Arnold Zwicky's Blog

From Mike McKinley this morning, news of the Jocktion Maketplace (website here). The name Jocktion is a portmanteau of jock ‘athlete’ and auction; the company’s enthusiastic pitch:

Welcome to Jocktion! We’re an online marketplace where the hottest guys sell the highest quality [used sports] gear. Register today to view our sales, check out our models, and participate in our Forums. Interested in selling your own gear? Apply today to earn top dollar on your merchandise. We’re constantly making improvements to our site and new items are being added, so be sure to check back often!

(Sellers pay a fee to list their wares; buyers get in free.)

The company is exploiting what you might call “contact magic”, the idea that clothes (and other artifacts) gain a kind of power from their association with specific people — usually famous people, in this case athletes. Some people will pay money to own a piece of clothing that had been worn by a celebrity. And some men will pay money to own a piece of sports gear that had been worn by a jock; its power lies in the strong masculine associations of men’s athletics.

Two thumbnails of (purported) models for the firm looking tough in their gear:

(#1)

Kickboxer displaying his muscular body.

(#2)

Football player displaying as much of his muscular body as he can in his shoulder pads, and in compensation doing a cock tease for the viewer.

Well, yes, this stuff is aimed clearly at potential buyers who are gay men, men who are widely supposed to be virility-obsessed; the listings seem to focus heavily on high-masculinity sports like soccer, rugby, lacrosse, and (American) football (and less on tennis, gymnastics, running, cycling, or swimming and diving); they focus on men’s underwear, more masculine in connotation than, say, shirts or sweatbands; they emphasize masculinity further by often stressing that the gear was actually worn in a game, suggesting that it might still be suffused with male sweat. (Nothing in the company’s materials says that the gear has been washed or otherwise cleaned.) And, even further, the models frequently stipulate that they are straight, playing on the widespread belief that straight guys are more masculine (and hence more desirable) than gay guys.

A listing that pretty much has it all, for a guy described as a “straight soccer jock”, offering a

Shock Doctor jock strap – game used

(not just any piece of sports gear, but in fact that most masculine of men’s gear, the jock strap, and, even better, actually used in a game).

The company’s terms of use specify that Jocktion is only a venue, merely connecting buyers and sellers, and not involved in transactions, so they can’t control the quality, authenticity, or legality of items listed for sale; but they provide a feedback mechanism for buys and sellers to rate one another after a transaction.

The items on auction could well be soiled beyond sweat from play in a game; that’s between seller and buyer.

On a less fastidiously framed website, naughtybids.com, the range of sellers is larger than purported athletes, taking in other types, like young men in general, tough working-class men (like cops), country boys, big-dicked good-looking men, even those well-known icons of masculinity, the Swedes: listings for

straight country boy’s Fruit of the Loom white briefs, used cop’s underwear, college boy boxers, hung blond Adonis (selling various items), boxer worn by straight 19 year old from Sweden

Some of the listings offer sweaty underwear and a few offer more heavily soiled items, with cumstains and skidmarks. It’s all between seller and buyer, remember.

 

 

 

This entry was posted on March 1, 2016 at 11:14 am and is filed under Gender and sexuality, Language and sexuality, Masculinity, Portmanteaus. 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.