Two things about today. First, it’s Day 3 of the 12 Days of Commercial Christmas, celebrated on the Daily Jocks site with this vision of playfully phallic briefs (the Hot Dog pattern of Cheeky underwear by Maverick):
(#1) 🌭 🌭 Also available in trunks and jockstrap; and in a Peach pattern (the playfully pygic, or buttocks, counterpart to the phallic pattern above); more discussion below
The ad copy from DJ:
Look tasty in the new Maverick Cheeky Brief! Featuring a fun design of miniature hot dogs, this brief is fabulous and comfortable. / Made from a soft and stretchy material, the pouch features contrasting piping to accentuate your assets. / 88% Nylon, 12% Elastane
Second, it’s the traditional Nishi — Japanese for ‘west’ — Day in my household, the beginning of the 5-day drive from Columbus OH west to Palo Alto CA for winter quarter (matched by Higashi Day, March 15th, for the start of the return trip).
The Nishi drive began at 5 or 6 in the morning, in the dark, going west through Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, to St. Louis, then angling southwest through Missouri to Oklahoma (coming within a few miles of Arkansas, and so touching on the paths of the tornadoes that have so recently devastated parts of five states), down through Tulsa and Oklahoma City to the Texas panhandle (Amarillo!), and then more or less straight west through New Mexico (Albuquerque!) and Arizona (Flagstaff!) to California; up and over the Tehachapi Pass, down into the Central Valley, and west to the coast. Reunion with family and friends here.
The first time on this route in 1985. Jacques and I rented an apartment in a faculty house at Stanford, meanwhile finding and buying our own place in downtown Palo Alto for the following years. Toggled back and forth across the country for about ten years, eventually moved here full time in the fall of 1998, when Jacques went into a local dementia care facility.
I will say that we encountered some truly awful weather on the Nishi drive: ice storms on the Great Plains, ghastly tule fogs in California. Had one flat tire, in the middle of nowhere (but the interstate highways are well patrolled), somehow never had an accident of any kind. Those cross-country drives were by far the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done in my life; but the optimism and enthusiasm of (relative) youth carried us through. It’s all totally unimaginable to me now (Jacques died in 2003, I haven’t travelled anywhere since 2006, and I long ago gave up driving).
Maverick’s Cheeky line of underwear. The Peaches pattern close up, in a jockstrap, on the same model as in #1:
(#2) 🍑 🍑 More antic homowear, so that #1 and #2 together incorporate the two objects of gay male sexual desire: the crotch, with the penis within, in #1, and the buttocks, with the anus within, here
Maverick, and DJ, certainly know their audience. Note that the model’s body hair has been carefully trimmed, to what amounts to bodily scruff, to achieve the perfect balance between two brands of masculinity: smooth-bodied youth vs. hairy-chested maturity, the beautiful boy Apollo / Adonis vs. the powerful man Dionysus / Priapus.
(As always, I lament the absence of faces in these ad shots.)
(And note that I’ve coined the adjective pygic (from Greek pyg-os ‘buttocks’, with a Greek-derived suffix of resemblance –ic); pygian (from the Latin version pyg-a ‘buttocks’, with a Latin-derived suffix of resemblance –ian) would be an alternative. Neither is in the OED.)
December 28, 2021 at 8:43 am |
pygic [….] pygian
The OED has pygal which we could borrow from zoological use.
I’m surprised by the absence of callipygous (καλλίπυγος, kallípygos, ‘having beautiful buttocks’, an epithet of Aphrodite), which I distinctly remember coming across in Modernist lit. Callipygian is there, though.