(About men’s bodies and man-man sex, in very plain talk, with only a little bit of linguistic interest — so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

What is this man so earnestly fixed on?:

A penis, which he’s about to fellate avidly. (The full picture, and some details, in #6 in the AZBlogX posting linked to below.)

On AZBlogX, an extended pictorial essay “Poised to prong, psyched to suck”, on the representation of fellators in publicity for gay porn. Here’s the text (without the thoroughly X-rated images), edited down somewhat to concentrate on the visual conventions in a corner of the gay porn world, but preserving the style of the original, which uses lots of street vernacular.

This is an essay on the representation of man-man sex in the publicity shots for gay porn — not in the porn itself, but in the stills used for publicity. These aren’t screen shots, but carefully posed photos designed to advertise the flicks themselves: buy this (or rent this or view it on demand, but pay for it), it’s **hot**!!! (As I’ve noted before, not infrequently these photos show things that never actually made it on screen.)

Visual gay porn is focussed, first of all, on dick; secondarily on asses: these two as sources of sexual pleasure. The overriding principle is Everything To the Max: really big — magnificently long and thick — cocks, in particular, accorded Maximum Visibility. The porn actors jack those cocks (their own or each other’s) off, suck them and get theirs sucked, fuck with them or get fucked by them, and all the while the cocks are the stars of the action, the top draw for the men using the videos for their own pleasure, so of course the films show as much of the stars as they can, for as long as they can. This drive for Maximum Visibility is much greater in still shots, of course.

In videos, a cock shown in all its splendor can be — will be, must be — engulfed, in part or in whole, in a mouth or asshole, but more of it will soon be back on view. On the other hand, in still shots, you have only the frozen moment; a photo of cock plunged to the hilt in ass or mouth shows no cock at all, and is therefore not even technically X-rated. In any case, many men find such shots unsatisfying (I find them quite moving, since they depict the deepest possible union between two bodies), so we get publicity shots in which cocks are shown in their entirety (poised to thrust into mouth or asshole) or almost so (with only the tip inserted). The latter approach, which I’ll call tipping, is a compromise between Maximum Visibility and another principle of visual porn, Carnal Connection, calling for actual physical engagement of two bodies. The other, less carnal, approach I’ll call gearing-up.

My impression is that tipping is by far the dominant approach in publicity shots. #1 on AZBlog shows a recent all-tipping mail ad from the C1R company for some Cocky Boys videos — which I was going to post anyway because of the remarkable athleticism (so wonderful to look at, so unlikely in real life) in the ad for Hung Flip Fuckers.

The real topic of the AZBlogX posting, however, is gearing-up, because it was featured so prominently in an issue of Adam Gay XXX Showcase (Vol. 8 No. 7, January 2001) I recently unearthed (from only 15 years ago, but in some ways an artifact from another world).

In tipping shots, the enthusiasm of the receptive (cock-taking) partner isn’t at issue; after all, the guy has the dick in his mouth or (partly) up his ass. But for gearing-up shots, things are not always so clear. For fuck shots, you’ve got the fucker poised to prong the hole, and the hole has usually arranged himself to convey his enthusiasm for the deed (humping up for doggie sex, for instance). In any case, all he really has to do is offer his asshole, make it available.

But for suck shots, you’ve mostly got the insertive partner doing the offering, and the prospective fellator showing, somehow, that he’s psyched to suck. I find these gearing-up for cocksucking shots almost always somewhat ridiculous, unintentionally funny. So many choices for the cockhound: how to position himself vis-a-vis the engorged treasure, what facial expression to display, what to do with his mouth (and tongue). The fellatee, meanwhile, can just stand (or sit or lie) there, offering his stiff rod, and his face can take on any expression appropriate for a guy engaged in having sex, of any kind (including solo jacking-off) — but the fellator is having a social encounter with a much-desired phallic partner. Hablale, to paraphrase Almodóvar.

The AZBlogX posting then surveys 10 Adam Gay images of such encounters, from three jack-off flicks released in 2000. Several are beautifully composed, several strike me as notably (unintentionally) funny, and one has an especially impressive implement, as I put it there. Some, of course, are artless or awkward. But they’ve all got dick.

News from the art world, caught on KQED in San Francisco yesterday: a story about an exhibition at UC Davis (the ag campus of the UC, not far from the state capital, Sacramento — but much more than an ag school). Featuring works by a group of 12 UCD artists that included Robert Arneson, with his celebrated ceramic sculptures “Johns”, funky (and calculatedly offensive) take-offs on toilets and urinals.

The UCD official story, characteristically cautious:

The Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California, Davis, announces the four opening exhibitions that will inaugurate its new, architecturally significant museum building beginning Sunday, Nov. 13.

… Drawn from the collections of major museums and private collections nationwide as well as UC Davis’ permanent collection, Out Our Way presents 240 paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints. Characteristic of the majority is an instinctive embrace of the vernacular and the desire to ingeniously transform the stuff of daily life.

… Represented in Out Our Way are the 12 artists [Richard L.] Nelson hired during his tenure (1952-70) [as director of the museum]: Wayne Thiebaud, Robert Arneson, William T. Wiley, Roy De Forest, Roland Petersen, Manuel Neri, Ralph Johnson, Ruth Horsting, Daniel Shapiro, Tio Giambruni, Jane Garritson and John Baxter.

(Thiebaud deserves a posting of his own.)

On Arneson, from Wikipedia:

Robert Carston Arneson (September 4, 1930 – November 2, 1992) was an American sculptor and professor of ceramics in the Art department at UC Davis for nearly three decades.

[Arneson was very much a northern Californian. Born and raised in Benicia, educated in the Bay Area, and then working and teaching at UCD.]

… Starting in the 1960s, Arneson and several other California artists began to abandon the traditional manufacture of functional items in favor of using everyday objects to make confrontational statements. The new movement was dubbed Funk Art, and Arneson is considered the father of the ceramic Funk movement.

Arneson used common objects in his work, which included both ceramic sculptures and drawings. He appeared in many of his own pieces — as a chef, a man picking his nose, a jean-jacketed hipster in sunglasses.

From a review in the SF Chronicle by Charles Desmarais on the 13th:

The most important works in “Out Our Way,” from an art historical point of view, are the 10 extant “Johns” (plus a drawing of the now-lost 11th) by Arneson. Full-scale ceramic take-offs on toilets and urinals — bloated, glazed and inscribed with sexual reference and scatological scrawlings — they were Arneson’s breakout works. He tells the story, recounted in the exhibition text, of being asked to join a major show of sculpture from throughout California. “I could see myself, Bob Arneson, in between John Mason and Peter Voulkos, and I would be just a junior version of those two guys and just a little pisser.” He considered the most ubiquitous large ceramic form in American daily life, and its connection to avant-garde art via Marcel Duchamp; maybe he also thought of Jasper Johns, one of the hottest artists of that moment.

The “Johns” are, in the way of bloody horror films, repulsively enthralling objects. Turds of clay, squeezed between greedy fingers, top “The Pisser” (1963) where the flush mechanism might have been. “Toilet: Life Size” (1964) is entirely smeared with a gloppy brown glaze. A grandly gross “Throne” (1964) stands nearly 6 feet tall.

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Arneson, “Pisser”

Disappointingly, this unique assembly — it’s the first time that all 11 works have been in the same exhibition — is not shown to best advantage. I had been excited to see how they would be presented (I engineered the acquisition of “The Pisser” by Laguna Art Museum many years ago). But they are scattered through the larger exhibition, with the effect that they sully the unrelated works around them. Worse, we don’t get to see them together, and there is no catalog to document this important showing.

Women’s bodies are not well treated. Here’s Arneson’s “John Figure” (1965): a life-sized toilet bowl with a female torso for a tank, one breast as the flusher handle:

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And, even more unnervingly, “Herinal” (1965-71), seen here in full (the flusher handle is a penis) and in close-up:

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Compare these to the “Misogynistic urinals and sinks” in my 1/3/16 posting. Those more recent works, by hands other than Arneson’s, were designed as working bathroom fixtures, so they are even more disturbing than Arneson’s art objects.

On the art-historical place of Arneson’s early ceramics, including the “Johns”, in Gareth Clark’s review of a 2013 exhibition “Robert Arneson’s Early Countercultural Ceramics” at David Zwirner in NYC:

Throughout the 1960s, Arneson produced highly charged and highly sexualized work that stood in stark contrast to the Minimalist constructions made by his contemporaries in New York. Drawn from public and private collections, the exhibition includes roughly 20 works that clearly show Arneson’s artistic development and also prefigure his later work, which delves even further into the topics of identity and the self, as well as political upheaval and war.

… [in response to another reviewer] It … does not “debase Pop,” it is anti-Pop, taking everything about the latter that was clean and making it dirty, everything that was slick and making it, not just grubby and handmade, but crudely hobbyist rather than manufactured. Stylistically, Pop took a high road and Funk the low one.

A huge part of Arneson’s work was self-portraiture, all of it wry and much of it playful caricature (he was not above representing himself as a literal dickhead). A nice collection of photographs of Arneson and examples of his self-ceramics can be found on the verisimitudo site. From which, these two examples, “self” and “California Artist”:

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(Note: the 12 artists in the UCD show were united by their standing apart from the work then current in NYC, but they in no sense formed an artistic “school” or “movement”. Arneson and Thibaud are surely the most famous of the group, and they could hardly be more different, though they both focused much of their art on common, everyday objects.)

Two news items about men’s junk: a Guardian story about the mammalian penis bone, and its lack in human beings; and an ad for a new line of quirky men’s underwear, the Eletrunks (“Now you can adjust your manhood discreetly”).

 Stiff Times at Dickmont High. Or: Science marches on. A piece by Ian Sample in yesterday’s Guardian, “Why don’t humans have a penis bone? Scientists may now know: Speed of human mating might be behind the lack of a baculum in humans, suggests study tracing bone’s evolution”.

Kit Opie[,] who ran the study with Matilda Brindle at University College London, said that penis bone length was longer in males that engaged in what he called “prolonged intromission.” In plain English, that means that the act of penetration lasts for more than three minutes, a strategy that helps the male impregnate the female while keeping her away from competing males. The penis bone, which attaches at the tip of the penis rather than the base, provides structural support for male animals that engage in prolonged intromission.

In chimps, the penis bone is no longer than a human fingernail. The tininess of the bone correlates with the very short spell that the male spends mating, in the order of seven seconds. In chimpanzee groups, females mate with all the males, in what appears to be a strategy to reduce the risk of her children being killed by older males. “It gives each male an idea that they may have fathered the subsequent offspring, and it is in her interests to get that done quickly,” Opie said.

Humans may have lost their penis bones when monogamy emerged as the dominant reproductive strategy during the time of Homo erectus about 1.9 million years ago, the scientists believe. In monogamous relationships, the male does not need to spend a long time penetrating the female, because she is not likely to be leapt upon by other amorous males. That, at least, is the theory.

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Penis bones from various mammals. The baculum varies so much in terms of length and whether it is present at all, that it is described as the most diverse bone ever to exist.

On the baculum (Latin baculum ‘stick, staff, baton’), from Wikipedia:

The baculum (also penis bone, penile bone or os penis) is a bone found in the penis of many placental mammals. It is absent in the human penis, but present in the penises of other primates, such as the gorilla and chimpanzee. The bone is located above the male urethra, and it aids sexual reproduction by maintaining sufficient stiffness during sexual penetration. The homologue to the baculum in female mammals is known as the baubellum or os clitoridis – a bone in the clitoris.

On the speed of ejaculation in human beings, from Wikipedia:

The 1948 Kinsey Report suggested that three-quarters of men ejaculate within two minutes of penetration in over half of their sexual encounters.

Current evidence supports an average intravaginal ejaculation latency time (IELT) of six and a half minutes in 18- to 30-year-olds. If the disorder is defined as an IELT percentile below 2.5, then premature ejaculation could be suggested by an IELT of less than about two minutes.

… There is no uniform cut-off defining “premature”, but a consensus of experts at the International Society for Sexual Medicine endorsed a definition including “ejaculation which always or nearly always occurs prior to or within about one minute”.

… studies report PE prevalence ranging from 3 percent to 41 percent of men over 18, but the great majority estimate a prevalence of 20 to 30 percent — making PE a very common sex problem

Be kind to your balls-bearing friends. Brought to my attention by Kim Darnell, this entertaining video ad for Eletrunks boxer shorts. A still version:

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The ele- from elephant, elephants being animals with trunks; and from elevate, elevating your junk being the point of the underwear. The garnent is designed to be kind to the testicles of boxers-wearing men, and to allow for lifting them discreetly in public — though you still have to stick a hand in your trousers to get at the lifter.

Background information from Wikipedia for understanding the company’s ad copy (to come):

Modal is a type of rayon, a semi-synthetic cellulose fiber made by spinning reconstituted cellulose, in this case often from beech trees. Modal is used alone or with other fibers (often cotton or spandex) in household items such as pajamas, towels, bathrobes, underwear and bedsheets.

Now for the company’s breezy copy:

How we started

While taking a sabbatical to travel Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia, founder Michael decided to buy a motorcycle to explore the mountains and jungle at his leisure. He found that every pair of boxers compromised the comfort of his family jewels.

He decided to fix the issue and designed what you see today – Eletrunks!

The making of Eletrunks

Manufactured in Brooklyn. Sourced in NYC from material made in the USA.

Made of breathable, environmentally friendly, incredibly soft modal fabric.

Modal = Beachwood tree fiber. 20x less water than cotton, 10x more production. 99.5% recycled process.

Soft, silky, sustainable.

How are Eletrunks different?

Eletrunks literally let you elevate your manhood without reaching below your waistband. They also create chafe-free zones under the legs and keep you from sticking to yourself.

How you ask?

Your manhood goes into the pouch, keeping it away from your legs. When you need to readjust, you simply use the patented ‘Lifter,’ a string that attaches from the waistband to the bottom of the pouch, and it elevates your entire manhood.

Because of the pouch design, you receive the benefit of gaining maximum coverage along the legs which eliminates any skin to skin contact. This is the brilliance and difference in the design.

Or you could wear briefs.

(Eventually about a set of social practices and the vocabulary — mostly transparent — referring to them.)

A standout phrase from a moving, and also wryly funny, Gail Collins op-ed column in the NYT on the 22nd, “The Senate Bathroom Angle”. The infamous pincher in question is the monstrous Strom Thurmond, a stridently anti-black and anti-gay politician and notorious sexist pig, also the U.S. Senator from South Carolina for 48 years.

Collins on Mikulski. I’ll lead with the good stuff, Collins appreciating Sen. Barbara Mikulski; the standout phrase is underlined:

We are sorely in need of some cheerful news out of Washington, so I’m going to tell you Barbara Mikulski’s story about the Senate bathrooms.

Almost every veteran woman legislator, in every level of government, has a story about the shortage of bathroom facilities at work. Really, there needs to be a book on this. It could have a happy ending, and none of the chapters would involve Russian attempts to manipulate an election.

Mikulski, 80, has served in Congress longer than any other woman in history. She’s retiring this month after representing Maryland for 30 years in the Senate. Before that she spent 10 years in the House.

… By 2013 there were 20 women in the Senate and waiting lines in the loo. Mikulski recalled that the Rules Committee, which controlled such matters, wanted to create an elegant place with a chandelier and little sinks with slim legs. “We wanted low cost. We didn’t want anything fancy or expensive, but we wanted maximum functionality — the way women use a bathroom and not the way men think women use a bathroom,” she recounted.

In the end, functionality won. The new bathroom had two more stalls, an extra sink and shelves in which each senator had her own basket to store combs, brushes, makeup, whatever. “And so when I leave they’ll retire my basket. … It’s kind of like retiring your jersey,” Mikulski said, rather proudly.

… In Washington, Mikulski has always exhibited a highly unusual combination of feistiness and bipartisanship. Susan Collins, a Republican senator from Maine, recalled that when she first arrived, Mikulski immediately reached out.

“She didn’t know me from Adam — or perhaps I should say from Eve,” Collins said in a recent tribute on the Senate floor. “Yet, despite the difference in our seniority, our states and our parties, she took me under her wing. … I was so grateful for her kindness and her wisdom. … She taught me the ropes of the appropriations process and instituted regular bipartisan dinners for the women of the Senate.”

Those dinners have become famous — especially since the male side of the chamber has become more and more viciously partisan. In the beginning, they were held in a Senate room named after the late Strom Thurmond, an infamous pincher of ladies’ bottoms.

“I know, the irony,” Olympia Snowe, the former senator from Maine, once told me.

… Recently Mikulski and Collins invited their female colleagues for coffee, to welcome the latest generation of newcomers. It was a final gesture of outreach as Mikulski moved on into Senate history.

She deserves some kind of permanent memorial. Maybe they could put a plaque in that bathroom. Or better yet, they could rename the Strom Thurmond Room in her honor.

(Points to Olympia Snowe’s “I know, the irony”.)

Mikulski at the Capitol in November:

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I provide no photo of the Massive Asshole of Southern Manhood, but for young readers and those outside the U.S., a bit of information.

Strom Thurmond. Very briefly, from Wikipedia:

James Strom Thurmond (December 5, 1902 – June 26, 2003) was an American politician who served for 48 years as a United States Senator from South Carolina. He ran for president in 1948 as the States Rights Democratic Party candidate, receiving 2.4% of the popular vote and 39 electoral votes. Thurmond represented South Carolina in the United States Senate from 1954 until 2003, at first as a Democrat and, after 1964 [in response to the Civil Rights Act], as a Republican.

Thurmond had two wives, both beauty queens he hired to work in his office and then married. The first was 21 to Thurmond’s 44 when they married, the second was 25 to Thurmond’s 68 (and they then had four children); he liked ’em young and pretty. But before all that, when he was 22, Thurmond impregnated a 16-year-old black servant in his parents’ house; the daughter of that union, who Thurmond supported financially but otherwise concealed, came forward, then aged 78, after Thurmond died and defiantly claimed her place in the family.

God knows how many women Thurmond screwed during his 100 years, but he certainly manhandled a legion of them.

Unwanted, uninvited attentions as a social practice. The key words are unwanted and uninvited; many of the practices I allude to here have their place in consensual relations between two people. The context of the practices is crucial.

[Digression on interactional equality. I’ve just framed things in terms of equality between the two people in these interactions; their intentions and wishes are equally valued, this despite the fact that in any particular interaction, there is typically an asymmetry of action between the two people, with one serving as agent in an act, the other as patient or recipient — pincher and pinched, for instance.

Interactional equality is a recommendation, a normative claim, a claim about what should be the case, not a factual claim, about what is the case, and a great many people subscribe to a different set of norms, in which the intentions and wishes of a male agent prevail over those of a female recipient, because of a set of beliefs about the “natural” stances of the sexes, according to which men are either involuntarily driven to impose themselves on women they find attractive (like cats driven to bat at shiny objects by innate disposition) or entitled to impose themselves on women by the natural order of things (often, because this is the order ordained by religious authorities, which in turn take it to be ordained by God).

There are obviously divergent claims about moral order here, and I’m firmly on the side of interactional equality. (I’m a feminist, so sue me.) But most people (in our culture, anyway) who appeal to the natural order of the sexes still recognize limits, as we’ll see. In actual practice, the divergence comes primarily in the sphere of what’s sometimes called everyday sexism — of which Thurmondian bottom-pinching is a prime example.]

Men’s impositions on women. Several varieties of everyday sexism, including two large sets:

(1a) physical imposition (gluteal): groping, fondling, patting, grabbing, pinching, or slapping a woman’s bottom

(2a) verbal imposition, framed positively: cat-calling, wolf-whistling

These are the least grave impositions. The physical impositions in (1a) target the buttocks rather than those bodyparts viewed as primary sexual loci (the vagina, the breasts). The verbal impositions in (2a), while harrassing, are framed as appreciations.

The physical impositions in (1a) are often framed by men as compliments: pinching her buttocks is conveying “Nice ass, baby!” or something of the sort. She should be grateful!

Otherwise, I’ve heard the impositions in (1a) explained as “checking out her goods”, assessing the quality of her body, and “testing how receptive she is” (in effect, making her a non-verbal offer of sexual relations of some sort). But no matter how framed, the impositions assert dominance over a woman and claim rights to her body. So it’s no surprise that women generally find them at least annoying, often objectionable, sometimes directly threatening.

Not infrequently, men explain both types of impositions above as natural, involuntary responses to an attractive woman: “I couldn’t help myself.” This was the reason traditionally given for the behavior of Italian men towards women in the days of rampant bottom-pinching on the streets of many Italian cities. Apparently, this behavior is much reduced, but there’s some material on the net about the legal status of “unpremeditated”, “involuntary” bottom-pinching (other instances of bottom-pinching on the street are now apparently straightforwardly against the law).

But, but… back in the bad old days `in Italy, a woman accompanied by an adult man would almost never get pinched, and a woman accompanied only by a baby or small child — a woman who presented herself as a mother — would almost never get pinched. Somehow the “involuntary” urges could be suppressed by another male or by maternity. (Raised eyebrow emoji here.)

A common opinion — held by some women as well as many men — about the impositions above is that they’re just “boys being boys”, an expected and “natural” part of heterosexual masculinity, so a woman imposed on in these ways should just accept it and not “make a big thing of it”. But on the face of it, these impositions are assaults; why should they be accepted?

Tougher stuff. The impositions above are at the mild end of the scale. But things can escalate. On the verbal side:

(2b) verbal imposition, framed negatively: anti-woman slurs, demeaning address terms, ordering women around, etc.

And on the physical side, things move from buttocks to more clearly sexual parts:

(1b) physical imposition (mammary): stroking, fondling, or grabbing breasts

(1c) physical imposition (pubic): pussy-grabbing etc.– groping, stroking, fondling, or grabbing a woman’s crotch

It seems to me that by the time we get to (1c), if the act is unwelcome, we’re unambiguously in sexual assault territory.

And then on to:

(1d) physical imposition (frottage): rubbing genitals against a woman’s body, through clothing

(1e) physical imposition (phallic): gaining explicit sexual favors (especially via threats or force) — manual, oral, vaginal, or anal

Meanwhile, there’s a parallel track of physical display rather than imposition:

(3a) physical display: crotch-grabbing, directed at another person, through clothing

(3b) physical display: crotch-thrusting (aka pelvic thrusting), again directed at another person and through clothing

(3c) physical display: flashing (genitals at another person)

If unwelcome, these are all aggressive displays, though they’re framed as if they were offers.

Agents and recipients. We started with a male agent and female recipients, with a gluteal focus. Buttocks come into it because of their proximity to the genitals and because the shape of the buttocks is a strong secondary sexual characteristic — and one that can be discerned through clothing.

So many straight men identify themselves as “butt men”, interested in female buttocks. And there’s clothing designed to show off beautiful female bottoms. The bikini, for instance, shown here as modeled by contestants in a Miss BumBum competition in Turkey:

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A great many straight women find male buttocks similarly attractive. A great many earlier postings on this blog have featured handsome male bottoms, but these are chosen with a gay man’s eyes. Here’s a hot Parisian guy, chosen by a straight woman who’s something of an enthusiast of the species:

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Male attraction to female butts sometimes results in (uninvited) bottom-pinching. What about female attraction to male butts?  Women seem to engage in (uninvited) bottom-pinching of men very rarely, although reversing roles here is sometimes performed as a journalistic stunt. Men’s reaction to having their butts pinched seems to be mostly surprised, very rarely offended; often, instead of being offended by the imposition, men tend to view the act as a (welcome) invitation to more intimate interaction. Well, at least if the agent is a good-looking young woman. Sigh.

In my experience, though gay men have an abiding interest in handsome male butts, uninvited bottom-pinching is quite rare; it’s likely to be taken as unpleasant aggression. Even more so for the more advanced forms of physical imposition and display, Instead, m2m interactions tend to be rather carefully negotiated, both verbally and non-verbally. (Once, in a situation where I might have been taken to be offering my body, another man didn’t advance on me physically, but instead said, from a distance of several feet, with a wonderful smile, “You have a beautiful ass”. And then in a while we were, in fact, on.)

(Male bodies and elaborate photographic fantasies, to inaugurate 2017, which is, by the way, a prime number.)

From my correspondent RJP, a link to the work of the Skiinmode studio (supplying Asian male muscle posed in complex fantasy scenes) on Tumblr. (The material is available on a number of sites, especially on Tumblr and Instagram.)

Men of several nationalities and body types (all with pleasing muscles and most in cocktease poses), in fanciful settings, sometimes appearing as complex imaginary creatures.

(The Asia of this material seems to start in Southeast Asia and go on east from there.)

Four examples, from a great many available on the web:

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… and a dirty joke. A ¡Toma Guasa! cartoon from October 2015:

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No one’s misspelled HALLOWEEN; the O is right there, it’s just that it’s an asshole.

Mira mi culo in panel 1 is ‘look at my ass’, with the same ambiguity in Spanish culo as in English ass — ‘butt(ocks)’ vs. ‘anus’.

And I got to the cartoon by looking for puns with mira and culo, together suggesting ‘miracle’: Latin miraculum, Italian miracolo, Spanish milagro. My asshole, it’s a miracle!

Here’s the English version, Cyanide and Happiness (a strip I’ve posted about before) from 10/19/15:

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The asshole joke is still there, but I think it’s better in Spanish.

I’m struggling with the Spanish title ¡Toma Guasa!, which has nothing to do with cyanide and not much to do with happiness, and lacks a conjunction corresponding to English and. Just two nouns: toma ‘taking, capture’ and guasa ‘joke, banter’. I don’t get a snappy English translation out of that, but then translating titles is never easy.

Unavoidably, I guess, once I got to “It’s a miracle”, I was taken to pop music: to Barry Manilow and (oh yes) to Culture Club.

“It’s a Miracle” is a 1975 single by Barry Manilow and was the second release from his album, Barry Manilow II. (link)

You can listen to the audio here.

Gay interest here: “Manilow’s well-known association with Bette Midler began at the Continental Baths in New York City in 1971” (link). Yes, the gay baths, celebrating sex between men. (On a personal note, the Continental Baths provided my first bathhouse experience, and a satisfying experience it was.) Despite all that, I’ve never warmed to Barry Manilow.

But then there’s this:

“It’s a Miracle”, was the fifth and final single from new wave band Culture Club’s 1983 Colour by Numbers album. (link)

You can watch the video here. This is Culture Club, wildly queer, and (to get back to the culo theme) it has a dancer swinging her butt for the camera.

(Mostly about language, but male bodies and bodyparts play significant roles.)

Yesterday, a posting about a fantasy agency supplying male hustlers, featuring two meat + N compounds: meat market ‘sexual marketplace’ and meatmen ‘men considered as sexual objects’ (as bodies as wholes, but especially as assemblages of sexual parts — cock, balls, and ass).  The interplay of two senses of meat here (the body, especially the male body, as a whole vs. the central masculine bodypart, the penis) led me to two joking uses of meat, in a Pat Byrnes New Yorker cartoon from 2001 (in which the ‘animal flesh as food’ sense of meat is central) and a piece of advice on the Usenet newsgroup soc.motss from Joseph Francis some years ago (in which the ‘body as sexual object’ sense is central).

The Byrnes:

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And the quote from Joe Francis, directed at gay men:

Remember; you’re not just a man, you’re also a piece of meat.

The Byrnes turns farly simply on the primary sense of meat. From NOAD2:

the flesh of an animal (especially a mammal) as food

(In a while, we’ll get to double entendres involving this sense.)

[Digression on Byrnes, who’s appeared once before on this blog. From Wikipedia:

Pat Byrnes is an American cartoonist best known for his work for The New Yorker. He created the comic strip Monkeyhouse, which ran for three years.]

Then on figurative developments from the primary sense, from GDoS:

1 a body, usu. a woman’s, as an object of sexual pleasure [1st cite 1515-16; in the gay world, the body in question is usually a man’s, as in the Francis quote]

2 (also lump of meat, piece of meat) the penis [1st cite c. 1564]

3 the vagina [1st cite 1611]

The sense development in 2 is presumably metaphorical — penis as like a piece of meat — while the development in 3 is pretty much a classic whole-for-(central)-part metonymy.

meat ‘body’. From a 5/1/16 posting with a caption for a shot of a man in his underwear:

He scrutinized himself pitilessly in the
Mirror, as a piece of meat to feed the
Hot guys

The development is from meat as food, providing one kind of pleasure, to meat as providing other sorts of pleasures — visual, tactile, sexual.

That brings us to the compounds meat market and meat rack, referring to places where bodies are made available to others. From GDoS:

meat market as a place, usu. for sexual encounters:

(a) a rendezvous for prostitutes of either sex [first cite 1896]

(b) (US) any situation or place where people are regarded as commodities, such as a recruiting agency ior a modelling agency [first cite 1941]

(c) anywhere that people gather for the primary purpose of finding sexual partners [first cite 1957, in a college context]

(d) in fig. use, the world of commercial sexuality [first cite 1967]

meat rack (orig. gay) a place, such as a bar or a particular street, where homosexuals display their charms to potential customers [this should be revised to “potential sexual partners”, since the encounters are not necessarily commercial]. After the ‘singles bar’ explosion of the 1970s, the term was extended to heterosexuality. [1st cite 1963, from John Rechy’s City of Night, referring to a cruisy L.A. park; 2nd 1978 from Larry Kramer’s Faggots, referring to the hook-up area of Fire Island Pines on the Long Island NY coast]

meat ‘penis’. Very common uses here in the (rhyming) slang idiom beat one’s meat ‘masturbate, jack off’ and the slang idiom eat s.o.’s meat ‘fellate s.o., suck s.o.’s cock’. The latter has been the source of numerous double entendres on the ‘food’ sense of meat, as on the

EAT MY MEAT

cookout apron from Crazy Dog Tshirts in Rochester NY (on Amazon for $26.99)

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and t-shirts with the slogans

I ♥ TO RUB MY MEAT [a reference to rubbing a preparation of herbs and spices into meat before cooking]

Once you put my meat in your mouth you’re going to want to swallow. [with image of a grill]

I rub my meat before I stick it in. [with image of a grill]

In other contexts, the phallic reference is explicit. As in the gay comics series Meatmen, posted on here.

And in the name of the punk band The Meatmen, complete with cartoon dicks:

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The Meatmen are an American punk band headed by Tesco Vee, originally existing from 1981 to 1997. They were known for their outrageous stage antics and offensive lyrics. They reformed in 2008 and continue to tour and record. (Wikipedia link)

Tesco Vee (born Robert Vermeulen; 1955) is a Michigan-based punk rock musician and co-founder of Touch and Go Records zine. Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, he is a former elementary school teacher and the founding member, and front man, of punk bands The Meatmen, Tesco Vee’s Hate Police, Blight, and Dutch Hercules. (Wikipedia link)

And in the song “It Ain’t the Meat, It’s the Motion”, whose title has itself become a catchphrase and an idiom. Glosses from Wiktionary:

When it comes to sexual satisfaction, penis size doesn’t matter, but technique does.

(more generally) The tools you use to accomplish a goal are not as important as what you do with them.

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Originally a 1951 song by Lois Mann and Henry Glover, recorded by The Swallows; you can listen to it here. It’s probably now known best through the cover Maria Muldaur recorded in 1999, which you can listen to here.

Finally, there is of course phallic meat in the world of gay porn, as in this reference to prime meat in the liner notes for Choice Cuts (1983 HIS Video starring J.W. King):

All-beef weenies on the rampage! From hard hats to surfers, students to street hustlers, Choice Cuts shows you Southern California from a distinctly male U.S.D.A. prime meat in action perspective.

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(A posting about a gay pornstar and his best video performance. About identities and personas; the negotiation of sex in public places; the structuring of gay porn flicks; with several linguistic notes. But there’s no getting around the fact that there’s a lot here about men’s bodies and man-on-man sex in very plain language, so this posting is not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Inspired by a recent re-viewing of Joe Gage’s Titan Media production Mens Room Bakersfield Station (2004), I’m posting about its star, Danny Vox (hereafter DV). I’ll lead with a startling photo that shows several of his salient characteristics:

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DV in a Please Fuck Me pose, cropped to eliminate his junk and his asshole (which is what’s enthusiastically on offer in the full photo), so as to focus instead on his wonderful smile, projecting amiability and playfulness (two characteristics that are rarely far from the surface in his publicity photos).

Two more publicity shots, more intent than sunny, both offering his ass (DV is a famed uberbottom):

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(#3)

Earlier on this blog, in my “Cute pornstars” posting of 7/23/16 (DV is decidedly cute): in #3 displaying his barely covered ass, with a big sweet smile; and in #4 doing an open-fly cock tease (DV has a beautiful cock that suits his body very well).

And now, in an XXX-rated annex to this posting on AZBlogX, 8 further shots, beginning with #1, a full-frontal display of DV’s body. DV has a beautiful masculine face (of the “cute” variety), intense eyes with admirable lashes, a nicely furred swimmer’s body, and a pornstar cock that’s just right for the rest of his body. Very satisfying to me: my fantasies can go back and forth between doing him and being him.

#2 has DV looking intense (with a totally hard cock) — that is to say, highly focused. Even in this workmanlike state, there’s some suggestion of playfulness.

#3 has DV llying on his back looking abandoned (with his sweet half-hard cock in the middle of the composition). Even here, he might just break into one of his adorable smiles at any minute. In any case, he wants you to take him; you’ll like it, and he’ll love it.

#4 is the full Please Fuck Me shot. The man makes getting fucked seem positively jolly — communicating “c’mon. buddy, this can make us both really really happy”.

Then in #5 Justin Dragon fucks DV, and in #6 Trevor Knight takes his turn. Getting fucked, DV sometimes shifts into ecstatic mode (#5), sometimes into workman or craftsman mode (#6), but almost never even seems uncomfortable, certainly not working through pain to get the pleasure of being filled up with dick. Like I said, he’s an uberbottom. By my count, he gets fucked three times in the Bakersfield mens room flick, once by double penetration, which he somehow manages to make look easy.

Also a famous ubercocksucker, so all in all, an ubercocklover, exhibiting (as I put it in a 2/9/16 posting) an

ecstatic devotion … to cocks: admiring them (especially in action, being jacked off and coming), desiring them, intense pleasure in handling them (especially, jacking them off), taking them into his body (in his mouth, in his fuckhole), becoming one with them, and receiving the gift of cum (especially in his mouth)

#7 in the AZBlogX posting shows DV at work in the Bakersfield men’s room, just beginning to inhale Matt Majors’s really thick cock. At one point or another in the Bakersfield flick, DV takes most of the other guys in his mouth, some of them several times during the roughly 3 hours of the movie.

Finally, though DV never gets his cock sucked in the Bakersfield flick, he gets serviced quite nicely by guys in other movies of his; #8 in AZBlogX shows Hank Real blowing DV.

As far as I can tell, DV fucked only one other guy on-screen during his career: Trent Atkins in Addiction, Part 1 (Jocks Studio, 2003): Atkins was apparently even more basal (more of a bottom) than DV. From the publicity for the flick:

Falcon Exclusive Tommy Brandt and newcomer Danny Vox face off in the bathroom, stroking their cocks. Soon the two young studs are absorbed in cock-sucking splendor. Exclusive Maxx Diesel and newcomer Ken Houser – bouncers at [Club] Addiction – interrupt and demand some attention. Tommy sucks Maxx while Danny services Ken. The studs switch partners and each gets a taste of the others. Trent Atkins joins in and these five studs enjoy an orgy of sucking, rimming, and fucking which leaves them satisfied and soaked in sticky release. [Atkins is the focus of a gang bang; even DV fucks him. When Atkins is out of the scene, DV becomes the focus of a gang bang from the other three.]

#4 in an AZBlogX posting on Atkins shows DV as one of the crew gangbanging Atkins.

A final sexual note on DV: several sources give his cock length as 8″, but those are probably porn inches. Probably 7″ in real life, fitting nicely on a well-muscled 5’11” swimmer’s body. In any case, DV is both adorable and hot.

Four DVs. At this point I need to return to distinctions I made in a posting about, among other things, the pornstar Kevin Wiles (like DV and Trent Atkins, an ubercocklover). We start in a fictional world, the fantasy world of gay porn, which I’ve sometimes called Gayland — more recently, Pornlandia, because I like the play on words. Pornlandia embraces a number of sites, locales, or (speaking figuratively) neighborhoods, among which are t-rooms, public mens rooms devoted to man-on-man sex. (I now use the spelling t-room rather than tearoom, to avoid confusion with establishments that provide tea, of one kind or another.) The fantasy t-rooms of Pornlandia (including the one in Bakersfield) bear a complex relationship to the t-rooms of the real world; more on that in a while.

Pornlandia is populated by an enormous number of characters, all with porn names (some with several alternative porn names). Among these are DV and the other men I’ve mentioned so far, including Matt Majors, Trent Atkins, Justin Dragon, Trevor Knight, Hank Real, Tommy Brandt, Maxx Diesel, Ken Houser, and Kevin Wiles (with still more to come). In this world, DV is famous.

Now the complications. As I wrote about Kevin Wiles:

The first thing to say is that porn actors are real people, with real-life non-porn names and lives off the set.  So we have the porn actor Kevin Wiles (KW from here on out), the alter ego of a man whose name I do not know but whose writer’s voice I have heard, through some blogging he’s done; I’ll call him MX, for Mr. X.

… Though a porn actor is asked to adopt a different persona for each character he plays, almost always he’s developed a more enduring persona, his “porn persona”, if you will, that cuts across different roles and indeed, helps to determine which roles he’s offered and which ones he’s willing to accept and how he will realize any particular role. A porn persona is built on physical appearance (including not only things like body type and hair color but also, very important in gay porn, dick size), the actor’s inclinations to certain kinds of behavior (in voice, gait, mannerisms, and so on), and the actor’s sexual tastes.

So we have the character Danny Vox, aka DV. And the real-life man who plays this character, someone I’ll refer to as DVReal. And his more or less enduring porn persona, DVPorn, the celebrated ubercocklover who solicits sex from other men. And DVMens, his character in the specifc flick Mens Room Bakersfiekd Station, a young man returning after some years to his hometown of Bakersfield, where at the bus depot he’s drawn — initially, somewhat reluctantly — into hours of enthusiastic (sometimes ecstatic) mansex in the ultimate fantasy t-room.

The four DVs diverge in interesting ways. In particular, DVPorn (versus DVMens) would never be the least bit reluctant to enter into mansex; he’d be more verbal about what he wanted (DVMens barely utters a word, communicating almost entirely by facial expression and body language); he’d kiss a lot (DVMens doesn’t get kissed — in fact, turns away from attempts to kiss him — until his very last moments in the t-room); and he’d get his beautiful cock sucked, a lot (DVMens offers up his cock, repeatedly, but gets no takers; in competitions of sexual display, DVMens always ends up submitting to his competitor or left to jack off in the background while other guys go at one another).

(One point here is that DVMens is a performance, of some complexity and skill, with DVReal creating a character in a specific context, not just working out DVPorn or displaying DVReal’s predilections.)

Some things seem to be constant across the four DVs, although much of what we can glean about DVReal is by inference from DVPorn. They’re all flat-out uncomplicatedly gay — not at all a given in the world of gay porn, with its many g4p (gay for pay) straight or bisexual actors (plus some with carefully concealed sexuality), some of them stars in the business, which means they’ve created porn personas only distantly connected to their real lives. All four DVs are also seriously devoted to cock.

DVReal. The man’s physical characteristics were displayed many times during his acting career (roughly 2002 to 2007), so except for some specifics (like his actual dick size), they’re there for all to see, and they were pretty much constant over his career. (Many men who act in porn alter their appearance in various ways over the years.)

A small amount of information is available in “Danny Vox: The Gay Porn Blog interview” of  2/27/05 (note: almost 12 years ago), Edited highlights, with comments from me:

What have you been up to lately? Well I’ve been busy with my new company … I launched my own jewelry line. [Elsewhere, there are suggestions that he worked as a masseur or ran a culinary service in Santa Barbara.]

Birthday/Astro sign? May 13. Taurus! [No year given anywhere that I can find. He would seem to be in his late 30s now, but that’s not at all a sure thing.]

Hometown? Santa Barbara, California. [So probably middle class, not originally working class like DVMens from Bakersfield.]

OK, so why the hell did you decide to become a porn star, anyway? I wanted cute friends that were as fucked up sexually and emotionally as I was. [DVReal’s parents apparently knew what he did for a living and how he conducted his sexual and affectional life but didn’t talk about it; that would be standard (upper) middle-class behavior. After all, a “normal” — not fucked-up — man wouldn’t talk about being an ubercocklover with his mother.]

How did you come up with your porn name? [Porn director] Chi Chi [LaRue] came up with it … and it’s close to my birth name so I thought it would be easier to adapt it into my life. [Note that the man refers to his birth name, in the way someone might refer to his birth father — his genetic parent, not the person he came to recognize as his functional parent. The suggestion is that the man has become DV and views this as his “real” identity.]

Favorite porn scene? Anything with Dred Scott … he is the perfect fuck. Just rough enough to hurt but not too much to leave no passion … at least when I jerk off to him. [DV and rough, dirty guy Dred Scott both appeared in Titan’s 2003 porn flick Carny, but not in scenes together. Still, the idea of being in a film together with your jack-off fantasy man must have been a kick.]

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Carny: Dred Scott on left, DV on right

What do you have a weakness for? Black men and daddies. [submission, submission]

As far as I can tell, DV’s last film was Beyond Malibu (surfers into mansex), from Jason Ridge’s Ridgeline Films in 2007/2008, with a scene pairing a scruffy DV with Ridge. The two men kiss passionately, JR sucks DV and then fucks him. Ridge is a great favorite of mine, featured on AZBlogX in a series of postings on the movie The Bombardier, in which JR is the central character:

12/18/10: The Bombardier 1: Jason Ridge, Breck Stewart, Nick Capra, Paul Johnson

12/18/10: The Bombardier 2

12/18/10: The Bombardier 3

12/18/10: The Bombardier 4: b/t: on b/t roles in the movie. Ridge is t to Stewart’s b, though as the love story develops they seem to move beyond these roles.

JRReal is sweet, shy, and openly, comfortably gay (from childhood); there are taped interviews. Both JRReal and JRPorn are smoothly versatile: in particular, they like to get fucked, which makes JR — a high-masculinity bottom — a hot commodity in Pornlandia, even more so because he’s an attentive lover. But DV can bring out the t in almost anyone (well, not Trent Atkins), so in Beyond Malibu, it’s definitely DV’s b to JR’s t. On the other hand, JRReal and JRPorn read as queer (in facial expressions and body language) in a way that DVReal and DVPorn seem not to. So there’s a nice tension between the two men’s presentations of themselves in the Beyond Malibu scene. Made a bit more pointed through DV’s scruffiness vs. JR’s clean-shaven face.

Even better, both DV and JR take their acting seriously, invest considerable thought to how they develop their characters. Yes, the point of their craft (and the craft of the directors and cameramen they work with) is to get fags like me off, but they understand that it is a craft, a job, which can be done well or negligently.

The Bakersfield t-room. Bakersfield is a real place, (in California) and t-rooms are real too (in a long-ago life, I was a habitué of t-rooms, so I can speak from first-hand knowledge here). But the Bakersfield t-room in the flick is a fantasy place in Pornlandia.

Bakersfield. A largely working-class small city in the San Joaquin Valley, about equidistant from L.A. (to the south) and Fresno (to the north), with significant oil production and (of course) agriculture. Brief exteriors of real Bakersfield appear in the movie. DVMens is returning to his hometown Bakersfield after some years away and finds that much has changed. He goes into the bus depot and down the stairs — the magic stairs to Pornlandia — and finds himself in a cavernous mens room unlike any I’ve ever seen, apparently designed specifically for sex between men, very much in public.

t-rooms. My Page on sex in public lists my blog postings on the topic, including those on t-rooms — but mostly the t-rooms of Pornlandia (although with some comparisons to the arrangements of actual t-rooms, which are simply ordinary mens rooms pressed into service for mansex). In actual t-rooms the sex goes on mostly between stalls (under the partition or through a glory hole) or between men in the same stall — with the doors closed, in either case. In sufficiently isolated t-rooms, or in mens rooms where the doors have been removed from the stalls in an attempt to discourage sexual activities, the mansex goes on in public view. (The sound or sight of other guys having sex can be powerfully arousing.) Or the t-room can be used as a place to negotiate sex in private elsewhere.  (For a slightly fictionalized account of some of my actual t-room experiences, see my short story “Roseate Tom”.) In the t-rooms of Pornlandia, mansex is almost always shown as fully, outrageously public — to cater to the desires of the viewers.

All of this sex action requires negotiation between men — in t-rooms just as in other sexual hook-up locales (in pick-up bars, in park cruising areas, on cruisy streets, in gay baths and sex clubs, on the phone, on-line, whatever). Are we both into this? (One of you might find the other unacceptable for any number of reasons.) And who’s going to do what to whom? (In the easy cases, both parties convey their desires, and they synch. But some men prefer, or insist on, a contestation of wills over these matters, a competition in dominance in which one man eventually submits to the other.) In most gay porn, guys fall into intense mansex on the slightest provocation and seem to fit together sexually with virtually no negotiation.

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

Real-life t-rooms are risky places, since t-room sex is sex in a public place (even if it’s behind closed doors and out of earshot of other users of the mens room), and therefore illegal. Police sweeps and entrapment are real risks. None of this in the ultimate fantasy t-room in Pornlandia’s Bakersfield. From the (characteristically coy) TLAGay video review:

Next time you’re hanging out at the depot, check out the men’s room, where hot daddies and cute twinks feeling the urge to surge go to unload. Even the security guard gets in on the action. With merely a thigh-high tile partition between fixtures, everyone in the john can cop a good view of everyone’s trickling and stiffening John-Thomas.

Yes, the security guard appears, but only to enforce the no-smoking rule in the john, and after that he’s just another one of the sexual celebrants. No cop fear here. In fact, the guard puts out a CLOSED sign on the mens room — which apparently serves as a signal to guys hunting for mansex that the t-room is in high gear.

The front cover of the DVD:

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A man, naked except for black boots, standing over a toilet — the toilet signifying not only a mens room, but also the tons of piss action in the expanded director’s cut; the director Joe Gage has a thing for piss. (The standard cut merely has many extended shots of guys pissing, lovingly dwelt on by the camera.)

And the back cover, which shows 12 of the 13 t-room guys (Nick Capra seems to be missing), with DV as the central figure, plus in the lower left, the participants in one of the group scenes, standing in front of the stalls (that’s the security guard in the middle) and next to it the four major participants in the first long scene of the flick (some description to come), showing the array of toilets in the center of the room (with their thigh-high partitions):

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The Bakersfield 13:

Danny Vox, Abram Rodriguez, Alex Leon, Andy Dill, Andrew Rubio, Joey Russo, Kent Larson, Lex Kyler, Marc Sterling, Matt Majors, Nick Capra, Randy Manroot, Tommy DeLuca

A wide sampling of ages, body types (though they all have pornstar dicks, some of them at the monstrous end of the scale), projected personas (trucker muscleman, nerdy twink, skateboy, businessman, etc.), ethnicities (but no black men), sexualities (a number of the men are presented as straight guys who just happen to be into mansex), and so on. Gage’s focus in all of his films is on working-class, highly masculine men (no even remotely nelly guys, in fact none who’d ping your gaydar — until the two of you exchange glances). However, Gage seems to prefer, in his leading men even require, frankly gay actors, so it’s about masculine presentation, not actual sexuality.

On the initial scene, involving two trucker buddies, played by musclemen Matt Majors and Kent Larson, plus DV and Abram Rodriguez in character as a nerdy twink in glasses and a cheesy sweater:

with DV serving Majors and Rodiguez serving Larson, including an amazing very long, whole-body spasm from Rodriguez when he comes after being fucked by Larson.

Majors is physically bigger: taller (6′ 2″ vs. 5′ 11″), heavier (180 lbs. vs. 150), muscular, broad-shoulered body type (vs. swimmer type); looks older than DV; the character is presented as more working-class (trucker vs. student type). MM’s cock is (he says) 7.5, though it’s listed as 9.5 (but it’s notably thick). So: lots of masculinity points for MM.  Two masculinity points for DV: his hair is darker than MM’s, and his body is much hairier than MM’s. But MM takes charge of DV from the beginning, pushes DV (presented as initially reluctant to suck cock) into going down on his knees and taking his dick; then pushes DV down on another man’s cock, controlling his body; later he keeps a controlling (protective) hand on DV’s shoulder. This is Man (MM in the t role) over Boy (DV in the b role).

Notes on MMReal:

MM has hypospadias, so he pisses and comes through a urethral opening on the underside of his dick; this is obvious at several points in his scene with DV. I’m pleased that a guy with hypospadias can build a significant career in gay porn.

MMReal (in interviews)  is pleasantly gay, amiable, and reports that he’s mostly a top. MMPorn is mostly a top; his first time bottoming on-screen was advertised as a big thing, but he’d already been fucked in his private life and says he likes it.

MM does drag for the month of October (for Halloween) every year, apparently very well (remember that he’s a very big muscular man).

His scene with DV in the Bakersfield flick is wonderful, largely because it seems so affectionate: MM is lovingly guiding DV on his journey to self-knowledge.

More from the video:

Men come in, hook up in various ways, then leave. DV is the only constant, and he’s in every scene, if only jacking off while appreciating the action.

A scene in which DV flexes his dick, trying to entice Joey Russo to suck it (while Russo displays his hard dick in his hand, competing with DV for dominance; the result is a stand-off, but Russo’s display works on Randy Manroot, who gets the prize).

[Sexual and linguistic note: flex one’s penis/dick/cock, making it dance up and down by clenching anal muscles, an act and linguistic usage that I don’t think I’ve mentioned on this blog. Part of an enticement display in man-man competition.]

[Another sexual and linguistic note: somewhere in the flick a character cries out “Sperm me!”, meaning ‘ejaculate on my body’. That’s seminal-ejaculatory sperm, N and V, examined not long ago in my posting “Sperm, sperm, wonderful sperm, and all that jizz”. The flick is licentious in lots of ways, but it’s all safer sex; nobody even comes in another man’s mouth (there is a lot of cum-eating, but it’s all guys eating their own).]

Scenes in which DV shares a cock with a buddy and others in which he shares an asshole with a buddy (they take turns rimming).

One guy gets himself off while eating DV’s ass, so that’s a fuck DV had solicited for but doesn’t get — but at least he gets his asshole licked. Though this is probably getting rimmed as submission rather than dominance.

A scene in which DV and Russo are again in competition, jacking themselves side by side; but this time they exchange knowing half smiles and each begins to play with his asshole, then moves into the beginning of a Please Fuck Me pose – offers that are quickly taken up by other men. So they get fucked side by side.

In detail: Nick Capra is enthusiastically sucking cock while bystander DV, in full Please Fuck Me pose, is jacking off, so Capra works two fingers into the hole, massaging it in preparation for fucking him; Capra moves to put his full attention to DV’s hole, rimming him and then entering him for a wild, incredibly energetic missionary fuck; Capra keeps bending forward to kiss DV, but DV turns his head away, rejecting the intimacy and affection; meanwhile, Russo is being similarly fucked next to him –- two buddies in the bottom’s pleasure zone.

On Nick Capra. a 2015 Manhunt Daily interview with him:

Transitioning back into the industry [after rehab] wasn’t difficult for me. It’s like riding a bike. I’m a natural performer, so it’s second nature to me.

Was I worried that I would fail at a comeback? Of course. I’ve already shot over a hundred scenes since 2002, for all the major studios.

There have been many changes in the industry since I left. The biggest change I have seen is the numbers shifting to bareback.  When I left, it was the studios doing “lower budget” product that were exclusively doing bareback. Now huge studios and websites, with great budgets, have gone bareback. I don’t shoot bareback videos, although I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t jerk off to it.

… as I’ve gotten older, my tastes have changed. I still love my Spanish uncut men. They carry a masculinity to them that is different than American men. However, I also have an affinity for pups – younger guys, early twenties with smooth holes. They call me daddy and curl up in my hairy chest. Let me throw ’em around in bed. I’m becoming a dirty old man!

… Kink.com is one of my favorite studios. They have pushed me to do some stuff that was out of my comfort zone, and that equals freedom for me. Being tied up, suspended in the air. That takes some trust and surrender.

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Capra torso shot, looking really amiable

At the end of the Bakersfield flick, a man appears, takes DV’s arm and says, encouragingly, “Don’t panic”, bends forward, and kisses DV passionately; DV melts into him, while the music swells.

I’ve picked out some of my favorites here: DV, MM, Joey Russo, Nick Capra. All hot men, in real life all frankly gay.

The structuring of gay porn. I’ve written quite a lot on gay porn as a film genre, with (among other things) a set of conventions about how mansex is portrayed. Some of these are shared with straight porn, in particular the conventions having to do with maximum visibility, of cocks, of penetration, of ejaculation. Beyond this, there’s the organization of the films as stories, as fictions in which characters are developed, relationships unfold, sexual tension builds, and the characters get release. Again and again, in ways that are rarely possible in real life. This is, after all, fantasy, where every guy is endlessly potent (the best man he can be) and also endlessly receptive (the best fag he can be).

If you were just telling a story about two guys getting into one another, the story could go on at great length — and, maybe, if the story was realistic, one guy, or even both, might not get off at all (they’re enjoying sexed-up affection and don’t feel the need to come, or they get interrupted, whatever), or one or both of them might have his hair trigger tripped and shoot very quickly, in which case they’ll want to pause for some time for reloading. Sex in real life develops in many complex ways (physically and emotionally), any of which can be turned into a story; in fact, many of these stories have been told on film, in gay films and tv shows (as in episodes in the two Queer as Folk series).

At the other end of the scale, you could just film raw sex, with a minimal story line. There’s a lot of that available, ranging from crude amateur stuff to suck-and-fuck film clips with high production values. The point is just to get the viewer off by showing him an encounter in which he can identify with one or more of the men in the clip. The men on-screen might not even get off themselves; maybe it’s enough to show a guy fucking an appreciative bottom hard and deep. Time for the viewer to climax: a few minutes.

Gay porn lives in the middle zone. Ideally, every guy in an encounter comes (sooner or later), and the story provides frequent occasions for the viewer to get off, while proceeding at a slow enough pace for the viewer to get into the characters. It’s a balancing act.

Standardly, gay porn flicks come in what are labeled in the trade scenes, each scene typically showing a number of sexual encounters between men — little stories —  sometimes in sequence, sometimes simultaneous. That scheme provides a smorgasbord of sexual events for the viewer to choose from: if one encounter doesn’t work for you, another is available elsewhere on-screen, or soon will be available.

Typically, scenes will be demarcated by a change of location (say, the characters having sex outdoors finish each other off, then move indoors for another round) or by a change of personnel (say, one set of characters finishing each other off, to be replaced by a fresh set in the same location).

The director Joe Gage is a master of “long-form” mansex porn, three hours or more, juggling simultaneous and sequential encounters, with changes of both location (even if it’s just a different part of the same large space, as in the Bakersfield mens room) and personnel, but with one or more recurring characters knitting the whole thing together (DV’s function in the Bakersfield mens room). The recurring characters also provide a long story arc: they develop and change during the full story, while inserted episodes allow breaks for special tastes (verbal abuse, watersports, interracial or intergenerational sex, whatever) and also give you time to recharge if the previous encounter got you off. (Porn characters don’t have refractory periods, but real men do. Porn characters also don’t have any trouble getting it up and keeping it hard indefinitely, even while getting fucked, but real men do. Porn characters never jump the gun, but real men sometimes do. Porn characters are never (truly) reluctant about or repelled by the acts in their scripts, but real men sometimes find themselves in places they’d rather not be: no, I really don’t want to be gangbanged, I don’t even like getting fucked; Jesus, man, don’t piss on me; dammit, your armpits stink; I don’t care how clean your asshole is, I’m not going to lick it; I’ll fuck you like a jackhammer, but I won’t kiss you; and so on. The thing is, porn characters are perfect sexual beings, free of the imperfections of real-life sex, living in the perfect sexual world of Pornlandia. And in Pornlandia you can get anything, even if it’s being fucked in mid-air by a winged man, even if it’s something that would totally disgust or frighten you in real life.)

(I say mansex porn rather than gay porn above because Gage provides sex between highly masculine guys who are often framed as neither gay nor bisexual.)

Mens Room Bakersfield Station is a fine long-forn Gage porn flick. Simultaneous action and changes of location and personnel allow some of the encounters to stretch over long periods of time. For instance, the relationship between DV and MM in the first scene develops quite slowly, physically and emotionally, a story-telling luxury that’s possible because Abram Rodriguez and Kent Larson are developing their own relationship (in one of the toilet stalls) at the same time and because other men enter the mens room and can be added to the action. There’s always something you can get off on; you don’t have to wait for DV to become Boy to MM’s Man, for them to get off, to shoot your load (if that’s what you want early in the flick).

To come in a later posting: more about Gage and mansex porn flicks.

The most recent Daily Jocks ad, with a caption sexual fantasy from me:

(#1)

You can buy him,
One trick a month – the
Standard hour, providing
Whatever you need –
And with a rock-bottom
Starter price of $10, the

Catch is that the price
Doubles every month. On
Month six his hour costs you a
Steep $320, but he’s
Worth it, though when the
Annual contract

Runs out in
Month 12,
You’ll be getting
$40,960 sex —
Better be
Best there is.

That’s the fantasy. Then there’s the real world, in which I tried to identify the model in #1.

At first it was a familiar story. Endless Pinterest postings (not attributed in any way) of this photo:

(#2)

(variously tagged as sexy man, beautiful body, tattoos, and even cute gay guy (almost surely a comment on the poster’s sexuality, rather than the model’s). I’m not especially a fan of extreme rippedness or of tats, but in this case I could admire both, as products of thought and hard work.

The model in #2 is presented as an object, with an impassive face and no engagement of the viewer, while in #1 is gazing intently into the viewer’s eyes, giving off the homoerotic aura of high-end underwear models in general: you can do me / you can be me.

Then I searched on the main tat message, “Would life have gotten better” (suggesting the continuation “if (only) I had …”). Here I hit image gold almost immediately, though the intention of the tat’s message never got clarified. From the Bang + Strike company’s site on the model:

Richard Rocco [Richie Amerigo Rocco III] grew up in Los Angeles [in a gritty barrio] and joined the United States Marine Corps in 2002.

When he was badly wounded in action, in Iraq, Richard’s perseverance and desire motivated him to push through physical therapy and within a year he was back in the gym. He now competes in professional power lifting competitions and has dedicated his life to health and fitness for over 10 years. Truly inspirational, especially from a man who literally broke his back.

Richard can be seen modelling for underwear brands such as Calvin Klein and Pump! [as above]

Here he is in a steamy triptych for Pump!, his body displayed like sculpture of almost unreal perfection:

(#3)

(Panel 3 is a literally ballsy shot.) All three panels are physically intense and aggressive; his aggression can be read as comptitiveness or as sexual domination, depending on the viewer’s inclinations.

Upscale underwear models and the companies they work for are perfectly aware of the homoerotic tones in their ads, and most models are happy to cater to the desires of fags like me, whatever their sexuality in real life. Here’s Rocco enthusiastically crossing the line into cock-teasing pitsntits homoeroticism:

(#4)

This is from a feature in DNA Magazine (Australian publication targeting gay men) “Rick Day Presents Richard Rocco” of 5/16/13, with this swooning copy:

Tattooed hottie Richard Rocco makes his DNA debut in these shots by Rick Day. We find all kinds of men hot and we know that there are many guys out there who are into dudes with tats. In addition to his body art, we think Richard has a totally hot bod.

Hey, I’m swooning too.

In my 3/7/13 posting “Cock tease”, there’s a section on male photographer Rick Day, who favors highy masculine models, focusing on their musculature, their faces, their butts, and, every so often, their cocks flagrantly displayed.

(Another posting in a long series. Very little about language in this.)

Cut to the chase, Brandon Quinn as Gabe Duncroft in the tv series The Fosters:

(#1)

A handsome man with a beautiful physique, very fit but not flagrantly ripped.

On the actor, from Wikipedia:

Brandon Quinn (born Brandon Quinn Swierenga October 7, 1977, in Aurora, Colorado) is a television and film actor. He started his career in 1998 as Charles Murphy in the film Express: Aisle to Glory.

He has acted in other TV series and films such as Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Nightmare Room, Big Wolf on Campus, What I Like About You, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Malachance, and Charmed.

On the series, from Wikipedia:

The Fosters is an American family drama television series created by Peter Paige and Bradley Bredeweg for ABC Family (renamed Freeform channel). It follows the lives of the title Foster family led by lesbian couple Stef and Lena, a cop and a school vice-principal respectively, who raise a multi-ethnic blended family that consists of one biological and four adopted children in San Diego, California.

The core cast:

(#2)

The family is named Foster, and they’re into fostering and adopting kids. A complex web of relationships here, involving the kids and an assortment of their biological families, among which is the character Gabe Duncroft, the biological father of one of the kids, a man of almost inarticulate high masculinity.

(Very little of linguistic interest, beyond a penis joke in Spanish and a note on grammatical gender. Otherwise, it’s the massive Latino musclehunk “The Marvel” on display.)

From my regular correspondent RJP this morning, a (broken) link to a Facebook video by The Marvel (posting as maravilla3x). I persevered and found a working Facebook link, which FB seems now to have taken down as too racy: it shows a naked Marvel sitting up in bed humping a big heart-shaped box of Valentine’s chocolates, then taking the cover off and eating chocolates from the box while revving up the tempo and intensity of his pelvic thrusts towards climax (at which point the tease is cut off). However, The Marvel has resourcefully put the video on YouTube, and you can watch it there.

A still from the video, close to the cut-off point:

(#1)

The caption (I translate from the Spanish): “Who wants chocolates? Your Valentine’s present.”

Some things to note: the truly gigantic upper arms; the shaved armpits, the big-assed tattoos.

That degree of muscle development, like a really big dick, is out of my personal arousal zone and into the zone of abstract size awe: something remarkable to observe, but not something I’m interested in engaging with carnally. (Yes, I understand that many other fags find The Marvel’s body deeply, deeply moving.)

The shaved armpits just mark him as a bodybuilder; on his FB page he identifies himself as an “NYC Fitness Model”, and the videos and photos there include a fair number of him doing weight training (but also a huge number of flagrantly sexual displays, aimed at women but surely snaring an audience of admiring gay men as well; in interviews, the man says he’s straight but welcomes followers of all kinds). As for the armpit hair, I’m really into that and miss it in serious bodybuilders.

The ornate, intense tattoos will be better visible in photos to come.

On the Marvel’s FB page we learn that his real name is Franyely Lora, born 9/3/93, and that he began to take an interest in music at an early age and had a talent for it. On the evidence of the photos, he seems to be a keyboardist.

[Added 2/13: Some postings about him say tha he’s a singer and also that he’s worked as an underwear model for Calvin Klein.]

Linguistic note: Maravilla is a fairly common Hispanic surname (I have friends with this name). But Spanish is a language with grammatical gender, and the noun maravilla ‘marvel, wonder’ is of fem. gender grammatically, even when it’s used to refer to a man. That’s why The Marvel is (in Spanish) La Maravilla (with the fem.sg. definite article la rather than the masc.sg. el).

(He could have chosen the pseudonym El Maravilloso ‘the marvelous (one) [masc.]’, but maybe he though that was just too long, or that nouns are somehow “stronger” than adjectives.)

More images of La Maravilla, two from a huge number in which the man is posed as an underwear model. “Buenos Dias”, with his morning coffee, in a minimal brief:

(#2)

And “Buenas Tardes”, with an afternoon moose-knuckle (also showing off his pecs and abs):

(#3)

A sex-play bonus on his FB page:

(#4)

The main part of the title, up to the last word, I would translate roughly as ‘What your (female) friend needs, to calm that pelvic heat’ (calor pélvico is an entertainingly roundabout way of referring to female arousal). Now that last word might remind you of English penicillin (the drug), but the name of the drug in Spanish is penicilina, while the last word in the title is pretty clearly pene ‘penis’ plus some diminutive derivational material: what the woman needs for the fire in her genitals is a dick (and here’s a toy one). Well, that’s how I read it.

Meanwhile, enjoy those Valentine chocolates.

Today’s Steam Room Stories is about “straight guys giving gay gifts”: what does a straight guy give as a Valentine’s Day gift to his best buddy, who happens to be gay? Two straight guys with this question talk together about it in the steam room, each explaining to the other what he proposes to say to his gay bro. You can watch the video here.

The guys get to know each other better, each admiring what a great buddy the other is, until they get to suggesting that maybe they should spend some time together, like maybe dinner and a movie. Oh, well, that would be a date, right, and that would be too fuckin’ gay. But they like each other more and more, eventually deciding that a date would be ok. And maybe some hot sex afterwards, that would be nice. So they hook up. (And then the third guy in the steam room, just off camera to one side, turns out to have been Cupid. “My work here is done.”)

A lot of the SRS episodes are about the permeability of the gay/straight divide. (The series is stunningly pro-gay, treating gay and straight with full parity, and depicting the men discussing sex (of all kinds) openly and easily.)

Here’s one on bro-jobs, to add to my brocabulary file: “BroJobs – there’s nothing more hetero than hooking up with your bud”, which you can watch here. The compaint is that it’s gotten so you can’t tell gays from straights any more: they look the same, act the same, wear the same clothes, do the same things, right down to enjoying anal sex (pegging by their girlfriends for the straight guys) and trading blow jobs (what a straight dude does for his bro when the bro is horny and his woman isn’t available).

And then, to add to my file on angle and curvature, an SRS episode on “curved cocks”, which you can watch here. Five straight guys show off — to one another, not to the viewing audience, these are cock-free videos — dicks that curve right, left, down, straight up, and then the surprise, the famed pretzel dick, and argue their merits. Guy comes in, straight guy says to him, “You’re gay, right?” — “Like Liza’s last husband!” he snaps back — so straight asks him to adjudicate, on the basis of his deep experience with dicks, which is best. Not a hard question: “It’s not the bend of the baloney, it’s the torque behind the tool”. All of the straights except Pretzel Dude troop out to hang out together, so gay guy asks  PD what he has in the bag he brought with him. Equipment for his lady to deal with his Bavarian Pretzel, starting with a squeeze bottle of mustard and a bottle of Hefeweisen. Straight asks gay if he wants a sausage, gay says sure, straight hands him the mustard, leans back to make his crotch available and gets ready for gay to feast on his meat.

This is absurd and crude, also very funny.

A recent Daily Jocks offer:

(#1)

Bob Beach

Lifelike PVC plastic figures from MaleBody®, life-size or miniature,
All anatomically correct (well-hung — but unlike gay action figures,
Not grotesquely huge) — life-size models come with the
WarmTouch® system, maintaining a natural skin temperature that’s
Pleasant to the touch — miniature models about a foot tall, no
WarmTouch, but they make attractive tabletop ornaments, can be
Engaged in imaginative play — all figures with factory-installed clothing,
Easily removable (for posing naked), additional costumes available —

Bob Beach smooth-shaven all over, including his pubes (his penis and
Testicles are marvels of detail) — each character with a back story:
Bob Beach, gay swimmer from Malibu, boyfriend Butch Beach (also
Available from MaleBody, not illustrated here), with Clone face (and
Mustache), more substantisl muscles, lightly furred body (chest, belly, forearms,
Buttocks, pubes, legs) —  they are a very hot couple — Bob found mostly in
Aquatic settings (at the beach, by a swimming pool, next to a hot tub, in a

Shower room; delightful
Standing by a koi pond)

  (#2)

KoiBob

(#3)

Akira figma

In the miniature line, Akira of Togainu no Chi,
Stripping for his Boys Love partner Keisuke (available from MaleBody) —
Pairing life-sized Bob Beach and life-sized Akira, reveling in their
Otherness, is
Deeply stirring

On Akira and Keisuke, from Wikipedia:

Togainu no Chi … is a Japanese BL [Boys Love] visual novel created by Nitro+CHiRAL. The plot centers on Akira, a young man who is made to participate in a deadly game called “Igura” (Russian for “game”) in post-apocalyptic Japan in exchange for being freed from prison.

The game’s main character, a young man named Akira, is falsely accused of a crime. Once arrested, a mysterious woman appears before him, offering him freedom if he agrees to participate in Igura and defeat Igura’s strongest man: the king, or Il Re. The story follows Akira’s life … as he fights both to survive and to unravel the mysteries developing around him.

Keisuke [is] Akira’s childhood friend and hard-working factory employee. … They grew up together in the same orphanage. Because he is a bit weak, he has always admired Akira’s strength. Though he is a bit quiet and shy, if Akira is involved, he suddenly becomes bold. Upon hearing Akira’s situation, Keisuke chases after Akira and also joins Igura, despite his weakness and lack of fighting experience.

Two stories of plastic male love: Bob and Butch Beach, Akira and Keisuke.

(Discussion of men’s bodies and male-on-male sex in mostly very plain language, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Today’s playtime viewing began with a compilation video of scenes from porn flicks featuring Trenton Ducati, beginning with an especially nicely crafted scene from the 2012 TitanMen Stud Finder, involving Jed Athens, Ford Andrews, and Ducati. Well, yes, a bit of titular word play, combining carpentry / construction work and hot men.

  (#1)

The DVD cover, with Ducati in the middle

Gay porn flicks (and the scenes within them) are interpersonal dramas in a largely conventional format, involving stock characters and relationships and characteristic narrative structures (among them: first physical displays of affection as foreplay, then cocksucking, then fucking, then everybody comes, on camera), and set in characteristic locales. Some of the most favored locales are spaces mostly peopled by blue-collar men, so it’s no surprise that a number of gay porn flicks are set in carpentry shops and construction sites and have titles like Stud Finder, packaging together stud ‘an upright support in the wall of a building to which sheathing, drywall, etc., are attached’ and stud ‘a young man thought to be very active sexually or regarded as a good sexual partner’ (both definitions from NOAD2).

A posting on AZBlogX (“Beefier and beefiest”) has XXX-rated photos (#1-3) of the three actors in the scene, displaying their bodies; descriptions of the three characters; two stills of sexual action from the scene (#4 oral, #5 anal); the story of the scene compactly described (who does what to who, in what sequence, with what emotional tones); and a brief analysis of the relationships between the men, mostly in terms of b/t (roughly, subordinate / dominant) roles (see the Page on b/t here).

From AZBlogX on the characters:

The scene involves three men: at first, slender, smooth-bodied, boyish Jed Athens (an enthusiastic bottom who sometimes tops) and beefier, hairy and scruffy Ford Andrews (versatile), who run through sexual preliminaries — lots of kissing, passionate cocksucking, Andrews on Athens, then Athens on Andrews) before they are joined by the beefiest of the three, square-jawed bodybuilder (hence smooth-bodied) Trenton Ducati (also versatile in gay porn, but in this scene he’s top all the way). The contrast in body types is especially nice. (Meawhile, everybody’s tall and everybody has a wonderful pornstar cock.)

(I follow the custom in many descriptions of porn of conflating the actors (identified by their stage names) with the characters they portray, since no one in the scene uses any names.)

Cropped versions of #1-3 in AZBlogX, so you can judge the men’s faces and bodies:

  (#2)

Athens

  (#3)

Andrews

  (#4)

Ducati

The somewhat breathless ad copy for the video, with the scenes numbered and the relevant scene description boldfaced:

Got hung? You need to find some wood and steel, and you need it soon. Hold the tool in your hand and guide it carefully until it hits the spot… [a little forest of phallic vocabulary] or just let TitanMen Trenton Ducati and Hunter Marx be your Stud Finders, leading the charge as a group of utility players get sweatier and hornier by the second. [1] A basement workshop heats up as Hunter Marx and Will Swagger [hard to beat as a porn name] take turns sucking each other before the hairy Hunter plows his bud’s hole. [2] After a passionate suck exchange, buddies Ford Andrews and Jed Athens are soon under the spell of alpha-stud Trenton Ducati, whose energy takes control. [3] Handyman Race Cooper’s ass is too much for co-worker Stany Falcone to resist; watch the duo’s tight abs and muscled bods glisten as they get breathless together. [glisten is a great porn verb]

The conclusion of my interactional analysis on AZBlogX:

On the basis of body types and face types, you might have expected Ducati over Andrews over Athens, or if you throw in Andrews’s [very masculine] hairiness and scruffiness (and Ducati’s versatility in other parts), maybe Ducati and Andrews flip-fucking [and both fucking] Athens (or even Andrews over Ducati). But the scene plays out with Andrews as everybody’s b (and Ducati as everybody’s t): the others both fuck Andrews (twice each), he doesn’t fuck anybody, and he comes last [coming first is a t move, coming last a b move]. A nice reversal of expectation — but only a partial reversal, since the three-way opens with Athens serving the other two orally, and his getting spit-roasted (ecstatically taking the other two men at once) is the high point of the scene, and Athens is a total cockwhore in it. So the three-way plays out as Athens serving the other two, then switching to being the man in the middle, and finally going back to where he really belongs, serving the other two.

Meanwhile, Andrews is a total b in the three-way, a role prefigured by his going down on Athens first in their initial encounter [going down first is a b move].

The whole scene (in two main parts) is long and unhurried, building slowly to its conclusion. Yes, I found it moving.

Within the constraints of the genre, this is a complex and interesting narrative.

Studs and stud finders. From NOAD2, with the senses relevant to the porn flick boldfaced. The complete entry for the inanimate noun stud:

1 a large-headed piece of metal that pierces and projects from a surface, especially for decoration; a small, simple piece of jewelry for wearing in pierced ears or nostrils; a fastener consisting of two buttons joined with a bar, used in formal wear to fasten a shirtfront or to fasten a collar to a shirt; (usu. studs) a small projection fixed to the base of footwear, especially athletic shoes, to allow the wearer to grip the ground; (usu. studs) a small metal piece set into the tire of a motor vehicle to improve roadholding in slippery conditions.

2 an upright support in the wall of a building to which sheathing, drywall, etc., are attached; US the height of a room as indicated by the length of this.

3 a rivet or crosspiece in each link of a chain cable.

ORIGIN Old English studu, stuthu ‘post, upright prop’; related to German stützen ‘to prop.’ The sense ‘ornamental metal knob’ arose in late Middle English.

And the complete entry for the animal-related noun stud:

1 an establishment where horses or other domesticated animals are kept for breeding: [as modifier]: a stud farm | the horse was retired to stud; a collection of horses or other domesticated animals belonging to one person; (also stud horse) a stallion; informal a young man thought to be very active sexually or regarded as a good sexual partner.

2 (also stud poker) a form of poker in which the first card of a player’s hand is dealt face down and the others face up, with betting after each round of the deal. [the sense development isn’t clear to me]

ORIGIN Old English stōd, of Germanic origin; related to German Stute ‘mare,’ also to stand.

And then, finally, the relatively transparent N + N compound stud finder, from Wikipedia:

A stud finder (also stud detector or stud sensor) is a handheld device used to locate framing studs located behind the final walling surface, usually drywall. While there are many different stud finders available, they all fall into two main categories, magnetic stud detectors and electric stud finders. Stud finders have been in use since the early 20th century.

Stud finders are not very photogenic, so I omit the pictures.

I suppose we could think of Grindr as a stud finder.

(Obviously, there will be a lot of dick talk here, but of the art-historical and art-critical variety, rather than the sexual-arousal variety.)

On Facebook, art historian Reuben Cordova writes:

I’m giving a lecture: “The Penis in Art. A Short History, From the Greeks to Today.” Any suggestions?

and offers as an example this ancient Greek vase with the image of a naked woman carrying a gigantic penis on it:

(#1)

(Such images appear to fall under the Fine Art Exemption for body display on Facebook, and presumably Google+ and WordPress as well. The point presumably being that the penis images on display are not of actual human bodyparts, but are fantasy creations.)

Naked men are all over ancient Greek art, and ancient Roman art as well. A few more examples, then a pile of links on this blog and AZBlogX to phallic art, and a sampling of modern penis art not already covered in my blogs.

A note on Cordova. From his amazon.com author page:

Ruben C. Cordova is an art historian, curator, and photographer. He holds a BA from Brown University (Semiotics) and a PhD from UC Berkeley (History of Art). Cordova has taught courses treating Art History, Film, and Museum Studies at UC Berkeley, UT Pan American, UT San Antonio, Sarah Lawrence College, and the University of Houston. He has curated or co-curated more than 20 exhibitions featuring Latin American, Latino, and Chicano Art. As a photographer, his primary interest is Day of the Dead and his work has been featured in 40 exhibitions. … His future books will treat the artist Mel Casas, Day of the Dead in Mexico and the US, and Frida Kahlo.

The glories of Greece. These include herms (or hermai) like these:

(#2)

Archaic herma of Hermes

(#3)

Herm with an inscription linking it to the Hermes Propylaios by Alcamenes

From Wikipedia:

A herma (Ancient Greek: ἑρμῆς, pl. ἑρμαῖ hermai), commonly in English herm, is a sculpture with a head, and perhaps a torso, above a plain, usually squared lower section, on which male genitals may also be carved at the appropriate height. The form originated in Ancient Greece, and was adopted by the Romans, and revived at the Renaissance

… In ancient Greece the statues had an apotropaic [‘supposedly having the power to avert evil influences or bad luck’ (NOAD2)] function and were placed at crossings, country borders and boundaries as protection, in front of temples, near to tombs, in the gymnasia, palaestrae, libraries, porticoes, and public places, at the corners of streets, on high roads as sign-posts, with distances inscribed upon them. Before his role as protector of merchants and travelers, Hermes was a phallic god, associated with fertility, luck, roads and borders. His name perhaps comes from the word herma referring to a square or rectangular pillar of stone, terracotta, or bronze; a bust of Hermes’ head, usually with a beard, sat on the top of the pillar, and male genitals adorned the base. The surmounting heads were not, however, confined to those of Hermes; those of other gods and heroes, and even of distinguished mortals, were of frequent occurrence. In this case a compound was formed: Hermathena (a herm of Athena), Hermares, Hermaphroditus, Hermanubis, Hermalcibiades, and so on. In Athens, where the hermai were most numerous and most venerated, they were placed outside houses as apotropes for good luck. They would be rubbed or anointed with olive oil and adorned with garlands or wreaths. This superstition persists, for example the Porcellino bronze boar of Florence (and numerous others like it around the world), where the nose is shiny from being continually touched for good luck or fertility.

In Roman and Renaissance versions (termini), the body was often shown from the waist up. The form was also used for portrait busts of famous public figures, especially writers like Socrates and Plato. Sappho appears on Ancient Greek herms, and anonymous female figures were often used from the Renaissance on, when herms were often attached to walls as decoration.

(Hat tip to Arne Adolfsen.)

The Secret Erotic Art of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The title of a 6/24/14 blog posting by Barbara Weibel, with a number of remarkable illustrations, including these enormous erect penises, mounted on walls to ensure fertility:

(#4)

Postings on my blogs on phallic art:

a Page “clothed/unclothed” on postings about male photographers concealing or revealing the penis in their work

on 5/20/11: “Saint Sebastian:”: #3 Keith Haring work with penis

on 5/23/11: “Another Flandrin pose”, with a link to an AZBlogX posting on the pose

on 9/14/11: “The news for penises”, with its 5th section on phallic art, with a link to an AZBlogX posting on Jos Karis’s penis art, plus two Baroque penis compositions, my “Dick Bouquet” collage, and a Benetton montage of genitalia

on 1/20/13 on AZBlogX: “Dick aversion”, with 11 examples of art works displaying penises

on 1/21/13: “Horror of the penis”, following up on this AZBlogX posting:

Hard cocks are apparently by definition inflammatory and cannot be displayed with serious artistic intent. There’s a small list of exceptions to this generalization: in particular, folk art, comic and fantasy art, and (overlapping with these categories) art showing erect penises *detached* from a body (here we sing King Missile’s 1992 song “Detachable Penis”). The remaining examples seem subject to constant pressure to re-label them as pornography rather than serious art.

plus a bibliography of books on male art (art with some homoerotic content or tone) in my library

on 1/22/13: “Porn / art”: art or porn? in male photography

on 3/22/13: “Surrealists”: Paul Cadmus and his male nudes

on 5/23/13: “Annals of phallic animation”: a flying penis monster from the 14th century

on 10/2/13: “Male nudes”

on 11/24/14: “Phallic art”, linking to artwork on AZBlogX

on 12/27/14: “Set of three”: Orlan painting of a male nude, reproduced on AZBlogX

on 1/13/15: “Bernard Perlin”: an much given to drawing male nudes

on 7/11/15: “Outrageous art”: Frankenchrist image on AZBlogX

on 9/24/15: “Another medieval penis monster”

on 1/17/16: “A remarkable website”, on photographer Bob Mizer, with full-frontal nudity on AZBlogX

on 5/17/16: “Joe Dallesandro”: photos of JD, with explicit images on AZBlogX

on 7/25/16: “George Platt Lynes and Jared French”, with male nude photos by Lynes on AZBlogX

on 8/22/16: “The Fine Art Exemption”: Michelangelo’s David on the cover of the NYT Magazine

on 8/26/16: “Two impressively eccentric artsts”, section on Lynda Benglis and her bronze phallic smile

on 8/26/16: “Sylvia Sleigh’s male art”, with a link to genitally nude paintings on AZBlogX

on 9/23/16: “News for penises and their simulacrea”:

Two new annoyances with the Penis Ban on WordPress, Facebook, and Google+. In two recent postings on AZBlogX: “Bear poets in 1963” on the 20th, with a Richard Avedon photo of poets (and lovers) Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg, in which Orlovsky’s (flaccid) penis is not at all the focus of the piece, but is important to its interpretation; and “Voluntary cuckoldry” on the 21st, with a striking graphic illustrating the roles of the three characters in such a relationship, a graphic with two stylized penises in it, one flaccid and one erect…

In both cases, the penises are central to the composition, and not as objects of veneration or erotic triggers; my fondness for cocks in these functions is well-known, and though in principle I think that that more open carnal sexuality would be a good thing, I’m willing to keep such images in a protected place. But in these two cases, I bridle at the Penis Ban.

Nevertheless, this blog is extremely important to me, so I don’t want to do anything that would threaten it. But I can still complain.

In contrast to the two problematic images I just described, consider another image, from an article in Le Soir on the 20th, “D’immenses graffitis de sexe choquent à Bruxelles” [‘Huge sex graffiti shock in Brussels’], an image that was quickly posted on Facebook: [#1, a giant penis image]

on 10/24/16: “Naked boys playing at liberty” in photographs, with a link to genitally nude photos on AZBlogX

on 11/9/16: “Eliding the black penis”: balloon male genitalia

on 12/31/16: “Surrealists, but especially Jess”: #5 Narkissos by the artist Jess

Modern times. From Bob Russell in response to Cordova’s request, this instance of a Magrittean Disavowal (which I’ve posted about several times; it all started with a pipe, but it’s gone in lots of directions, here to a wooden penis):

(#5)

Russell gave no source for the image, and I haven’t been able to track it down: Google Images unhelpfully thinks it’s a picture of bread, and searching on the text didn’t get me a source for #5, though it did net this version in chalk:

(#6)

This from Robyn Gallagher on Flickr, taken 12/10/06 in Auckland NZ. Gallagher’s comment: “They’re right. It’s not. Outside the Stamford Hotel on Albert Street.”

Searching on “penis in art” brought several more entertainments. This jar of pickled penises, for example, Mary Ellen Croteau’s Men I Have Known:

(#7)

Penis art by women (like #7) is sometimes playful but often edgy. A SheRa magazine posting by Charlotte Heather on 1/7/15, “Dick Pics: Art and the Penis”, offered four examples of “some female artists working on or around the penis”, starting with this whimsical composition by Freudenthal & Verhagen:

(#7)

Freudenthal & Verhagen are a Dutch duo who’ve been working as a photographic and creative team for over 20 years. Both Carmen Freudenthal (photographer) and Elle Verhagen (stylist) graduated from Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 1988 and began working together shortly after [laergely in commercial art]. Since, this provocative pair have developed a shamelessly edgy style. (link)

Then Louise Bourgeois and her Janus Fleuri:

(#8)

From Wikipedia:

Louise Joséphine Bourgeois (… 25 December 1911 – 31 May 2010) was a French-American artist. Best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the subconscious. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists and her work has much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement.

And Yayoi Kusama’s Violet Obsession:

(#9)

From the MOMA site:

[Kusama] affixes sewn-and-stuffed phallic protrusions to everyday objects — ladders, shoes, furniture — which she then arranges in installations, some room-sized. Violet Obsession is a monumental Accumulation: a rowboat with oars, electric purple and covered in irregular oblong forms.

Finally, Kirsten Fredericks:

(#10)

A knitwear designer for 12 years, Kirsten Fredericks decided to turn a craft deemed very feminine on its head by crocheting and knitting a bunch of penises. She does all shapes, sizes, colors, and personalities (from SheRa)

Bonus. A bit of language art, a prick ambigram:

(#11)

Reversible word readable upside down. This ambigram shows how the CK letter combination becomes a P after a 180° rotation. In slang language, a prick is a penis, and is also a term used for a worthless asshole. (Wikimedia link) [designed 10/10/16 by Doxoc]

From Wikipedia:

An ambigram is a word, art form or other symbolic representation whose elements retain meaning when viewed or interpreted from a different direction, perspective, or orientation.

Douglas R. Hofstadter describes an ambigram as a “calligraphic design that manages to squeeze two different readings into the selfsame set of curves.”

… The earliest known non-natural ambigram dates to 1893 by artist Peter Newell. Although better known for his children’s books and illustrations for Mark Twain and Lewis Carroll, he published two books of invertible illustrations, in which the picture turns into a different image entirely when turned upside down.

(This posting has no redeeming social value whatsoever, and hardly any linguistic interest, but it can afford some laughs. It is, however, about gay porn ads, describing hard-core mansex, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

The hard-core evidence is on AZBlogX, in a posting titled “Sleazy Presidents Day with Michael Lucas” (Michael Lucas the gay porn honcho), with a holiday ad (#1) plus a still from a video the company has on sale (#2).

As I wrote on AZBlogX, #1 shows

Double penetration, with the guy in the middle getting it from two hairier guys, and with an extraordinarily hairy (and sweaty-sticky) guy on top. I suppose the message is that on Presidents Day we get two presidents in one event, and in #1 the hole in the middle is getting two big dicks in him in one event. Or something like that.

Double penetration happens in real life, but very infrequently. It’s mostly a gay porn stunt — tricky to pull off — designed to provide the viewer with as full a view as possible of as many cocks as possible. Take it to the max.

Obviously I can’t show you any part of this image, since it’s nothing but XXX-rated bodyparts. But I can give you a taste of #2. The brief description:

Two couples doing out-facing sit-fucks (arranged, of course, so that the viewers can appreciate as much cock as possible, so everybody’s being all athletic, straining their muscles), with everybody apparently aiming at ecstatic facial expressions, which only two approximate: [but] Guy 1 is apparently registering shock-horror, and Guy 3 is snarling like a dog. All in all, to my eyes it’s both awkward and hilarious, not anything that would make me want to buy the scene.

Cropped so you can see the expressions:

Do one for Washington and one for Lincoln!

Yes, another man in underwear… There will be plain sex talk, too.

The Daily Jocks ad from 2/10:

  (#1)

They looked upon him, found him
Wonderful, fabulous, a mighty man —
Unanimously accepted him as their
Prince everlasting — and
Had him bronzed.

Two contributions here.

First, a friend reported to me that a guy she knew was sending her dick pix, of his (admittedly) enormous prick, which he was inordinately proud of. What, she wondered, did he expect her to do with it? (She and I have had chats about really big cocks and the challenges they present. Our joint feeling was that they were mostly objects to be admired as living art, but to be dealt with manually as sexual organs.)

My suggestion was that she should have it bronzed.

Little digression on bronzing:

Bronzing is a process by which a bronze-like surface is applied to other materials (metallic or non-metallic). Some bronzing processes are merely simulated finishes (patinas) applied to existing metal surfaces, or coatings of powdered metal that give the appearance of a solid metal surface. In other cases, an actual layer of heavy copper is electroplated onto an object to produce a bronze-like surface. This electroplating is the method traditionally used for “bronzing” of baby shoes, but to electroplate a non-conductive item like a baby shoe, a conductive material must first be applied, then the copper plating is done. (Wikipedia link)

Then, the noun bronze took me to Bonzo:

The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band (also known as The Bonzo Dog Band) was created by a group of British art-school students in the 1960s. Combining elements of music hall, trad jazz and psychedelic pop with surreal humour and avant-garde art, the Bonzos came to the public attention through a 1968 ITV comedy show, Do Not Adjust Your Set.

… Bonzo the dog after a popular British cartoon character created by artist George Studdy in the 1920s. (Wikipedia link)

You can listen here to one of my favorite Bonzos tracks, “The Intro and the utro” (1967).

A Studdy sketch of Bonzo:
  (#2)

A truly enormous amount of Bonziana, of all kinds, was produced back in the 1920s and thereafter. And yes, there were — oh joy! — bronzed Bonzos, lots of them, of many different sorts. Here’s a Bonzo bronzed plated car mascot:

  (#3)

To put it all together, there are (of course) bronze phalluses, tons of them, from ancient Chinese to thoroughly modern (phalluses are objects of power, luck, and awe) — including this startling cast bronze penis doorpull (from a collection of phallic hardware, faucets, and barware on this site):

  (#4)

See: you can have it bronzed.

(There will be some sex talk, and a photo of men being papillarily affectionate, but, I think, nothing seriously problematic. Use your judgment.)

Another item backed up in my posting queue: from the Gaily Grind on 5/14/15, “Did You Know It Was Illegal For Men To Show Their Nipples In Public In The 1930s” by Adrian Garcia.

(#1)

Nipples, then and now

Up until the mid 1930’s it was illegal to publicly flaunt the male nipple in public [note: in certain jurisdictions in certain countries].

Men were forced to wear nipple-covering swimsuits prior to 1936, when it became legal to expose nipples in New York state.

In the early 1930’s, a group of men gathered on Coney Island to fight for their right to swim and sunbathe in shirtless swim trunks.

In 1935, another group of brave male protesters got themselves arrested in Atlantic City for hitting the beach while baring their torsos.

(#2)

Baring a nipple in protest

Then in 1936, these men legally gained the right to show their nipples in public, laying the foundation for existing New York state laws that allow women to be topless wherever a man is legally allowed to be, Yahoo reports.

Today, women can still be charged with public indecency, disturbing the peace, or lewd behavior for going topless.

Louisiana specifies that “female breast nipples in any public place or place open to the public view with the intent of arousing sexual desire or which appeals to prurient interest or is patently offensive” can receive up to three-years in jail for a first-time offense and a $2500 fine.

Women in Delaware can be arrested if they expose their breasts “under circumstances that she knows her conduct will likely cause affront or alarm.” In Arizona, a woman can be arrested for indecent exposure if she exposes the areola or nipple of her breast if someone else is present.

Today, the #FreeTheNipple movement is gaining momentum, fighting a similar fight that men waged in the 1930’s to liberate their nips. The movement has garnered support from Miley Cyrus, Lena Dunham, and Rumer Willis, among other celebrities.

Nipple erections. The idea seems to have been — and for some people, with respect to women, still is — that nipples are sexual organs, providing pleasure when stimulated, and in fact stiffening during sexual arousal. From a Body Language website on 4/16/15, “The Body Language Of Nipple Erections’ by Christopher Philip:

Both men and women experience nipple erections. Research has found that reflexive nipple erections may be the result of stress, fear and anxiousness, and also occur in association with cool temperatures.

In fact, it seems that the piloerector muscles, the same muscles that produce “goose bumps” are the main agent in producing an erect nipple. The muscles which usually surround hair serve to wrinkle the skin of the areola forcing it to tighten up. The piloerector muscles are also intimately linked to the autonomic “fight or flight” response in humans. Thus, the nipples can become erect due to anxiety and arousal generally.

As we know, nipples also become erect in response to sexual stimulation. This is particularly so for women, but men also infrequently experience nipple erections during sex.

Here I need to register an objection. In my experience, most men experience nipple erection as part of sexual arousal. Starting with me, and going on through most of my sexual partners. More pronounced in some men than in others, but very common indeed.

A nice torso shot of a guy with erect nipples:

(#3)

Nipple enlargement. Given the analogy between nipples and penises, and the involvement of both in arousal, it’s no surprise that for some gay men, large nipples (aka nips) have become a symbol of masculinity, not unlike a large penis. So they work to enlarge their nipples. Relatively easy to do in the short term, with suction cups and stretching devices, but it seems to take time and devotion to achieve significantly large nipples: if you’re into this, the goal is pencil eraser nips. The basic item:

(#4)

But more extreme eraser nips can be achieved, as here:

(#5)

I’ve played with nips like this (on a very fit, older guy, way back in my distant dissolute past), but I didn’t get around to asking how he cultivated them. Some sites say that the way is through nipple piercing: a piercing produces some scar tissue and enlarges a nipple; you then just — just! — need to have repeated piercings.

Nipple play and nipple pigs. Which brings me to getting or giving nipple stimulation as a (minor-league) sexual act — something I was very fond of when I was sexually active, so I find photos like this satisfying:

  (#6)

Men who are into this sort of play are known as nipple pigs, nippigs, or (metonymically) titpigs — all terms instances of the sexual X pig snowclonelet. On this blog, on 9/23/25:

titpig in a gay sexual context, using “the snowclonelet X pig, denoting someone who’s seriously into X (sex pig, involving sex in general or specifically “dirty sex” of various kinds; dick pig; piss pig)” (posting here). Specifically, a gay man who’s seriously into titplay, either as receiver or giver (very often both), so a gay man especially aroused by getting or giving nipple stimulation or (in a BDSM context) pain. Titpigs are stereotypically big hairy men, bears, leathermen, and sexual fetishists. [as in #5]

A couple more X pig postings on this blog:

on 10/19/15: a fuck pig / fuckpig is someone (of either sex) who’s seriously into getting fucked / stuffed

on 12/22/15: a cock pig is a man who loves to suck cock, … a spit-roasting pig is a man who loves to be spit-roasted

(Hunky guy in skimpy underwear, mildly racy talk. That’s all.)

  (#1)

Born
SwimWear GrabCock,
Of a long-ago line of
Poultry thieves,
In an eccentric
Underwear-oriented
Family, with his
Brother JockStrap and his
Sister SportsBra,

SwimWear traded his natal
Surname in for
GrabBag,
Because it wasn’t necessarily
Sexual, and he liked to
Scratch his balls

A recent Daily Jocks ad, featuring a formidably upper-bodied model, with the rest of the equipment to match (especially those thighs).

Here he is on another part of the beach, amidst the black volcanic rocks, sliding a hand into a pocket  to dig for nuts:

  (#2)

In my blogging backlog, two underwear images from Daily Jocks, from the Echt Apparel company (of Australia):

(#1)

The Lowe [‘Lion’] Stringer

(#2)

The Equip Stringer

The linguistic path here starts with tank top, for a type of sleeveless t-shirt. From that, by truncation, tank ‘tank top’.

Then a particular type of tank, one with thin (sometimes string-like) shoulder straps (and, usually, a deeply scooped front): the stringer tank. From that, by truncation, stringer ‘stringer tank, stringer tank top’.

So: the stringers in #1 and #2.

Stringers are especially associated with bodybuilders. The two guys above are well bulked up, but the next two are out in the further regions of muscular development:

(#3)

At the other end of the scale, we have a nicely muscled but slender young man in slim stringers (from the New Arrival company):

(#4)