(Mostly about gay porn and advertising for it, but there’s some language stuff in there.)
We’re into the latter part of the summer season, and there aren’t many occasions to celebrate in the US, now that Independence Day and gay pride days are past and Labor Day is about six weeks in the future. That presents a challenge for gay porn studios, who like to have holidays to hang sales on. Two of them — C1R (Channel 1 Releasing) and TitanMen — have taken the challenge, with rather different approaches.
C1R wasn’t inventive; they just declared a “summer splash sale” and offered up chunks of their inventory, plus a new flick, It All Cums Down to Cock (cramming cum, the down of go down on, and cock into a six-word title). The material in their ad, reproduced in an AZBlogX posting (note: visually and verbally X-rated), is undistinguished except for a steamy shot from the new flick (with slim twink Devin Dixon admiring hunk Jason Phoenix’s penis).
But TitanMen went for playful cleverness, with a “Christmas in July” ad campaign (details on AZBlogX).
The ad campaign highlighted scenes from two TitanMen flicks, Impulse (with porn veterans Adam Killian and Jessy Ares) and R.E.M. (with relatively fresh faces Carlos Marquez and Dirk Lang). The Impulse scene features underwater fellatio, a surprisingly popular theme in gay porn, despite its real-life drawbacks. The R.E.M. scene has the Latino hunk Marquez served up to the slenderer, somewhat punkish, German Lang on a golden platter; hey, it’s a dream fantasy. Visual details, and the ad copy, on AZBlogX.
Linguistic point: the text for the R.E.M. scene refers to
Latin spitfire cover model Carlos Marquez
I think that the copywriter intended the word spitfire to convey something like ‘really really hot guy’, but that’s wandering pretty far from its usual semantics, where a quick or fiery temper is central to its meaning (in the R.E.M. scene, Marquez, bottoming for Lang, is cooperatively receptive sexually).
Three dictionary sources on spitfire:
NOAD2: a person with a fierce temper
M-W Online: a quick-tempered or highly emotional person
OED2: One whose temper is fiery; an irascible, passionate, or quick-tempered person (also: a cat in an angry state)
In fact, some dictionaries add that a spitfire is typically female, a connotation that I share:
dictionary.com (based on RHD): a person, especially a girl or woman, who is of fiery temper and easily provoked to outbursts
Collins: a person given to outbursts of spiteful temper and anger, esp a woman or girl
References to a “Latin spitfire” are very heavily (though not exclusively) to women; Carmen Miranda is the prototype.
Carlos Marquez might be spitfirish in other settings, but bottoming for Dirk Lang, a spitfire he is not. He is, however, definitely hot.
Late summer days. Now I note that July and August constitute the dog days of summer, and porn studios could have taken advantage of that fact to have Dog Days of Summer sales, in which they could offer porn flicks on puppy play, obedience training for men serving as dogs, or flicks focused on doggie- (or doggy-) fucking, in which a bottom rests on his foreams and humps his ass up, “like a bitch in heat”, as they say, offering himself for penetration by his top; there are a great many such flicks. As far as I can tell, the porn studios haven’t taken advantage of the idea.
Or a Dog Days of Summer sale could just offer porn flicks as an antidote to the lassitude of the dog days.
But why dog days? This is, literally, a very old story. From Wikipedia:
The phrase dog days refers to the sultry days of summer. In the Northern Hemisphere, the dog days of summer are most commonly experienced in the months of July and August, which typically observe the hottest summer temperatures. In the Southern Hemisphere, they typically occur in February and March, in the midst of the austral summer.
… The Romans referred to the dog days as diēs caniculārēs and associated the hot weather with the star Sirius. They considered Sirius to be the “Dog Star” because it is the brightest star in the constellation Canis Major (Large Dog); this linkage first appeared in the Greek poem Phaenomena by Aratus (~310-260 BC) while Sirius’s association with summer heat is found in an earlier Greek poem, Works and Days by Hesiod in ~700 BC.
… Dog Days were popularly believed to be an evil time: “the Sea boiled, the Wine turned sour, Dogs grew mad, and all other creatures became languid; causing to man, among other diseases, burning fevers, hysterics, and phrensies.” according to Brady’s Clavis Calendaria, 1813.
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