of the body, especially feces and semen. (Some underwear also supplies support, for female breasts or male genitals. In addition, as clothing, underwear can serve aesthetic purposes. And underwear that encloses sexual parts can serve as sexual display.) In any case, the intersection of toilet paper and underwear is skid marks.

The commercial. In this partial transcript, I’ve given the bear cubs numbers; they probably have names in the Charminverse, but I don’t know them. Bear 3 seems to act as Head Bear, and Bear 2, in a baseball cap, seems to be the Kid. Bear 4, in glasses, has no speaking part in this ad.

The scene starts with Bear 1 bringing a pack of Charmin into what looks like a living room, where the other three cubs are hanging out. A stairway leads to a second story, where Mama Bear is.

The script:

1: Wow! This toilet paper reminds me of a washcloth!

3: New Charmin Ulta Strong, dude. Cleans so well, it keeps your underwear cleaner. So clean you could wear them a second day.

2: [some exclamation I haven’t been able to make out]

Mama [appearing on the stairway]: I did not just hear that!

3 [to Mama]: I said that you could, not that you would.

[voiceover here]

3: It cleans better. [to 2] Uh, you should try it, Skitz!

[further voiceover]

Skitz is so close to Skids as to make no difference. Apparently 2 is a Skid Kid.

(It’s going to be penis penis penis in this posting. But fairly decorously, and with some discussion of names, plants, and medicine.)

Every so often there’s an outbreak of ExtenZe commercials on late-night cable television. Well, the same commercial, over and over again. The current ad features former Dallas Cowboys head coach Jimmy Johnson, who became the official spokesman for ExtenZe in 2010:

Here’s comic Jim Gaffigan riffing on this commercial:

Note Gaffigan’s playing on Jimmy Johnson‘s name as a possible factor in his choice as spokesman; Gaffigan mentions (former Chicago Bears linebacker) Dick Butkus as an alternative. I suppose it’s too bad that actor Peter O’Toole is no longer available. (In a while I’ll consider Willy / Willie candidates.)

But first some ExtenZe background.

From Wikipedia:

ExtenZe is a herbal nutritional supplement claiming to promote “natural male enhancement”, a euphemism for penis enlargement. Additionally, television commercials and advertisements claim an “improved” or “arousing” sexual experience [longer, stronger, harder erections]. Websites selling the product make several more detailed claims, including acquiring a “larger penis”. Their enlarging effects are described as “temporary” which will only provide you a “chubby one” while under the use of Extenze. Early infomercials featured a studio audience and porn star Ron Jeremy.

(#1)

(Earlier mention of the product on this blog in section 3 of a 9/14/11 posting.)

(ambesium labidrol is an invented name for ExtenZe.)

A fair number of websites claim to be providing “reviews” of ExtenZe and its efficacy, but these are just disguised ads for the product.

The world of male enhancement. A very crowded world it is. It comes in two parts: supplements that you take internally, like ExtenZe or its competitor Rock Hard Weekend;

(#2)

and massage oils for the penis, usually from Chinese or Indian sources:

(#3)

(#4)

Penis slang names. A digression now on the topic of names that are slang terms for the penis. Gaffigan went though Johnson and Dick, and I added Peter and O’Toole. Then there’s Willy / Willie. Plenty of candidates here, though I think my favorite is singer-songwriter Willie Nelson.

Also plenty of playing with the names Willy / Willie, with the phallic associations. Here are three from a very crowded field: a rainbow willy warmer (knitted), from the firm MenKind:

(#5)

and two plays on Where’s Wally (British) / Waldo (North American)? One, the image “Where’s wally willy” by Rennis05 on DeviantArt:

(#6)

And, two, the book “Where’s Willy?” by Wings Illustration (2010). From the publisher’s blurb on Amazon UK:

Where s Willy? is a great fun book for the sausage-chaser in your life! The concept is slightly rude of course, but this book is not filled with huge, graphic images, the material is handled in a delicate manner and is great for a giggle! With three star characters throughout who bear an uncanny resemblance to Tiger Woods, Bill Clinton and Michael Douglas the Search for little Willies around the world begins!

(#7)

(All very British. Spotted Dick is the name of a traditional British suet pudding, briefly considered on this blog in a posting of 9/9/09).

The ingredients of ExtenZe. On a “How Does Extenze Work?” site, the company explains that the ingredients come in four parts: three “Support formulas” — male prohormones, bio-enhancement, and sexual response enhancement — plus zinc and folic acid. I’ll run fairly quickly through two of these parts, saving the Bio-Enhancement Support and Sexual Response formulas for extended discussion. From the compay site:

(4) There are two … ingredients in Extenze which are not part of the 3 Support formulas: Zinc and folic acid. Both of these ingredients are essential to your overall health and have many functions in the body. For the male sexual system, they are very important for sex hormone production. Studies show that deficiencies in zinc or folic acid can lead to infertility. By taking these supplements as part of Extenze, you can get an impressive boost in your male vitality. Ejaculations become more voluminous.

(1) Extenze Male Prohormone Support: There are two ingredients which make up this part of the Extenze formula: DHEA and Pregnenolone. Both ingredients are chemicals which naturally occur in the body. Their jobs include regulating sexual hormones. By taking Extenze, you can get a boost in your testosterone levels.

The supplement also contains γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) (a neurotransmitter, marketed as a supplement for its purported calming effect) and L-arginine hydrochloride (a natural amino acid).

(2) Extenze Bio-Enhancement Support: As men age, their blood circulation becomes weaker. This is harmful to your entire body, including your erectile function. Without enough blood flowing to the penis, penile cells can become weak and incapable of holding enough blood for a large erection. Poor blood flow can also result in smaller, soft erections. Extenze makes sure that men are getting the best quality, largest erections possible with the Bio-Enhancement Support formula. This formula contains circulation boosters like black pepper and ginger.

Not only black pepper (Piper nigrum), but also the closely related long pepper (Piper longum), both as ground-up seeds in ExtenZe. These two plants have three things in common: they are spicy, “hot”, which goes along with their circulatory effects; they have notably phallic seed clusters; and they are elements in several traditions of herbal medicine, probably because of the first two commonalities.

On the phallicity of the long pepper:

The fruit of the pepper consists of many minuscule fruits — each about the size of a poppy seed — embedded in the surface of a flower spike that closely resembles a hazel tree catkin.

Examples:

(#8)

Black pepper flower spikes are less showily phallic.

In any case, it’s quite likely that these pepper seeds play a role in some herbalist traditions in part because of the phallic nature of the spikes — as instances of folk beliefs that the utility of a plant can be gauged from the appearance of its parts (walnuts are “brain food” because their nutmeats resemble brains). In the West, such beliefs were incorporated in medical practice in the doctrine of signatures —

The doctrine of signatures, dating from the time of Dioscurides and Galen, states that herbs that resemble various parts of the body can be used by herbalists to treat ailments of those parts of the body. A theological justification for this, as stated by botanists like William Coles, was that God would have wanted to show men what plants would be useful for.

but similar beliefs guided other ancient traditions, in paricular those of China and India.The two types of Piper seeds have two things going for them as elements of folk-medical practice: via their circulatory-stimulant, and therefore potentially pro-erectile, properties and via the appearance of their flower spikes.

But folk-medical traditions are somewhat arbitrary, even whimsical, with respect to which particular plants are singled out as medically useful. Piper seeds get in, and so does ginger (Zingiber officinale), in part because of its hotness, in part because of the phallic appearance of ginger root:

(#9)

Given what I just said, you’d expect chili peppers (in the genus Capsicum) to be in the folk-medical tradition and also in the formulation of ExtenZe: they are (mostly) hot, and their fruits are significantly phallic, but they haven’t made it into folk-medical practice (except for topical applications of pepper oil), and there’s no Capsicum in ExtenZe.

It looks like ExtenZe follows folk-medical traditions very closely; the ingredients in the Sexual Response formula for the stuff is a compendium of herbs said in one tradition or another to be aphrodisiac (increasing desire) or pro-erectile (strengthening and lengthening erection) or tonic (boosting energy) or anti-aging.

From the site:

(3) Extenze Sexual Response Enhancement Support: The Sexual Response formula of Extenze contains an impressive 18 ingredients including some notorious ones for sexual enhancement, like horny goat weed, Yohimbe, and damiana leaf. These ingredients, most of which are natural herbs, will make your sex drive go through the roof. There are several ways that this is accomplished. Firstly, the ingredients support healthy hormone levels so you can become sexually stimulated. Secondly, the formula supports nerve function so your brain can trigger a sexual response throughout your body. Finally, the ingredients ensure that your penile cell membranes are healthy.

One ingredient on this list is not from a plant. That’s deer velvet antler, the young, not yet calcified, antler of a deer after the annual shedding. The antler is cut off, dried, and powdered. It’s a drug in traditional Chinese medicine. Indexing youth and masculinity, and obviously phallic.

Then there’s the leaf of the horny goat weed, in the genus Epimedium. From Wikipedia:

Epimedium, also known as barrenwort, bishop’s hat, fairy wings, horny goat weed, rowdy lamb herb, randy beef grass or yin yang huo … The plant contains [small quantities of] icariin, which is a PDE5 inhibitor like sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra. It is therefore used as an aphrodisiac and a treatment for erectile dysfunction.

The amount of icariin in an ExtenZe capsule must be truly tiny, nowhere near the amount that browsing animals (like goats, lambs, or cattle) can ingest by chomping down a bushel or more of leaves of the plant, which then has been observed to make the animals horny, rowdy, or randy. In any case, this plant gets into the formula via an empirical observation, with no involvement of phallic plant parts that I can see.

Something similar may be true of the extract of yohimbe bark in ExtenZe. From Wikipedia:

an indole alkaloid derived from the bark of the Pausinystalia johimbe tree in Central Africa[,] ,,,yohimbine has been studied as a potential treatment for erectile dysfunction but there is insufficient evidence to rate its effectiveness. Extracts from yohimbe containing yohimbine have been used in traditional medicine in West Africa as an aphrodisiac and have been marketed as dietary supplements.

And possibly of the Cnidium monnieri (Monnier’s snowparsley) seed in the formula. From Wikipedia:

A pro-erectile herb from Traditional Chinese Medicine, Cnidium monnieri and its main bioactive known as osthole appear to have mechanisms similar to Viagra in penile tissue and the hippocampus; the influence of cnidium monnieri on testosterone and cognition remains unexplored.

And possibly of some other ingredients:

• damiana (Turnera diffusa) leaf. From the WebMD site:

Damiana is a wild shrub that grows in Mexico, Central America, and the West Indies. The leaf and stem are used to make medicine. Historically, it was used mostly to increase sexual desire (as an aphrodisiac).

• stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) root, a traditional medicinal herb in Austria and in Anglo-Saxon England
• licorice extract. From Wikipedia:

the root of Glycyrrhiza glabra is used in traditional Chinese and Indian medicine; glycyrrizin has medicinal properties, but must be taken in moderation

• Astragalus root. From Wikipedia:

Extracts of Astragalus propinquus … are marketed as life-prolonging extracts for human use. A proprietary extract of the dried root of A. membranaceus … [has been] associated with … [an] age-reversal effect in the immune system

But then we get to ingredients where the appearance of plant parts probably figures in their herbal medicine use:

• aerial parts of Xanthroparmelia scabrosa, a lichen with fleshy protuberances. From WebMD:

Xanthoparmelia is used to treat sexual dysfunction, especially erectile dysfunction (ED), as well as to increase sexual desire (as an aphrodisiac).

• Ho Shou Wu extract, from the often anthropomorphic roots of

Fallopia [syn. Polygonum] multiflora (tuber fleeceflower or Chinese knotweed; Chinese: hé shǒu wū … Fallopia multiflora is used in traditional Chinese medicine, which regards it as having anti-aging properties (Wikipedia link)

• Tribulus terrestris extract, from a widespread invasive plant with many common names (goathead, bindii, bullhead, burra gokharu, caltrop, cat’s head, devil’s eyelashes, devil’s thorn, devil’s weed, puncture vine, puncturevine, tackweed), used in both Chinese and Indian traditional medicine. Its

spiky nutlets strikingly resemble goats’ or bulls’ heads… [The] extract is claimed to increase the body’s natural testosterone levels and thereby improve male sexual performance and help build muscle.

Then some ingredients where appearance almost surely plays a part:

• Korean ginseng extract, from the phallic roots of plants in the genus Panax, esp. P. ginseng. From Wikipedia:

Folk medicine attributes various benefits to oral use of American ginseng and Asian ginseng (P. ginseng) roots, including roles as an aphrodisiac or stimulant treatment

• Eleutherococcus extract from phallic roots. From Wikipedia:

Perhaps the best known [species] in the West is … E. senticosus, used as herbal medicine, and commonly known by such English names as Eleuthero or Siberian ginseng. In traditional Chinese medicine, this is administered to increase energy, thus traditionally recognized to have attributes akin to true ginseng (Panax).

• Muira Puama extract (from the stems of Ptychopetalum, a plant with notably testicular roots). From Wikipedia:

Ptychopetalum is a genus of two species of flowering plants in the family Olacaceae, native to the Amazon rainforest. The indigenous name for the genus is Muira Puama, “potency wood”.

Another installment on male ballet dancers and their remarkable bodies. Passed on by Mike McKinley, Chris Ambidge, and Arne Adolfsen from the Male Ballet Dancers Facebook page, Friedemann Vogel as photographed by Youn Sik Kim:

(#1)

Vogel in mid-air: slender and lean, lean, lean, but with massive thigh muscles.

From Vogel’s own website:

In September 1998 Friedemann Vogel joined the Stuttgart Ballet and quickly rose through the ranks. In 2002 he was promoted to first soloist, the company’s highest rank.

And he guest dances with companies around the world, taking on an exceptionally wide range of roles in doing so.

Two more photos of Vogel by Kim:

(#2)

(#3)

Youn Sik Kim lives in Seoul, South Korea; his subjects are diverse, but ballet is a special focus. Profile photos of him from his Facebook page:

(#4)

(#5)

(Another posting about the male body, but with some fine photography.)

From the models.com site on the 11th, a piece by Jonathan Shia, “Matthew Brookes’ Ballet Dancers”. Highlights:

Flip through the pages of Les Danseurs, the photographer Matthew Brookes’ new book devoted to the male dancers of the Paris Opéra Ballet, and you might take him for a lifelong fan of the artform. The intimate black-and-white photos offer a personal and powerful look at their bodies, shaped by lifetimes devoted to dance, combining both grace and power as the best performers do. But Brookes, a frequent contributor to various Vogues, Interview, and Vanity Fair who has also lensed campaigns for Giorgio Armani, Cartier, Burberry, and Berluti, says he knew nothing about dance before being introduced to one of the dancers through a casting director he was working with, a chance encounter that eventually blossomed into this monograph.

… The photographs, shot in a clean studio against a rough cloth backdrop, are guided by an abstract and almost sculptural sense of form. There are no arabesques or pirouettes, just shapes and compositions reminiscent of flowers and what Brookes calls his initial inspiration of “birds falling from the sky,” with hints of Rodin’s muscular sculpture thrown in. The photographer says that his driving instinct was to capture the dancers’ strength as athletes, rather than following the stereotypical ideas of classical ballet as “sensitive” and “ethereal.”

Three of the photos:

(#1)

(#2)

(#3)

(Hat tip to Chis Ambidge and Mike McKinley.)

An entertaining photo that’s been floating around the Internet for some time:

(#1)

In speech, the intended parsing

(1) [ Alaskan cod ] [ pieces ]

is indistinguishable from the humorous parsing

(2) { Alaskan ] [ codpieces ]

In writing, the conventional spelling distinguishes the two and enforces parsing (1). But if you’re not aware of the item of apparel the codpiece (more on that to come), or if the possibility of an ambiguity hadn’t occurred to you, you might be tempted to the spelling codpieces instead of cod pieces.

This has happened at least once beyond #1. Here’s a list of ingredients for fish stew on the Chickenfoot Soup blog on 2/28/13:

Clam juice, clams, Alaskan codpieces, white wine, saffron, mild Rotel Tomatoes & green chiles

Hat tip. To Chris Hansen on Facebook, who found #1 in a Style Invitational contest — more on which below.

Codpieces. My posting of 4/17/11, “Bulges”, has a section on codpieces. The codpiece is cousin to the jockstrap, the thong, and pouch-enhancing underwear — all clothing focusing on a man’s package (and so related to the lack of underwear in the practice of freeballing, aka going commando, which encourages the development of visible packages: moose knuckles).

There are historical codpieces, and then there are modern codpieces, favored by performers who want to exaggerate and promote their packages, thrust them in their audiences’ faces. The singer Adam Lambert in my “Bulges” posting, and many others. I’ll illustrate with three of these, starting with one my readers might not be familiar with:

(#2)

This is the bodybuilder and heavy-metallist Jon Miki Thor, as seen in a cheesy low-budget cult classic flick. From Wikipedia:

Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare (also known as The Edge of Hell) is a 1987 direct-to-video Canadian horror film directed by John Fasano, and stars heavy metal musician Jon Mikl Thor, Jillian Peri, and Teresa Simpson.

(#3)
On to Alice Cooper, known for performing in a bright red codpiece with a death’s head on it:

(#4)

And of course to Gene Simmons of KISS:

(#5)

Not just codpieces, but Alaskan codpieces, and wild ones at that. I’m entertained by the idea of Alaskan codpieces: what would set them apart from the codpieces of the lower 48 (not to mention Hawaii)? Perhaps the Northern Lights play over them; that would make a nice show

Then there’s wild added to the mix. With the parsing in (1), wild could in principle be understood as modifying pieces ((1a) ‘wild pieces of Alaskan cod’) or Alaskan cod ((1b) ‘pieces of Alaskan cod that is wild, pieces of wild cod from Alaska’ — the intended reading in #1) or even Alaska ((1c) ‘pieces of cod from wild Alaska’).

On top of this, there are several senses of wild that might apply in one or the other of these cases. From NOAD2:

(of an animal or plant) living or growing in the natural environment; not domesticated or cultivated [the intended sense in #1]

(of scenery or a region) desolate-looking: the wild coastline of Cape Wrath

uncontrolled or unrestrained [or extravagant, outrageous, eccentric , or unusual]

With the parsing in (2), wild could modify Alaskan codpieces — the codpieces are wild, presumably in the third sense above (Gene Simmons’s codpiece in #5 is certainly wild in this sense) — or Alaska (codpieces from the boonies of Alaska, not from settled Alaskan places like Anchorage, or from crazy, hippy Alaska).

The Style Invitational. From Wikipedia:

The Style Invitational, or Invite, is a long-running humor contest that ran first in the Style section of the Sunday Washington Post before moving to Saturday’s Style and later returning to the Sunday paper. Started in 1993, it has run weekly, except for a hiatus in late 1999. In that time, it has had two head judges who select winning entries: “The Czar” and “The Empress.” The Czar, who was anonymous, abdicated in late 2003, leaving the contest in the hands of his former associate, The Empress, copy editor Patricia (Pat) Myers. The humor ranges from an intellectual vein to a less mature style, and frequently touches on sophisticated political or historical allusions.

In searching for the contest that was the source of #1, I came across a recent (November 5th) contest (#1148), where Pat Myers wrote:

The Donald should have
A far more fitting nickname. .
Like J. Lo’s slick name,
It should right out at you jump!
Hey, then: How about T. Rump?

Last fall we introduced a brand-new form of poetry — or at least we declared it so in Week 1095, since that was easier than getting complaints that we didn’t do the old form correctly. Whatever, it’s a variation on the ancient Japanese poetry called tanka, which are, roughly, 31-syllable poems in five lines; they begin with 5-7-5, as haiku do, then have two more lines of seven syllables each. However, notes Wikipedia, “traditionally tanka had no concept of rhyme.” And traditionally The Style Invitational has a big fat concept of rhyme. We like it. Hence the TankaWanka. This week: Write a TankaWanka about something that’s been in the news lately. The poem must consist of five lines of 5, 7, 5, 7 and 7 syllables in that order. And it must include at least one rhyme [The example above has two.]

Wonderful! A new poetic form to play with.

The latest ad from the Daily Jocks company, with a caption:

  (#1)

The head-scratcher

He didn’t know
Where he was or
How he got there;
Last he remembered,
He was rocking to
“El Bimbo” at the
Blue Oyster Bar, in his
Pink and blue jockstrap,
With a really
Hot
Sweaty
Stud
Who called him
Sugar

Some notes:

Ad copy from Jocks:

Get the blood pumping with the all new Sugar Rush Collection from PUMP!
Made from quality micromesh and cotton fabric, each pair will help keep you cool while still giving you full support.
Available in jock and jogger in a funky pink and blue color combo!

Then the Blue Oyster Bar — the gay leather bar in the Police Academy films (link), where the guys dance to the song “El Bimbo” (played by Jean-Marc Dompierre and his orchestra); a Blue Oyster Bar scene can be viewed here. El Bimbo would of course refer to a male bimbo, otherwise known (by portmanteauing) as a himbo or mimbo: good-looking, buffed, focused on his grooming and his body, not very bright, and inclined to be a slut. In another variant, he’s a bimboy, as in the 2015 book Becoming the Bimboy, a male/male romance by Lance Abrusco:

  (#2)

But why Blue Oyster Bar? Well, the color blue has been associated with gay men, as in the (now-deceased) gay pornographic magazine Blueboy:

  (#3)

(plus the use of blue to refer to material with sexual or pornographic content).

Then there’s the rock band Blue Öyster Cult, but I don’t see any gay male association there, so it probably just contributed the words blue and oyster to the bar name.

As for oysters, they’ve been associated with virility since ancient times, no doubt because of the similarity in appearance of oysters and vulvas:

  (#4)

Now this is easily seen as a vulva, but it can also be seen as a (moderately complex) anus, and gay men are in any case inclined to view the male anus as a sexual organ, analogous to a vagina (with the vulva as its external part). That makes Blue Oyster a moderately subtle name for a gay bar, less blunt than, say Manhole or Tool Box.

(More common as symbolic of both vulvas and anuses are flowers, in particular roses.)

Yes, a posting about men’s bodies and gay sex, but without pictures (those are on AZBlogX, in a posting entitled “The news for penises, Thanksgiving edition”). Still, not for the kiddies or the sexually modest.

Photo #2 on AZBlogX shows a guy with a huge hard-on, an industrial-strength metal cock ring, and some kind of penile piercing — improving the experience even more by inhaling poppers. Popper Man is a compendium of clichés of sex in the gay male world. (Cock rings, poppers, and piercings are of course not restricted to gay men, but they are especially prevalent in the gay world and are stereotypical there.)

(For the record, I’ve used cock rings, but not poppers, and I have no piercings, and no tattoos either.)

On cock rings, see my 1/30/12 posting “erection enhancer”. Here I’m focusing on poppers and piercings.

Poppers. From a 9/13/12 posting, in a section on alkyl nitrites, taken from Wikipedia:

[They] are often inhaled with the goal of enhancing sexual pleasure. These products have also been part of the club culture from the 1970s disco scene to the 1980s and 1990s rave scene. Poppers have a long history of use due to the rush of warm sensations and dizziness experienced when the vapours are inhaled.

Alkyl nitrites are vasodilators (dilating the blood vessels), causing an immediate drop in blood pressure, resulting in those sensations of warm dizziness.

Piercings. Besides ears, quite a few body parts can be pierced:  lips, noses, tongues, cheeks, eyebrows, nipples, pectoral muscles, navels, and of course genitals. Nice example of a pectoral piercing in a 5/23/14 posting.

(The aptly named character Pierce in the comic strip Zits has multiple piercings, which are the vehicle for sweet humor: people hang things on his piercings, and so on.)

Male genital piercings come in many forms, From the Piercing Bible site on male genital piercings, a list:

Prince Albert,
 dolphin piercing, ampallang piercing,
 Apadravya piercing, 
frenum piercing,
 Lorum piercing, scrotum/Hafada piercing, 
dydoe piercing,
 guiche piercing, 
pubic piercing

None of these matches what you can see in photo #2 in my AZBlogX posting, where the jewelry is black (rather than the usual silvery color of stainless steel or titanium piercings). The piercing appears to be at the corona (aka rim) of the glans penis.

On to the Prince Albert, illustrated in close-up in #3 on AZBlogX, with a metal barbell as the jewelry. From Wikipedia:

The Prince Albert (PA) is one of the more common male genital piercings. The PA is “a ring-style piercing that extends along the underside of the glans from the urethral opening to where the glans meets the shaft of the penis.” The related “reverse Prince Albert piercing” enters through the urethra and exits through a hole pierced in the top of the glans.

… The origin of this piercing is unknown. Many theories suggest that the piercing was used to secure the penis in some manner, rather than having a sexual or cultural purpose.

In modern times, the Prince Albert piercing was popularized by Jim Ward in the early 1970s. In West Hollywood, Ward met Richard Simonton (aka Doug Malloy) and Fakir Musafar. Together, these men further developed the Prince Albert piercing. Malloy published a pamphlet in which he concocted fanciful histories of genital piercings in particular. These apocryphal tales — which included the notion that Albert, the Prince Consort invented the piercing that shares his name in order to tame the appearance of his large penis in tight trousers — are widely circulated as urban legend. No historical proof of their veracity has been located independent of Malloy’s assertions.

Like many other male genital piercings, it had a history of practice in gay male subculture in the twentieth century. It became more prominently known when body piercing expanded in the late 1970s and was gradually embraced by popular culture.

A couple of weeks ago I posted about the product ExtenZe,

a herbal nutritional supplement claiming to promote “natural male enhancement”, a euphemism for penis enlargement. Additionally, television commercials and advertisements claim an “improved” or “arousing” sexual experience [longer, stronger, harder erections]. (from Wikipedia)

Now another product has come along and is advertising heavily on cable tv, especially at night. Unlike ExtenZe, which contains small anounts of virtually every substance believed (in some tradition or another) to be of some efficacy in enlarging the penis or improving sexual performance, Nugenix has a small ingredients list, which includes one herb, fenugreek seed, that is not in ExtenZe.

From the Supplement Critique site, in a 9/13/12 review of Nugenix by Rob Miller (who rated it 4.5 out of 5):

Nugenix is a combination of zinc, vitamin B6, vitamin B12 and a testosterone booster complex that combines the properties of several herbal extracts.

Zinc is known to be a natural testosterone booster, as well, which means that there may be some truth to the manufacturer’s claims.

… the manufacturer [goes] through extensive detail about how the ingredients in their formula work, although it should be noted that most of their claims are not medically reviewed.

The Nugenix blend contains a compound called Testofen,which is actually a clinically studied ingredient that has been proven in lab studies to increase testosterone levels dramatically. Testofen is actually a patented version of the popular Fenugreek Extract, which is found primarily in the middle east and southern Europe.

Nugenix also contains L-citrulline, which is an amino acid, and Tribulus Terrestris, which is found in literally hundreds of other testosterone booster products, including Penatropin.

One thing that users may not like that much about Nugenix is that it must be taken daily in order to deliver effects. Three capsules per day is the recommended dosage and a free trial bottle has 42 capsules, giving you 14 days to try the product out. A standard bottle contains 90 capsules, and costs about $70 per bottle, making it quite expensive when compared to other natural testosterone boosters.

(#1)

(On Tribulus terrestris, see the discussion in my ExtenZe posting.)

Note that Testofen — transparently a portmanteau of testosterone and fenugreek — is, like Nugenix, a registered name, but fenugreek is a pefectly ordinary common name for a well-known plant. From Wikipedia:

Fenugreek (… Trigonella foenum-graecum) is an annual plant in the family Fabaceae [the legumes], with leaves consisting of three small obovate to oblong leaflets. It is cultivated worldwide as a semiarid crop, and its seeds are a common ingredient in dishes from the Indian subcontinent.

Fenugreek is used as an herb (dried or fresh leaves), spice (seeds), and vegetable (fresh leaves, sprouts, and microgreens). Sotolon is the chemical responsible for fenugreek’s distinctive sweet smell. Cuboid-shaped, yellow- to amber-colored fenugreek seeds are frequently encountered in the cuisines of the Indian Subcontinent, used both whole and powdered in the preparation of pickles, vegetable dishes, daals, and spice mixes

Fenugreek leaves:

(2)

and Fenugreek seeds:
(#3)

(About men’s bodies, not much about language.)

Item 1: posted on AZBlogX today, “You go your way and I’ll go mine”, with a sexy, sweet, and (I think) funny photo of two men in bed: one with a notably upcurved penis, the other with a notably downcurved one.

Item 2: a link to the XBlog posting has been added to the “Angle and curvature” Page under the larger XWriting page (which has essays from my XBlog or about XBlog materials).

Item 3: a listing of postings about the gay pornstar Ken Ryker, with a penis that is not only famously large but also downcurved

11/30/10: Phallicity: Falcon SuperCocks:
http://arnold-x-zwicky.livejournal.com/16395.html
Tom Chase, Ken Ryker, Eric Hanson, Jeremy Penn
[Pornstar dildos. Note: In the photo of Ryker, his penis is strongly downcurved, but the dildo is (ahem) straight as an arrow. Well, silicone-rubber dildos aren’t nearly as flexible and adaptable as actual penises.]

12/24/12: Hammond organs:
http://arnold-x-zwicky.livejournal.com/66092.html
Steve Hammond, Jeff Hammond; mention of ubermanly gay pornstars — Mike Branson, Ken Ryker, Steve Hammond, Ryan Idol, Jeff Stryker, Rex Chandler – and frankly hungry bottoms like Joey Stefano, Kevin Williams, Kevin Wiles, Tag Adams

1/10/13: The Ken Ryker files:
http://arnold-x-zwicky.livejournal.com/67330.html
Ryker showing off his penis in Renegade

1/12/13: A matter of size:
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2013/01/12/a-matter-of-size/
on penis size, with extensive discussion of Ken Ryker

3/13/14: Today’s hunk:
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2014/03/13/todays-hunk/
Ken Ryker (photo from Jonathan Black, Idols)

10/13/14: traps:
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2014/10/13/traps/
on the trapezius muscles, with two photos of Ken Ryker’s

I start with yesterday’s Daily Jocks ad, with a Black Friday sale:

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Knocked Down

They put him on a Black Friday
Half-off sale, he felt
Devalued

(The briefs in the photo are apparently 2(X)IST Sweats Briefs, which are in the Daily Jocks sale in Earl Grey and Very Blue — normally $28 each, $14 on sale — but not in the vivid red shown above.)

Daily Jocks offers a number of lines of what have come to be called premium brands, emphasizing not just comfort but also style and sexiness, and in cost a step up from basic brands like Fruit of the Loom and Jockey. In fact, the world of men’s underwear has undergone a kind of revolution, from the days when 75% of men’s underwear purchases were made by women to the current scene, where only 25% are; men have become fashion-conscious and are shopping for themselves these days. Meanwhile, underwear modeling has gone from just a routine specialty in male modeling to a high-fashion specialty; men with good looks and hot bodies vie with one another for modeling jobs, and celebrities in sports and entertainment are courted by premium brands (for big bucks) to represent them in advertising.

Now the next stage: from premium brands to luxury brands. On to a wonderful piece by Guy Trebay in the NYT‘s Styles section on the 26th:  “As Personal as Luxury Gets: Men’s underwear goes premium, entering triple-figure territory” (head in print), “A Pair of Boxers for $400? Men’s Underwear Goes High-End “ (head on-line).

Some highlights — well, quite a few — from Trebay’s piece:

Once, they were known as unmentionables, and it only mattered that they were clean. You never knew, after all, when you might be knocked down by a bus.

“When we were young, you would never show your underwear,” the designer Tommy Hilfiger said recently, referring to an era when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president. “Now, if you don’t show your underwear, you’re just not cool.”

Mr. Hilfiger was marking one of those shifts in the culture that lurch along with a tectonic jolt. For generations, American men who were raised wearing generic boxers or Jockeys purchased in three-packs expended little thought or time or post-tax income on the foundation garments worn beneath their outerwear. The whole point of skivvies seemed to be encapsulated in the name given to the category under which they were sold: intimates.

That was before Justin Bieber, of course, before sexting and saggers and artfully lighted, half-clad Snapchat selfies. It was before baldly erotic videos of Rafael Nadal popped up on smartphones or monitors in advertisements depicting one of the world’s top tennis players doing a locker-room striptease in Mr. Hilfiger’s new line of sexy boxer briefs — images that even five years ago may have been flagged as NSFW.

It was also before a trend (most likely inaugurated by Calvin Klein in the prehistory of Marky Mark) that gained considerable momentum over the last dozen years, that of offering so-called premium underwear for men. [Language Log and this blog have tracked these developments for some time; see the “Underwear postings” Page on this blog.] “Underwear is where jeans were 20 years ago,” Mr. Hilfiger said. “It’s the new denim.”

Proof of that assertion can be found on The Underwear Expert, a startlingly comprehensive website dedicated to researching, testing, reviewing and even curating for sale underpants culled from the nearly 600 labels now crowding the field.

… Priced in a broad range from $24.99 (the figure at which men’s underpants are considered “premium”) to the $470 the French luxury-goods house Hermès charges for a pair of woven boxers are briefs whose virtues are sometimes described in terms better suited to the aerospace than the apparel industry.

… Teaming up with Frigo, a premium underwear brand developed by Mathias Ingvarsson, the Swedish entrepreneur who helped transform Tempur-Pedic from a no-name mattress brand into a global powerhouse, [Curtis Jackson III, better known as 50 Cent] last December helped close an $80 million licensing deal for a brand apparently pitched at the so-called urban market.

… The marketing of Frigo tends to favor innovation over style as a way to lure consumers to a product that costs up to $100 a pair. Like the patented AussieBum Wonderjock, or the SAXX Vibe “articulated contour pouch,” or 2UNDR’s “Joey Pouch,” or the “keyhole comfort pouch” made by the label MyPakage, Frigo briefs also feature a patented interior pouch designed to lift and display a man’s anatomical endowment to maximum benefit.

(On this blog, on pouch-enhancing underwear: “The Xmas package 2” on 12/17/10, “Bulges” on 4/17/11.)

Pouch enhancement predictably leads Trebay to material on codpieces (see this recent posting of mine, which has a section on codpieces).

Trebay’s piece is amply illustrated. The first photo:

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Matthew McGue, a model, auditioning for an event to celebrate the debut of a collection of high-end Parke & Ronen underwear. (photo by Deidre Schoo)

Back to basics. Basic lines continue, but even they have fashioned up some. The Fruit of the Loom site offers only three styles of men’s underwear — boxers, boxer briefs, and briefs — but the briefs come in several styles (in particular, there are bikini briefs, without flies, in many colors).  These are offered in 4-packs, 5-packs, and 6-packs (mostly at $18.99 per pack, which is way below premium prices). For instance,  a 6-pack of stripes / solids fashion briefs (with fly) for $18.99, a 5-pack of assorted-color bikini briefs for $15.49.

Meanwhile, Jockey has moved into fashion world. The Jockey site for men’s underwear offers eight styles:

string bikini, bikini, brief, trunk, boxer brief, boxer, midway brief (essentially a lomng boxer brief), quad short (even longer, covering the thighs)

in three fits (as described on the site):

classic fit (full coverage styles that offer long-lasting comfort), low rise (tailored underwear in fashionable colors and styles), sport (underwear designed to keep you cool and comfortable)

These are available in 2-packs, 3-packs, and 6-packs, all well under premium prices. For example: Elance String Bikini (2 for $19.50), Pouch Boxer Brief (2 for $25),  Elance Brief (3 for $19.50),  Classic Brief (6 for $36).

A different marketing strategy. While most menswear has moved in the direction of style, fashion, and sexiness, one firm, the Duluth Trading Company, has gone for a marketing strategy that elaborately pushes working-class masculinity, with pants (that is, trousers) claimed to be super-durable (even a grizzly bear couldn’t take them on), and the like. In the men’s underwear department, they offer their Men’s Buck Naked Performance line:

Boxer Briefs for $22.50 each, Boxers for $22.50, Briefs $19.50, Extra-Long Boxer Briefs $24.50

Just under premium prices (and, nice point, prices set to correspond roughly to the amount of fabric in a garment).

A commercial (obviously meant to be funny) can be viewed here. The print ads are elaborately folksy-masculine:

TIRED OF SWEATIN’ AND SQUIRMIN’? GET “BUCK NAKED!”

No sweat. No stink. No pinch! “Almost feel as if you are wearing no underwear at all!” says Ric from Richmond, VA. If you’re like most men, you’re still wearing the same kind of ‘tighty whities’ you grew up with. Our Buck Naked™ Briefs (previously known as Performance Underwear) are making working guys all across the country change their underwear. They’re stretchy, yet supportive too, for extra ease when you’re climbing or kneeling. (“Great comfort and gentle control of all my parts” as Doc from Michigan so carefully put it.) They also wick sweat far more efficiently than any cotton skivvies out there to keep you drier. Plus they’re treated to fight odor.

None of that fancy-pants stuff, but underwear for Real Men!

The most recent Daily Jocks ad, with a darkly brooding model in Jack Adams  briefs who’s performing the first step in a cock-tease show, pulling down one side of those briefs, hinting that he might be willing to give us more:

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I love my Jack Adams

When Adam delved
Into his briefs,
Seeking his identity,
He named himself —
For his belovèd
Underwear.

In its ads, the underwear firm Jack Adams (JA) — it specializes in jockstraps, but offers a full range of styles — focuses on masculinity, with an unmistakable homoerotic subtext, though its statements are tamer, emphasizing athleticism and stylishness, as here:

Jack Adams – Defined By The Man Who Wears It: Founded in 2010, Jack Adams is an underwear and activewear brand that’s defined by the man who wears it. We appeal to the athletic man with a masculine style – and a strong sense of style at that. We are one of the few brands that clearly acknowledge the confidence that can come from a fashionable, maybe even sexy pair of underwear. That’s why the quintessential Jack Adams man is self-assured, comfortable in his own skin, and even more comfortable in Jack Adams style.

The firm’s name conjures up (no doubt intentionally) a huge assortment of associations, masculine and sexual, with Jack, jack, and Adam.

JA uses a wide range of model types (though they’re all in fantastic shape), with a variety of presentations of themselves. The guy above falls pretty far out on the male-hustler end of the scale.

I’ll look at a bunch of Jack Adams models in a little while. But first, notes on two of the allusions in my caption above.

The title. An echo of the British singer-songwriter Donovan’s song “I Love My Shirt”, from the 1969 album Barabajagal, a song you can hear at this YouTube link.

Delving.  That is, ‘digging’. Here the echo is of a famous couplet:

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From the Victorian Web site, this is a William Morris illumination of A Dream of John Ball (1892), on the words of reformist preacher John Ball during the 1381 peasant rebellion (a sermon about the unequal distribution of wealth).

Previously on this blog. Two postings with JA in them. On 1/16/13, a posting on “The H fly”: the horizontal or army fly, which allows a man to fish out his penis from above with ease, illustrated by the JA Army Fly Jock Brief (in case you’ve forgotten, a jock brief is a brief in front, a jockstrap – hence open-rear – in back; sort of like a mullet, business in front, party in the rear).

And then on 9/14/15, a posting on “Alex Minsky and his underwear”, on 2014 JA model Minsky: heavily tattoed, very hot, and with a prosthetic lower right leg.

Jesse Jordan. That was 2014. The 2013 JA model was Jesse Jordan, a favorite of mine. Also tattooed, but more lightly, and given to facial expressions that suggest he might be about to smile — certainly, neither overtly seductive nor challenging. Three items. First, the JA Footballer Lace Up Jockstrap (in red and black), a preposterous but entertaining garment:

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Then a JA Army Fly Brief (with H fly), in black (and now we see the tattoing on his right pec: “Ich Liebe” ‘I love’):

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And the JA Core Boxer Brief, in grey, with a great big jutting pouch:

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From the Model Mayhem site, we learn that 34-year-old Jesse Daniel Jordan, who lives in L.A., is a big man (6′ 2″, 203 lbs.). From his sweetly enthusiastic personal statement, we learn that he’s also a hair stylist:

I [have] been very fortunate to work in many different avenues of entertainment. I have modeled for magazines and billboards, was on a reality tv show on Bravo called “Workout,” acted in commercials, and I am a licensed hair stylist. As a hair stylist I have worked with some of the top magazines and celebrities. I am open to both modeling and hair jobs. I consider myself a kind and hard working person so feel free to message me about potential jobs. THANK YOU!

Dylan Austin Scott. Male fitness model Scott was the 2012 JA model. As far as I can tell, he’s inkless, and he’s clean-shaven. Two poses, in the JA BodyFlex Mesh Jockstrap, in black, snapping a strap; and in the JA Trainer Trunk, in white, with another big jutting pouch:

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And then, out of his underwear. showing off his muscles and smiling devilishly through cock-teasing:

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One more JA model: John Strand, shown here in a JA Air Mesh Track Short:

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One of his moods. In a wilder mood and a different presentation of self, he’s posed for a number of cock-tease shots by David Wagner, for instance:

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Assembling materials for my posting on Jack Adams underwear for men took me further into the world of homowear, premium men’s underwear brands (pricey, emphasizing athleticism and stylishness, plus comfort and sexiness, and also homoerotically tinged) and the world of the male underwear models who are used by these brands — both crowded and competitive fields these days. And there I came across this David Wagner photo of model José Parra displaying his muscular body and offering his crotch (and one armpit) in a wrestling singlet (aka wrestler) from N2N:

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I’ll be posting a few more photos of Joey Parra (as he is also known), mostly doing enthusiastic cock-tease performances, and also information about some of the homowear brands he’s worked for, starting with N2N.

Wrestling singlets. Strictly speaking, #1 is not a cock-tease performance, since this wrestling singlet is cut super low by design, so that anyone wearing it will be displaying pubic hair. The garment is not a piece of athletic gear at all; it’s a piece of homowear. Note the stylish fabric and the pouch enhancement.

Here’s a genuine athletic singlet, from a wrestling supplies firm:

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It has a U neck, like many athletic shirts, but it’s not scooped low.

An intermediate case, from the style-conscious firm Pistol Pete:

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This has a scoop neck, designed to show off the wearer’s manly chest, and it’s stylish, but it has no pouch enhancement, and it could in principle be worn on a wrestling mat (especially if your team’s colors are gold and black).

Homowear singlets are scooped way low, below the navel, to display the whole torso; they are pouch-enhancing; they’re likely to be made of sexy materials (faux leather, shiny fabrics, camo fabric, fabrics in intense colors); and sometimes they have open rears, offering the wearer’s butt as well as his crotch (the singlet in #1 does not). They are for fun and display, not athletic competition.

Of course, the attraction of a wrestling singlet, even one not homo-enhanced, is the combination of the high masculinity of  sports and the high homoeroticism of two sweaty, minimally clad men in prolonged close physical contact with one another.

The N2N brand. From the Underwear Expert site:

Designed to offer a flattering fit, N2N Bodywear offers a wide selection of men’s underwear, swimwear, active wear and loungewear specifically for gay male consumers or adventurous metro-sexuals. Founded in Los Angeles in 1997 by fashion designer, Andrew MacKay, N2N (short for “Next to Nothing”) offers an apparel line that embraces the male physique and provides customers with a number of options. N2N Bodywear’s mission is to provide the most comfortable, quality apparel to make any man feel masculine, sexy and confident.

The N2N Underwear line offers a variety of styles such as revealing G-strings or jockstraps as well as trunks or long johns that hug the body. The brand utilizes natural and synthetic fibers such as cotton, polyester and spandex to achieve a lightweight, smooth feel. The brand provides a variety of selections with different colors and prints. For a flattering contour enhancing silhouette, N2N offers its own nHANCE pouch, which lifts and supports your package. N2N Mens Underwear also provides a sensual touch with several ranges featuring see-through fabrics.

N2N underwear is in the premium range (mostly $20-$30 apiece), but they also offer some specialty items, especially in the Erotic category, where you can find

(1) The C-Strap (for cock strap), essentially a nylon/spandex cock ring, which N2N bills as a “bulge booster” and “ball lifter”. In various kicky colors, at $14 apiece.

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(2) The N2N Suede Harness, which goes for $40:

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(3) And another homowear wrestling singlet, The Liquid Skin Wrestler, which sells for $44:

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On José “Joey” Parra. He’s now in his late 20s. Lives in Montebello CA (in L.A. County, east of downtown L.A.). His entry on the Model Mayhem site says he doesn’t do nude shots… but he’s clearly an adventurous fellow. From a 12/13/13 feature in Next Magazine, “Colby Melvin, Brent Corrigan and [José Parra] model the smallest men’s underwear you’ve ever seen [NSFW]”:

Looking for a stocking stuffer that won’t take up too much space? PetitQ has taken revealing underwear to a whole new level with their latest line of incredibly skimpy products. (Seriously, you could use some of these to floss.) [with a link to an entertaining video; a screen shot from the video]

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Joey’s big break was modeling for Andrew Christian. Here he is, younger and tamer than above (but still intense), modeling an AC jockstrap:

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On the Andrew Christian brand. From the Underwear Expert:

Based in Los Angeles, California, Andrew Christian underwear was founded in 1997. Led by the brand’s namesake creative director, Andrew Christian, the brand is best known for its devoted fan base, viral video campaigns, innovative pouches and designs and, of course, the ever popular Andrew Christian models.

The brand is perhaps most well known for its anatomically correct Almost Naked range of men’s underwear. The range features a hang-free pouch designed to enhance the profile of the package and maximize comfort.

AC on this blog:

“Male vanity” of 3/30/11: the AC Shock Jock Flirt Brief (with “a soft hidden cup, sculpted into a penis shape”)

“For Stonewall Day” of 6/28/12: including “a puppy pile of Andrew Christian football boyz”

“Color and advertising your preference” of 2/27/15: ad copy for AC; photos of the CoolFlex Retro Brief Jock and the C-Ring Brief Jock (brief jock = jock brief, brief in front, jock in the rear)

David Wagner and Rufskin. In Joey’s next big career move, he hooked up with L.A. male photographer David Wagner for work with Rufskin garments (underwear and jeans), both for ads and for cock-tease play. In all of these shots, the man is sexily intense. I find these shots really hot and at the same time really funny.

Two underwear cock-teases, with Joey using both hands to pull his skivvies down to show some pubes and suggest that he might be willing to go all the way for you:

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(#10)

And then a nice sequence, with the ad first (with both armpits displayed), followed by a one-handed cock-tease pants-lowering (the other hand in use for an armpit display):

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(#12)

In the jeans cock-teases, Joey has undone his fly and pushed his jeans down to expose his pubes and (usually) also his cockroot, leaving both his hands free to do whatever he wants with them:

(#13)

(#14)

In the underwear cock-teases, Joey is naked except for the underwear, so all the muscles on the front of his body are on display. In these two jeans cock-teases he’s exposing some of this musculature, by opening his shirt in #13, by shirt-lifting in #14.

The Underwear Expert (in January 2013) on the Wagner / Parra / Rufskin shoot:

David Wagner recently photographed this series of Jose Parra Rufskin photos. Parra pulls Rufskin off like a champ – the 25 year old model really isn’t shy in front of the camera and is more than willing to give us a peek at what’s going on underneath in these Rufskin photos. We see Parra in briefs, boxer briefs, button-fly jeans and even a bow tie. The tan and muscular model reminds us just how seductive and sensual the California based apparel brand can be.

(As far as I can tell, WagnerLA has appeared on this blog only once before, in yesterday’s posting on Jack Adams underwear — with cock-tease shots of model John Strand.)

The Rufskin brand. A San Diego firm founded by Hubert Pouches and Douglas Coats. From its website:

Rufskin began with a desire to fill a void in men’s fashion, starting with the ethos of our brand: a well-cut, sexy men’s jean. The business grew from its original artisan denim line, created from a garage in San Diego, to a global menswear company encompassing swimwear, underwear and athletic wear. It is built on the foundation of being at once vintage, sexy, masculine, athletic, futuristic and above all, well crafted.

“About Rufskin: Ruf but Smooth” by Darren Styles, who interviewed the founders:

Coats: “Hubert and I met in Paris back in the ’90s, where he ran a modeling agency and I was one of the models. He’d previously worked for a couple of fashion labels there, Bernard Perris and Courreges, and after a decade together we decided to become business partners, too”

… The kick-start for Rufskin was the founders’ realisation that there was a gap in the men’s denim market, where men were going into women’s stores to find jeans with a fitted, sexier cut – as styles elsewhere had morphed into something altogether more workmanlike. “So we started with low-rise jeans with unique styling and made that our signature,” recalls Pouches.

… some of the Rufskin output has a reputation for being somewhat risqué

Rufskin came up in this blog in a 7/1/10 posting with the poem “Golden State Rufskin Tit”, based in part on a Rufskin ad — one that features, among other things, yet another homowear wrestling singlet.

(Mostly about hunks.)

I’ve been catching up on the Canadian medical drama Saving Hope, which features three hunks, very different in projected persona and body type, but all three given to shirtlessness: Michael Shanks, playing chief of surgery Charlie Harris; Daniel Gillies, playing orthopedic surgeon Joel Goran; and Kristopher Turner, playing psychiatry resident Gavin Murphy.

Background on the show, from Wikipedia:

Saving Hope is a Canadian television supernatural medical drama, set in the fictional Hope Zion Hospital in Toronto. The show’s central character is Dr. Alex Reid (Erica Durance), a doctor whose fiancé, Dr. Charles Harris (Michael Shanks), is in a coma after being in a car accident. The show follows the life of Charlie in his coma state [during which he roams the hospital halls in a tuxedo, consulting with the spirits of the dead and other people in coma], and [follows] Alex dealing with patients, and hoping that he will survive. Dr. Reid is the Chief Surgical Resident while Dr. Harris was the Chief of Surgery until his accident. Dr. Harris recovers at the end of season 1, but [continues to be] able to see the spirits of comatose and dead patients through subsequent seasons. … The show also stars Dr. Joel Goran (Daniel Gillies), a new orthopedic surgeon and Alex’s former lover.

(Medical shows have long been a tv staple, ranging from soap operas to complex ensemble-cast dramas, many with special twists to them, as here.)

The three hunks in brief.

Shanks is the oldest, ten years older than Turner, with Gillies almost exactly in the middle in age.

Shanks’s character Harris projects sturdy competence; he’s a solid adult. Here he is, intent on a consultation with a dead guy:

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Pair this with a shot of Turner (left) and Gillies (right) from the show:

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Shanks is a solid beefy man, as you can see in this screen shot from the show:

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Gillies‘s character Goran is darkly, edgily handsome, projecting the possibility that he’s a bad boy:

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Gillies is relatively slim but very fit, with the body of a male model. Here he is, being playful and sexy:

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And Turner‘s character Murphy comes across as a cute, lovable kid:

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Turner is boyishly slender, and (like Gillies) he’s happy to be playfully sexy for the camera — as here, doing a pitsntits display, with his jeans down far enough to show some pubic hair:

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All three actors have significant fan followings, Shanks and Gillies especially so, thanks to other work they’ve done. To which I now turn.

Wikipedia on Shanks:

Michael Garrett Shanks (born December 15, 1970) is a Canadian actor, writer and director best known for his role as Dr. Daniel Jackson in the long-running Canadian-American military science fiction television series Stargate SG-1. More recently, Shanks has been playing Dr. Charles Harris on the Canadian medical drama, Saving Hope.

My “Scruffilicious” posting of 4/3/13 has a section on Shanks as Dr. Daniel Jackson — a role he became so identified with that many fans referred to him by this character’s name. And yes, there are plenty of shirtless photos around of Shanks in his Stargate days.

Wikipedia on Gillies:

Daniel J. Gillies (born 14 March 1976) is a Canadian-born New Zealand actor. He is best known for his role as Elijah Mikaelson on the television series The Vampire Diaries and its spin-off The Originals, as well as Dr. Joel Goran on the Canadian series Saving Hope.

(Gillies came back to Canada from New Zealand through some time in Australia; in any case, he has a notable antipodeal accent on Saving Hope.)

Thanks to The Vampire Diaries and The Originals, Gillies has a huge fan following. About The Vampire Diaries, see my “Hunkville” posting of 6/11/15; the show prominently features shirtless vampires Stefan Salvatore (played by Paul Wesley) and Damon Salvatore (played by Ian Somerhalder). As I noted in that posting, “For some time now, lycanthropy and shirtless masculinity have gone hand in hand, on tv and in film.”

Finally, Wikipedia on Kristopher Turner:

Kristopher Turner (born September 27, 1980) is a Canadian actor. He is noted for his role as Jamie Andrews on the CTV teen drama Instant Star.

And now, at age 35, for his role as psychiatry resident Dr. Gavin Murphy on Saving Hope — an enthusiastic and empathetic young doctor with a really sweet smile.

(Mostly about gay porn resources, with some plain language but no actually X-rated images (though the images flirt with the rating). And there are several linguistic points.)

Yesterday I stumbled across a Gay Porn Site (as it labels itself) called “cocksuckers guide” (how crude is that?). The name cocksucker here is not used more or less literally, as ‘fellator’ (esp. a male fellator), and it certainly is not used as in this NOAD2 entry for the word:

vulgar slang, chiefly N. Amer.  a contemptible person (used as a generalized term of abuse)

Instead, it’s used in a sense that’s historically intermediate between those two senses, as ‘gay man, queer’: though what gay men actually share is a sexual attraction to other men, fellating other men is the characteristic sexual act of a gay man, so it was natural to extend cocksucker to refer to gay men in general; but then distaste for gay men and their sexual activities contaminated the term cocksucker, and it became a slur, a term of abuse, at first used of gay men and then generalized, ultimately even to inanimate objects: (said of a recalcitrant corkscrew) This cocksucker [or: this cocksucking corkscrew] doesn’t work!

Now, in the real world, not all gay men are, or have been, sexually active, and the ones who are don’t all suck cock — some give but don’t take, and some engage in other sexual activities (frottage, masturbation with other men, anal intercourse) but not cocksucking (and, of course, not all cocksuckers are men). Cocksucker is a label for gay men, not a definition — but most gay men suck cock (or have sucked cock or hope to suck cock), so cocksucker is not at all a bad label.

On to the gay porn site. It has four sections, named CockSucker Videos (free videos), Adult Site Directory, Porn Star Directory, and Straight Porn Studs for Gay Guys. I’ll take these up one by one.

CockSucker Videos (free videos): as far as I can tell, these are almost all clips from videos or trailers for them; they’re designed to get you to subscribe to on-line video services.

Adult Site Directory: takes you to sites offering on-line videos or DVDs. But not to gay blogs; the sites of gay artists; gay publications; service sites like Commercial Closet, the LGBT Historical Society of San Francisco, etc.; gay goods providers, including homo-oriented underwear and jockstrap sites; organizations like Blow Buddies; and so on

Porn Star Directory: a huge (nearly 9,000-man) directory of gay pornstars, helpfully indexed by first and last names, with photos and lists of their films, and sometimes with informative write-ups about their careers. Diverse “types”, races and ethnicities, nationalities. The source of the three photos I’ll post below.

Straight Porn Studs for Gay Guys. At first I thought straight porn studs was parsed

[ straight ]  [ porn studs ]

and that this section was offering links to sites with (ostensibly) straight guys doing gay porn, either as amateurs or as pros — that is, to gay-for-pay (G4P) guys. There are a lot of them, and there’s a huge market for their work, thanks to many guys’ belief that straight men are inherently more masculine, and (if you are gay) therefore more desirable, than frankly gay men.

But no: the intended parsing is

[ straight porn ]  [ studs ]

that is, guys who act in straight porn. The links are to material that might be of interest to gay viewers for one reason or another — mostly, it seems, because these straight pornstars are working with guys in drag.

Like guys who do gay porn, these guys have wonderful names, emphasizing masculinity, aggressiveness, power, and the like:

Mike Panic, Will Havoc, Jimmy Bullet, Max Thrust, Slate Steele, Max Steele, Bobby Bull, Luke Hotrod, Brandon Bronco, Johnny Rocket, …

Bonus feature: three porn actors (two not at all well known, one a genuine pornstar), of three different body types. First, slender, cute twink Christian Connor, doing a cock-tease with his briefs:

(#1)

Then athletic, male-model type Petr Herman, doing a cock-tease with his jeans unbuttoned and pulled down:

(#2)

And finally, one of the truly huge, veteran pornstar Billy Herrington, exhibiting his massive musculature:

(#3)

This posting takes off from my “Gay Porn Portal” posting yesterday, which ended with three photos of actors in gay porn, of three different body types and projected personas (all of them displaying their bodies invitingly, the first two performing cock-tease displays): a cute twink, an athletically fit male-model type, and a massively muscled bodybuilder, who got mixed reviews.

But first some notes on Pages on this blog.

Two new Pages: under the “Lists” Page, “Dance postings” (link), listing postings on this blog dealing with dance, dances, dancers, and dancewear; and under the “XBlog essays” Page (itself under “XWriting”), a “Cock tease” Page (link), listing postings on this blog about various sorts of displays of this sort. Plus an addition to the “Pits ‘n’ Tits” Page (under “XWriting”) with postings on this blog about these displays (of armpits and pectorals) in 2013-15. And that brings me to another XWriting Page, on “Body size” (link), which is mostly about postings on the Truly Huge in gay porn (like Billy Herrington in yesterday’s posting) — in particular, an initial posting on this blog on 7/19/10 (which has photos but no genital nudity, plus an entertaining piece about sex columnist Dan Savage’s encounter with one of the Truly Huge) and a follow-up on AZBlogX on 3/28/13 (with plenty of decidedly X-rated photos of these guys, including more about Herrington; you’ve been warned).

Savage and I were both unmoved sexually by massively muscled guys, but in my X Blog follow-up, I quoted a gay male friend who found them incredibly hot and had been training to become more like them. Similarly, after my posting yesterday, gay guys posted Billy Herrington comments on Facebook that ranged from the strongly positive (“Magnificent”) to the strongly negative. I quote:

(1) I don’t mean to sound picky, but perhaps Billy Herrington should consider Dr. Ellison’s Vein Institute.

(2) My eyes!!! Pass the fork, so I can remove them and not have to see the testosterone poisoning victim.

(De gustibus and all that.)

(1) has a reference to the Ellison Vein Institute in Jacksonville FL (under Dr. Robert G. Ellison, Jr.), whose website says:

At the Ellison Vein Institute, we are dedicated to providing you with the very best treatment options available for varicose veins and venous disorders of the legs.

Study the veining in Herrington’s legs in #3 from yesterday’s posting.

As for the second commenter, he views committed bodybuilders in general as victims of testosterone poisoning (and finds them singularly unattractive).

On bodybuilding, from Wikipedia:

Bodybuilding is the use of progressive resistance exercise to control and develop one’s musculature. An individual who engages in this activity is referred to as a bodybuilder. In competitive amateur and professional bodybuilding, bodybuilders appear in lineups doing specified poses, and later perform individual posing routines, for a panel of judges who rank competitors based on criteria such as symmetry, muscularity and conditioning. Bodybuilders prepare for competition through a combination of dehydration, fat loss, oils, and tanning (or tanning lotions) which make their muscular definition more distinct. Well-known bodybuilders include Charles Atlas, Steve Reeves, Reg Park, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno. The winner of the annual Mr. Olympia contest is generally recognized as the world’s top male bodybuilder.

Courtesy of a fit friend (who’s roughly like #2 in yesterday’s posting and doesn’t aspire to anything like #3), here’s a particularly remarkable competitive bodybuilder, Flex Wheeler:

From Wikipedia:

Kenneth Wheeler (born August 23, 1965, Fresno, California, United States), known as Flex Wheeler, is a former American IFBB professional bodybuilder. Wheeler won the Arnold Classic a record four times. Wheeler was described by Arnold Schwarzenegger as one of the greatest bodybuilders he ever saw.

… Wheeler has remarkable flexibility, including being able to do a complete split, which led to his nickname Flex.

My fit friend is straight but is entertained by my writing on the gay world and intrigued by photo spreads like the one in yesterday’s posting. He raised the question of what straight women thought about these body types and personas. He shared my impression that very few straight women found the Truly Huge attractive (very few, but not zero), and in his experience, many women found men of his body type less attractive than cute guys like #1 in that spread; he suspected that many women found guys like him too absorbed in their fitness and not involved enough in them, while the cute guys were adorable and inclined to be attentive to them — like really nice puppies. You can find plenty of opinion about What Women Look For In a Man, but I don’t know if it’s been systematically examined at the right level, beyond studies showing that men’s faces that people judged to be high on a scale of “masculine” appearance tended to be judged as more attractive by women (though the findings are complicated by interactions with things like the health status of societies); see my 11/22/11 posting “Annals of masculinity studies: the face”. (There’s also a possibility that highly masculine facial appearance might be associated with aggression.)

Max Vasilatos writes me to report thar she has “this notion that a disproportionate number of actors [she sees] on TV are left-handed, but that seems unlikely”, and she connects her impression to what I’ve called the frequency illusion:

The illusion in which a word, a name, or other thing that has recently come to one’s attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterward (Wikipedia link)

(and often for extended periods of time after that). Surely Max is right — about the source of her impression, not about the extent of left-handedness in tv actors.

The label frequency illusion is mine (from an 8/7/05 Language Log posting); the phenomenon is also known under the more colorful label Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (a name taken from an instance of the phenomenon),  from a 1994 comment on the St. Paul Pioneer Press’s online discussion board, by someone who noticed hearing the name of the German terrorist group the Baader-Meinhof Gang twice in 24 hours.

(There is a Page on this blog –“Illusions postings”, under “Linguistics notes” — with links to postings on the many illusions.)

My original posting connected the phenomenon to two well-known cognitive biases in psychology: selective attention (once you’ve noticed something, you are more attentive to occurrences of it than you were before) and confirmation bias (in which you’re inclined to collect instances of the phenomenon, as confirming your hypothesis about its frequency, and discount the many disconfirming instances in your experience).

What Max noticed was tv actors writing with their left hands, an indication of a very strong bias towards the left hand; many people are not fully right-handed (I am one), but only a fairly small number of these have a strong preference for writing with the left hand (I’m incapable of managing this), and these people are easily detected, if you see them write.

Men are somewhat more likely than women to be left-handed, but the evidence for other groups (like homosexuals) tends to be equivocal. There is certainly no reason to suppose that tv actors are more likely to be left-handed than the general population.  Nevertheless, I am myself inclined to be selectively attentive to people writing with their left hands, and since these days most of my experience seeing people writing comes from tv, I share Max’s impression about tv actors, inaccurate though it surely is.

For what it’s worth, I have a strong impression that gay pornstars are disproportionately left-handed, but I have absolutely no way to examine the hypothesis, and although sites about these men supply many stats about them, handedness is not one of them..

No, not the penis, the condom for the penis. News from the Brisbane (AU) Times, in yesterday’s story “‘Like you’re touching someone covered in a lubricant’: next generation condoms”, about hydrogel condoms,  by Bridie Smith:

Researchers are using brain scanning technology to test the “pleasure” attributes of the next generation of condoms.

While latex condoms have remained largely unchanged for almost a century, researchers say the new hydrogel material will have properties similar to human skin.

Thinner and stronger, the hydrogel is made with water and held together by molecular chains called polymers. [The chemistry is murky here; a latex is also a suspension of polymer particles in an aqueous medium.]

It’s really unusual to touch,” said Swinburne University cognitive neuroscientist Joseph Ciorciari. “It feels like real human tissue, like when you’re touching someone but they’re covered in a lubricant.”

Developed by materials scientists at Wollongong University, the hydrogel material has been tested for its “pleasure” attributes in Melbourne.

I wonder about smell and taste. Latex condoms have a smell and taste that many people find unpleasant, and flavoring the condoms (or lubes) only makes things worse: who wants the smell or taste of artificial wild cherry?

(Hat tip to Michael Carden.)

The illustration:

(#1)

From a piece in BuzzFeed yesterday, “the first images of the live-action film, The Legend of Tarzan, have been released and they are quite simply [hot hot hot]” by Kimberley Dadds:

The first official stills, featuring Alexander Skarsgård as the main man Tarzan, were released on Wednesday and they’re heavenly.

(Hat tip to Mike McKinley.)

Skarsgård has always kept himself in great shape, but here his body is extraordinarily (even unnaturally) ripped, along the lines of the photo I posted a couple of days ago of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine.

Shirtless hunks are a recurrent theme on this blog. In fact, there is a Page on “Shirtless postings”, with the note:

excluded, for the most part: photos of men who are shirtless by virtue of their occupations — pornstars, underwear models, models for male photographers, swimmers and divers, dancers

There are some postings on the Page with photos of men in the generally excluded groups, but mostly the photos there are of actors (like Skarsgård and Jackman) and athletes other than swimmers and divers (tennis players, soccer players, baseball players, etc.).

A note: the adjective ripped in NOAD2:

informal   having well-defined or well-developed muscles; muscular: through his slightly-too-tight shirt you could see he was ripped | they’re going to the gym daily to get buff pecs, ripped abs, and tight buns.

Massive musculature is not necessarily the main point here, but a high level of fitness combined with extremely low bodyfat is, and in today’s world, abs have taken center stage (see the 8/2/13 posting “It’s all about the abs”, with 5 photos from a Hunk of the Month calendar), while in earlier days men focused primarily on their pecs and biceps.

On to Skarsgård and then to Tarzan.

The actor. From Wikipedia:

Alexander Johan Hjalmar Skarsgård (… born August 25, 1976) is a Swedish actor. He is best known for his roles as vampire Eric Northman on the HBO series True Blood, Meekus in Zoolander and Brad Colbert in the HBO miniseries Generation Kill. He is the son of Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård.

Ah, the vampire connection; these days, vampirism (like lycanthropy) is associated with intensely sexy masculine shirtlessness.

Here’s Skarsgård, displaying his body and offering an armpit, in a sexy shot from somewhat earlier in his career.

(#2)

He’s harder-core now, more developed, and scruffier too, as here (where he is, however, fully clothed):

(#3)

The Tarzan story. From Wikipedia:

Tarzan (John Clayton, Viscount Greystoke) is a fictional character, an archetypal feral child raised in the African jungles by the Mangani great apes; he later experiences civilization only to largely reject it and return to the wild as a heroic adventurer. Created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan first appeared in the novel Tarzan of the Apes (magazine publication 1912, book publication 1914), and subsequently in twenty-five sequels, several authorized books by other authors, and innumerable works in other media, both authorized and unauthorized.

… The Internet Movie Database lists 200 movies with Tarzan in the title between 1918 and 2014. The first Tarzan movies were silent pictures adapted from the original Tarzan novels, which appeared within a few years of the character’s creation. The first actor to portray the adult Tarzan was Elmo Lincoln in 1918’s Tarzan Of The Apes. With the advent of talking pictures, a popular Tarzan movie franchise was developed, which lasted from the 1930s through the 1960s. Starting with Tarzan the Ape Man in 1932 through twelve films until 1948, the franchise was anchored by former Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller in the title role. Weissmuller and his immediate successors were enjoined to portray the ape-man as a noble savage speaking broken English, in marked contrast to the cultured aristocrat of Burroughs’s novels.

With the exception of the Burroughs co-produced The New Adventures of Tarzan, this “me Tarzan, you Jane” characterization of Tarzan persisted until the late 1950s, when producer Sy Weintraub, having bought the film rights from producer Sol Lesser, produced Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure followed by eight other films and a television series. The Weintraub productions portray a Tarzan that is closer to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ original concept in the novels: a jungle lord who speaks grammatical English and is well educated and familiar with civilization.

… There were also several serials and features that competed with the main franchise, including Tarzan the Fearless (1933) starring Buster Crabbe and The New Adventures of Tarzan (1935) starring Herman Brix.

A poster for the 1933 movie, with Buster Crabbe (another Olympic swimmer, who had a long career in movie serials — as Tarzan, Flash Gordon, and Buck Rogers — as well as in single movies):

(#4)

(I’m very fond of Crabbe, much more than Weismuller.)

The Jane is Jacqueline Wells, who later changed her name to Julie Bishop.

Note that Crabbe is hunky, but mostly in the pecs and biceps (plus big shoulders).

Then to Weissmuller, Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942):

(#5)

Cheeta the chimp, Boy (Johnny Sheffield), Weissmuller as Tarzan, Jane (Maureen O’Sullivan)

Well-developed pecs and biceps, powerful shoulders, but no work on the abs.

It started with a postcard from my friend Max:

(#1)

The card said this was a photo of model Nathan Black, from Body Image Productions. That led me to the company’s website (not especially easy to negotiate) and eventually to the information that #1 was from a photo spread in Men magazine (formerly Advocate Men) by male photographer Ron Lloyd — a magazine that was one of a number of publications that supplied high-quality erotic photography (featuring lots of full-frontal nudity) appealing primarily to to gay men (who used it as jack-off fuel) but also to straight women. The models have attractive (and carefully developed) bodies — they are muscle hunks — which they, in effect, sell: they are professional muscle hunks.

Body Image Productions has an even narrower focus: its wares are aimed specifically and unapologetically at gay men, and they are intended as well “for the physique connoisseur”.

The company sells books and calendars of erotic male photography, and now DVDs in which Lloyd’s hunky models do a specialized form of gay porn: solo performances, with a man jacking off for an audience. (Some guys who do solo-only are in fact straight, but they love to display their bodies and usually revel in the attention they get from gay men.)

Still photography calls for some acting ability, some talent for projecting a persona; Nathan Black was really good at this. (If you decide to look at his Men spread, you should know ahead of time that Black has some scarring on his (otherwise very attractive) penis that shows as a white strip — an imperfection that Black, admirably, just ignores in his performance for the camera.) But videos call for more serious acting abilities, and not all professional muscle hunks have them. In a while I’ll post more about one who’s really wonderful doing solo work, the regrettably named Braun Drek (I’ll post about the name, too).

Now, Ron Lloyd. From his book publisher in an amazon.com writeup:

Ron Lloyd, the man behind Body Image Productions, started his career as a professional photographer in the early 80’s. As a young man he developed a passion for the beauty of pronounced forms through looking a bodybuilding magazines.

Now he supplies these images for other aficionados.

From the Body Image Production site on Lloyd’s most recent Legend Men photo book (reproduced here exactly as on the site):

Photographer Ron Lloyd has one of the best jobs of this planet without doubt: He’s looking for muscular, incredibly good looking hunks and makes them strip off their clothes in front of his camera … all their clothes. With a naughty grin on their face these dream-made-flesh guys present their bodies, which are immaculate from top to bottom. Horny hunks such as Zeb Atlas and Von Legend are popular among gay men worldwide — and in Lloyds third photo book LEGEND MEN they offer us a look that really deserves to be called “legendary”.

(#2)

Model Von Legend aka Matt Davis on the cover

(If a Lloyd model has any clothes on at all, he’s about to strip them off.)

And Lloyd’s recent book Built!, with Zeb Atlas on the cover:

(#3)

(No, Zeb Atlas doesn’t have a small head; it’s entirely normal in size, but he has an absolutely gigantic upper body. He has a big dick, but in photos it often looks small, by comparison to his musculature. However, if you actually dealt with it, as guys do in the hard-core porn Atlas performs in, you’d realize that it was really big.)

Now from the company’s calendar days — it no longer seems to produce them — two examples: Naked Straight Men, with Max Wheeler on the cover; and Naked Hairy Jocks, with Braun Drek on the cover:

(#4)

(#5)

Now we’re in video and DVD days. Here’s the cover of the Legend Men DVD, with Braun Drek again:

(#6)

Pornhub has a big pile of Drek solo videos. I’m not generally a fan of solo performances, but these are really good. He has a handsome face, a great smile, and a long dick, and he loves to display himself. He puts on a fine show.

Digression on the name. I haven’t yet found an audio in which Braun Drek pronounces his stage name, or even one in which someone else does, but I’m pretty sure his first name is not /brawn/ (like brown), as it would be if taken directly from the German family name, but instead /brɔn/ (like brawn), as in Carol Mosely Braun and the bodybuilder P.J. Braun. That would be an auspicious first name for a professional muscle hunk

But Drek is harder to cope with. It would, alas, seem to be dreck /drɛk/. From NOAD2:

rubbish; trash: this so-called art is pure dreck. ORIGIN early 20th cent.: from Yiddish drek ‘filth, dregs,’ from a Germanic base shared by Old English threax; probably related to Greek skōr ‘dung’

Dreck is often glossed as crap (both as ‘rubbish, junk; nonsense’ and as ‘excrement’) or even shit (again, two sense ranges).

Maybe someone thought of Drek as powerful name, like Shrek (the ogre), suggestive of German Schreck ‘terror, shock, fear’, or Dred, suggestive of dread (note pornstar Dred Scott); or as suggestive of Derek / Derik (derrick, a construction machine with masculine associations) and Drake ‘male duck’. But it sure does sound like dreck. And if you know a bit of Yiddish, Braun Drek reads as ‘brown shit’.

The muscle hunk continuum. Ron Lloyd’s models are far out on the continuum of muscle hunks, a continuum that ranges from well-muscled very fit men (like most underwear models and many actors given to shirtlessness) to the Truly Huge, like the “massively muscled bodybuilder type” Billy Herrington (the pornstar) and, even more, competitive bodybuilders like Flex Wheeler, with high muscular definition and very low bodyfat. Both Herrington and Wheeler were treated in a December 7th posting of mine.

At the high end, we have men who are extremely ripped: not only massively muscled, but also with bodyfat low enough to produce very prominent veining. Note the comment in the earlier posting about the veining, and also the comment about men at the high end of the continuum as victims of “testosterone poisoning”. Both comments were from gay men; some gay men celebrate, even fetishize, men at the high end of the continuum, but many are turned off by them.

The economy of professional body-workers. Professional body-workers are those who exploit their bodies to earn a living. The category covers the professional muscle hunks I’ve been talking about, men who use their bodies to earn model fees for work for photographers, but it includes much more: male models in general, especially underwear models; male strip-tease performers, like the Chippendales dancers and Channing Tatum and other actors in the Magic Mike movies, all of whom do “male erotic dance shows”, and men performing solo at parties; other men paid to dance for audiences (doing pole-dancing for tips, for example); men who do solo porn; and men who are straightforwardly sexworkers of one sort or another — doing hard-core porn, doing live sex shows, and men working as rentboys, escorts providing sex, and sexual masseurs. It’s very common for men who serve in one of these occupations to take on work in another, or of course other work outside of body-work. (Gay porn actors may also work as models, dancers, or escorts, and many have more ordinary jobs.) And of course men whose main source of income is something other that body-work (notably professional athletes and actors) may do some body-work as a sideline.

Very few men who get modeling fees can come close to living on them; they need other work. Male photographers (like Ron Lloyd and others I’ve talked about) can get closer to living on the fees they get from selling their photographs of men, but almost all of them do other sorts of photography (say, fashion photography, portraiture, journalistic photography, or “art photography”) and some do other kinds of artwork as well. But, still, they have to piece together a living, and many have resorted to operating as their own distributors, in the belief that the real money comes from selling the products (books, DVDs, and videos-on-demand (VODs), in particular) to the public.

This is what Ron Lloyd has done with the videos he makes. In addition to Body Image Productions, there is a separate legendmen.com site, with spreads on all of the models he’s used, which serve as a come-on to a subscription service for VODs.

An offer from Daily Jocks yesterday, with an image that will be #4 below, from Obviously Apparel, advertising their new Lumber collection. Manly underwear for lumberjacks (and the men who love them). Especially for well-endowed lumberjacks (and the men who love their endowments). Four images of a single model, worked into a story.

But first, a word from Monty Python. You can view the video here.

The sadness of the new morning

(#1)

Already he misses Simon,
Even though the man’s
Smell is still on his body
And in his mouth.

The dick of death

(#2)

He takes his coffee outside, to
Ponder the day, thoughtlessly strokes his
Pouch (Patrick jokes about
Il Monstro, but Simon, that shameless
Size queen, worships him).

The impalement

(#3)

First task of the day, taking WOL out for
His morning hunt, to plummet
Down
On small
Woodland creatures.

The felling

(#4)

Then to hard work, wielding his
Axe on the trash trees that
Spring up everywhere. His body glistens with
Sweat, his smell mingling with the
Fading scent of Simon’s furry
Chest and the sweet taste of Simon’s cock.

Patrick doggedly chops away.

…..

The company’s statement:

Obviously Apparel is an Australian designed and world renowned premium men’s underwear and undershirts brand. Our online store offers the ultimate in comfortable underwear and undershirts coupled with sophisticated design.

Obviously Apparel can be found in stores across Australia, the US, Canada, Russia, UK, Japan, France, India, and we are constantly expanding our global network of partners. Obviously Apparel puts an emphasis on what we believe is the most important aspect of clothing – comfort.

Our meticulously engineered anatomical pouch design is what places our brand at the forefront of the underwear market. In order to provide you with the ultimate in superior quality of underwear we have chosen to use nothing but the finest natural fabrics – Bamboo Rayon and Licensed Lenzing Modal. These fabrics allow us to create underwear that is perfect to convey the feeling of softness, durability and support. Our fabrics have significant health benefits over regular cotton and synthetic underwear fabrics, they are highly UV resistant, non Genetically Modified (GM), sustainable and environmentally friendly.

In their advertising, all premium men’s underwear companies play on the homoeroticism of their products, and Obviously is no exception: the photos above dwell lovingly on the model’s body, even at the cost of not showing much of his clothes (except in #2, where the long boxer briefs, with their prominent pouch, are the centerpiece). In #1, in fact, the model is wearing underwear with the new AnatoMAX design, with a truly huge pouch, but you can’t tell that from the picture, which focuses on the model’s handsome face, his well-developed biceps, and his nice (but not extraordinary) abs. (Unusually, the model is not tanned. But par for the course, his body is smooth, except for very light fur on his forearms; whatever their natural state, underwear models are usually presented as smooth, often the result of shaving. Me, I would have liked some fur on his chest.)

(I haven’t been able to discover the model’s name or anything about him as a person. Underwear companies rarely identify their models, though there are a few notable exceptions.)

That said, Obviously’s advertising and its products are remarkably restrained, showing none of the extravagant (and often entertaining) fagginess that many companies display. (Examples in many of my earlier underwear postings, including a fair number that had to go on AZBlogX because they were too explicit.) They really do focus on comfort, in the design of the garments and in the fabrics they use, which wick moisture away from your privates.

On design: this review on the Underwear Expert site:

Well endowed men who love all the styles Obviously has to offer will be happy with their newest pouch design! The Obviously AnatoMAX Pouch aims to maximize comfort by providing extra room where you need it most.

The AnatoMAX is the largest pouch ever produced by Obviously! It will provide extra comfort, room and size for men who need it. … This collection is available in four colors: graphite, gray, white and black. These colors are perfect for everyday wear as well as the nightlife. [That is, in or out of your other clothes] If you’re someone who tends to love specific styles in underwear, you won’t be left without options. The Basics Collection is available in eight styles: 9 inch boxer brief, 3 inch boxer brief, jockstrap, thong, bikini brief, brief, hipster brief, and hipster trunk.

Eight styles and four pouch sizes; the new AnatoMAX is one step above the previous top size, AnatoFREE.