The trophy boys park the beef bus in tuches town

(The title tells the story. Racy topic, unquestionably alluding to hard-core mansex, but indirectly and playfully. Use your judgment.)

The Steam Room Stories video that came by me yesterday morning: “Trophy Boys”, in which two good-looking, ripped gay men complain about being treated as pieces of meat, as just their bulging muscles and big dicks. There are several twists in this short scene (which you can watch here), but here I’m going to focus on the title and on one of the men’s complaints about the men who pick him up as their trophy boy:

It’s dinner, drinks, and back to their place to park the beef bus in tuches town.

(referring to insertive anal intercourse). Playful alliteration in beef bus and tuches town, — the characters in SRS are given to fanciful indirect references to all matters sexual — and then there are the specific items beef, tuches, and of course trophy in trophy boy.

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On the right, two gay trophy boys commiserating; on the left, two straight guys who (eventually) bond over admiration for intellect rather than bodies

Trophy. A trophy is an award in a contest, displayed (for admiration) as a symbol of victory. Specialized in the idiom trophy wife. From NOAD2:

noun trophy wife: informal, derogatory a young, attractive wife regarded as a status symbol for an older man.

And then extended to other compounds of the form trophy X. OED3 (March 2014) on the noun trophy in a class of compounds:

C1b. Designating people or things regarded as a status symbol; esp. in  trophy wife: a wife regarded as a status symbol for a (usu. older) man. [1973 trophy-wives, 1978 trophy-husband, 1989 trophy wife, 1997 ‘trophy’ books, 2008 ‘trophy tourism’ , 2009 trophy dining]

An example of trophy wife in popular culture:

Trophy Wife is an American television sitcom that aired during the 2013–14 television season on ABC. … Trophy Wife premiered on September 24, 2013. On May 8, 2014, ABC canceled Trophy Wife after one season.

The series revolved around Kate (Malin Åkerman), a young, attractive, blonde party girl, who marries a middle aged lawyer named Pete (Bradley Whitford). With the marriage come Pete’s two ex-wives, the stern, perfectionist doctor, Diane (Marcia Gay Harden) and the flaky, flamboyant, new age Jackie (Michaela Watkins), as well as Pete’s three children: overachieving good girl Hillary (Bailee Madison), slacker Warren (Ryan Lee), and adopted Asian-American son Bert (Albert Tsai). The series explores the marriage and generation gap between Kate and Pete, along with the modern family dynamics between them, the ex-wives, and their respective children. (Wikipedia link)

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Extension of this to trophy husband (OED above) and also to trophy boyfriend; from Urban Dictionary:

Trophy Boyfriend: A boyfriend that a girl is proud of being with. She thinks a lot of him and in some cases can feel he is superior to most. She wants to go everywhere with him so everyone can see them together and she can “show him off”. – by KandysGurl 2/5/10

In these straight-world uses, a trophy husband or boyfriend is displayed primarily for the admiration of other women: the guy is a tool in the competition between women in the romantic and sexual marketplaces.

A parallel gay sense of trophy boyfriend or trophy boy would make sense — there is certainly a competition between men in the romantic and sexual marketplace, competition for desirable young men as partners — and no doubt these expressions have been used that way, but trophy boy seems to have been specialized still further, to focus on the purely physical: the young men’s muscles and penises: their meat, in two senses. And then uberqueer underwear designer Andrew Christian got his hands on the expression, and went for the dick (and, secondarily, the ass):

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The underwear comes as jock, brief, or boxer, all with generous big pouches. A brief boy:

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All the Trophy Boy models are deeply expressionless in the ads; they are nothing but prominent cocks and, oh yes, muscles. (They might well have been the inspiration for the SRS episode.) Then there’s the 2013 AC Trophy Boy twerk video, showing two gangs in an intense twerk-off contest, all aggressive butt-shaking and dick-jiggling; you can watch it on the Underwear Expert site here. (Like most AC videos it’s simultaneously a send-up and a sexual provocation, designed to make you chuckle and get a hard-on.)

Beef. The story of sexual slang beef is pretty much the story of sexual slang meat (in the US at least, beef is the central, prototypical item in the MEAT category). In particular, slang beef is prominently used to refer to muscles (hence, beefy as an adjective for a body type and the slang noun beefcake) and to the penis (so that the Wendy’s fast-food slogan “Where’s the beef?” from 1984 worked in part because of the double entendre). A summary of the GDoS entry for beef:

1 the vagina [first cite 1538] 2 (also piece of beef) a sexually appealing man or woman [first cite c1597 Henry IV Part 1] 3 (also beef-steak) the penis [first cite Measure for Measure] 4 human flesh 5 physical strength, power, muscles 7 (US) (also piece of beef) a well-built male; used by both heterosexuals and homosexuals; thus beef on the hoof, a number of such men [first cite 1929]

A sampling of the ‘penis’ cites:

1971 Frank Zappa ‘Latex Solar Beef’: All groupies must bow down / In the sacred presence of the latex solar beef.

1980 Edith Folb runnin’ down some lines: the language and culture of black teenagers: The penis is referred to as a piece of meat: beef, meat, or tube steak.

1987 Ice-T ‘Rhyme Pays’: But whether your names’s Lucy, Terry, Laura or Cindy / Ice got beef and this ain’t Wendy’s.

Searching on prime beef gets lots of cuts of meat, raw and cooked, but also a bunch of gay porn videos, with titles or captions like:

Prime Beef (Young and Old Muscle)
Italian raw prime beef [with raw ‘bareback, condomless’]
prime Chilean beef inspected at urinals
Fabio strokes the full 9.5″ of Prime Beef between his legs

Fabio Stallone in the last (prime beef between his legs not shown):

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Searching on beef hunk gets an even wider assortment, also including lots of photos of beefy hunks, plus cans of dog and cat food.

So much for the penis, the insertive participant in parking the beef bus in tuches town. On to the receptive participant, the anus, or (metonymically) the buttocks.

Tuches. This is the Yiddish English vulgar slang noun for ‘buttocks’ (also ‘anus’) usually spelled tuches in AmE — with many alternative spellings, though tokhes (with o representing the close, short and lax vowel [O]) or tukhes (with u representing the close, short and lax vowel [U]) are closest to actual Yiddish. In AmE the first vowel is pronounced [ʌ].

The medial consonant in Yiddish is a voiceless velar fricative [x], but in AmE it’s a [k], so that tuches in AmE is pronounced [tʌkIs] or [tʌkǝs], and the tuch part rhymes with fuck, a fact that makes tuches more satisfying in sexual contexts.

One Response to “The trophy boys park the beef bus in tuches town”

  1. Robert Coren Says:

    I think I’ve pretty much always heard the first syllable as in English took.

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