(Highly sexualized men’s underwear, leading to blunt talk of men’s bodies and mansex. Lots of other content, but this is enough to put it out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest.)
Today’s Daily Jocks ad, for a new line of underwear for the PUMP! company — the image is meant to be outrageous, fey, macho, and funny, all at once — with their ad copy:
(#1) The all new Space Candy Collection from PUMP! has launched. A new take on PUMP’s classic shape, available in Space Candy Pink & Purple. [available as a boxer (boxer brief), (low-rise) brief, and jock]
An image crammed with content — incuding those little candy-themed patches on the front (on the hip or pouch) and the back (on one cheek) of the garments.
Butch fagginess, take 4. All in all, an image that’s an exercise in butch fagginess, mostly gay-playful in pink and purple, but with big hard muscles and clearly defined dicks (especially on the man on the left, in the pink boxer brief, with the outlines of his dickhead clearly visible through the fabric of the boxers); all this further butched up by the addition of hardware, especially the phallic futuristic hand weapons. So combining phallic display with the offer of oral satisfaction — the underwear equivalent of sucking a lollipop symbolically.
The ad is then the fourth chapter in my adventures in butch-faggy undergarments. The previous chapter, with links to earlier postings, is my 10/12 posting “Butch fagginess, take 3”.
Two of the garments up close:
(#2) The (baby) pink jock and the (dark) purple brief; a pink jockstrap nicely combines max-macho in the underwear world with high-faggy in color symbolism
Pink jockstraps (which deserve a separate posting) generally take us off the end of the pier at the butch-faggy boardwalk: what we’ve got there is usually a stone-solid muscle queen, a guy with the best of male musculature, in a way-high homo presentation of self. (This is not mockery: I find such men entertaining to be around — they are certainly ornamental — and admirable — you have to be really sure of yourself to pull this off — and incredibly hot sexually.)
It would be hard to beat this incorporation of a pink jockstrap into a My Homo Pony presentation:
(#3) Beyond butch-faggy: from my 5/14/16 posting “Pretty in pink: my homo pony”
Firearms and the man. (The image in #1 might well be a take-off on a specific space epic from popular culture; but I didn’t recognize it as such.)
#1 is all about the underwear the three men are wearing, and it’s also all about the weapons, the firearms they are brandishing. Whose function in the ad is to serve as heavy phallic symbols: the men have dicks in their pants and dicks in their hands. But at a deeper level, the men in the ad are, metonymically, their weapons; and they also are, metonymically, their dicks. In the military triple equation, man = penis = weapon. From my 3/23/18 posting “What does a wooden penis mean?”, about Finnish camp cocks and their meanings for the military men who display them:
(#4) A Finnish camp cock being deployedIt’s not that men are being encouraged to see their penises as weapons, but the reverse: they’re being encouraged to see their rifles as extensions of their own bodies, to identify with their weapons, as in the Rifleman’s Creed, in which the soldier’s dependence on and reverence for his rifle — so great that it’s like a part a part of his body — is explicit. Soldiers are trained to identify with their weapons and care for them as they would parts of their own bodies, because that attitude is literally life-saving for them.
On the Rifleman’s Creed, from Wikipedia:
The Rifleman’s Creed (also known as My Rifle and The Creed of the United States Marine) is a part of basic United States Marine Corps doctrine. Major General William H. Rupertus wrote it during World War II, probably in late 1941 or early 1942. In the past, all enlisted Marines would learn the creed at recruit training. However, in recent years the creed has been relegated to the back pages of the standard recruit training guide book and its memorization is no longer considered doctrine for recruits.
From the text as it appears in the movie Full Metal Jacket (1987):
This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.
Without me, my rifle is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless. I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me.
… Before God, I swear this creed. My rifle and myself are the defenders of my country. We are the masters of our enemy. We are the saviors of my life.
The Rifle/Gun Chant. This would have been a natural point for me to bring the underwear phallicity topic to a close, with only some footnotes on Space Candy to add, but a mention of Full Metal Jacket in connection with firearms and male genitals leads inescapably to a chant that became a bit of pop culture because of its appearance in the movie. It is, somewhat remarkably, about a point of linguistic usage: on the use of the nouns gun and rifle.
Now, in current everyday English usage, gun is the superordinate term for a large class of weapons that includes cannons, rifles, and handguns. From NOAD, showing some of the category structure:
noun gun: 1 a weapon incorporating a metal tube from which bullets, shells, or other missiles are propelled by explosive force, typically making a characteristic loud, sharp noise… [OED2 reports a specialized use for handguns in I.3.b.: A pistol or revolver. originally U.S. [1st cite 1744, then through 1971]]
– noun cannon: 1 [a] a large, heavy piece of artillery, typically mounted on wheels, formerly used in warfare. [b] an automatic heavy gun that fires shells from an aircraft or tank …
– noun firearm: a rifle, pistol, or other portable gun.
— noun rifle-1: a gun, especially one fired from shoulder level, having a long spirally grooved barrel intended to make a bullet spin and thereby have greater accuracy over a long distance.
— noun handgun: a gun designed for use by one hand, especially a pistol or revolver.
But in American military usage, rifle is in contrast with gun (meaning ‘handgun’), rather than subordinate to it. I don’t know the history of this usage, but in part it seems to have been motivated by a desire to deprecate handguns as street weapons and to elevate rifles as proper military weapons. In any event, as a consequence of this distinction in technical usage, it became necessary to indoctrinate newcomers to riflery, especially in the military, in this usage — specifically, to warn them off using gun to refer to a rifle. As a boy taking riflery classes in summer camp, I got the standard indoctrination, a brief memorable dirty rhyme for guys.
Instructor picks up rifle, shoulders it, recites “This is my rifle”. Then with his other hand he grabs his crotch and mimes masturbation, “And this is my gun”. Looks to the side at the rifle, “This is for fighting”. Glances down at his crotch, “And this is for fun”. You only have to do that once for boys, and they don’t have to rehearse it. They get it, and they appreciate the outrage of the instructor‘s telling a dirty joke. (There was, of course a gigantic subterranean camp trade in dirty jokes of all kinds.)
That was around 70 years ago, and for years after that a guy could get a quick laugh just by saying (in the right context) “This is my rifle”, as an allusion to the full formula.
From the evidence of Full Metal Jacket, it would appear that the Rifle / Gun Chant was incorporated at some point into the rigors of boot camp for Marine Corps recruits. From Wikipedia:
United States Marine Corps Recruit Training (commonly known as “boot camp”) is a 13-week program “including in & out-processing” of initial training that each recruit must successfully complete in order to serve in the United States Marine Corps.
A scene in FMJ (which you can watch here (#5)) in which recruits run through repeated recitations of the chant, guns on shoulders, hands grabbing crotches, in a still shot for memic purposes:
(#6)
Information about the use of the chant in actual Marine Corps boot camp isn’t easily available in on-line searches, but I assume that there’s plenty in reporting about and fictional representations of the Corps’s practices.
For what it’s worth, my postings on guns as phallic images on this blog and AZBlogX (inventoried in a Page on phallicity-general) have cannons and handguns, but no rifles. My postings that touch on military gay porn are, of course, dense with rifles and free of handguns.
Space Candy. Not just kicky PUMP! underwear, but also recreational plants and fun food.
First, from the Hytiva site (reporting with connoisseurship on cannabis offerings):
A mainstay of the Colorado cannabis market, Space Candy is a fairly even hybrid. When grown right, the flowers bear a light green hue, and the petals hold tons of orange pistils. Its buds exude a deliciously sweet-and-sour berry scent, and when smoked it leaves an aftertaste of burnt apple.
Deliciously sweet-and-sour berry scent, with an aftertaste of burnt apple. Swoon.
Then, from the Bakers Party Shop site:
(#7) Outer space candy sprinkles “for decorating Alien birthday party cakes, cookies, cupcakes and more!”
So a gay man of suitable sensibilities might hoist his junk in a cute pink Space Candy jock while offering guests at his jockstrap party some primo Space Candy weed, and then cupcakes topped with Space Candy sprinkles for when the munchies set in.
Note: jockstrap parties are very much a thing. Two ads from a great many — the first with the down and dirty right out in front, the second more decorous and Prideful:
(#8)
(#9)
I was never sure enough of the desirability of my body to show it off at a jockstrap party, but I did have a faggy pink jockstrap that was strictly for private display, for my man Jacques’s pleasure. He thought it was funny, and really hot.
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