Today’s ad mailing from the Daily Jocks homowear company came with an artistic allusion (plus some fairly routine ad copy):
(#1) [ad copy:] 20% OFF – FETISHWEAR Welcome to The DailyJocks Backroom, from harnesses to wrestling suits, check out some of the most intimate products from your favourite brands including DJX, Nasty Pig & many more
It’s a grease monkey homage! To the Herb Ritts oeuvre, specifically to Fred with Tires, Hollywood 1984.
From my 2/1/22 posting “Who was that man?”:
(#2)
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Fred with Tires, Hollywood 1984 — on a poster for an exhibition in (apparently) 1988 (see “Herb Ritts” on this blog, in a 9/9/16 posting); the Getty description of Fred with Tires: “Muscular young man, wearing dogtags [AZ: as working-class insignia], work pants, and work boots, carrying two car tires, one in each hand” … The model called Fred is clearly a bodybuilder (the Getty’s “muscular young man”), and the pose is homoerotic (Ritts was openly gay, and an unashamed admirer of the male body) — notably homoerotic (with a cruise face on Fred) if you take this to be a photo of a grease monkey in his garage; but in fact we know this is posed and suspect that Fred is a fashion model in body-shop drag, so maybe that’s just a fashion-model glare, but, still …
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Two things. First thing, production values. Yes, the strategy of the DJ ads is to use maximum exposure of dick and ass — sometimes quite startlingly up against the line of what can be shown in public — to sell premium men’s underwear and various underwear-adjacent goods. The images, however, aren’t crude stuff at all, but carefully posed and framed, with the models coached in stances and facial expressions that will offer their bodies as prime objects of homo-lust
This means, incidentally, that DJ will offer a variety of types of bodies and presentations of them, to cater to the wide variety of tastes and fantasies among its customers. Something for everybody, as they say. As it happens, intense grease-monkey bodybuilders are not my thing at all, but I understand what #1 is offering and admire the craft that went into it. Other DJ ads speak to me deeply (though I’m not much of a customer, since I have what is surely a lifetime supply of entirely satisfying, and masculinely pretty, Tommy Hilfiger briefs).
In any case, the ads are high-quality professional work on everybody’s part.
Second thing, artistic values. They’re not just well done, they’re done with style and panache. Quite often, they’re self-consciously artistic, showing off their visual effects and making reference to the visual traditions of Western art, sometimes to specific art works — or (as in this case) giving a bow to earlier highlights from the world of male art.
Quite enjoyable stuff. I hope the art directors and photographers had some fun creating it for us.
Power to the Pouch. Premium men’s underwear ads, aimed at man-inclined guys like me, are heavily pouch-focused (first the face, then we get literally down to business), because that pouch contains the prize, holds the power of desire. Sometimes the prize is outlined in loving detail through the fabric of the pouch, sometimes the pouch is merely weighty with its contents. But the pouch is prominent.
Pouches then take on symbolic lives of their own, for some cohort of observers. With the result that guys like me are likely to see photos like the one below, from an Etsy ad that came in my mail today, in sexual terms:
(#3) [ad copy:] Soft, simple fabrics and neat natural dyes — name a more blissful combination. This Earth Month, support small shops and explore handcrafted creations colored with marigolds, indigos, and other earthly finds. Happy April!
Mesh shopping bags in attractive natural colors (and several sizes). Which sacophiles like me will be inclined to see as resembling genital pouches. Delightful, sweet genital pouches.
So I found the photo quite pleasing, even pacific (rather than urgently arousing). Considered as actual genital pouches, Golden Boy would be uncomfortably thick for me, Indigo Boy uncomfortably long, but as symbolic pouches just hanging down at rest, each of the five is beautiful, each in its own way.
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