(plenty of references to a wide rage of sexual practices, mostly between men (though not in street language), so dubious for kids and not for the sexually modest)
A e-mail ad today for a new t-shirt from the Peachy Kings shop: the SIR mesh football jersey ($40), with this pitch:
Yes SIR… we’ve got the top for you! Our new SIR mesh jersey will let everyone know who’s the boss! This top will get you all the attention this summer with its slinky sleeves, peek-a-boo mesh and slight-crop.
SIR now joins PK’s existing t-shirt labels GOOD BOY, PORN STAR, STUD, and TRASH, but with a sociolinguistic twist: sir is primarily an address term; unlike the count nouns boy, star, and stud, and the mass noun trash, it has virtually no uses as a referential common noun. In man-on-man sex, it’s used by a subordinate addressing a superordinate: a bottom to his top, a Boy to his Daddy, a sub(missive) to a dom(inant), a (sexual) slave to his master. I am Sir is used in bdsm contexts, but I am a sir ‘I am a top / Daddy / dom / master’ is decidedly odd.
Lexical matters. From NOAD:
noun sir: used as a polite or respectful way of addressing a man, especially one in a position of authority: excuse me, sir.
exclamation siree / sir: North American informal used for emphasis, especially after yes and no: he’s not the type to treat young employees like mud, no siree.
Images. So to push the topman / Daddy / dom / master reading for the t-shirt, the PK’s ad team used an overcoded topman for its primary image:
(#1) Shaved head, lots of tats, a heavy chain as collar, an intense facial expression, and, to hammer it home, a wristband on his left side, the side flagging top, dominant, and active roles in man-on-man sexual encounters
But the world, even PK’s world, is more complex than that, since the model in #1 isn’t scowling, or otherwise looking menacing, and since the site offers an alternative SIR-shirt guy who doesn’t tick any of the boxes that #1 scores on:
(#2) Styled hair, no tats, light chain (more like a necklace), half-smile (with smiling eyes), no wristband; he might be looking for a guy to call sir
To make things still more complex, the PK ad cycles through these two images interspersed with two other SIR-guys (images I’ve been unable to extract from the ad), one of which shows a guy a wristband on his right side, the side flagging bottom, submissive, and receptive roles in man-on-man sexual encounters. At which point, I begin to suspect they’re just playing with top ‘topwear’ (tees and tank tops) and top ‘insertive partner’, maybe in an extended sense.
About Peachy Kings. The company offers gay-male-themed apparel and accessories (tees and tanks, swim suits, shorts, calendars, postcards, etc.), especially those featuring Tom of Finland designs.
The name will suggest, from its pronunciation, the
adjectival phrase peachy keen: North American informal, dated very satisfactory; fine: I’m not saying everything is peachy keen (NOAD)
but is probably to be understood as conveying something like ‘butt masters’ (in emoji, 🍑 👑 👑), combining the adjective peachy derived from
US gay slang noun peach ‘the buttocks’ (esp. as the locus of anal intercourse) (brief entry in GDoS) — a metaphorical usage, with the buttocks image now associated with the peach emoji 🍑
and the head noun kings, the plural of the
noun king: 1 [b] a person or thing regarded as the finest or most important in its sphere or group: a country where football is king | the king of rock. (NOAD)
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