Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(Substantial section on English syntax and semantics, but even that is about raunchy sexual vocabulary — so it’s pretty much wall to wall about sex between men, in street language, with photos: absolutely inappropriate for kids or the sexually modest)

What got me into this was the cover of a CockyBoys gay porn DVD Flipping Out (#1 below, after the fold), showing two men engaged in the variety of anal intercourse known as Asian Cowboy. More descriptively, Squatting Cowboy: the receptive man rides the insertive man’s penis roughly the way a cowboy rides his horse, by sitting on it — in this case, from a squatting position. In plain Cowboy, the receptive guy lowers himself onto his ride while kneeling, so in more descriptive terminology, that’s Kneeling Cowboy.

I was struck by the photo because the Cowboy sex positions hold a special resonance for me, and because I’d been looking for Cowboy illustrations in which the insertive guy is sitting up (in a chair or on a sofa), a position that invites the men to kiss, the way my man Jacques and I did when we enjoyed Cowboying together. The cover of Flipping Out gives me just what I was looking for, in an especially attractive and wonderfully intimate composition of bodies.

Then, as a linguistic bonus, there’s the verb to flip-fuck, played with in the DVD’s title.

Flipped Out fucking. The DVD (directed by Jake Jaxson; I haven’t been able to find a release date), with 4 flip-fuck episodes: Alex Mecum + Jack Hunter, Jacen Zhu + Jack Hunter, Josh Moore + Ricky Roman, Ashton Summers + Calvin Banks

(#1) Ricky Roman riding Josh Moore’s dick; they can smell each other’s breaths as they prepare to kiss (squatting gives the guy getting fucked the feeling of floating on his fucker’s cock, but it can be hard on the thigh and calf muscles — which is why Roman is steadying himself with one hand on the chair and resting his knee against Moore’s shoulder, while Moore is holding Roman’s ankle)

A more spontaneous moment, from the actual DVD; you can see that the men are fucking in a chair in front of a big uncurtained window:

(#2) Ecstatic faces on both of them

And then, since this is a flip-fuck flick — I’m sorry, the phrase was inevitable — a screen shot of Roman fucking Moore, but doggie-style:

(#3) Doggie and missionary seem to be the everyday fuck positions for male couples who are into fucking

Background on this blog. My 8/25/21 posting “Sexual notes from 6/5” combined a posting on my man Jacques’s death day — and my raunchy recollections of getting lovingly Cowboy-fucked by him — with a posting about Asian Cowboy and its variants. The illustration there of Asian — Squatting — Cowboy:

(#4) [from caption:] an especially intimate photo — the men, similar in body types and presentations, though contrasting in race, are about to kiss — and very nicely composed; the fuckhole appears to be floating on his fucker’s cock

The fucker here is supine (though with his head raised some), which means that his hole has to scissor his body forward to kiss him. Things are much easier when the fucker is sitting up, as in #1.

Here ends the visual portion of the program. On to the verbal portion.

The title. Titles of porn flicks make a topic all their own. Some are baldly descriptive (Bareback Hospital Orgy, which entertains me enormously, I’m not sure why), often using raw language (Cum Whores); some are clever in one way or another, often just by using a formulaic expression with a sexual pun in it (Cocked and Loaded). Flipping Out uses the idiom flip out, but just to allude to flip-fucking, which is the actual theme of the DVD. From NOAD:

verb flip out: suddenly lose control or become very angry: she would have flipped out if someone had done this to her.

The image of losing control during sex might be in there somewhere, but mostly, I think, it’s just a way to use the verb flip in the title.

Specialized vocabulary. The first thing to say about to flip-fuck ‘to alternate acting in the insertive role in anal sex between men’ is that it seems not not have appeared in any dictionary assembled by lexicographers, including GDoS, which casts a very wide net on slang, and Sheidlower’s The F Word. Sheidlower does have the adj./adv. flipping, a chiefly British euphemism for exclamatory (not sexual) fucking (this item, might, of course, contribute to enjoyment of the DVD’s title).

The second thing to say is that this lexical lacuna surely isn’t an accident. The fact is that in real life, flip-fucking is not unknown, but seems to be rare. It’s not a thing, as they say. The cocksucking counterpart to flip-fucking, on the other hand — called trading blow jobs — is a commonplace. Not universal among gay men, but certainly commonplace, a routine way to manage “you get me off, I’ll get you off” (in 69ing, the two of you manage this simultaneously, but at the cost of seriously divided attention, while in trading blow jobs, doing things sequentially, each of you is more focused).

The place where flip-fucking is a thing is gay porn. In #1, “everybody gets fucked in this one!”, and fully democratic fucking is a theme in a whole subgenre of gay porn. From my 9/15/20 posting “Tom of Finland at 100”:

It’s all extravagant fantasy, but also a celebration of gay male desire and affiliation in all of its forms, and so it has provided reassurance to untold numbers of gay men who scarcely resemble the fantasy sexually heroic figures of ToF — we are, variously, indetectable in the straight world and effeminate and dorky and little-dicked and horse-dicked and insecure and out-and-proud and full of shame — but can find in these figures validation of their desires and practices (notably, receptive anal intercourse: Real Men Take It Up the Ass).

Meanwhile, flip-fucking  shows a whole lot of fucking, a whole lot of dick for the viewers to enjoy. So you get a lot of it in gay porn, not so much in real life. And to flip-fuck ends up being part of the specialized vocabulary of gay porn.

Syntactic and semantic notes.

The central item. (a) intr. flip-fuck ‘to alternate acting in the insertive role in anal sex between men’:  Harry and Joe flip-fucked; The two boys flip-fucked; Guys were flip-fucking in the mensroom; The staff were flip-fucking right there in the office

This is a plain intransitive, with no non-SU arguments. The subject is plural and are understood to be engaging in this sexual activity in pairs.

The abbreviated item. (b) intr. flip, the clipped variant of (a): Joe and Harry flipped; The two boys flipped; Guys were flipping in the mensroom; The staff were flipping right there in the office

This variant requires sufficient context to prepare the audience for the sexual sense of the verb flip, as opposed to its many other senses.

The oblique-object intransitive. (c) intr. flip-fuck, with an OO marked by the preposition with. Joe flip-fucked with Harry. Of the two participants in the act of flip-fucking, the SU of this verb denotes one of them, the OO the other.

Semantic note: it then follows that: X flip-fucked with Y ⊃ Y flip-fucked with X

An example from text (about gay porn, of course):

Manny is Sean Cody’s most consistently great versatile star — he flip-fucked with Kurt back in January — and he’s back today in his 35th scene to flip-fuck with similarly vers[atile] and similarly hot Josh. (link)

(And this of course has an abbreviated variant, as in Joe flipped with Harry.)

The plain intransitive understood with oblique object. (d) intr. flip-fuck as in (c) with Indefinite OO Omission. He’s flip-fucked before ‘He’s flip-fucked with a guy / guys before’.

The pseudo-transitive in the WAY construction. (e) flip-fuck one’s way + goal complement. He flip-fucked his way into the elite of porn (roughly) ‘He got into the elite of porn by flip-fucking’.

An example from text (about gay porn):

a busy guy – he’s flip fucked his way across the stable of Seancody studs (link)

Finally, I suppose inevitably, a transitive (DO) variant of the intransitive OO construction. (f) trans. flip-fuck. Joe flip-fucked Harry. The SU denotes one participant in the act of flip-fucking, the DO the other.

Semantic note: it then follows that: X flip-fucked Y ⊃ Y flip-fucked  X.

An example from text (again, about gay porn):

There’s nothing like a Cocksure Man and that’s exactly where Bennett got his XXX start when he flip fucked AJ Irons in Irons’ Men. (link)

No doubt this just scratches the surface of the relevant phenomena; it’s just what I found in 3 or 4 hours of searching.

And then the important caution: this constellation of constructions (with their semantics) isn’t a random assortment of idiosyncrasies that somehow fell from the sky. By and large, there are larger  generalizations here about English syntax and semantics, of which these phenomena are instances. I have to leave the development of these ideas to other hands (I’m not coping even minimally with the projects on my desk, but I hope to spur interest in this one).

This entry was posted on October 3, 2021 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Abbreviation, Facial expression, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Idioms, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Syntax. 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.