(Intended as an entertainment in tough times. There will, however, be male bodyparts and mansex, in sometimes very plain language, so in general not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
It starts with a regular feature of this blog: advertisements for premium men’s underwear that treat men’s bodies simultaneously as the engines of vigorous athletic pursuits and as the loci of hot sex between men. And, correspondingly, that view the underwear — especially the quintessentially masculine undergarment, the jockstrap — as simultaneously a piece of sports gear and a vehicle for sexual advertisement, displaying a man’s package prominently in front and his bare buttocks behind.
Exhibit #1 is a Daily Jocks ad from 3/31 for a jockstraps sale, featuring a muscular model with a remarkable bubble butt, who is sporting a handsome deep red jockstrap with matching harness and socks, while poised midway between the position for doing pushups and one offering his ass for sex.
The accompanying jockstrap sale catalogue then takes us on a jaunt from Surry Hills, near Sydney NSW in Australia (where the Supawear company has its headquarters) through Hawaii and northern California (Berkeley and Sunnyvale) to San Pedro Town in northern Belize. And then back by plane from San Pedro to Sydney.
But first, below the fold, the world-class bubble butt on display, with a fanciful caption of my own devising:
(#1)
Sporking
from Buttpush,
Versatilio can
pivot in seconds to
Pushup or to
Humped Up in Heatresponding to the
exigencies of the
occasion
The point is that what Versatilio is doing is neither a good pushup nor a good humping up to get fucked, though he can move from the position in #1 to either of these pretty easily. Well, he’s a jock; he’s good with his body.
For comparison, first, an illustration of good form for pushups:
(#2) From the site of POWER: Chiropractic Health Center in Longmont CO (I note, but will not comment on, “maintain a perfectly flat position when going down”)
When doing a pushup, it’s no butt in the air. If you’re humping up to get fucked, that’s pretty much the whole point.
So, from my 12/30/18 posting “Sexual displays > offers: prone, supine, lateral”, in a section on prone displays of the naked male body, focused on the model’s buttocks (this is a version of a more explicit AZBlogX piece):
Many gay men, responding to their predilections and desires, would look upon these butts and find them arousing, would be inclined to view them as implicit offers; but they’re just posed bodies. Sometimes, however, the offer is explicit: the subject spreads his legs and humps up his ass, making his asshole available (and his cock and balls visible), as here:
(#3) Richard Vytniorgu, spread and humped up…Spread and humped up, … in a variant of the prone position, but now offering his body. He could be easily fucked in this position, or he could raise himself up on his knees, offering himself for a doggie fuck
That’s all about exhibit #1. Intrigued by the jockstrap there, I went to the Daily Jocks sale page to see what other jocks they had on offer. And found some wonderful stuff.
The Jockstrap Trail. The DJ ad copy:
Don’t hide your best assets – feel sexy and confident in our designer range of men’s jockstraps underwear … guaranteed to turn heads and enhance all of your best features.
(Note that no athletic functions of the jockstrap are touted here. It’s confidence, fashion, and attractiveness to other men.)
The first station on the trail: Sydney. Just one row of jocks from the Supawear company (headquartered near Sydney), in two different lines:
(#4) Two jocks from the Galaxy line, featuring intense bright colors; and two from the POW line, with fancifully patterned pouches — notably the Fruit Punch jock, with a variety of colorful fruits (you can see a strawberry and part of a pineapple)
The Galaxy jocks look like they would actually work as athletic supporters, albeit dramatic and fashion-conscious ones. The POW jocks have thinner bands and straps and strike me entirely as items of a costume rather than as functional jocks to sweat in. That’s not a complaint — I get a big kick out of the POW line — just an observation that they’re symbolic, not actual, gymwear. Their function is as homowear, to provide an entertaining wrapper for a guy’s dick and balls, one that an audience can appreciate, while making his ass available.
[Late-breaking addendum: a 4/2 mailing from DJ, with this ad featuring a Supawear POW Dessert pouch (you’re so sweet I could just eat you up):
(#5) A pouch of sweets (note to model: no teeth on that sucker, sucker! lick it and mouthe it, don’t bite!)
End of addendum.]
Surely fruit punch was chosen intentionally as a pattern and a name, evoking the slur fruit (now defiantly reclaimed by many of us fruits), and combining faggy fruit with aggressive punch — butch fagginess is all over the place. (Imagined dialogue: “Hey, dude, cute jock; can I fondle your fruit?”)
The second station on the trail: Hawaii. The power of associative thinking then kicked in and fruit punch led me to the commercial powerhouse of fruit punches: Hawaiian Punch:
(#6) (from the Hawaiian Punch company site)
Note that Hawaiian Punch is symbolically, not actually, Hawaiian; it incorporates some ingredients from Hawaii to create a southern California product that evokes Hawaii. Some official company history:
In 1934, A.W. Leo, Tom Yates, and Ralph Harrison developed the first Hawaiian Punch recipe in a converted garage in Fullerton, California [in Orange County]. They wanted a tropical-tasting syrup to add to their line of ice cream toppings sold under the trade name Pacific Citrus Products Company. “Leo’s Hawaiian Punch,” as the brand was called at the time, was sold to area restaurants, soda fountains, and ice cream manufacturers. The “Leo’s” was dropped from Hawaiian Punch several years later. The main ingredients of the first Hawaiian Punch recipe were shipped from the Hawaiian Islands, thus the origin of the name.
The graphic in #5 shows the company mascot, Punchy, who was the central figure in a famous ad campaign of the 1960s and 70s, exploiting a simple pun on punch:
From the Cartoons Plus site:
In 1962, the Atherton-Privett ad agency created a 20-second commercial to advertise Hawaiian Punch drink.
You can see the 1962 commercial here (#7).
The commercial was produced by John Urie and Associates in Hollywood. Jean Guy Jacques was the director; Bob Guidi and John Urie designed the two characters, Punchy and Oaf. Ross Martin did Punchy’s voice, “Hey! How ’bout a nice Hawaiian Punch?” and John Urie did Oaf’s line, “Sure”. Rod Scribner animated the commercials. Sam Cornell also worked on the later versions. Oaf never learned to say “No” and he was always punched. The commercial ended with Punchy leaning on a can of Hawaiian Punch, saying, “Wasn’t that a refreshing commercial?” The commercial won many awards.
The third station on the trail: northern California. The Hawaiian Punch ads turn on a pun on the punch of fruit punch. But then there’s a whole world of word play that turns on a pun on the fruit of fruit punch — employing the anti-gay slur fruit, now wielded, defiantly and also playfully, as an affirmation of queerness in a hostile world.
Two notable examples from northern California: gay radio in Berkeley, gay comedy in Sunnyvale.
From Wikipedia on the slang term fruit:
Fruit Punch was the first gay radio show in the United States, and possibly the world, which aired weekly from 1982–1987 from Berkeley radio station KPFA, the first listener-supported radio broadcaster in the United States.
(My first resonse was surprise that this came so late, given that Stonewall happened in 1969, and energized a series of defiant gay activist groups virtually immediately. But of course the commercial media were generally as least as hostile to lgbt folk as the wider culture.)
Meanwhile, KPFA 94.1 endures.
Then, south and on the peninsula, there was comedy. From the site of the Rooster T. Feathers comedy club in Sunnyvale CA, the show for 6/6/12:
FRUIT PUNCH! An Evening of Gay and Gay Friendly Comedy is back at Rooster T. Feathers Comedy Club. It’s a diverse evening of stand up comedy featuring gay and gay friendly comics from the Bay Area and beyond! All are welcome- Whether you’re Gay, Lesbian, Straight, Bi, Questioning or just like to get drunk and make out with everybody you see. San Francisco’s favorite fierce comedic tranny tart Pippi Lovestocking hosts with appearances by Natasha Muse, Beth Schumann, Jennie McNulty, Ronn Vigh and headliner Scott Silverman!
Rooster T. Feathers also endures.
The fourth station on the trail: San Pedro in Belize. Go back to #4 and look at the first two jocks in it — with SPRSYD on the waistband. Mystery initialism, not explained anywhere on the Supawear site, so far as I could see.
Was it a secret slogan — Show Prodigious Rear, Show Your Dick? SPRay SYDney? — or what?
Ah, SYD isn’t just an abbreviation for Sydney, it’s specifically the code for Sydney airport. Could SPR be an airport too?
Astonishingly, yes: San Pedro, in Belize (yes, Belize, the country on the Caribbean coast of Central America, in between Mexico and Guatemala). So a flight between SPR and SYD, halfway around the world (ca. 8,650 mis.) would be a SPRSYD flight. There don’t seem to be any actual flights, so we have to treat this as a flight of the imagination, merely evoking exotic Caribbean shores.
San Pedro, originally a small fishing village settled mostly by Mexicans, is now a very popular tourist destination, especially for scuba diving. Most San Pedrans speak both Spanish and English fluently, so it’s congenial to English speakers.
Besides the diving, San Pedro is famous for its annual Gran Carnaval, celebrated a week before Ash Wednesday. This turns out to be a festival of transgressive sex and gender, with a bonus of face and body painting. From Wikipedia on El Gran Carnaval de San Pedro:
It is meant for people to indulge in bodily pleasures that they will avoid during Lent. Men dress as women, and perform dances for money in the street, with a competition to see who performs the most outlandish dance. On the last day of the carnival people flood the streets to paint one another.
Well, you could do all of this at Mardi Gras in Sydney. Or you could do it in a more intimate and exotic location, and get the plus that you’re taking part in a genuine folk festival.
When you’re done, exhausted but refreshed (as one hopes to be after a ritual of sexual excess), you can take a SPRSYD flight of the mind back to Oz, completing the loop of the trail.
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