Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(Men’s genitals, man-on-man sex, lots of street talk about them, entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.)

The Merry Homomonth of May on my two male calendars for 2022: the Tom of Finland calendar (which is mostly free of naughty bits) in my living room, where visitors (I do have an occasional one) can see it; the Cocky Boys / CockyBoys / Cockyboys calendar (which is all about the naughty bits) stashed away in my bedroom, where it can be viewed from my bed and so can provide me with an inspirational penis boost as called for by the exigencies of the moment.

So, in order: the ToF, which turns out to be primarily (though not exclusively) about gay men’s nipples, or tits, as we usually call them (metonymically); and then three months of CockyBoy cocks (April through June).

Work my tits, man! The ToF page for May, plus the ToF illustration for February (which I haven’t posted about before), also about tits:

(#1) The mantit action: R is sucking L’s right tit, while L is grabbing R’s left pec; but then the drawing shows a moment in a larger story, in which a great deal more is happening (to start with, R appears to be en route to fucking L)

(#2) The mantit action: R (the subject of the drawing), his body arched back, is having his left tit tweaked and his right pec grabbed by M; but much else is going on at the very moment of the drawing (to start with, R is getting fucked by M)

Artistic notes 1. Some scratches on the surface; there’s aways a lot to say about ToF.

First, his drawings are formal compositions of bodies, carefully arranged, with echoes (sometimes very specific echoes) of paintings, drawings, and sculptures in the traditions of Western art since the Renaissance. On occasion, the elegance of composition can quickly overshadow the sexual acts being depicted; I responded at first to the May drawing as an artful arrangement of forms, quite satisfying in its planes and surfaces — so much so that I was startled back to carnal reality by the realization that, Jesus Christ, the men are working each other’s tits and pecs, that R is masturbating L, and that R’s proprietary hand on L’s ass signals that R is about to get fucked. They are getting down and dirty with one another, in public, outdoors.

Meanwhile, the raw materials of the compositions are male faces and male bodies, usually arranged so that each of these two components tells its own story; this is dramatically so in the February drawing (see below).

The bodies are composed of rounded forms, with the surface sensuousness of female nudes (where breasts and buttocks rule), except that these forms are rock-solid, outsized male muscles: in shoulders, upper arms, torsos, and, especially asses. These guys are fantasy muscle-hunks, and they look beautiful. Looking at them can get you flipping back and forth between seeing a gorgeous rolling landscape of rounded forms and seeing hugely powerful hyper-hunks. Well, both are there.

Second, his drawings also depict formal arrangements of emotions, of men’s relationships and their roles in them. These are usually complex and often surprising. Again, the double view.

Take the May drawing. At first, you say, R is in charge, dominant, and sexually the top (I mean, L doesn’t even have pants of any kind on, is going around essentially naked, he’s perched on R’s knee, and he’s about to get fucked by R.

Ah, but look again. R is sexually servicing one of L’s tits, he’s jacking L off. And the visual signals give L the upper hand across the board: his face is one of the foci of the drawing (while R’s face is obscured), his body makes the main axis of the drawing, he’s a whole head above R in the drawing. He’s the subject of this drawing, it’s about him (with R in a supporting role).

And then you understand that L is getting R to give him what he wants. He has a powerful desire to get fucked and is firmly directing R to provide that service, as a sequel to the tit-sucking and hand job R is already giving him.

But R is no subservient cream puff here. He is, in fact, a ToF-standard Top Man, the tough guy you don’t fuck with because he actually fucks you. He’s the embodiment of ToF’s real-life fantasies of powerful men dominating and using him.

The thing is, R is both things at once.

Meanwhile, L is going to get most satisfactorily fucked, and he will probably thank R for the wonderful fuck, for the great job R did for him.

(Those of you who know me will recognize that emotionally I’m L. Physically, nobody is quite as perfect as L, certainly not me.)

Also: we don’t get to see the men’s cocks here, but we know that since all this is taking place in ToF-Land, everybody has a cock of truly super-human dimensions; none of us will ever encounter men like L and R in this regard, and that’s surely a good thing. I note, however, that ToF’s choosing not to show dick in some of his more artfully composed drawings is an artistic decision, and a canny one: much as ToF himself and his target audience adored dick, super-cocks in these compositions would probably have diverted attention from the formal and emotional landscapes he wanted to depict. Those gigantic organs are just too insistent, too demanding of our attention, better to keep them out of sight for the moment.

Artistic notes 2. About the February drawing. And how the faces and the bodies tell two different but interlocking stories. Which I will now explore just a little bit by extracting those two portions of #2, with my commentary in the captions.

(#3) Three men, three facial types, three facial expressions, three angles of presentation; the ecstatic blond R (sexual ecstasy and blondness being conventional markers of femininity in men), with his extraordinarily powerful neck and prominent Adam’s apple both signals of high masculinity, is totally the focus of the composition (meanwhile, he’s having his tits and pecs manhandled, and he’s getting fucked by M, presumably having the time of his life) — compare L in #1

(#4) A landscape of rounded man-muscle, from which two foci emerge: L’s right tit and M’s beautifully muscular ass; here, R is just part of the setting for the other two bodies (also note the aesthetically satisfying fit of male pelvis to male buttocks in this position for ass-fucking; surely god must have made us that way on purpose, it’s so perfect (as one of my boyfriends wryly observed)

The nipple thing. Three previous postings on this blog with relevant material.

— from my 5/24/21 posting “The Ecstasy of St. Atlas:

In the case of nipple play, pleasurable stimulation can give way to (often pleasurable) pain. … The pleasurable stimulation can be autoerotic, stroking or otherwise playing with your nipples. So can pain; you can apply nipple clamps — even just clothespins — to your own nipples. Or, of course, the pain can be part of a sub + dom scene with a partner.

— from my 1/25/22 posting “I love you a nipple and a pec”, on papillary pleasures (among other things):

there are men who are into getting or giving nipple stimulation as a (minor-league) sexual act … Men who are into this sort of play are known as nipple pigs, nippigs, or (metonymically) titpigs … Nip play can also be a solitary pleasure (nipple self-play) — stroking and pinching — usually combined with masturbation. And of courshere are BDSM variants of all of this

— from my 4/11/22 “This is gonna hurt, bro”, with a section on tit torture and devices for providing it, in a subsection on one stage of nipple torture:

note that your tits have now been damaged to some degree; the damage is temporary, your tits will heal, but they have been damaged. (Some men embrace this damage, cultivate it, work to build up scar tissue that will give them thick, long, hard tits. Yes, yes, tits like little dicks, tits that other men can suck on like cocks, for mutual pleasure.)

CockyBoys cock. I start with the calendar photos for April, May, and June. The top sections, with the faces, are below, as #5-7; the bottom sections, with the cocks, are in an AZBlogX posting yesterday (“Dick Days at CockyBoys”, here) , as #1-3 there.

(#5) April: Sean Ford and Angel Rock. On the dicks: cut Ford and uncut Rock, both hanging down, long and sleek: classic pornstar dicks on two contrasting young men

(#6) May: Brock Banks. On the dick and the porn persona: Banks, thick, uncut, and notably veined: more mature model, more mature dick, lightly furred body

(#7) June: Blake Mitchell. On the dick and the porn persona: Mitchell, uncut, very thick and upstanding: earnest young man with kissable mouth seeks hot ass to fuck like a sledge hammer

(#8) On Lips Together (a sweet gay courtship drama, with very hot sex, also well acted; both Ford and Rock view their acting as a craft, and their performance of sexual acts as another craft), see my 6/4/21 posting “Fox and friends I” (Ford is the fox)

In any case, Ford and Rock are very good at what they do; not only do I truly enjoy the little romantic drama they play out in Lips Together,  the video has gotten me off quite a few times. I looked forward to an April in which the Ford-Rock team would help to bring me rapid ejaculational pleasure at (roughly) dawn and dusk, on a regular basis. This was not to be. I found the dicks in the photo — dicks I treasured in action in Lips Together — unarousing, and that was distressing. (Your mileage might vary, of course; I’m giving you a report, not advice.)

The dicks are even nicely paired: Ford’s about an inch shorter than Rock’s, cut to Rock’s uncut, slimmer and more elegant than Rock’s thicker dick. If you’re into size, Rock would be a good man for you; he’s short, so his 7ʺ pornstar-standard dick looks truly impressive. All of this is wonderful, I’m a dick-loving faggot, these guys have equipment that’s both fine and familiar and nicely contrasted too — but in the photo those dicks just looked — to me — like lifeless dangly bits somehow attached to Ford and Rock’s very attractive bodies. (In contrast, thank god, for this month Brock Banks was shot offering a pulsingly warm and tempting dick, with visible veining and a very long foreskin — a dick that has already worked for me, and this is only the third day of the month.)

You can see the calendar for May, in situ in an intimate corner of my bedroom, in this photo of mine:

(#9) The man of the CockyBoys homomonth is always there for me; as a further plus, Banks has been posed with slightly parted lips and somewhat narrowed eyes, giving some subtle cues of a sexual persona (I really really want to have readable faces, indeed faces that read as open, available, likable, and amiable)

One website selling calendars advertises the Cocky Boys calendars as “art-house erotica” that’s “perfect for the bedroom or den” — so I’ll want to have a few words here (well, in a bonus section at the end of this posting) about the term den as, in NOAD’s careful second definition,

informal a small, comfortable room in a house where a person can pursue an activity in private.

(in the calendar world, a room serving as a private place for private parts); and also note that “art-house erotica” refers here to professionally done photographs with a laser-like focus on dick, dick, dick (well, why are they called Cocky Boys?), to the point where the models are posed with neutral, mostly unreadable, facial expressions (not a one of the 2022 models is smiling), presumably so as not to detract from the lure of the fabulous phalluses. A presentational strategy that seems to have backfired for me: my well-documented peniphilia is totally overwhelmed by my fascination with people’s faces, so I pretty much disregard the dicks, in order to struggle to wrest some kind of content from the faces.

In fact, when I cropped some of the photos to isolate the cocks — they’re in yesterday’s AZBlogX posting — I discovered that the calendars provide a fine sampling of the variety in mostly Euro white-boy dicks with pornstar dimensions (this is a gigantic niche market). Some quite moving for a person with my genital tastes. (I note that it’s quite easy to pursue cock-lust as a pleasant diversion in the midst of a complex and busy life; I mean, it takes less time than doing the housework, and as a mental activity it can run in parallel with lots of other lines of thought.)

Bonus: den, living room, parlo(u)r. Three lexical items in the semantic domain of rooms in domestic housing: the term den is metaphorical, based on a similarity to the lairs of wild animals; the term parlo(u)r is metonymical, associating the room with the activity of talking (via the French verb); the term living room is a specialized N + N compound, with basic meaning ‘a room for living (in)’ (living as opposed to eating, sleeping, bathing, etc.). But that’s etymology; this is usage

My initial impression was that dens, under that name, were American things from the mid-20th century. Which was, of course, where I came across the word. So my impression was merely a reflection of my experience; in reporting it, I was acting like an ordinary person, not a lexicography-adjacent linguist.

Ordinary people go on their personal experiences — I mean, what else could they do? They have no panoptic view of usage at different times and places and in different communities (they do have hints in the variation they hear around them, but they have no systematic knowledge, nor any easy way to come by such a thing — nor much reason to seek it out).

But as a lexicography-adjacent linguist, I actually have ways to get something more like a panoptic view. And my sources tell me that room-den has been around a long time.

From NOAD:

noun den: [a] a wild animal’s lair or habitation. [b] informal a small, comfortable room in a house where a person can pursue an activity in private. [c] a place where people meet in secret, typically to engage in some illicit activity: an opium den | a den of iniquity.[d] mainly US a small subdivision of a Cub Scout pack.

OED2 under den:

3. c. colloquial. A small room or lodging in which a man can seclude himself for work or leisure; as, ‘a bachelor’s den’. [all the cites:]

1771 T. Smollett Humphry Clinker I. 238 So saying, he retreated into his den.

1816 W. Scott Let. 26 Nov. (1933) IV. 302 A little Boudoir..a good eating-room and a small den for myself in particular.

1882 Blackwood’s Edinb. Mag. Dec. 709 [He] went off in the direction of his own den, a little room in which he smoked and kept his treasures.

Then we look at the longer treatment in Wikipedia, we see, first of all, quite significant variation. In the details of the referents (in the association with men, as in OED2, for example), in the functions to which dens are put, and in way in which a conceptual distinction between kinds of activities for which we have the labels private and public enters into the matter:

A den is a small room in a house where people can pursue activities in private.

In North America, the type of rooms described by the term den varies considerably by region. It is used to describe many different kinds of bonus rooms, including family rooms, libraries, TV rooms, home cinemas, spare bedrooms, studies or retreats.

… In some places, particularly in parts of the British Isles, a small den may be known as a snug.

While living rooms tend to be used for entertaining company on formal occasions, dens, like other family rooms, tend to lean toward the more informal. In houses that do not have dedicated family rooms or recreation rooms, a den may fill that niche. Dens can also be private areas primarily used by adult members of the household, possibly restricting access to the room by their children. Dens with home theatre systems and large screen televisions may be referred to as media rooms instead.

Dens can serve the same purpose as cabinets in the past, becoming a modern man cave — a place for men to gather and entertain. In such cases, the design and decor may be distinctively masculine.

All of this is amplified enormously for parlo(u)r. The short take from NOAD:

noun parlor: 1 dated a sitting room in a private house: they had lunch in the parlor | [as modifier]:  she knocked on the parlor door. 2 [a] a room in a public building for receiving guests: the mayor’s parlor. [b] a room in a monastery or convent that is set aside for conversation. 3 [usually with modifier] a shop or business providing specified goods or services: a funeral parlor | an ice cream parlor. 4 (also milking parlor) a room or building equipped for milking cows.

But then we have a little essay from OED3 (June 2005) on the noun parlour / parlor (the history of usages suggesting a tension between places to talk in private and places for public talk):

A. I. 2. b. In a private house: a sitting room; esp.the main family living room, or the room reserved for entertaining guests (now somewhat archaic). …

Often, before c1700, applied to a bedroom, but thereafter most commonly used of a sitting room. N.E.D. (1904) noted that parlour was in that period (i.e. the late 19th and early 20th cent.) the name given to ‘the ordinary sitting-room of the family, which, when more spacious and handsomely furnished, is usually called the drawing-room.’  Cent. Dict. (1890) recorded that ‘In the United States, where the word drawing-room is little used, parlor is the general term for the room used for the reception of guests’. In English regional use the word was formerly applied spec. to the inner or more private room of a two-roomed house, cottage, or small farmhouse, which was variously used (according to locality, affluence of household, etc.) as the living room of the family (as distinct from the kitchen), or as the ‘best room’ (as distinct from the ordinary living room). [1st cite 1448]

Given all this, you should be very reluctant to ask what parlo(u)r really means.

Things don’t really get better for living room, except that OED3 lacks the essay. And that now instead of the private / public distinction, we get the general / specific and informal / formal distinctions (much unpacking of concepts needed in all three cases):

NOAD: noun living room: a room in a house for general and informal everyday use: the apartment has a comfy living room with sofas, chairs, TV, and dining table.

OED3 (Dec. 2016): 1. A room in a house for general and informal everyday use (as opposed to a bedroom, dining room, etc.). Also U.S.: a more formal room, used for receiving guests. …

This entry was posted on May 3, 2022 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Categorization and Labeling, Compounds, Effeminacy, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, It's Just Stuff, Language and the body, Male art, Masculinity, Metaphor, Metonymy, My life, Semantics of compounds. 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.