Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(About men’s bodies, with allusions to mansex, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

The Daily Jocks 7/10 ad for two more items in the Elia beachwear company’s offerings for men: the Titan swim short in the (new) Turkish Tile pattern, worn by a model I pronounce to be a Turkish young man named Yusuf; and the Kos enhanced-cup swim brief in turquoise, worn by a (presumed) Romanian man I am calling Alexandru.

This is the fourth in a series of postings about Elia’s offerings, and I’m going to need to explain how Romania, Greece, and Turkey are all somehow mixed up in this. But first, the ad and a story I have spun about Yusuf and Alexandru in it.

(#1)

Ass pirates of the Aegean

Yusuf and Alexandru always
cruise the beach as a couple, offering
amiable buddyhood or
aggressive dominance,
whatever you need in the dunes

Things about the ad:

— the colors. I probably would have re-posted this ad just to celebrate the wonderfully  intense and eye-catching colors and patterns in the swimwear. Love the Turkish Tile, love the saturated turquoise; praise for the Elia designers.

— the facial expressions. Those narrowed eyes, which might just be from squinting into the sun, but in Alexandru’s case look a lot like a dominance display: it looks, in fact, like Alexandru is projecting a Cruise of Death. More below.

— the setting. On a beach (which could, of course, be anywhere, even just a stage setting in a studio). The Elia company is headquartered in Romania, which has its own beaches, on the Black Sea, but its ads are located in a fantasy world of the warm Aegean, further south: on the Greek isle of Kos, co-opted for the ads; and now on the (immediately adjacent) Turkish coast. In any case, remember this: Romania, Greece, Turkey (RGT, for short).

— the men’s bodies 1.  Elia men’s models in general are impressive examples of the swimmer body type: sleek (low body fat) and well-muscled but not obtrusively so, and so contrasting with the bodybuilder or muscle-hunk type, with the twink type, and with the bear type. (Personal note: I am an enthusiast for the swimmer body type.)

— the men’s bodies 2. Yusuf and Alexandru not only have swimmer’s bodies, those bodies are also utterly smooth and hairless. This despite the fact that a stereotype of men from RGT is that they are hot but mostly on the hairy side. (There is, of course, considerable variation on this dimension: smooth men from RGT are not rare.) More on this below. (Again, a personal note: like Esau, and unlike Jacob, who was a smooth man, I am an hairy man. It’s an Alpine thing.)

— the men’s bodies 3. The crotches. Yusuf is just a guy who looks great in swim shorts, but Alexandru, in his enhanced-cup swim briefs, is doing a flagrant dick display. See my earlier postings on Elia’s Kos enhancement cups (listed below).

— Yusuf and Alexandu as a with. People almost never look at an image without constructing some sort of story about what they’re seeing: where is this place? when did this happen? who are these people and how are they related to one another? what’s going on?

So Elia juxtaposes two models, advertising two different new pieces of swimwear, in a single ad, just for the company’s convenience. And viewers will be inclined to see them not merely as happening to be together, but being together together (as in “Are you two together?”), in what Erving Goffman once called a with, a unit (perhaps temporary) of social connection between two people.

And I ran with that instinct, devising a story — using the models’ remarkable bodies, Alexandru’s dick display, their narrowed eyes, the beach context — that treated the two men as a with: two buddies, maybe lovers, cruising the beach together as a couple, each offering his own flavor of sexual connection.

— and then the ass pirates. Yes, the title is a cheap play on Pirates of the Caribbean, but the lexical item ass pirate has a lot of interest on its own, given that its primary use seems to have come to be merely ‘homosexual man’, not specifically the much more transparent ‘insertive partner in male-male anal intercourse’. More below.

Gathering in the threads. Four items from the above, for greater exploration.

Thread 1: narrowed eyes. From my 5/26/18 posting “Porn for the holidays, with narrowed eyes”

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. … 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.

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

Thread 2: hairiness. Guys from RGT are stereotypically hot, but not stereotypically smooth (as in #1), though there are plenty of smooth men from the Mediterranean basin (my man Jacques — South of France in body type, sometimes looking North African — was one, though he had very nicely furry forearms).

Meanwhile, in the RGT gay world, there are movements to celebrate hairy men. For example, the Gay Romania Pride Facebook group, which is very much into hairy men. Two of their treasures, both cock-tease photos:

(#2)

(#3)

In contrast, from the Turkish Men Twitter account, the Turkish model and actor Caner Tanrıverdi (note dotless I in the second syllable),  model-smooth in a Speedo (but of course with facial hair):

(#4)

Meanwhile, back in Greece, the astoundingly steamy, and moderately furred, Greek male model Alexis Papas:

(#5)

(Oh my, the half-open mouth and wrinkled brows.)

Thread 3: earlier Elia postings. Three of them

— on 7/7/20 in “Pretty, and sometimes protuberant, in pink”:

From Romania, through the fabled sensuality of Greek islands in the Aegean, to you [in particular, Kos, right up against Turkey]: men’s swimwear that embraces playful pinkness while pushing enhancements of male genitals forward. The Elia swimwear company, in a series of ads on the Daily Jocks site.

— on 7/7/20 in “Navy flamingos and roseate spoonbills”, on the Navy Flamingo pattern (in swim briefs with enhancement cups)

— on 7/9/20 in “Midnight Tropics”, on swim briefs in the Midnight Tropics pattern, here focused on desirable male buttocks, but also with enhancement cups

Thread 4: ass pirates. From GDoS:

noun ass pirate (also arse pirate): (var. on arse bandit): a male homosexual [cited in dictionary collections from 1989, and other cites thereafter]

noun arse bandit (with other variants): a homosexual male [1st cite from 1962]

My notes: the general sense seems to be that of ‘male who engages in anal intercourse (in either role, not just insertive)’, though surely reference to insertive partners (who figuratively invade and take other men’s assholes, like pirates or bandits) is the basis for the compound; then extended to ‘homosexual male’, presumably in the belief that anal intercourse is the characteristic sexual act of gay men. In fact, fellatio is the routine, everyday, sexual act for most gay men, but for a variety of reasons, anal intercourse plays an outsized role in the public imagining of sex between men, as especially perverse and disgusting (and invasive of the body).

This entry was posted on July 13, 2020 at 9:02 am and is filed under Language and the body, Language of sex, Underwear. 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.