Arnold Zwicky's Blog

On AZBlogX today, a posting “Memorial mansex”, about a Lucas studio gay porn sale for Memorial Day 2018, with an ad offer (cropped below to avoid penises) showing three naked men with narrowed eyes, plus a shot of the onset of fellatio (with two men knee-deep in a pool of water, for added interest), to show you the sort of thing you can get from the Lucas sale offer:

(#1)

To come: on porn for the holidays; then on narrowed eyes and drooping eyelids and how these might be interpreted.

Porn for the holidays. From “Memorial mansex” (slightly edited):

Every holiday can be turned into an occasion for gay porn sales, but some are easier than others. Truly religious holidays — like Pentecost (last Sunday, the 19th); the associated Jewish holiday of Shavuot (the 19th-21st); Trinity (tomorrow); Ramadan (May 16th – June 14th) and Eid al-Fitr following on June 15th — are difficult indeed to reconfigure as occasions for jacking off to fuck-and-suck flicks. But many orginally religious or solemn holidays have secular counterparts as cultural holidays with very different meanings, and these can be hijacked for porn purposes: in particular, Christmas and Easter, and the two US holidays bracketing the cultural summer season: at the end, Labor Day (created as a celebration of working people); and at the beginning, Memorial Day (originally, remembering people who died while serving in the US armed forces), this coming Monday.

Holidays to watch out for during the summer:
— patriotic holidays, licensing military porn: (US) Flag Day on June 14th; Canada Day on July 1st; (US) Independence Day on July 4th; Bastille Day (France) on July 14th
— LGBT holidays: Stonewall Day on June 28th (and Pride Month throughout June)
— and for daddies and their boys: Fathers Day on June 17th

Narrowing and drooping. Narrowing (or squinting) of the eyes — involving lowering the upper eyelid and raising the lower, often lowering the eyebrow as well — can convey a number of different emotions: anger, ferocity, discomfort. People also squint in bright sunlight (which might be what’s going on in #1). And they narrow their eyes for greater focus in examining something, so that narrowing can indicate intense attention, or be used as a display of dominance.

Without context, narrowing is often interpreted as anger. So with this shot of the My Little Pony character Rarity narrowing her eyes:

(#2)

Narrowed eyes are a regular feature of Clint Eastwood’s characters. Conveying anger, ferocity, intense attention, or dominance, or some combination of these:

(#3) Clint Eastwood Eyes in “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”

Then there’s drooping of the upper eyelid (without raising the lower), due to tiredness, sleepiness, or the sedative effects of drugs or alcohol. Some people have naturally drooping eyes; I am one (so when I have my picture taken I deliberately open my eyes wide, to avoid the impression that the guy in the photo is in a drug haze). (A drooping eyelid is also a symptom of some medical disorders, in which case it’s referred to as ptosis ‘falling’.)

This entry was posted on May 26, 2018 at 2:54 pm and is filed under Facial expression, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv. 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.