(There’s actually some languagestuff here.)

Over on AZBlog X there’s a posting “Bundles of love”, about an ad for a holiday sale at the gay porn studio C1R. The sale offers bundles of C1R flicks, each with three or four DVDs on a theme, and the model in the ad is bundled in a scarf, against the winter weather, so there’s a little play on bundling here — but, well, the model is totally naked except for that scarf. The photo is really about his handsome face, his fit body, and of course its centerpiece, his weighty and desirable cock, which happens to have a prominent penile raphe (/réfì/), the ridge that runs up the underside of the penis and (in many men) is somewhat sensitive to stimulation, in a way that the rest of the shaft is not; just under the glans, the raphe is extraordinary sensitive, the source of much of the pleasure men get from their penis in sex.

The AZBlog posting also has a little story about how the penile raphe is metaphorically connected to plate tectonics.

In lieu of an photo of a raphe leading to the head of the penis (the glans penis), here’s a photo of a mountain ridge in Alaska, with a trail on it leading to the head, um, peak of the ridge:

On the technical term raphe, from NOAD2:

ORIGIN mid 18th cent.: modern Latin, from Greek rhaphē ‘seam’

I don’t know of any slang terms for the penile raphe, though the six expressions

dick/cock ridge/cord/seam

would all be possibilities.

Finally, here are the three bundles on offer at C1R:

Daddy/Son: The Boy Who Cried DILF, Fucked by Our Dads, Daddy It Hurts!

Dirty Sex Pigs: Submit and Conquer, Spit Roasted Pigs, Sling Fucked

Man Royale: Thick and Big 1-4

The Boy Who Cried DILF (with DILF ‘dad(dy) I’d like to fuck’, a development from MILF) is an entertaining play on  the boy who cried wolf, and Spit Roasted Pigs is a wonderful piece of language play, with both spit roasted and pig having two senses that are played on here, one sexual and one not: spit roasting is a cooking practice, involving roasting a piece of food (especally a suckling pig) impaled on a spit (a long, thin, metal road) over a fire, and it’s also, by a metaphorical extension, a sexual practice (which has been illustrated in a gay context quite a few times on AZBlogX) in which someone is pentrated by one man’s penis while fellating another man’s; and pig can be understood as referring to the animal or, in the snowclonelet X pig, someone who is passionate or enthuastic about X (so that, in the gay context,  a cock pig is a man who loves to suck cock, a piss pig is a man who loves piss play, and a spit-roasting pig is a man who loves to be spit roasted). The porn flick in C1R’s bundling sale is all about men enthusiastically enjoying being spit roasted.

Heard in a tv commercial for Scratch-Aide:

Let’s face it: if you’ve got wood, you’ve got scratches.

Unintendedly, with an ambiguity in got wood: the literal ‘have wood’ and the idiomatic ‘have an erection’ (of the penis), ‘have a woody / boner / hard-on’.

On the mass noun wood ‘erection’, see some brief discussion in an AZBlogX posting of 1/4/11 on morning wood (posted on my X blog because it has a photo of a morning erection, from the gay porn flick Morning Wood).

An oddity not noted there is that the mass noun wood has the idiomatic penile meaning only as the object of get (notably in the informal idiom have got ‘have’) and a few other verbs (like pop), but not (at least for me) as the object of have itself, so that if the commercial had gone

Let’s face it: if you have wood, you have scratches.

there would have been no penile ‘if you have a hard-on’ reading.

Meanwhile, I muse on why I might expect to have scratches if I have a hard-on.

(Very little about language. A ton of frank talk about men’s bodies and man-man sex, but no actually X-rated images. Still, definitely not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Yesterday’s morning name, but it was no surprise that the gay pornstar’s name was in my head yesterday morning, since I’d watched him perform the day before with Tomas Brand and Dirk Caber in Men At Play’s Boy Been Bad; Ferdynand is the bad boy, being taught a lesson by businessmen Brand and Caber in Caber’s office. (Men At Play features videos of guys in business suits having sex with other men, often at the office.)

Very nice contrasts in body types and role-playing in gay sex, and I find the oddly named Ferdynand (who was new to me) to be really cute and really hot.

In a posting “X-rated Darius Ferdynand” on AZBlogX, I supply two stills from the video, two shots of Ferdynand displaying his naked body, front and (with an offer of his asshole — the man is a total bottom) rear, and one of Brand in a full-frontal display of his naked body. (Caber has been featured previously both on my X blog and this one.)

Now some merely G-rated discussion.

First, those stills from Boy Been Bad. Here they are with the dicks cropped out, so I can focus on reading other content in them. First, from early on in the video: submissive Ferdynand has been stripped of all his clothes, while the two dominant men still have some vestiges of their business suits on:

(#1)

Brand, Ferdynand, Caber.

Brand (hereafter, TB) and Caber (hereafter, DC) are substantially taller than Ferdynand (hereafter DF), and have substantially broader shoulders and more developed torsos than DF does; they are also significantly older than he is. So DF is playing the cute kid submitting to two powerful and successful men. TB is taller than DC, but DC has a generally bigger, more solid, body, so they contrast nicely. TB and DF have smooth bodies, while DC has a lightly furred chest, belly, and forearms; with his more solid body and substantial facial hair, DC reads as a muscle bear, while TB (with his scruffy facial fair) just reads as a muscle hunk, and the clean-shaven and slimmer DF reads as a muscle twink (see #3, to come a bit later in this posting).

The two dominants also contrast in the personas they project: TB, staring intensely in the photo, projects menacing coarseness, while DC, with his half-smile (and glasses) comes off as an agreeable elder. (TB is a total top, while DC is famously versatile; DF is a total bottom.) Both men fuck DF, but their behavior suggests that for TB’s character the act is one of crude humiliation, while DC’s demeanor suggests his character is helpfully giving DF what the boy needs and so much desires.

In the second still on my X blog (which I can’t reproduce here), everybody is stripped down fully (except that DC still has his tie on) and DF is standing, bent over the desk, on which TB is kneeling and thrusting his fat cock down DF’s throat, while DC reflectively fucks him from behind: a satisfying spitroast.

In the next cropped still here (which is not on my X blog), DF has gotten up onto the desk and lifted one leg, so that DC can fuck him from the side (while TB awaits his turn at the boy’s hole). The nice thing about this shot is that DF ihas a fleeting smile on his face.

(#2)

At this point, DF levers himself onto his back and raises his knees, so that he can be fucked missionary-style (while hanging his head over the other edge of the desk to suck one man while the other is fucking him: more spitroasting).

You can find videos of DF getting fucked in pretty much every imaginable position, including what the Lucas website identifies as his great favorite, doggie-style.

(A further note on the three actors in the video: TB is Swedish; DF is Hungarian by birth but has been living in the UK for several years and has a distinctly British English accent on top of the Hungarian; and DC is American — grew up in Maine. Details about DC in a 4/6/15 posting on this blog.)

Here’s a G-rated shot of DF displaying his body, doing a cock tease in an Andrew Christian jockstrap:

(#3)

A very handsome man with a carefully sculpted body, plus an astounding ass and a nice-sized uncut dick (in the 7-inch range) that fits the rest of his body well. He has striking blue eyes and a delightful smile, and comes across as a sweet young man in interviews.

[I’m now watching him in Men At Play’s Boytoy, where he’s put in a sling by top Dato Foland and then fucked in three different positions by Foland; #3 is doggie-style on the floor.  Now on to the sequel to Boy Been Bad, Boss Been Bad, with boss Paul Wagner topping FD. And then to DF’s remaining MAP video so far, The Morning After, with beefy, powerful, hairy top Adam Champ in (and then out of) a business suit.  (Each MAP video is about 20-25 minutes long, enough for an unhurried but satisfying jack-off session for the viewer.) DF really does adore getting fucked.]

Since TB hasn’t appeared on this blog before, here’s a technically G-rated photo of TB, taking over Scott Carter in Lucas’s Bangers & Ass, bumping cocks while they are still both in their Calvins:

(#4)

(The name is a play on the British dish bangers and mash ‘sausages and mashed potatoes’).

Finally, about DF’s stage name. In an 5/18/14 interview for Manhunt, DF explains his names:

They’re both Polish names, and come from my Polish origins…. [But] I’m originally from Hungary, I was born in Budapest.

(Lots of plain talk about bodies and sexual practces, so not for kids or the sexually modest. But also plenty of stuff of linguistic interest.)

An ad for a Christmas sale on gay porn at an aggregation site for porn (of all sorts) that fills my mailbox with offers, most of which I just trash, but in this case… Here’s the ad, with the sale details cropped out:

(#1)

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

(A note on the aggregation site. When it started funneling stuff into my mailbox, almost all of it was hot babes for horny guys. But somehow the software for the site began to grasp the nature of my sexual tastes, and hot guys for horny gays began to take over, until now they’re all I get. But far, far too many of them.

Oh yes, the site’s copy seems to have been written by one or more non-native speakers of English, which occasionally provides small moments of enjoyment.)

I any case, #1 is a not at all subtle play on vocabulary taken from ordinary language to supply euphemisms for explicit sex talk — notably a play on box and package (similarly, basket, junk, sack, etc.) used to refer to the male genitalia. (I do hope that someone will push the practice of giving baskets loaded with gifts for Christmas, so that we could have Christmas basket along with Easter basket. Well, basket is my preferred euphemism from this set, though package is close.) So that these guys are presented as admiring (and presumably coveting) one another’s cocks and balls. On this reading, Gay 1 is fondling Gay 2’s genitals, probably jacking him off. (The boys are wonderfully open about their desires.)

A complication for box. Menwhile, there’s a set of everyday terms for the vagina, and box is one of those — at the euphemistic end of the scale, with pussy taking us into taboo territory, and cunt at the extreme, flagrantly coarse, end of the scale.

Next, all everyday vocabulary for the vagina can be (and, as far as I can see, has been) pressed into service to refer to the male anus viewed as a (receptive) sexual organ (see my 7/26/13 posting on the phenomenon). That gives us a series of synonyms of bottom boy ‘man whose preference is to serve as the recipient in anal intercourse, man who prefers to be fucked’: from the top on down: cuntboy, pussyboy, and, yes, boxboy. (All of these have boy used for a gay man, of whatever age.)

In any case, Gay 2’s Christmas box in #1 could represent either his genitals or his anus; he could be a boxboy, and Gay 1 could be finger-fucking him (to Gay 2’s evident pleasure).

(I intend to write a caption for #1 that tells the story of the guys in it, with Gay 2, a passionate boxboy, as the central figure, but I’m putting that off for another posting.)

So we have a sexual sense for the N + N compound box boy, with both Ns used in special senses: the head N boy used in a gay context for ‘(gay) man’ and the modifying N box used for ‘male anus’ (as above), with a complex relationship between the two Ns, certainly not one of the standard semantic relations between Ns in compounds, but something more like the distant ‘(gay) man who uses his anus’ (specifically, in certain gay sex acts). (Some reflections on the complexities of the noun boy in my 1/27/13 posting “boys”.)

Back in the wider world, there is a well-attested N + N compound box boy ‘a clerk who packs groceries into cartons [that is, boxes], especially at a supermarket, as for delivery or carrying out to a customer’s car’ (Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Dictionary). The head N here is boy used to refer to males performing some sort of service typically performed by teenagers or young men; I once worked with a newspaper copyboy who was literally old enough to be my father. But in any case the combination has become a fixed expression. And the semantic relation between boy and box is complex and specialized (as is the relation between boy and copy in copyboy and, for that matter, between boy and box in gay boxboy).

One more use of box boy / boxboy — well actually, Box Boy! I got to this one during a search on { boxboy gay }, which took me to a gay gamer site, with gay gamer referring not to someone who’s an enthusiast for gay video games, but to someone who happens to be both gay and a gamer ‘enthusiast for video games’. His site took me to the Nintendo game Box Boy! From Wikipedia:

Box Boy! is a puzzle platformer video game developed by HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo 3DS. The game was released on the Nintendo eShop in Japan on January 14, 2015, and in North America and Europe on April 2, 2015.

[It’s a} is a platform game in which players control a box-shaped character named Qbby as he makes his way through each level. The source of the game’s mechanics come from Qbby’s ability to spawn boxes out of his body, the number of which varies between each level.

So Qbby is a box boy in the sense that he is a box and also in the sense that he spawns boxes.

Back to gay boxboys. But back to the sex stuff, in particular to bottom boys. That took me to this wonderful photo of a guy in Andrew Christian BottomBoyWear (not that it’s called that on the AC site):

(#2)

A model in an AC  jock trunk (trunk in front, jock in back, with ass open and available), advertising that he’s a bottom: underwear that screams “Fuck me!”.

(I have a past history as a bottom boy — a history that started when I was 25, no longer really a boy, and came to an end when I was 55, way way past boyhood — and I admire and applaud open and enthusiastic bottom boys.)

Now to the verb bottom. This is normally intransitive: you bottom for another man, who tops you) — with semantics that mirrors the view that bottoms are sexually passive (the subject of intransitive bottom denotes the man who plays the recipient role in the act — but note that I bottomed for him is syntactically an active, not passive, clause) and tops are sexually active (the subject of transitive top denotes the man who plays the agent role in the act). (The idea that bottoms are sexually passive, immobile — just lie back and take it up your hole, faggot — is widely disputed, often mocked. See discussion to follow.)

On to something I think is genuinely recent: transitive bottom in the slogan “I will / would bottom you so hard”, which has achieved a kind of meme status in certain corners of the net. You can even buy the t-shirt:

(#3)

There are two ways to take the slogan. One way is to understand transitive bottom as a causative, glossable roughly as ’cause (someone) to be a bottom, make (someone) into a bottom’; such causatives (based on predicatives — nouns or adjectives) are very common indeed in English; many examples in earlier postings on this blog. That gives you an alternative to transitive top, with very similar, but subtly different, semantics/pragmatics: this transitive bottom highlights the role of the bottom man in the sexual act, while transitive top downplays it. “I would bottom you really hard, so hard that you become a legendary faggot, Superfag.”

The other way of understanding transitive bottom is to take it as a reference to extreme power bottoming, with the subject referring to the guy in the bottom role in the sexual act, playing the agent role extravagantly in the situation. “I would take control of the event and perform so intensely that you became merely a tool for my pleasure, a human dildo.” Power bottoming often goes this way — notably when the bottom sits on the top’s cock, giving him little opportunity for thrusting, effectively immobilizing him, but in other situations as well.

Actors notable for bottoming in gay porn (and there are quite a few, including three featured in recent postings of mine, Damien Crosse, Johnny Hazzard,  and Darius Ferdynand; Crosse is versatile, Hazzard a versatile bottom, Ferdynand a total bottom) typically perform with this almost manic intensity.

The second understanding is surely the right one in a short video (“Dick Slapping: Dildo in Ass”) going the rounds that appears with the slogan “I will bottom you so hard” attached to it — at least if the slogan is taken as being uttered by the man in the video. You can watch it here, but let me remind you that it’s totally, deeply X-rated.

The video starts with the guy (naked, fit body, notable hard-on, face not seen) in position, at the edge of a bed, to be doggy-fucked. He then backs onto a huge rubber ball and bounces on it while the bouncing makes his dick slap up and down and then round and round. Then he leans back and reveals that he has a dildo in his ass. Slides it back in, and you realize he’s using the vibration from the bouncing to pleasure himself on the dildo. Leans forward, jacks himself off until he cums in a fountain on the bed. Just over a minute.

Note on butt boy / butt-boy. Not generally interchangeable with bottom boy. I haven’t tried to do an exhaustive search on examples, but the compound seems to be used widely for submissive or subservient men, especially in construction with a possessive determiner (Bruno’s butt-boy,  my butt-boy); it isn’t necessarily sexual, and it can be used in an extended sense for someone the referent of the possessive just treats as worthless.

Culture clash. Bottom boy can be abbreviated to b-boy, in which case it potentially clashes with the African American and Puerto Rican vernacular English usage b-boy for a break dancer (who engages in b-boying or breaking); and with a somewhat wider use by African American gay men for a type of homiesexual.

Wikipedia has a substantial page on b-boying.  For the other use of b-boy and of homiesexual, it turns out that I did a Language Log posting “Homiesexuals and guys on the down low” on these back in 2004, inspired in part by James Earl Hardy’s fine 1994 novel B-Boy Blues. The book cover:

(#4)

I wrote back then about

James Earl Hardy, author of (among other things) B-Boy Blues (1994), “a seriously sexy, fiercely funny Black-on-Black love story”, as the front cover says; the back cover tells us, in a burst of -in‘, that the protagonist had “always wished, hoped, and dreamed for a RUFFNECK — a hip-hop-lovin’, street-struttin’, cool posin’, crazy crotch-grabbin’ brotha”. Very sweet book, in fact.

… Homiesexuals are quite clearly Black, gay, out, proud, and identified with ghetto/hip-hop culture. They’re not flamboyant, in the sense of outrageous, ostentatiously effeminate, campy, etc.; they’re home boys — queer home boys, but still home boys, with all the displays of hypermasculinity that go along with the homey identity. Hardy starts chapter 3 of B-Boy Blues with a little lecture on this role from his protagonist, who has a jones for these guys:

…[Raheim’s] a B-boy — or banjee/banji/banjie boy, or block boy, or homeboy, or homie, or as MC Lyte tags ’em, “ruffneck.” [pages of exposition follow, ending with…] They are the boyz who are the true hip-hopsters, the gangstas, the menaces 2 and of society, the troublemakers, the troubleseekers, the hoods, the hoodlums, the hood-rocks, the MacDaddys, the DaddyMacs, the rugged hard-rocks…

Mitchell is educated and middle-class, with a good job; he’s also simply and uncompicatedly gay. He hangs with other black gay men like him but he has a serious jones for B-boys. He’s had relationships with two B-boys and then (eventually) hits the jackpot with Raheim. All three of these B-boys take men exclusively as their sexual partners, and all are strictly tops, so B-boys are very much not bottom boys (for his part, Mitchell’s happy getting fucked, but he also likes to fuck guys), and none of the three think of themselves as gay. Yes, Raheim is physically substantially bigger than Mitchell, tougher and more aggressive.

In the climactic scene, Raheim asks Mitchell to fuck him, and Raheim turns out to have just the sort of asshole that Mitchell likes to fuck (the sex scenes are explicit and very hot). Raheim admits that Mitchell is his first, and that he asked Mitchell to fuck him because he loves him. (Of course Mitchell loves Raheim.) How sweet is that? (Oh yes, they have cute lover names for each other, Pooquie and Little Bit.)

The book was adapted for the stage and was successful in that version. Plans advanced fairly far on doing a film adaptation, but as far as I can tell, the film hasn’t been made.

My recent “boxboys and transitive bottoming” posting led me to the informal English vocabulary for talking about the male genitals euphemistically: package, box, basket, junk, stuff, sack, unit, … (photo #1 there is an entertaining presentation of packages and boxes) — what you might think of as packagecabulary or boxcabulary. (NOAD2 has package ‘a man’s genitals’, but none of the other boxcabulary.)

That posting probably primed me to think of the premium underwear company Baskit; in the very crowded field of homoerotic underwear marketing, the company manages to be profoundly gay, starting with its name.

On to a November 17th piece “Baskit $12 Tuesday – Contrast Low-Rise Trunk” by Colleen Hennessy on the Underwear Expert site. An ad from the company, showing two boyfriends holding hands and displaying the waistbands of their Baskit underwear:

(#1)

The guy on the left is flagging blue/gold, whatever that might mean (possibly fellatio in a three-way, either two looking for one or one looking for two, with fellatio as the main course). Here’s a model in that style, illustrating the package-flattering pouch and the low-rise styling that barely, but just barely, covers his public hair:

(#2)

From Hennessy’s piece:

Give yourself a little credit. You’ve made in this far, and Monday wasn’t so bad, right? Well, whether you came out unscathed or not, treat yourself to this week’s $12 Tuesday deal on the Baskit Contrast Low-Rise Trunk!

The Contrast Low-Rise Trunk features a low-rise waistband, so you can show off those beautiful abs you’ve been working on! This is a square cut trunk so the leg openings cut off on your upper thigh for minimal coverage. The contoured pouch will keep your boys in place while you go through your daily routine.

The wide logo waistband and leg seams contrast with the color of the fabric for a fun look! Some of the styles also have contrasting season [??] in the contoured pouch to give it a little something extra. This style is available [in] five colors: orange/grey, red/black, blue/gold, grey/purple and white/turquoise. Each color combination is available on this $12 Tuesday, so stock up on every color!

Well, the sale day is long past, but we can still admire the underwear and the models who wear it.

The Contrast line comes in a number of styles (in addition to low-rise trunk: at least, (regular) trunk, brief, bikini brief, boxer brief, jock, jock brief). And there are two color combinations in addition to the ones Hennessy lists: green/gray (which is what the guy on the right in #1 is wearing, apparently conveying that he’s into stud hustling, either as hustler or as john, as the main course, and bondage) and yellow/green (piss and stud hustling). Can this coupling survive?

I have need (for a posting in preparation) to talk about the classification of urinals, the naming of the types, and the sociocultural conventions that surround their use.

Start with Wikipedia:

A urinal … is a sanitary plumbing fixture for urination only, predominantly used by males. [And mostly used in public places rather than in private houses, where toilets serve as fixtures for urinating while standing up.] It can take the form of a container or simply a wall, with drainage and automatic or manual flushing, or without flush water as is the case for waterless urinals.

The different types of urinals, be it for single users or as trough designs for multiple users, are intended to be utilized from a standing position (rather than squatting or sitting).

One crucial distinction is clear in this: single-user fixtures vs. multi-user fixtures. The multi-user type is sometimes called a gang urinal (parallel to gang shower), and that’s the label I’ll use here ; the single-user type, as the most common form of urinal in many places, has no standard name; I suggest the name solo urinal.

The other crucial distincrion is not clear in the Wikipedia passage above: between urinals that are hung from a wall (which I’ll call mounted urinals) and those with their base on the floor (which I’ll call standing urinals); again, mounted urinals are the most common type in many places, so that in many places unmodified urinal refers to the default type, a mounted solo urinal.

In any case, that gives us a four-way distinction, with many design details possible for each type.

One variable applies only to solo urinals: whether or not there are partitions between the urinals, to protect the user from the gaze of other men and from splashing or spraying from adjacent urinals (some guys are seriously messy users).

Mounted solo urinals have been varied in innumerable ways, notably in the design of the receptacle, including both its shape and color. Sometimes these designs are fanciful, artistically crafted (as in the delightful Clark Sorenson numbers, in the shapes of flowers and shells, I wrote about in a 1/8/12 posting on this blog), or playful, as in this open-mouthed number:

(#1)

(The height of the mounting can also be varied, to accommodate boys or disabled men.)

Of course, the rest of a men’s room — the wall treatment, the flooring, what else is mounted on the walls (things for users to read, even small screens, etc. is also up for design decisions, and men’s rooms can range from minimally designed to high-fashion, as in this array of mounted solo urinals in white and a pretty standard shape (with partitions):

(#2)

On to standing solo urinals, sometimes called floor urinals, as here:

(#3)

These are somewhat easier to install than mounted solo urinals, and there’s no issue about the height of the fixtures.

When we turn to gang urinals, we get to fixtures that make many men nervous, because they feel too exposed to the other users. Two types. First, the mounted gang urinal, customarily called a trough urinal:

(#4)

And finally, the most basic sort of urinal, the standing gang urinal, sometimes called a wall urinal because it’s just one step up from pissing against a wall — except that it’s got a drain (in the recessed trough) and a backsplash surface that can stand up to streams of urine from the users:

(#5)

(Sometimes a raised ledge is supplied for the users to stand on, in which case the ledge essentially creates a trough at floor level and there’s no need to create a recessed trough.)

There’s a solo variant of this (which I experienced in China many years ago), in which the floor trough shrinks to a one-user hole in the ground, with some splash protection. That could reasonably be called a hole urinal.

Men’s room protocol / etiquette. The conventions for using urinals are designed to serve a more general social convention: avoiding intimate interactions with strangers. So: look straight ahead or down; don’t catch another user’s eye (and certainly don’t stare at him), even if a partition separates you. And: don’t engage in conversation. And: keep your physical distance from other users; don’t take a urinal next to an existing user if you can help it, and don’t stand close to an existing user at a gang urinal. (The guys in #1 have left an open urinal between them.)

(These conventions also apply if you are in fact pissing against a wall in the company of other men.)

Caveat 1: If the user closest to you is a friend of yours, it’s usually ok to talk.

Caveat 2: Not all cultures are this rigid; in some, restroom behavior is just another way of interacting in public with other people, and some cultures allow more intimacy in such interactions.

Caveat 3: Of course you might actually want to cruise other guys. If so, proceed with caution, as you would in other cruising contexts, or perhaps more carefully.

Now, some issues: If there’s no way to avoid standing next to another man, do you just go ahead and use an open slot, or do you wait for a “safe” slot to open up for you, or do you use a toilet? Similarly, if there’s only one urinal, do you wait for it, or do you use a toilet? (Then if no toilet is free, what do you do?)

Now, from a 4/16/14 Slate piece by J. Bryan Lowder, “Homophobia i the Bathroom”:

For many men, taking a piss at the office is apparently a “nightmarish” experience. That’s one of the many fascinating things we learn in Julie Beck’s engrossing essay on the psychological minefield that is the public bathroom, published today in the Atlantic. We all know people who do their best to avoid defecating outside the privacy of home, but the fears and fantasies that Beck explores in her piece are almost Sadeian in detail — paranoia about seeing and being seen, elaborate attempts to construct sonic shields, and most of all, a deep sense that the perils of humiliation and social opprobrium waiting on the other side of the restroom door may very well outweigh the relief of relieving oneself.

Before potty puns get the better of me, I want to highlight one of the more striking themes of the piece — the rupture of spacetime risked when two men realize that they will have to urinate side-by-side. According to a study from which Beck draws some of her material, “the anxiety [men] reported was centered around ‘watching’ — being watched by other men, or being perceived to be watching other men — and that this watching was linked to the possibility of sexual violence.” This anxiety arose as much from fear of “threat … to their sense of masculinity” as to their actual physical safety. Some of the trepidation could be attributed to orientation-neutral size insecurity, but even so, what we’re really talking about is homophobia, whether in terms of a direct fear of gay men or worry that an absent-minded glance will get you pegged as the same.

Now I’m prepared to return to Hrjoe’s superhero compositions.

Follow-ups to yesterday’s posting on urinals, starting with a photo of a rainbow men’s restroom that illustrated the piece on “Homophobia in the Bathroom” I quoted from in that posting:

(#1)

Such a place would make a number of straight men profoundy anxious; the rainbow says that this is a gay space, or at least a gay-friendly space, and these guys would be hesitant indeed to expose their bodies to a queer gaze. They are likely to believe that gay men are inherently predatory, hence dangerous to them. They might even believe that gay men are contaminated — sick and dirty — and capable of spreading the disease of homosexuality to them. So they sometimes propose that gay men should be forced to use their own, segregated, restrooms (even if they don’t go further and maintain that gay men should be put in internment camps, or go all the way with the injunction in Leviticus that they should be put to death). In any case, they don’t want gay men in the restrooms they use (or in the locker rooms and gang showers they use).

There’s a partial parallel here to the situation of black men. Back when there were whites-only water fountains (so that white people’s bodies would not be contaminated by contact with the bodies of blacks), there were also whites-only restrooms, where white people could be protected from dirty (and potentially dangerous) blacks and their gaze. Still today, some white guys are uneasy about sharing urinals with black men.

Avoiding the gaze of your (perceived) inferiors at your body still resonates in some situations. Some companies have executive washrooms, so that higher-ups will not expose their bodies to the gaze of the masses. Schools have separate bathrooms for teachers. Until recently, some colleges and universities had similar arrangements for faculty, and maybe they still do. (This was the way things worked for some buildings at Ohio State when I taught there. Some quarters, the men’s room closest to a room I was teaching in was a faculty men’s room, and more than once I was challenged by other faculty about my right to use these facilities. Well, I was young and didn’t dress in professor drag, but even so I was astonished by these guys’ vehemence in defending the privileges of their position.)

Now, I can turn to more light-hearted bulletins about urinals.

Wall urinals at the Madonna. First, a famous urinal, at the Madonna Inn, on Route 101 in San Luis Obispo CA (close to Arroyo Grande, where my father and stepmother lived for some years). I posted a light-hearted piece about the Madonna back on 8/23/12, where I quoted the Wikipedia note that

some tourists stop just to peek at the famous rock waterfall urinal located in the men’s restroom, a feature designed by Hollywood set designer Harvey Allen Warren.

but failed to provide a photo. Now its time has come:

(#2)

Stepping up to bat breaks a beam and triggers water to cascade down the rocks; the sight and sound of running water encourages urine to flow and also flushes it away. When you step back out of the beam, the waterfall stops. Functional and entertaining.

It turns out that the Madonna has at least one other public men’s room with a wall urinal. This one’s in copper, and it has a waterwheel:

(#3)

A passion for urinals. There are any number of sites on the net that are preoccupied with urinals, but the top of the line has to be this one:

Showcasing the World’s largest collection of urinal photographs ever assembled, Urinal Dot Net is the best place to piss away your time on the Internet.

As of 12/30, it had photographs of and information about 4,262 sites around the world. (There are interactive maps.) Possibly more about urinals than you ever wanted to know.

Four quirky urinals. From an enormous collection, four of interest. One, a musical number:

(#4)

Though porcelain is the standard material for urinals, metal ones (especially stainless steel ones) are fairly common.

Two, playing card urinals. In a bank of four, one for each suit:

(#5)

Just white porcelain mounted solo urinals, but hung low, and with the outflow pipe going into the floor rather than down through the wall (this is a common variant) — and in four s0mewhat different designs. Nothing says that all the urinals in a bank have to have exactly the same design.

Three, sink urinals. The idea of combining a urinal with a sink for washing up, so that the outflow from the sink can flush the urinal, has occurred to a number of people over the years. Here’s a bank of mounted solo sink urinals in an assortment of colors (nothing says that all the urinals in a bank have to be the same color):

(#6)

Peeing in public. Not in a restroom, inside a building, but out on the street or in some other open place, with the back of the user visible to passers-by while the front of his body is not, open street urinals are common in many parts of the world, though still rare in North America. They provide an alternative to pissing against walls, which is unsanitary, aesthetically unpleasant, and destructive of property, and they can provide an alternative to enclosed toilets or pissoirs (of various designs), whose privacy can be a cover for sexual activity or drug dealing.

Open street urinals are almost always solo fixtures, standing alone or (very commonly) arranged in banks, either in a line or in a circular cluster, and almost always with partitions or walls separating the individual urinals. Other than that, almost anything is possible. They can be permanent (with plumbing built in) or temporary (in which case they must be emptied every so often, like portable toilets). Some temporary urinals are retractible, so that they are available during night-time drinking hours but disappear during the day. Occasionally, street urinals have roofs, to give the users some protection from the weather. Street urinals can be mounted or standing, with an extraordinary variety in the details of their design.

Open street urinals are common in India and some other parts of Asia, and seem to have caught on in the Netherlands and Italy and some other European countries.

Maybe the most ingenious open street urinal is the Uritonnoir, illustrated in use here:

(#7)

From a Guardian story of 4/26/13 (by Olive Wainwright), “L’Uritonnoir: the straw bale urinal that makes compost from ‘liquid gold’: French design studio Faltazi has developed a plug-in funnel to upcycle urine and bring an eco message to summer festivals”:

“Are you used to going for a number one in the back of your garden?” asks French design studio Faltazi. “Do not waste this valuable golden fluid by sprinkling on inappropriate surfaces!”

Their solution to the problem of peeing al fresco is l’Uritonnoir, a hybrid of a urinal (“urinoir” in French) and a funnel (“entonnoir”) that plugs into a straw bale to make your very own urine upcycling factory.

As the bale is filled with your “liquid gold”, the nitrogen in the urine reacts with the carbon in the straw to begin the process of decomposition – forming a rich mound of composted humus within 6-12 months.

L’Uritonnoir was originally dreamt up with summer festivals in mind, where straw bales are often in frequent supply, but portaloos are not. The device comes as a flat polypropylene sheet, which is folded into shape and slotted together, then threaded on a looping band around the bale, its funnel wedged deep into the centre of the straw to channel the fluid to the composting core. A deluxe version is also available in stainless steel – presumably for the VIP bale urinal area.

The urinal’s receptacle is deep enough that the user’s penis can be concealed from the sides, and partitions or walls are unnecessary. Still, using the Uritonnoir is peeing very much in public.

(As for making compost, I haven’t used straw, but Jacques and I didn’t waste our liquid gold: we combined it with shredded plant material to create some excellent compost.)

Joking with urinals: ads. I’ve come across two ad campaigns that joke outrageously with urinal lore. One, from the Canadian ad agency Enterprise Creative Selling, for Tattoo Music, was released in 2004: “Geniuses at music. Idiots at everything else.”

(#8)

Aim that thing, dude!

The other, from the New Delhi agency McCann Worldgroup, for the antibiotic hand sanitzer (or sanitiser) Sanitol (made by the Whiteley Corp.), was released in 2010: “Touch him. And you touch everything he’s touched.”

(#9)

Left [on phone]: Gotta ring off now; I’m getting a brilliant hand job from this bloke in the Gents.

Right [to himself]: Great cock, but where has it been?

That’s for testicular photograph portmanteau, in a portmanteau.

The Steam Room Stories episode (very fit guys, gay and straight, clad only in a towel, in a steam room, talking about their bodies and about sex) of December 31st featured two of the steam room guys sitting side by side on the bench. I paraphrase their exchange:

Right asks Left how his vacation was. Fantastic, Left says, bragging that he took some great photographs. Left whips out his cellphone, pages through photos of gorgeous landscapes for Right, who admits that Left is a really good photographer, adding, however, that Left’s camera seems to be defective, because there are dark round blobs at the top of all the photos. Nothing wrong, dude, Left replies, those are my balls, don’t you know about nutscapes? Right is astonished, appalled. Left stands up, bends over, and shows how he snaps his testicles:

  (#1)

Right is even more appalled; of course he says that Left is nuts.

The actual “Nutscapes” SRS episode can be viewed here.

That’s nuts + landscape, with a play on Netscape folded in.

A nutscape, one of many you can find on the net, with an especially hairy testicle:

  (#2)

From Details magazine in November, “WTF: Men Are Taking Pictures of Their Balls in Beautiful Landscapes: Nutscapes are a new trend that involves pretty vistas and testicles” by Max Berlinger:

Ever thought that the beauty of God’s green earth in all [its] unfettered glory was somehow missing something? That a verdant pastoral field or the gloriously undulating rock formations of a millennia-old canyon needed the addition of something more corporeal? Well, you’re not alone in your desire to add a decidedly human touch to nature’s stunning vistas and breathtaking expanses. As the website Nutscapes so . . . interestingly . . . demonstrates, sometimes Mother Nature’s most majestic views can be improved upon by just a small glimpse of testicle.

This is where you ask yourself: Huh?

No, we’re not kidding. The site’s entire existence is to promote the “trend” — if you can call it that . . . yet — of bending over, dropping trou, and capturing a lovely landscape with just a hint of hairy sack hovering at the top of the frame. Juvenile? Sure. And yet there’s something both disgusting and strangely hypnotizing about the endless array of variations featured on the site. From just a little sliver of the ol’ family jewels floating above a coastal scene to a more eye-catching hint of hanging ‘nad perched above a snowy mountain setting, it’s a reminder that (a) nature’s bounty is endless and (b) one’s body is, in fact, a wonderland [John Mayer song “Your Body Is A Wonderland”].

Notice that Berlinger pretty much runs through the relevant vocabulary: testicles, nuts, balls, family jewels, (go)nads, sack. Journalists are fond of avoiding the use of one term again and again by constantly varying their vocabulary, piling on synonyms, especially in edgy semantic domains,

(Side note: In unearthing this piece, I found the sad news that Condé Nast has closed Details down, and at the same time has significantly cut back the staff at GQ.)

(This posting is packed with pretty direct talk about bodies (women’s and men’s) and sexual practices (mostly, but not entirely, straight, and some kinky). While NSFW, the images are technically not X-rated. Still, definitely not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Another spin-off from my urinals postings, this time specifically taking off from image #1 in my New Year’s Day posting on “Urinals and the conventions of the men’s room”: a urinal in the shape of a mouth, probably from the Rolling Stones Museum in Germany — where it appears not as an artwork in a gallery of the museum, but as a functioning urinal in the museum’s men’s room.

(Note: the museum was founded, in a tiny German town, by a Stones-mad couple, Birgit and Ulrich “Ulli” Schröder; it has no official connection to the Stones. Meanwhile,  Mick Jagger is considering opening a Stones museum in London.)

Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky then sent me a link to a 3/18/12 piece on the Sociological Images site, “Women’s Parts as Urinals and Sinks” by Gwen Sharp, which begins:

Stephanie Medley-Rath sent in a new example of urinals shaped like women’s mouths. We’ve taken the submission as an opportunity to re-post our collection

She adds also other women’s parts used as urinals: vaginas and perhaps buttocks as well. And to branch out into fixtures for a men’s room that incorporate women’s bodies presented from behind (thus offering their vaginas and/or buttocks) incorporated into urinals and sinks. Some, if not all, of this is clearly misogynistic.

The problematic feature of these fixtures is that they’re fully functioning items in a men’s room, often the only ones available there, so that a man who needs a urinal or a sink is obliged to engage his body interactively with a representation of a woman’s body parts, not merely to appreciate the way these representations are crafted; he becomes an active participant in urinating in or having intercourse (vaginal or anal) with a simulacrum of a woman.

Hold off on those oral urinals for a bit. From Sharp’s collection, we get a female-frontal urinal:

(#1)

and a bank of femae-posterior urinals:

(#2)

and then a bank of female-posterior sinks (in a notably well-appointed men’s room):

(#3)

The user of one of those urinals is put in the position of symbolically humiliating a woman by urinating on or in her body, and the user of one of those sinks is put in the position of symbolically imposing himself on a (passive) woman via frottage or intercourse. That seems uncomplicatedly misogynistic to me. A decent man’s only recourse is to refuse to play, to opt out: find a more conventional urinal somewhere else or use a toilet, find a more conventional sink somewhere else or go without washing his hands.

Now back to those oral urinals in Germany, image repeated here:

(#4)

Here’s a 1/31/12 piece on the Ultimate Classic Rock site, “Rolling Stones Urinals Causing Controversy in Germany” by Billy Dukes:

German women wouldn’t have an issue with the lip shaped urinals at the recently opened Rolling Stones museum in Lüchow, Germany if they came installed with tongues. That way, the toilet would more accurately resemble the famous lips logo the band has long used in promotional material.

(#5)

The mouth, with or without the tongue, has very red (and hence feminine) lips, mirroring Mick Jagger’s frequent presentation of himself in the Stones’ early days as androgynous (while being simultaneously quite nastily homophobic). So I’m not sure adding a tongue would have helped. To convey that the mouth belongs to a man with lipstick on, you’d need to see more of the face: a square jaw, a cleft chin, maybe some facial scruff, or even an adam’s apple. That would require re-doing the bottom part of #2 in flesh-tone porcelain, and making it longer. That’s certainly possible, and it would give the user something to brace himself against white he’s pissing.

But wait a minute? Would men accept the notion of (symbolically) pissing in another man’s mouth? Most, I think, would not, though some might enjoy the sense of dominating, humiliating another man. (There’s a reason why urinals with mouths that are clearly male — belonging to men or boys — are so hard to find. And why urinals with apparently female mouths seem to be powerful for many men; we’re back to misogyny.) And some men might have other motives for fancying a urinal with a male mouth: gay men who are into piss play, for example.

And then there’s the protagonist of Nick Baker’s wonderful and highly original first novel, The Mezzanine, who is entirely straight. This character could use a male-mouth urinal for the technique he employs to overcome his pee-shyness in men’s rooms: he imagines pissing in another man’s mouth (dominance and humiliation again). I’m somewhat pee-shy myself, also kinky about piss, and I’ve found the Baker technique, as I think of it, quite effective.

Back to the Billy Dukes article:

The L.A. Times reports that critics of the bathroom art say it conveys a “misogynistic message.” “It’s discrimination against women,” local feminist Roda Armbruster tells Hamburg based broadcast network NDR, explaining that without the tongue it’s just a woman’s mouth a man is relieving himself into.

It seems unlikely that the outcry will change the decor of the museum’s mens room. Founder Ulli Schroder says they’re art, not a man’s mouth or a woman’s mouth. [They could, of course, be both art and a person’s mouth; that’s what I think they are, in fact.] “They were damned expensive and they’re staying where they are,” he said, according to the International Business Times. “That’s final.”

Dutch artist Meike van Schijndel [a woman] designed the toilets, which have been decorating bathrooms worldwide since the early 2000’s. This isn’t the first time controversy has dogged the manufacture. TMZ reports that in 2004, Virgin Airlines flushed plans to install a pair of these toilets at JFK Airport. These controversial items are marketed as “Kisses!” urinals on Bathroom Mania’s website, and at last check sold for over $900.

As I said earlier, if the urinals were on display in a gallery, as art, I would have no problem; in fact, I’d find them intriguing and entertaining. And there’s a long tradition of treating urinals as art objects, going back at least to Marcel Duchamp’s Dada urinal of 1917, Fountain. More recently, there have been Clark Sorenson’s beautiful and clever flower and shell urinals, which have had at least one exhibition of their own; they are fully functional as urinals, but are sold only to individuals, never (as far as I know) installed in a men’s room (though I’d have no problem pissing into a calla lily or a seashell, objects that, even symbolically, have no consciousness or social identity). For similar reasons, I’d have no problem pissing into a playing card urinal (I’d probably avoid the club one, though, because it requires really careful aim) or a musical urinal, like the ones in my “News for urinals” posting yesterday. And some photographers have shot urinals and presented them as aesthetic objects; these fixtures were, or are, functional in real life, but not of course in a photograph.

As I said earlier, the problem comes when apparently feminine-mouth urinals are actually employed as receptacles for piss. I myself would shrink from using them, no matter how much I might appreciate them as art objects.

Bonus note. The Rolling Stones continue to tour, though all four in the current band are around 70. Here they are in 2015, looking amiable and unthreatening:

(#6)

Charle Watts, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger (all in their early 70s), and the kid of the band, Ronnie Wood, in his late 60s

(Considerable frank talk about men’s bodies and sex between men, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Armed by two recent postings on urinals — January 1st ,”On urinals and the conventions of the men’s room”, and January 2nd, “The news for urinals” — I can reurn to an issue raised in another January 1st posting, “Holiday images”, with a section about a Christmas composition of superhero action figures by Indonesian photographer Edy Hardjo, who distributes photos of his entertaining compositions under the pseudonym Hrjoe. That Hrjoe posting had a quote from a Cultura Inquieta (CI) piece about Hrjoe’s work, describing his compositions and how he creates them. In the CI piece there’s a reference to one of Hrjoe’s works, with five superhero figures lined up against a wall, described in the following way:

Watch as Earth‘s mightiest heroes pee on a wall

  (#1)

At the time I doubted that this was quite the right way to think about #1, and now that I’ve written quite a bit about men pissing, I can explain why.

(In what follows I’ll continue my recent practice of mostly using the verb to piss and the (mass) noun piss (even though NOAD2 describes them as vulgar slang; for me, they’re everyday street talk) rather than the euphemistic (and, to my ear, infantile-sounding) slang to pee and pee or the more medical terms to urinate and urine.)

So, the CI piece sees #1 as a group of five guys pissing against a wall, certainly something that guys do, but very rarely in groups this large; usually it’s just one or two guys. You do get groups like this in men’s rooms, using gang urinals (either of the wall urinal or the trough urinal type) or in banks of solo urinals (either of the floor urinal or the mounted urinal type), but here, apparently, without partitions or walls separating the individual urinals. (All four of these types are illustrated in previous postings.) Why didn’t Hrjoe indicate these fixtures, rather than leaving them to the viewers’ imaginations?

(Again, hat tip to Mike McKinley, who pointed me to Hrjoe in the first place.)

I noted in earlier postings that Hrjoe has some difficulty finding appropriate-size props (at, I’d guess, affordable prices) in Jakarta (or by mail to Jakarta), so some of his compositions leave details to the imagination. Miniature urinals (of any of the four types I mentioned above) would, I imagine, be especially hard to come by.

But, whether you suppose that #1 shows fve superheroes pissing against a wall or five superheroes at urinals of one kind or another, the scene is decidedly odd.

First, all five of the superheroes presuably have their dicks out to piss, either though a fly or by opening their pants in front — we just can’t see this, because they have their backs to us — but the Hulk and Wolverine have also lowered their pants in the back, to expose and display their buttocks. That looks like a sexual display.

Then, the etiquette of pissing in front of other men dictates that you stare straight ahead, not looking at other guys. But except for the Hulk, the superdudes are all looking to one side or the other, apparently checking out other superdudes. That looks like cruising in public for sex. (I even have a Page linking to some postings on Sex in Public.) Maybe this is just a salacious fantasy on Hrjoe’s part — a number of his compositions are slyly naughty — but he might not know about how much sex goes on between men in public places, including the men’s rooms known as tearooms (or T-rooms), which men (some frankly gay, some identifying as bi, an astonishing number identifying as straight) frequent for these purposes. Some of these men’s rooms are essentially devoted to sex between men; they are located in such hard-to-find places that pretty much the only men who go there are guys looking for mansex.

In an ordinary tearoom, negotiation between men for sex takes place from stall to stall and is either consummated that way or leads to mansex within one stall. In a well-regulated ordinary tearoom, men who are using the place for toilet purposes only will not be imposed upon in any way by those who are using it as a sex venue.

But you can amp up from there. Guys will often (very carefully) cruise each other at the urinals and then move to a stall or to some other location for the sex. If the men’s room is truly remote and is heavily used as a tearoom, the action can be quite blatant, with urinal cruising leading to sex at the urinals or (to free the urinals up for other heavy cruisers) against a wall or even in the middle of the tearoom floor. The guys who are performing might enjoy putting on a show, and there might be guys who like to watch them. I have been in such places (but that was a very long time ago).

In any case, if you are so inclined, you can view #1 as a heavy-duty superhero tearoom fantasy.

At least one more of Hrjoe’s compositions can fairly easily bear a gay sexual interpretation:

  (#2)

(This has been cropped down from an even wider composition.)

Here, the superdudes come in couples, interacting with one another in various ways.

More on the photographer, from a 2/17/15 photographer profile, “Edy Hardjo Uses Superhero Action Figures To Create Hilariously Arranged Photo Scenes” (by Cynthia Boylan) on the Shutterburg.com site, an interview with him with this lead-in:

Photographer Edy Hardjo likes to put superheroes in some of the strangest of positions. Hardjo’s popular Facebook page is filled with hilarious images of action figures, including many iconic Marvel and DC chacters, in humorous and often human-like scenarios.

Hardjo was was born in Medan, Indonesia in 1973 and graduated college with a Chemical Engineering degree. He was married in 2004 and has two sons and a daughter. He currently lives with his family in Jakarta, Indonesia. All of which is a long way from the world of superheroes but that hasn’t stopped Hardjo from capturing his out-of-this-world images.

The man at work:

  (#3)

Wolverine abusing the Hulk, with (so far) Thor and Spiderman in attendance. The completed composition, with three more superheroes:

  (#4)

(Not about language, but about hunky guys doing cock teases. Yes, it’s shallow.)

Two images passed on to me by Mike McKinley (with Chris Ambidge):

(#1)

(#2)

Both guys are sporting moose-knuckles, and intentional display of a moose-knuckle is in itself a kind of cock tease. But the guy in #2 (who’s also lowering one side of his dance pants to expose his body down to the root of his penis) is more clearly toying with the viewer. On the other hand, his dance pants are thicker than #1’s briefs, and #1’s briefs are white and wet, so his moose-knuckle is really honkingly prominent (while #2’s is subtler).

#1 is a male model working for the Andrew Christian (famously homoerotic) premium underwear firm (it appeared on the AC Facebook page). The photo comes from the website for AllAmericanGuy, a membership site offering male fitness models in still shots and videos; I think the model is Luke Bryans (but I’m not entirely sure). In any case, he’s definitely ripped, with especially substantial arm muscles.

#1 is doing a carwash-in-underwear routine, a form of soft porn that AC is certainly fond of. A bunch of hunky guys (all in the same model of cute blue AC briefs and nothing else) working it and horsing around at the Andrew Christian Car Wash can be viewed in the video here; there’s also a video of cops stripping off their uniforms to wash their patrol car, and bump and grind, in a variety of AC briefs).

While we’re at the carwash, you might want to check out a Philly GayCalendar video, Boys of Summer Fiat Car Wash 2013, featuring Philadelphia gay boys, in quite a range of underwear styles, washing a car and one another.

On to #2. This came to me from the Facebook site Male Ballet Dancers, where it was posted by a Jordan Wolf, but without any information about the source of the photo, the model, or the photographer. Several people have commented that the guy doesn’t have a dancer’s body, though it’s certainly well-developed and he’s doing an entertaining cock-tease offer of it.

I put the second photo through a Google image seach and got ten or so hits, all thoroughly uninformative, though several of the sites took the model to be a body-builder (one of them offered to sell you the leggings he’s wearing). So for the moment he remains a sultry unknown.

From Michael Carden on Facebook recently, this comic strip panel from Marvel, showing an exchange between Iron Man (whose nickname is Shellhead) and Captain America:

(#1)

Carden commented:

Marvel has been around long enough that at one time “solid dick” was slang for “straight talk”.

(a story repeated with amazement and mirth on any number of blogs). I was somewhat concerned about the poor quality of the image, but much more concerned that I could find no reference to non-sexual solid dick (or anything like it) in a reputable source on slang.

Then came a small flood of debunking.

From these debunkers I choose dorkly, in a posting “3 viral geek rumors that were total bullshit” (because he does a nice follow-up to his debunking). dorkly writes, of his second example:

The Reality: Nooooooooooooooooooooooooope. The magic of poorly-done photoshop strikes again, this time to imply Iron Man is going to sexually assault Captain America, when in fact he’s only going to assault him with solid advice:

(#2)

In recompense for eliminating one piece of fabricated slang, dorkly offers us the Joker (from Batman) on some genuine (and still current) slang:

(#3)

From NOAD2 on the noun boner:

1 N. Amer. informal    a stupid mistake.

2 N. Amer. vulgar slang    an erection of the penis.

The newspaper laughs at his stupid mistakes, so the Joker plots to screw Gotham City. Never mock a supervillain’s penis, especially when he has a hard-on.

(Mostly about dance and male bodies, with only a bit about language.)

From balletomane (and sometime dancer) Mike McKinley a little while ago, this wonderful photo he found on the Male Ballet Dancers Facebook site (where, as common there,  the poster provided no information at all about the source):

(#1)

A beautiful male dancer performing a step in which he appears to be flying in mid-air, exhibiting great power and great grace simultaneously. You don’t have to be into ballet to admire his body and his performance.

Thanks to Google’s image source, I was able to identify the dancer as Jesse Inglis of the Compañía Nacional de Danza España, in a photo by Carlos Quezada. That search led me to three similar performances by other dancers and to a wonderful set of photos of a male couple flying together.

But first some notes on the step in #1, from Mike, who wrote to me:

It’s not a “classical academic” step. It’s something more like demi caractère dancing which is a sub-genre of ballet. If you know Nutcracker, think of the “national” dances in the final act or see [the Wikipedia page on character dance, which tells us:]

Character dance is a specific subdivision of classical dance. It is the stylized representation of a traditional folk or national dance, mostly from European countries, and uses movements and music which have been adapted for the theater.

The step is definitely a grand jeté with a cambré en arriére. There are a bazillion kinds of jeté from small petite allegro to the big ones shown in the photo. Below is from the ABT Ballet Dictionary [on pas jeté}:

Throwing step. A jump from one foot to the other in which the working leg is brushed into the air and appears to have been thrown. There is a wide variety of pas jetés (usually called merely jetés) and they may be performed in all directions.

Now from the Dancerboys site, this shot of dancer Fabian Morales, photographed by Carlos Quezada:

(#2)

And from that same site, this shot of dancer Francesco Mariottini, photographed by Romano Paoleschi:

(#3)

And from another site, this shot of Sergei Polunin (photographed by Dave Morgan) doing a high jump in Narcise:

(#4)

Now to the male duo of Isaac Montllor and Jean Philippe Dury, of the Compañía Nacional de Danza España, as photographed by Fernando Marcos, under the title Levitadores (literally, ‘levitators’):

(#5)

(#6)

(#7)

Montllor is the darker, somewhat shorter, Spanish one, Dury the lighter, somewhat taller, French, one. Both hot, but in different ways, and they make a nice contrast as a couple. This photo (in a thumbnail) suggests that they are romantic partners as well as dance partners:

(#8)

Dury began in the corps of the Paris Opera Ballet and then moved to Spain as a principal dancer in the CND. Dury’s career has been principally as a choreographer for a while now; his own conpany, Elephant in a Black Box, is based in Madrid. Montllor performs traditional Spanish dance as well as ballet.

Today’s Steam Room Stories (which you can view here) circled around once again to a topic always of fascination to the young men in the steamroom: penis size. One guy confessed that he was down because his girlfriend freaked out as they were getting into serious love-making. He’d warned her that he had an infant-size penis, and she was cool with that, but then when it came time for his pants to come off, she freaked. Oh, his steamroom buddy says, that’s totally insulting, to reject a guy because he has a little penis. No, no, the first guy said, I didn’t warn her that I have a penis the size of an infant’s, but that I have a penis the size of an infant: 6 lbs. 7 oz. and 18 inches long. His buddy asks to see, and is then suitably astounded. The big reveal:

Believe it or not, I have a posting in the queue with a section on micropenises, but I won’t try to fold that into this posting, which is really about ambiguity in compounds.

But, yes, 18 inches is way way off human scale, the longest recorded erect penis coming in at about 13.5 inches (and anything roughly 9 inches or more counting as a macropenis).

Compounds are notorious for their ambiguity; clarity is  the price you pay for the brevity of compounds. The compound infant-size (similarly, infant-sized) is ambiguous between ‘the size in an infant, very small’ and ‘the size of an infant’.

A Pinterest page on male haircuts led me to the undercut, a cut I’ve seen but had no name for (but this is a good one). From the Max Mayo site on men’s fashion (2/25/15, “45 Stylish Looks of Undercut Hairstyle”):

2015 would be the year faux-hawk officially died. But instead of dying by way of losing sight of it on the street (remember mullets from the 80s?) faux-hawk became a permanent fixture on today’s hairstyle menu, joining the classic league of buzz cuts, side-parted and the Ivy League.

In 2014, undercut hairstyle dethroned faux-hawk and took over the “Most Popular Hairstyle” crown. The request for the “IT” haircut at barber shops and salons continues to grow 3 years after we first spotted (and then embraced) the trend. The natural progression of the trend has given birth to countless permutations of the original style.

An undercut is short on the sides and full on the top. In a disconnected undercut, the sides are very short and clearly separate from the top; in a faded undercut, the sides blend gradually into the longer top.

Some examples to come, the first featuring male model (and former footballer) John Halls, who will provoke a digression showing him hunky in his underwear (and an undercut). Then a few notes on the faux hawk (or faux-hawk), a ‘false mohawk’.

Illustration: Halls in a disconnected undercut, with a pompadour on top:

(#1)

Max Mayo caption:

Male model John Halls spotting undercut in DETAILS magazine, March 2014

At first I thought that spotting was just a typo for sporting, but the site uses spotting in other captions; no one else seems to use the verb spot this way (except in quoting Max Mayo), so the usage looks like an eggcorn (though it’s not anywhere on the Eggcorn Database site).

On to the first note: undercut in NOAD2:

a space formed by the removal or absence of material from the lower part of something, such as a cliff, a coal seam, or part of a carving in relief.

In the haircut, the hair on the lower part of the head is shaved down, though not to the point of complete removal.

Second note: Very briefly from Wikipedia about Halls:

John Halls (born 14 February 1982) is a model and former English footballer.

… After leaving Wycombe [Wanderers] in May 2012 Halls decided to retire and set up his own male fashion business. Halls currently models for Next Models.

Here he is reflectively modeling underwear (in a faded undercut):

(#2)

(Soccer player / male model is a thing. The sport is good for developing model-style bodies.)

Back to haircuts. A disconnected undercut “with dishevelled side quiff” (as Max Mayo puts it):

(#3)

Some older men have taken up the style. Here’s “silver fox Domenico Gianfrate spotting undercut”:

(#4)

On to mohawks (on the way to faux hawks). From Wikipedia:

The mohawk (also referred to as a mohican) is a hairstyle in which, in the most common variety, both sides of the head are shaven, leaving a strip of noticeably longer hair in the center. The mohawk is also sometimes referred to as an iro in reference to the Iroquois, from whom the hairstyle is derived – though historically the hair was plucked out rather than shaved.

… While the mohawk hairstyle takes its name from the people of the Mohawk nation, an indigenous people of North America who originally inhabited the Mohawk Valley in upstate New York, the association comes from Hollywood and more specifically from the popular 1939 movie, Drums Along the Mohawk starring Henry Fonda.

Here’s an example with a relatively modest spike:

(#5)

Now to faux hawks. From The Right Hairstyles for You site:

A stylish and appealing haircut can do wonders with man’s looks, especially if the haircut is just edgy enough to be intriguing yet not so over the top that it can’t be taken seriously. This is the case with the popular men’s faux hawk haircut that has been around for decades dating back to the punk rock movement, but it still continues to remain relevant due to constant updates.

… Essentially it is a haircut that is cut partially into a Mohawk, but not all the way. How to cut a faux hawk? The sides are generally clipped short with the hair longer in the top where it can be spiked or formed into a point, depending on hair texture.

Here’s an illustration of what’s identified as a “classic faux hawk”:

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Note that the back is clipped as well as the sides and that the sides are back are faded, but with a clear delineation between sides and top.

An uncut is then very similar to a faux hawk, differing from it mostly in not having a spiky or pointed top. Both cuts can have the back of the head styled in various ways.

On Saturday I got a copy of GQ magazine — The Body Issue, for February — in the mail, with an announcement from Condé Nast that Details magazine had been closed and they were sending me GQ {for Gentlemen’s Quarterly] for the rest of my Details subscription period. GQ is, like Details, a fashion and lifestyle magazine, tilting towards fashion, while Details tilted towards the lifestyle side, and their target audiences are different: Details for metrosexual straight guys and gay guys (we’re all brothers, and we can learn from each other, or something like that), GQ very much for straight guys, with visible anxiety lest its readers be taken for queers because of their interest in men’s fashion, grooming, and the like.

So the February issue features Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo, maintaining on the cover that he’s the “Nobel Prize Winner for Physical Perfection” and showing him there in nothing but trunks from CR7 Underwear (Ronaldo’s own company) — but pairing him there (and elsewhere in the magazine) with supermodel Alessandra Ambosio (who appears to be topless on the cover). The strategy is to surround a man featured in the magazine because of his physical attractiveness with really hot women hanging on to him, to convey his heterosexuality and so to reassure the readers that it’s safe for them to admire him and identify with him. In the case of Ronaldo, who could be described as a, to put it very gently, serial dater (details to follow), the effort would seem superfluous, but it’s a standard GQ strategy.

In a separate posting, I’ll look at another story from this issue of GQ, rather coyly advertised on the cover:

Super-Size Me! We Have Huge News About Your Manhood

Here I’ll stick to Ronaldo, because there’s a lot to say, going beyond what I wrote about the man in my 8/27/15 posting “On the fashion front”, where there were three photos of him: #2, in a sexy + amiable pose; #3, in a fancy composition advertising his CR7 line; and #4, an unposed shot of him shirtless and sweaty on the soccer field.

Now, in GQ, there are two shots of him without Alessandra Ambrosio, both showing off his remarkable body (oh yes, he has a handsome face, too; smiles a lot; and projects intense energy):

(#1)

(#2)

I’ve reflected several times on this blog that soccer player plus male model (especially underwear model) is a natural pairing — soccer develops a body well suited to commercial display — but these two shots show that Ronaldo has gone way past such development, into some sort of stratospheric cultivation of a muscular swimmer-type body, achievable only by long hard work beyond staying in good shape for playing soccer.

#1 shows the man in those CR7 trunks from the cover, plus a chain/necklace by David Yurman and what is probably a very expensive Tag Heuer watch — Ronaldo lives high — though GQ gives the cost only for the trunks, $27; on the Tag Heuer site, men’s watches run from $1,200 to $8,500, and on the David Yurman site, chains like the one Ronaldo is wearing run from $350 to $1,050.

What’s especially remarkable about #1 is Ronaldo’s lats, like wings made of solid muscle. I don’t think I’ve ever seen lats quite like that on a swimmer-type body.

#2 shows the footballer in colorful CR7 trunks (again, $27; the Nike jacket goes for $85), sitting up a bit, so doing the beginnings of a crunch, which demonstrates that his abs are not just attractive (if you’re into abs), but are in fact masses of rock-hard solid muscle.

Now, getting past that body, I remind you that Ronaldo plays for the Spanish team Real Madrid and the Portuguese national team. He lives mostly in Madrid with his son Cristiano Jr., now 5. Ronaldo has steadfastly refused to identify the boy’s mother or to discuss the circumstances of the child’s birth. He does seem to be devoted to his son, or at least as devoted as a man with his demanding occupations and his lifestyle can be.

Ronaldo is the world’s highest paid footballer; and, by far, the world’s most recognizable athlete (thanks to the immense popularity of soccer worldwide). When you add to his soccer earnings the earnings from CR7 and the huge payments he gets for endorsements of various products, he is an extraordinarily rich man, quite an achievement for someone who was born 2/5/85, so will be 31 10 days from now.

Now, those women he’s dated and his girlfriends (one of whom people thought he was actually going to get around to marrying). The Ronaldo CR7 site lists 18 of them, but since that list was put together there have been several fresh entrants. (The Ronaldo CR7 site is written in very rocky English, with a fair number of misspellings (like Atinkson for Atkinson), so I had to do some fact-checking to put this list together.)

dated Portuguese model Karina Ferro in 2002 (when he was 17); Brazilian supermodel Jordana Jardel in 2003; Portuguese model Merche Romero 2005-06; Portuguese tv and film actress Soraia Chaves in 2006; 18-year-old Mia Judaken in 2006; callgirl or porn star Gemma Storey in 2007; British supermodel Gemma Atkinson in 2007; Portuguese Pop Idol contestant Luciana Abreu in 2007; call girl Tyese Cunningham in 2007; Bollywood actress and supermodel Bipasha Basu in 2007 (2007, when Ronaldo was 22, seems to have been an especially busy year for him); Spanish model Nereida Gallardo in 2008; seen with American celebrity Paris Hilton in 2009; seen with American celebrity Kim Kardashian West in 2010; Welsh model and beauty queen Imogen Thomas in 2010; rumored one-night stand with Brazilian model and tv personality Andressa Urach in 2013; five-year relationship with Russian model and actress Irina Shayk (which looked like a really serious thing at the time); tv reporter Lucia Villalon in 2015

In 2015 came reports of a relationship with 19-year-old Danish model Maja Darving; with 23-year-old Spanish model Claudia Sanchez; and with 24-year-old Marisa Mendes (the daughter of his agent, which at least one sports reporter has described as like “dipping his pen in the company inkwell” — wink wink nudge nudge).

Live hard, play hard, work out hard, spend as much time with the kid as you can (Ronaldo says they are trying to improve their Engish and their Spanish together). Oh, and he’s really close to his mother.

The News for Penises, 1/26/16 edition.

In the February issue of GQ magazine (pp. 80-83, 119), this feature article:

Heavy phallicity from the outset: the symbolic cactus, the U of Huge made into a penis icon (complete with urinary meatus, aka piss slit). The lead-in:

An enterprising L.A. surgeon [James Elist] has invented a silicone penis implant [the Penuma], which, because we’re sure you have a frient who’ll want to know, costs 13 grand and can nearly double your size. Amy Wallace grills the good `doctor on how it works – and asks a few of his satisfied customers (and their mostly satisfied wives) how it’s working. (photos by Andrew B. Myers)

In a box on p. 82, under the heading “The Bionic Manhood”:

It comes in three sizes…: Dr. Elist’s Penuma is a silicone implant that encircles about 80 percent of the shaft, leaving an opening to allow for expansion. The implant adds length, but even more girth.

… and takes less than an hour: After getting stitched up following the 45-minute procedure, patients can get up and walk out of the office. But no sex for three to six months. The Penuma needs time to settle in.

The girth thing is important. A number of women report dissatisfaction with male partners who have long but slender penises — pencil dicks, in the vernacular — which fail to stimulate their clitorises. The Penuma is designed to fix this problem.

It’s also designed to alleviate the feelings of inadequacy (and shame) so many men have about the length of their penises; it’s often been noted that half or more of American men believe that their penises are significantly smaller than average (the mean for erect adult penises is about 5 inches), which of course cannot be an accurate assessment of the situation. Instead, many men judge a penis to be of adequate length only if it is in fact notably long, at least 6 inches (for men in porn, 7 inches or more is the expected length) — so men with entirely average penises judge them to be inadequate, and men looking for male sex partners judge entirely average penises to be unacceptably small in a partner

A note about the GQ approach to these issues, which is socially very conservative. The article talks only about men and their wives, as if men and women have sex with one another only within the bounds of marriage, and as if men don’t have sex with one another. But surely in the real world people in these other sorts of relationships might desire a Penuma for themselves or their partner.

Then there is the fact that the Penuma is a silicone implant, and as with other types of implants, there’s a significant chance of things going wrong: the implants can leak, become unattached, and so on. A number of patients have had their Penumas removed.

Finally, there’s the question of the name. The pen– part is obviously from penis, but I haven’t found an account of where the –uma comes from. From pneuma ‘the vital spirit, soul, or creative force of a person’?

Or: Australia Australia Australia!

From Daily Jocks on the 25th, this example of their own AUS line (with my caption appended):

(#1)

A triple threat: proudly
Australian, proudly
Working class, proudly
Queer – “I like to get
Down under with
Me mates”

The company’s ad copy:

Say G’day to our newest underwear collection, designed downunder (for your downunder). Featuring a soft waistband with bold AUS logo and printed Australian flag, the cotton/spandex blend will keep you feeling comfortable.

To come: more on the underwear and the body of the model in #1. Then to Monty Python’s “Bruces” sketch, notes on Bruce as a particularly Australian name (and, in the U.S., as a particularly gay name), with a digression on the wattle, and then to Australian comedian and actor Barry Humphries, Dame Edna Everage, and Aussie bloke Barry McKenzie.

The underwear. #1 has DJ’s AUS underwear in a trunk (with fly). It also comes as a low-rise brief (flyless, more serious pouch):

(#2)

The AUSwear is in the blue and white of the Australian flag, but without the Union Jack or the representaion of the Southern Cross constellation:

(#3)

The model. The model in #1 has a really fine model’s body: swimmer-type build, really fit, but not ostentatiously developed. Lightly furred, neither notably hairy nor notably smooth. A very good-looking body, also “natural” — a body men can admire and identify with, or (if that’s what works for you) desire. No doubt he’s good for business.

As for the actual man, I doubt that his name is Bruce, and I have no idea whether he is Australian, working class, or queer.

Bruces. From Wikipedia:

The Bruces sketch is a sketch from the television show Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and appears in episode 22, “How to Recognise Different Parts of the Body” [aired 11/24/70]. It involves a group of stereotypical lounging Australians who are revealed to be the Philosophy Department at the fictitious University of Woolamaloo (a misspelling of the Sydney suburb of Woolloomooloo; this is how the suburb is actually pronounced with an Australian accent), and all named Bruce, with a common fondness for beer and a hatred of “poofters” (a derogatory Australian slang word for a homosexual). Terry Jones plays a “pommie” [British] professor, Michael Baldwin, joining the department and meeting his colleagues for the first time.

… Eric Idle co-wrote the sketch with Cleese and said he based it on his Australian friends from the 1960s “who always seemed to be called Bruce”.

You can watch the whole sketch here. It’s laced with stereotypical Aussie slang and stereotypical Aussie admiration for working-class values and behavior (and disdain for their stereotypical British counterparts). The full transcript, so you can appreciate the details:

Voice Over: Number eight. The kneecap

Pull back to reveal the knee belongs to First Bruce, an Australian in full Australian outback gear. We briefly hear a record of ‘Waltzing Mathilda’. He is sitting in a very hot, slightly dusty room with low wicker chairs, a table in the middle, big centre fan, and old fridge

Second Bruce [Graham Chapman]: Goodday, Bruce!

First Bruce [Eric Idle]: Oh, Hello Bruce!

Third Bruce [Michael Palin]: How are yer Bruce?

First Bruce: Bit crook, Bruce.

Second Bruce: Where’s Bruce?

First Bruce: He’s not here, Bruce.

Third Bruce: Blimey, s’hot in here, Bruce.

First Bruce: S’hot enough to boil a monkey’s bum!

Second Bruce: That’s a strange expression, Bruce.

First Bruce: Well Bruce, I heard the Prime Minister use it. S’hot enough to boil a monkey’s bum in ‘ere, your Majesty,’ he said and she smiled quietly to herself.

Third Bruce: She’s a good Sheila, Bruce and not at all stuck up.

Second Bruce: Ah, here comes the Bossfella now! – how are you, Bruce?

Enter fourth Bruce with English person, Michael

Fourth Bruce [John Cleese]: Goodday, Bruce, Hello Bruce, how are you, Bruce? Gentlemen, I’d like to introduce a chap from pommie land… who’ll be joining us this year here in the Philosophy Department of the University of Woolamaloo.

All: Goodday.

Fourth Bruce: Michael Baldwin – this is Bruce. Michael Baldwin – this is Bruce. Michael Baldwin – this is Bruce.

First Bruce: Is your name not Bruce, then?

Michael [Terry Jones]: No, it’s Michael.

Second Bruce: That’s going to cause a little confusion.

Third Bruce: Mind if we call you ‘Bruce’ to keep it clear?

Fourth Bruce: Well, Gentlemen, I think we’d better start the meeting. Before we start, though, I’ll ask the padre for a prayer.

First Bruce snaps a plastic dog-collar round his neck. They all lower their heads.

First Bruce: Oh Lord, we beseech thee, have mercy on our faculty, Amen!!

All: Amen!

Fourth Bruce: Crack the tubes, right! (Third Bruce starts opening beer cans) Er, Bruce, I now call upon you to welcome Mr. Baldwin to the Philosophy Department.

Second Bruce: I’d like to welcome the pommy bastard to God’s own earth, and I’d like to remind him that we don’t like stuck-up sticky-beaks here.

All: Hear, hear! Well spoken, Bruce!

Fourth Bruce: Now, Bruce teaches classical philosophy, Bruce teaches Haegelian philosophy, and Bruce here teaches logical positivism, and is also in charge of the sheepdip.

Third Bruce: What’s does new Bruce teach?

Fourth Bruce: New Bruce will be teaching political science – Machiavelli, Bentham, Locke, Hobbes, Sutcliffe, Bradman, Lindwall, Miller, Hassett, and Benet.

Second Bruce: Those are cricketers, Bruce!

Fourth Bruce: Oh, spit!

Third Bruce: Howls of derisive laughter, Bruce!

Fourth Bruce: In addition, as he’s going to be teaching politics, I’ve told him he’s welcome to teach any of the great socialist thinkers, provided he makes it clear that they were wrong.

They all stand up.

All: Australia, Australia, Australia, Australia, we love you. Amen!

They sit down.

Fourth Bruce: Any questions?

Second Bruce: New Bruce – are you a pooftah?

Fourth Bruce: Are you a pooftah?

Michael: No!

Fourth Bruce: No right, well gentlemen, I’ll just remind you of the faculty rules: Rule one – no pooftahs. Rule two, no member of the faculty is to maltreat the Abbos in any way whatsoever – if there’s anybody watching. Rule three – no pooftahs. Rule four – I don’t want to catch anyone not drinking in their room after lights out. Rule five – no pooftahs. Rule six – there is no rule six! Rule seven – no pooftahs. That concludes the reading of the rules, Bruce.

First Bruce: This here’s the wattle – the emblem of our land. You can stick it in a bottle or you can hold it in your hand.

All: Amen!

Fourth Bruce: Gentlemen, at six o’clock I want every man-Bruce of you in the Sydney Harbour Bridge room to take a glass of sherry with the flying philosopher, Bruce, and I call upon you, padre, to close the meeting with a prayer.

First Bruce: Oh Lord, we beseech thee etc. etc. etc., Amen.

All: Amen!

First Bruce: Right, let’s get some Sheilas.

An Aborigine servant bursts in with an enormous tray full of enormous steaks.

Fourth Bruce: OK.

Second Bruce: Ah, elevenses.

Third Bruce: This should tide us over ’til lunchtime.

Second Bruce: Reckon so, Bruce.

First Bruce: Sydney Nolan! What’s that! (points)

Cut to dramatic close-up of Fourth Bruce’s ear. Hold close-up. The superimposed arrow pointing to the ear.

Voice Over: Number nine. The ear.

A still:

(#4)

The sketch was varied in a number of ways in performances and in the version that was recorded on the 1973 album Matching Tie and Handkerchief, where the sketch concluded with the whole cast singing “The Philosopher’s Song”, which is all about drinking:

Immanuel Kant was a real piss-ant who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as sloshed as Schlegel.
There’s nothing Nieitzsche couldn’t teach ‘ya ’bout the raising of the wrist.
Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed.
John Stewart Mill, of his own free will, after half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away, half a crate of whiskey every day!
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
And Hobbes was fond of his Dram.
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart: ‘I drink, therefore I am.’
Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he’s pissed.

The name Bruce. Now from the site Waltzing More Than Matilda ~ Names with an Australian Bias of Democratic Temper, from 9/17/14, Famous Name: Bruce:

When the name Acacia was featured for Wattle Day, I mentioned that Monty Python made gentle fun of our national flower with their Bruces Sketch, where all the philosophy faculty at the (fictional) University of Woolloomooloo are named Bruce. This seems to be the origin of the notion that Bruce is a particularly Australian name.

(#5)

Acacia podalyrifolia, Queensland silver wattle

Barry Humphries has said that the inspiration for the Bruces Sketch was his Barry Mackenzie character, who began life as a comic strip in Private Eye. Barry Humphries’ television series, The Barry Humphries Scandals, was a precursor to Monty Python, and Eric Idle has cited Humphries as one of his comedy influences.

It’s rumoured, not implausibly, that Humphries himself suggested the name Bruce as an Australian signifier, either directly or indirectly. The name Bruce peaked in Australia in the 1930s, and in Britain slightly later, in the 1940s. Even at its height in the UK, it was only around the bottom of the Top 100, so it wasn’t nearly as common there.

Humphries was born in 1934, so had peers called Bruce. The most obvious example is Australian director Bruce Beresford (born 1940), who directed the Barry Mackenzie films. Like Barry Humphries, Bruce went to England in search of career opportunities, but was unable to break into the British film industry, and found success at home, with movies like Breaker Morant and Puberty Blues, and in North America with Driving Miss Daisy, and Black Robe.

The connection between Barry and Bruce continued when Humphries took the role of a great white shark named Bruce in the animated film, Finding Nemo. The American film-makers named Bruce, primarily not as an Australian reference, but after the shark in Jaws, whose models were all called Bruce after Steven Spielberg’s lawyer. Bruce the Shark does have an Australian accent though, and uses ockerisms like “Good on ya, mate!”.

From the United States, the name Bruce gained a different stereotype, being associated with homosexuality. The reasons are unclear, but one of the most popular theories is that it’s connected to the campy Batman television shows of the 1960s, as Batman’s real name is Bruce Wayne. Another is that it is from the 1960s parody song Big Bruce, where Bruce is a camp hairdresser.

Apart from these reasons, it does seem that the “tough guy” names of one generation are often seen as effeminate, dorky, or otherwise laughable by the next. Something to think about should you be considering one of today’s rugged baby names, such as Axel, Blade, Diesel, or Rowdy.

Barry Humphries. From Wikipedia:

John Barry Humphries … (born 17 February 1934) is an Australian comedian, actor, satirist, artist, and author. Humphries is best known for writing and playing his on-stage and television alter egos Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson. He is also a film producer and script writer, a star of London’s West End musical theatre, an award-winning writer and an accomplished landscape painter. For his delivery of dadaist and absurdist humour to millions, biographer Anne Pender described Humphries in 2010 as not only “the most significant theatrical figure of our time … [but] the most significant comedian to emerge since Charlie Chaplin”.

Humphries’ characters have brought him international renown, and he has appeared in numerous films, stage productions and television shows. Originally conceived as a dowdy Moonee Ponds housewife who caricatured Australian suburban complacency and insularity, Edna has evolved over four decades to become a satire of stardom, the gaudily dressed, acid-tongued, egomaniacal, internationally feted Housewife Gigastar, Dame Edna Everage.

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Humphries’ other major satirical character creation was the archetypal Australian bloke Barry McKenzie, who originated as the hero of a comic strip about Australians in London (with drawings by Nicholas Garland) which was first published in Private Eye magazine. The stories about “Bazza” (Humphries’ nickname, an Australian term of endearment for the name Barry) gave wide circulation to Australian slang, particularly jokes about drinking and its consequences (much of which was invented by Humphries), and the character went on to feature in two Australian films, in which he was portrayed by Barry Crocker.

Humphries’ other satirical characters include the “priapic and inebriated cultural attaché” Sir Les Patterson, who has “continued to bring worldwide discredit upon Australian arts and culture, while contributing as much to the Australian vernacular as he has borrowed from it”, gentle, grandfatherly “returned gentleman” Sandy Stone, iconoclastic 1960s underground film-maker Martin Agrippa, Paddington socialist academic Neil Singleton, sleazy trade union official Lance Boyle, high-pressure art salesman Morrie O’Connor and failed tycoon Owen Steele.

Barry McKenzie. From Wikipedia:

Barry McKenzie (full name: Barrington Bradman Bing McKenzie) is a fictional character created by the Australian comedian Barry Humphries (but suggested by Peter Cook) for a comic strip, written by Humphries and drawn by New Zealand artist Nicholas Garland in 1964, in the British satirical magazine Private Eye.

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The Private Eye comic strips were compiled into a book, The Wonderful World of Barry McKenzie, in which McKenzie travels to Britain to claim an inheritance. The book was published in London, but was banned in Australia with the Minister for Customs and Excise stating that it “relied on indecency for its humour”.

Two films followed.

The character was a parody of the boorish Australian overseas, particularly those residing in Britain – ignorant, loud, crude, drunk and punchy – although McKenzie also proved popular with Australians because he embodied some of their positive characteristics: he was friendly, forthright and straightforward with his British hosts, who themselves were often portrayed as stereotypes of pompous, arrogant, devious colonialists. McKenzie frequently employs euphemisms for bodily functions or sexual allusions, one of the most well-known being “technicolour yawn” (vomiting). The [1972] film popularised several Australian euphemisms and slang terms which are still used today in the Australian vernacular (such as “point Percy at the porcelain”, “sink the sausage” and “flash the nasty”). Some of the sayings were invented by Humphries, while other terms were borrowed from existing Australian slang such as “chunder” [vomit] and “up shit creek” (adopted by the Australian poetry magazine Shit Creek Review).

For a later posting, on Aussie masculinity (and class): aussieBum underwear, Shearing the Ram by Tom Roberts, and Slim Dusty.

On AZBlogX on the 26th, a posting “Dean Phoenix in disguise” that starts (#1 there) with an ad (titled “Ahead of the Curve”) for the Dirk Yates gay porn flick God Was I Drunk (2013), in which the DP character is presented as a straight army private who, under the influence of drink, agrees to have sex (for cash, in a video) with another straight soldier. This is a routine story line for the Dirk Yates flicks, which purport to show straight military men having sex with men (other straight military men) for the first time (for cash, in a video by Yates). The men are framed as real military men, not actors, and they always get seriously into the sex.

The idea is to provide a double dose of masculinity for the gay male viewer: the masculinity of the military (an appeal I appreciate at some level, though it’s not particularly my thing) and the masculinity of straight guys (who, we all know, are superior to gay men, gay men being, after all, just fags and sissies — an appeal I totally fail to appreciate). Folded in there somewhere is the idea that all men are, deep down, gay, well at least bisexual — in particular, able to enjoy fellating men and receptive anal intercourse with a male partner — an idea that doesn’t fit especially well with the idea that straight guys are superiorly masculine, but then lots of people have inconsistent beliefs and attitudes.

But Dean Phoenix (born Curtis Dean Hutchinson) is a long-established major pornstar (his first film was in 1998, when he was 24), not an amateur, and certainly not a military man, ever (he came out in high school, in a time when openly gay men were not at all welcome in the military). He’s a favorite of mine, really good at what he does, and he has a famous warm smile as well as a very nice body and a big penis, strongly downcurved, which is where the heading “Ahead of the Curve” comes from. Details (and photos) on AZBlogX.

I doubt that anyone in God Was I Drunk is an amateur, and I wonder if any of the guys in Dirk Yates flicks are military men hired off the streets, so to speak. Since I find the premise of the Dirk Yates genre icky, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of his flicks, and I certainly don’t own any of them. But if I were persuaded that they’re really just ordinary gay porn flicks, with professional actors practicing their craft, that would take some (but not all) of the edge off their ickiness.

In the real world, there are gay men who enjoy the challenge of getting straight men to have sex with them; alcohol is usually involved.

Two recent items passed on to me by Mike McKinley: one a photograph of young male dancers at the barre, the other a video compilation of dancer Joseph Gatti in an assortment of his roles. The photograph, found on a Facebook page (where it wasn’t identified in any way: where? when? who are they? who was the photographer?):

(#1)

The Gatti compilation can be viewed here; it has some remarkable stuff.

#1 has three dancers, all young, lean, and muscular, all wearing nothing but their dance belts. The first two are at rest at the barre. The third, with his remarkable buttocks, is, also remarkably, standing en pointe at the barre. It’s a wonderful photograph, of dancers, of male bodies, of faces, of people at work; I might have asked the photographer to shade down the background behind the first two dancers, to make their heads stand out more clearly, but, on the other hand, leaving the shot this way underscores its unposed character.

I appealed to Google Images to find the source, and the program found a huge number of examples of this image: dozens and dozens on various Pinterest pages, large numbers on tumblr pages, but not a single one with any information at all. (One of the Pinterest people thought it was an old-time photo, I don’t know why.)

Now Gatti is young (30), very much a dancer of our times, and easy to find information about. Well, he tweets., so I know something about his career, his gigs, the fortunes of his favorite sports teams, his enthusiasms for some surprising dancers (like Michael Jackson), his friendships, and the excellence of his girlfriend. He sounds like a nice man, and he’s cute:

(#2)

Another compilation, put together from his performances in various competitions and remixed, can be viewed here.

From an Orlando (FL) Sentinel story from a year ago, “After 13 years, Joseph Gatti returns to Orlando Ballet”:

After nearly 13 years, Joseph Gatti is coming home.

From 2001-2003 the dancer was an apprentice with Orlando Ballet, under then-director Fernando Bujones. Just 17 when he departed — he’s now 30.

“It’s the right decision,” Gatti said about returning to live in Central Florida. He’ll perform with Orlando Ballet as principal guest artist during the 2015-16 season and work as an instructor at the school.

“I’ve been through a few companies now, big and medium,” said Gatti, who was a principal dancer with Cincinnati Ballet from 2007-2008, then a principal dancer with Corella Ballet in Spain and most recently a first soloist with Boston Ballet.

“I just don’t feel the need to sacrifice love and happiness for the name of a bigger company,” said Gatti, citing the stress found in big-name troupes. “I’ll be really happy here and loving my career, dancing until the last day I can dance.”

For the past few years, Gatti and his dance partner [not his girlfriend], Adiarys Almeida Santana, have performed freelance gigs with companies worldwide.

(#3)

Gatti in flight in mid-air. And here’s Gatti and Bradley Schlagheck flying together in Polyphonia (choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon to music by György Ligeti), photo by Gene Schiavone, at The Boston Opera House in February 2012:

(#4)

Bonus. In looking for the source of #1, I found lots of other neat stuff, including the amazing young dancer Jorge Barani, trained in Cuba, who can be seen in action here.