An excellent line of dactylic tetrameter — Navy flamingos and roseate spoonbills — featuring two strikingly pink birds, and these birds on fancifully patterned men’s swimwear and shorts. Then a bonus item that’s not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.
We begin with yesterday’s Daily Jocks ad, for the Elia beachwear company:
(#1) A not entirely human apparition on the beach, a superreal PlasticMan hunk, staring down fixedly at his big (artificially enhanced) package and at the wonderfully playful pink flamingos on his navy-blue swim briefs (note the typo flip fops, which I’ll get to in the bonus section)
The model has appeared in other Elia ads, looking more carnal and somewhat less like a dream creature, notably in my 7/4 posting “Pretty, and sometimes protuberant, in pink”, about Elia swimwear with enhancement cups:
(#2) Modeling the Kos Titan swim short in the Beach Unicorn pattern
Pink flamingos. Not merely brightly colored and remarkable birds, but also (now) an object of popular culure. From my 7/26/19 posting “On the lawn”, about, among other things, pink lawn flamingos and their cultural significance:
lawn flamingos aren’t presented as authentic flamingos; no one makes claims of flamingohood on their behalf. They are merely flamingoids.
(#3)
Lawn flamingos are “the stereotypical example of lawn kitsch”.
And beyond that, they are icons of camp; it’s now hard to view the actual birds without evoking this cultural context; roseate spoonbills, on the other hand, are just big remarkable pink birds.
(#4) Illustration from the public radio Living on Earth site “BirdNote®: Roseate Spoonbill: Hot Pink”, aired the week of 6/8/18
Delightfully, roseate spoonbills have made it into the world of men’s underwear, most notably in Patagonia’s men’s boxer briefs “Spoonbills” in “big sky bue”:
(#5)
Even better, there are shirts, “men’s lightweight A/C® buttondown shirts” (“Lightweight, relaxed-wearing 100% organic cotton shirt with an airy, open weave for hot and humid climates”). In this pattern:
(#6)
(I note that there are many wonderful other patterns in this collection.)
The typo bonus: flip fops. This section involves discussion in plain language of men’s bodies and mansex, and is not suitable for kids or the sexually modest, who therefore should now leave this posting.
It’s all about and get flip fops (instead of flip flops, referring to footwear). Two parts: fops; and flip fucks.
Fop. The briefest fop story, from NOAD:
noun fop: a man who is concerned with his clothes and appearance in an affected and excessive way; a dandy.
More detail from Wikipedia:
Fop became a pejorative term for a foolish man excessively concerned with his appearance and clothes in 17th-century England.
… The pejorative term today carries the connotation of a person, usually male, who is overly concerned with trivial matters (especially matters of fashion) and who affects elite social standing. The term also appears in reference to deliberately camp styles based on eighteenth-century looks.
… The fop was a stock character in English literature and especially comic drama, as well as satirical prints. He is a “man of fashion” who overdresses, aspires to wit, and generally puts on airs, which may include aspiring to a higher social station than others think he has. He may be somewhat effeminate, although this rarely affects his pursuit of an heiress. [extended presentation of examples from literature]
Fops certainly play at being effeminate, whatever their brand of masculinity (embracing styles of homomasculinity as well as heteromasculinity). Meanwhile, they are extravagantly ornamental.
Just two notes on foppishness. An excellent Ed Koren cartoon:
(#7) Koren’s site dates this as 1/15/13 “Fop’s Corner”
And then for foppishness as stage display, with all of its ambiguities, the performances of Prince:
(#8) Prince at the Forum in Inglewood CA 4/14/11
(Just a personal note to say how much I miss Prince.)
Flip fuck. (Not in HDAS or GDoS, as far as I can tell, and not in Sheidlower’s The F Word.) Sometimes it comes down to Urban Dictionary:
flip fuck: To alternate having the active role when two gays are having anal sex: Bob and Ted flip fucked all night long; every time one got close to cumming they changed positions and the other took his turn. (posted by dcnutzball 12/19/05)
The compound is long familiar to me from gay porn, where its referent is a common practice, often celebrated. It’s clearly based on flip-flop, as in flip-flop sex.
From my 2/20/20 posting “love nest”, about a context from the world of porn — remember that this is a fantasy world — in which flip fucks are not just routine, but an actual egalitarian moral value:
[Damien Crosse]’s porn films (especially for Raging Stallion) in which he seems to have insisted — probably working with pornstar and director Steve Cruz and other staff — that all the scenes be jam-packed with fucking, but framed as really energetic “sweet sex”: sexually democratic and celebratory (everybody fucks, but more importantly, everybody gets fucked, they’re all eager for it, and they all express deep pleasure in the act), and also (while the characters are nearly unhinged with desire and arousal) sexually considerate and attentive (not selfish).
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