It’s Pride month, time for rainbow everything (as symbols of solidarity and resistance to oppression) and also time for defiant celebrations of same-sex desire, same-sex sexual acts, and social and personal motss-identification. All especially important in the face of explicit attempts to exterminate our community, like the monstrous wickedness in Orlando the night before last. As usual, I’ve sequestered the images of sexual body parts on AZBlogX (“The dick days of summer”, here, with three stirring photos for gay men), but I won’t be shy about talking about men’s bodies and the excellent sexual practice of masturbation, so this isn’t for kids or the sexually modest.
The dual flag. Start with the easy stuff: this dual-purpose flag (it’s two, two, two flags in one!) and a slogan to go with it (a slogan open to quite a range of interpretations):
On the left, it’s an American flag; on the right, it’s a rainbow flag. So who is the we in our story? Americans? lgbt people? the union of these two sets? their intersection?
And then — I hate to have to say this — what does is mean in the slogan? Is it a descriptive is, asserting that hate is not, has not been, our story? Or is it a normative is, making a claim about what our story should be?
Assuming for the moment that the we is the lgbt community, is our story the one we tell, as actors in the world? Or is it the story we experience, have thrust upon us (in which case, hate is certainly our story)?
Bator days. On to another rainbow item: Rainbow Dick (#3 in the “dick days” posting), an erect penis illuminated for the viewers’ delight, by what I take to be prismatic light.
The other two photos in the “dick days” posting are a tiny sampling of a avalanche of photos and video clips on the Tumblr site “hairyb8r’s bate fuel”, devoted to hairy men masturbating.
[A linguistic note: the site regularly uses the clippings bate (or b8) for masturbate and bator (or b8r) for masturbator. I don’t think I’ve noted these on this site before (and they’re very hard to search for). On-line slang sites, including Urban Dictionary, generally have both, but the big slang dictionaries (Lighter’s HDAS and Green’s Dictionary) seem to have neither — suggesting that the clippings are either relatively recent or not very widespread (or both). (There are also some on-line uses of bation for masturbation.)
The full versions are formal or clinical in style / register, while the clipped versions are slang, so of course speakers see a connotative distinction between them — usually expressed by saying that the clipped versions refer to acts performed for pleasure, or very frequently or compulsively (even “obsessively” or “addictively”). The first way of talking shows a generally positive evaluation of masturbation, the second betrays the widespread devaluing of the act.]
hairyb8r says of himself, “Being a compulsive bator with a fetish for hairy guys, I post the types of things that get me off.” So he collects phallophili(a)c photos and videos showing hairy men jacking off, or getting ready to do so: what part of this indicates a compulsion and a fetish? (compulsion in NOAD2: ‘an irresistible urge to behave in a certain way, especially against one’s conscious wishes’; fetish in NOAD2: ‘a form of sexual desire in which gratification is linked to an abnormal degree to a particular object, item of clothing, part of the body, etc.’). Why are all of these things — delight in cocks, especially hard ones; a preference for hairy men; pleasure in watching men jacking off; jacking off oneself — not simply enthusiasms (requiring no apology, and in the case of jacking off, deserving of encouragement and celebration)? Why should b8rs be treated differently from foodies, avid sports fans, or opera queens?
In any case, some of b8r’s material is artful (#1 in “dick days”), but a lot of it is routine means to an end (#2 there is a borderline case, though I like it, both aesthetically and viscerally). But then some religious music is great art, though a lot of it is routine, and some of it is downright embarrassing (soppy-sentimental and awkward), but it gets the job — praising God, inspiring devotion — done, at least for people who are inclined that way. So with porn (hairyb8r’s stuff is certainly a species of gay porn).
This would be a good time to celebrate jacking off and whatever helps you to shoot your load. In your face, haters and destroyers!
June 13, 2016 at 7:02 am |
Just to note that the flag image came to me through a chain of sharings on various sites, including Facebook. But I don’t know who designed the dual-flag image or who assigned the slogan to it.