This posting takes off from my “Gay Porn Portal” posting yesterday, which ended with three photos of actors in gay porn, of three different body types and projected personas (all of them displaying their bodies invitingly, the first two performing cock-tease displays): a cute twink, an athletically fit male-model type, and a massively muscled bodybuilder, who got mixed reviews.
But first some notes on Pages on this blog.
Two new Pages: under the “Lists” Page, “Dance postings” (link), listing postings on this blog dealing with dance, dances, dancers, and dancewear; and under the “XBlog essays” Page (itself under “XWriting”), a “Cock tease” Page (link), listing postings on this blog about various sorts of displays of this sort. Plus an addition to the “Pits ‘n’ Tits” Page (under “XWriting”) with postings on this blog about these displays (of armpits and pectorals) in 2013-15. And that brings me to another XWriting Page, on “Body size” (link), which is mostly about postings on the Truly Huge in gay porn (like Billy Herrington in yesterday’s posting) — in particular, an initial posting on this blog on 7/19/10 (which has photos but no genital nudity, plus an entertaining piece about sex columnist Dan Savage’s encounter with one of the Truly Huge) and a follow-up on AZBlogX on 3/28/13 (with plenty of decidedly X-rated photos of these guys, including more about Herrington; you’ve been warned).
Savage and I were both unmoved sexually by massively muscled guys, but in my X Blog follow-up, I quoted a gay male friend who found them incredibly hot and had been training to become more like them. Similarly, after my posting yesterday, gay guys posted Billy Herrington comments on Facebook that ranged from the strongly positive (“Magnificent”) to the strongly negative. I quote:
(1) I don’t mean to sound picky, but perhaps Billy Herrington should consider Dr. Ellison’s Vein Institute.
(2) My eyes!!! Pass the fork, so I can remove them and not have to see the testosterone poisoning victim.
(De gustibus and all that.)
(1) has a reference to the Ellison Vein Institute in Jacksonville FL (under Dr. Robert G. Ellison, Jr.), whose website says:
At the Ellison Vein Institute, we are dedicated to providing you with the very best treatment options available for varicose veins and venous disorders of the legs.
Study the veining in Herrington’s legs in #3 from yesterday’s posting.
As for the second commenter, he views committed bodybuilders in general as victims of testosterone poisoning (and finds them singularly unattractive).
On bodybuilding, from Wikipedia:
Bodybuilding is the use of progressive resistance exercise to control and develop one’s musculature. An individual who engages in this activity is referred to as a bodybuilder. In competitive amateur and professional bodybuilding, bodybuilders appear in lineups doing specified poses, and later perform individual posing routines, for a panel of judges who rank competitors based on criteria such as symmetry, muscularity and conditioning. Bodybuilders prepare for competition through a combination of dehydration, fat loss, oils, and tanning (or tanning lotions) which make their muscular definition more distinct. Well-known bodybuilders include Charles Atlas, Steve Reeves, Reg Park, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno. The winner of the annual Mr. Olympia contest is generally recognized as the world’s top male bodybuilder.
Courtesy of a fit friend (who’s roughly like #2 in yesterday’s posting and doesn’t aspire to anything like #3), here’s a particularly remarkable competitive bodybuilder, Flex Wheeler:
From Wikipedia:
Kenneth Wheeler (born August 23, 1965, Fresno, California, United States), known as Flex Wheeler, is a former American IFBB professional bodybuilder. Wheeler won the Arnold Classic a record four times. Wheeler was described by Arnold Schwarzenegger as one of the greatest bodybuilders he ever saw.
… Wheeler has remarkable flexibility, including being able to do a complete split, which led to his nickname Flex.
My fit friend is straight but is entertained by my writing on the gay world and intrigued by photo spreads like the one in yesterday’s posting. He raised the question of what straight women thought about these body types and personas. He shared my impression that very few straight women found the Truly Huge attractive (very few, but not zero), and in his experience, many women found men of his body type less attractive than cute guys like #1 in that spread; he suspected that many women found guys like him too absorbed in their fitness and not involved enough in them, while the cute guys were adorable and inclined to be attentive to them — like really nice puppies. You can find plenty of opinion about What Women Look For In a Man, but I don’t know if it’s been systematically examined at the right level, beyond studies showing that men’s faces that people judged to be high on a scale of “masculine” appearance tended to be judged as more attractive by women (though the findings are complicated by interactions with things like the health status of societies); see my 11/22/11 posting “Annals of masculinity studies: the face”. (There’s also a possibility that highly masculine facial appearance might be associated with aggression.)
