Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(Frank discussion of man-on-man sex, short of X-rated images but otherwise about sexual acts in plain terms, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

The most recent offer of gay porn under one of the names, Yoasobi News, used by a gay porn aggregation service that fills my mailbox with offers of this stuff. This particular piece of porn came from the Maximum Pleasure site, offering NextDoorWorld gay porn, and this particular video manages to cross allusions to the confessional (where priest and penitent engage with one another in such a way that both are, in principle, anonymous) with allusions to the t-room (a men’s room used for male-male sexual hookups, especially in glory-hole and under-partition sex between men in adjacent stalls, acts that are typically performed under the cloak of anonymity).

The ad image:

  (#1)

And a scene in a confessional, from the 2008 movie In Bruges:

  (#2)

There’s a lot to cover here. I’ll start with the Yoasobi News name. As I explained in my recent posting on yaoi (“Boy’s Life”) gay manga, with special attention to the manga Himitsu no Yoasobi (Secret Night Play), yoasobi is a Japanese noun glossed as ‘night play, night amusemernts, nightlife’. Though the Yoasobi News name is mostly used for material that tilts towards twink porn (involving cute, boyish young guys), that isn’t always the case, as you can see from #1.

It will eventually be important that the Yoasobi News name is based on a Japanese noun.

The confessional. From Wikipedia:

A confessional is a small, enclosed booth used for the Sacrament of Penance, often called confession, or Reconciliation. It is the usual venue for the sacrament in the Roman Catholic Church, but similar structures are also used in Anglican churches of an Anglo-Catholic orientation, and also in the Lutheran Church. In the Catholic Church, confessions are only to be heard in a confessional or oratory, except for a just reason

The priest and penitent are in separate compartments and speak to each other through a grid or lattice [an arrangement designed to grant anonymity to both participants]. A crucifix is sometimes hung over the grille. The priest will usually sit in the middle and the penitents will enter the compartments to either side of him. The priest can close off the other compartment by a sliding screen so that only one person will be confessing at a time. Kneelers are provided in the compartments on each side of the priest, sometimes a prie-dieu style kneeler, or sometimes a diagonal kneeler built into the walls of the confessional. Confessions and conversations are usually whispered. Sometimes a confessional will be built into the church walls and have separate doors for each compartment; other confessionals can be free-standing structures where curtains are used to conceal penitents (and even the priest in some confessionals) from the rest of the church.

The priest is said to take confession from penitents and then to give (or grant) absolution to them. That is, he is a (passive) recipient in part of this performance, but an (active) agent in another part, a fact that makes it difficult to transfer the customs of the confessional metaphorically to those of the t-room, as image #1 proposes to do: in glory-hole sex, one man is usually the recipient, period, tending to the agent’s cock with (sometimes) a hand, (most often) his mouth (cock-sucking is everyday glory-hole sex), or (sometimes, as in #1) the offer of his asshole (the guy on the right is getting fucked through the glory hole by the guy on the left, and he seems to be seriously into it, while his fucker looks pretty nonchalant about the whole thing, and is in any case focused on us, his audience). Notice that #1 is framed as in a confessional (the figure of the Virgin Mary is a nice sacrilegious touch), but a confessional with a glory hole rather than the customary grille.

Background. A 7/31/12 posting on this blog about glory holes. And two postings on AZBlogX on t-rooms / tearooms, with explicit images, including glory hole action:

2/5/11: T-room action (link)

8/12/15: Tearoom time (link)

Digression on In Bruges. Very briefly, from Wikipedia:

In Bruges is a 2008 British-American neo-noir black comedy crime drama film written and directed by Martin McDonagh. The film stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as two Irish hitmen in hiding, with Ralph Fiennes as their boss. The film takes place and was filmed in the Belgian city of Bruges.

The confessional / t-room mashup. Perhaps we are to see the bottom in #1 as the penitent and the top as the priest: as the penitent in the confessional offers his sins in confession, so the bottom in glory-hole fucking offers his asshole in submission; and as the priest in the confessional gives his absolution to the penitent, the top in glory-hole fucking gives his cock to his bottom. This interpretation could have been made clearer by giving the top in #1, where both men are stark naked (as is standard in gay porn, and possible but not usual in actual t-room sex), a clerical collar or a stole or both (see the priest in #2, who of course has both); neither would have gotten in the way of his fucking, and they would have been deliciously sacrilegious.

Then we have the titles:”Not sinful if sincere” (suggesting, I suppose, that gay sex is not sinful if it is entered into with sincerity, not a position that the Roman Catholic Church would take kindly to) and the slogan “Cheating in Faith” (somehow suggesting that illicit sex is acceptable, even to be celebrated, if it is entered into in a spirit of faith, or maybe faithfulness).

The ad copy. Finally, we get to the text of the ad from Yoasobi News, text produced by the aggregation service and not the makers of the porn. Just three sentences. The first is unremarkable:

You can do whatever you want anytime with anyone.

(everything is permitted; do what thou wilt), but the second is in strikingly non-native English:

In such time we are living.

First, there’s in such time, where an English speaker would say either in such times or in such a time — suggesting that the ad’s writer speaks a language without (obligatory) number marking, and perhaps without articles. (Such languages are not at all uncommon.)

Then there’s the inverted order, suggesting a source language that uses topic-comment order frequently, without insisting on syntactic structures that make such marking explicit (like the English cleft sentence It is in such times that we are living). Undoing the inversion gives us the ordinary English We are living in such times (meaning times where you can do whatever you want anyime with anyone).

Put all this together with the choice of the Japanese name Yoasobi News and you get the likelihood that the bundling company is Japanese: Japanese is fond of topic-coment word order (indeed, it has a topic-marking particle wa), it has no obligatory number marking (no plural morphology, in particular), and it has no (definite or indefinite) articles.

Similar glitches occur in other ad copy from Yoasobi News, by the way.

Oh yes, the third sentence in the ad is unremarkable again:

Do you like it?

(where really heavily Japanese-influenced Engilsh would have had You like it? Japanese does have a sentence-final question particle no, which can turn a declarative into a yes-no interrogative, and it has nothing like English Subject-Auxikiary Inversion or the English “supportive” do).

 

 

 

This entry was posted on January 20, 2016 at 11:04 am and is filed under Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and religion, Language of sex. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.