This is a piece of moderately raunchy silliness in a time of great difficulty. (I am trying, with increasing desperation, to write just one blog essay a day as proof that I’m Not Dead Yet, but I didn’t manage it yesterday, 6/30.) Most of it is directly or indirectly about penises, so some readers might want to avoid this posting.
A tv commercial for the Silver Bullet Hose proclaims:
Things that used to be big and bulky now fit in your pocket. Even your hose.
The commercial goes on about hoses and nozzles in gee-whiz fashion; it’s probably just enthusiastic salesmanship, but it would be hard to miss the playfully carnal subtext, of symbolic penises.
And the commercial extols the compact and easily portable, in the garden hose world — and, by extension, in the world of men’s bodies. As the possessor of a penis that fits comfortably into most trouser pockets, I applaud the attitude. All praise to the right-sized; let’s look to Michelangelo’s David.
A crucial part of the garden hose pitch is that the Silver Bullet expands to an impressive length when it’s called upon to perform its function. Oh. My.
The commercial. The one I saw:
(#1) On iSpot.tv “Pocket Hose Silver Bullet TV Commercial, ‘Hassle-Free’ Featuring Richard Karn” — a 2019 commercial: “The Pocket Hose Silver Bullet is a lightweight, expandable hose made with a bullet shell outer casing which can resist snags, wear and tear.” (The whole commercial can be viewed via iSpot.)
The Silver Bullet hose has a Turbo Shot Jet Nozzle. (I’ve enjoyed the company of men with turbo shot jet nozzles, and it’s quite something to see. I’ve always been a low-velocity, short-shot guy, but the internal experience is quite satisfyingly overwhelming for me, so it’s all good.) The hose is also advertised as “the hose that grows”. In fact, back in a 4/23/13 posting “More news for penises”, I noted
seeing an ad for the Pocket Hose on tv: “The Pocket Hose just grows and grows and grows, into a full-length hose.”
I don’t think any of this needs further comment.
hoses (and nozzles). The Page on this blog on “phallicity postings – general” catalogues a number of postings on nozzles and hoses. But it seems I haven’t actually looked at the lexical items in question.
From GDoS:
noun-1 hose: 1 (US) the penis, usu. large. [1st cite 1928 from Read’s Lexical Evidence] …
noun nozzle: 1 the nose or a nostril … 2 (US) the penis. 1994 G. Indiana Rent Boy 8: A bulky Italian guy with a fat not very long nozzle.
Though nozzle could in principle have been used metaphorically for the head of the penis and then been extended metonymically to the whole organ, it looks like its main route to phallicity was through the nose-penis metaphor.
From my 10/10/15 posting “Annals of phallicity: nozzles (and glycerin, lubes, and posing oils)”:
So a nozzle is a little nose (though actual nozzles are mostly bigger than actual noses), and the frequent use of nozzles as phallic symbols is another instance of the recurrent nose-penis metaphor
(See the nose entries on my phallicity Page.)
Matters of size. The Pocket Hose is both compact and handy (right-sized, I called it above) and also expandable into a hose monster (something of fable and fantasy). Best of both worlds.
On matters of penis size, see the Page on this blog on the subject. Most penises are in the range from 5 to 7 inches, which I will now refer to as right-sized. Below that, there are smaller penises, down to the micropenis level. Above that there’s world of big dicks, analyzed and labeled in my 2/17/20 posting “Preference labels and little pockets”, which looks at guys advertising 7, 8, and 9 inches, and provides a categorization of the world from 7 inches and up, with labels for a PSD (Porn Standard Dick) of 7 inches; a PWD (Porn World-Class Dick) of 9 inches; and a RM (Ripley Marvel) longer than that.
All this caused me to reflect on the labels given to product sizes (large economy size and all that).
Well, it turns out to be pretty much of a giant morass, with different products and different companies using vocabulary chosen on the fly; to cope properly, you need the actual dimensions, forget the labels. I fixed on mouthwashes as a test case, and did find a few labels used with some frequency:
travel size: either 1.2 oz. (really tiny) or 3.2 oz. (presumably the legal maximum for carrying onto an airplane)
regular size: 16.9 oz.
large economy size: 33.8 oz.
So large economy is twice regular. This doesn’t translate at all well into penis sizes, given that regular, right-sized penises are in the range of 5 to 7 inches; that would make large ones 10 to 14 inches, definitely RM territory. So clearly a scaling factor must be applied. This is left as an exercise for the reader.
Bonus: Pin the Hose on the Fireman. While searching on hose and nozzle material, I stumbled on the arch Last Night of Freedom site, offering accessories for stag parties (bachelor parties in particular) and hen parties (bachelorette parties or bridal showers). I’m not going back to analyze these elaborate cultural practices of the American white middle class, but will just run with it.
Thing is, what I got was the Pin the Hose on the Fireman (‘Is that a hose in your pocket or…”) game on the site. The ad poster:
(#2) With a firehat coyly placed over his hose; the actual game provides him with hoses
Text from the company:
One thing we have learnt is that blindfolding a group member and asking them to pin anything to a poster is always a very popular game. This pin the hose on the fireman is the latest in our collection of games all based around the tail and donkey concept.
The three foot by two foot poster is reversible with two hunky firemen to choose from and there are a total of 12 hoses available too. Unlike in the stick a dick geek edition these hoses don’t stick to the poster but it’s still fun all the same.
Yes, stick a dick.
Also available from the company: Pin the Cucumber on the Hunk, Pin the Junk on the Hunk, Pin the Macho on the Man, Pin the Torpedo on the Sailor, Stick a Dick – Hunk Edition. You hardly know how to choose.
An example of the actual materials, for Pin the Torpedo:
(#3) One of the posters, and an assortment of torpedo dicks (plus some pairs of aggressive testicles) for him
Sail on, silver boy!
July 2, 2020 at 6:59 am |
“Actual nozzles are mostly bigger than actual noses”: True enough, but last night I watched a 2013 Metropolitan Opera production of Shostakovich’s The Nose, which involves a nose that escapes from its owner and grows to the size of a normal human body. Well, that’s not an “actual” nose, I guess.
Commercial sizes: I remember, many decades ago, browsing the toothpaste shelves of a local drugstore or supermarket, and noticing that for at least one brand the smallest size available was called “large” (others being labelled things like “giant”, “economy”, etc.).
July 2, 2020 at 7:34 am |
Two nice observations.
The body part run amok is a recurrent theme in imaginative (largely comic) fiction — usually, breasts or penises (which I’ve posted about), but anything is in principle possible.
The American obsession with size is astonishing — one of the central principles of American predatory capitalism is that if your company is not expanding, it’s failing — and leads to the contemptuous dismissal of anything *labeled* small, or even average. So all the labels are, absurdly, reset.
July 3, 2020 at 7:35 am
And some things come in a size bewilderingly labeled “regular”.