(much talk of men’s bodyparts and some of man-on-man sex, much of it in street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
Background: from Benjamin Dreyer on Facebook yesterday (5/7), about assless:
— BD: My gosh, I’m in the dictionary.
(#1) From Merriam-Webster online
And my comment:
— AZ: why do I find no citations (anywhere I can see) of hyperbolic bodypart assless ‘having minimal buttocks’, esp. in assless Irishman (used ruefully by some Irish American men I know)?
The answer, my friend, is not blowin’ in the wind, but
having a flat butt / ass, often described as having no butt / ass, but apparently never as being buttless or assless, who knows why
So, in the Urban Dictionary for flat ass by DzNutz on 1/20/04:
Having no ass or junk in the trunk.
And from Men’s Health, “The Man With No Butt” by Mike Bender on 12/17/25, with the subtitle:
My flat ass has haunted me since high school. So I did what any man would do and sought out some wisdom from the Internet. This is the story of my midlife butt crisis.
With this embarrassing (but alliterative) tale from high school:
One fateful morning during my sophomore year, I was standing at my locker wearing a pair of saggy-bottomed Gap khakis when I heard giggles behind me. The distinctive sound of teenage girls discovering something hilarious and vaguely cruel.
“Oh my God,” one of them said. I froze.
“He has no butt!” another voice announced with the confidence of a scientist making a groundbreaking discovery. More giggling. Then came the death blow that would echo through the halls of my high school for the next two and a half years:
“No-Butt Bender!”
Chaps and jockstraps — and Robert Conrad and his kind. To start with, my 2/21/23 posting “Explorations in abessive clothing”, in which I draw a distinction between items of clothing that are missing some part vs. people who are missing some item of clothing. And then on to people who have some minimal bodypart and so are said, hyperbolically, to be missing that bodypart. And then from people missing some bodypart in this fashion to a contrast with people who are amply endowed with this bodypart (which is where actor Robert Conrad and his ass come into the story).
From the abessive clothing posting:
About items of clothing or parts of such items that are missing, lacking, absent. (I’ll explain the adjective abessive in a moment; it does some of the work of the English derivational suffix –less or the preposition without, but is of wider applicability.) Two topics in this area are standing preoccupations of this blog: (re: absent items of clothing) male shirtlessness; and (re: absent parts of items of clothing) the assless / bottomless / backless nature of jockstraps.
The actual entry point to this posting came on Facebook on 5/9/19, when John Dorrance asked about the first use of assless chaps and Season Devereux responded ,”Aren’t all chaps assless though?” To which I replied:
Yes indeed. The assless in assless chaps is an appositive, rather than restrictive, modifier — used to remind the hearer that chaps do in fact lack an ass, or to emphasize this fact in context — cf. appositive ‘chaps, which are assless’ vs. restrictive ‘chaps that are assless’, which is pleonastic.
It will take a little while to work up to chaps as abessive clothing: in this case, an item of clothing that lacks one of its parts (they’re assless) — in fact lacks two, since they’re also crotchless (chaps are essentially outerwear leggings of leather, held up by a belt).
… So: welcome to the world of abessive clothing, of two types, which I’ll refer to as the shirtless type (with reference to the wearer of an item of clothing, conveying that they are without this item, that they do not have this item on, that they are missing this item) and the assless type (with reference to an item of clothing, conveying that it is without some part, that it doesn’t have this part, that this part is missing).
… a routine example, of a relatively canonical jockstrap:
(#2)
[the item of clothing is assless, but the man is very much not; he’s callipygian ‘having well-shaped buttocks’; similarly for these chaps (in rear view), as worn by a callipygian model:]
(#3)
The adjective callipygian applies to a person; what’s the adjective for the buttocks themselves? For ample buttocks, especially in a man.
In many cases, the adjectives that are used are merely those of high aesthetic evaluation. So, in my 4/21/24 posting “Acting Corps: Robert Conrad”, we get:
his ass was hot — a prime-grade index of masculinity; [his] legendary butt, [his] incredible butt, what is possibly the finest ass in Golden Age TV history
Elsewhere, exemplary asses on men are described as muscular (distinguishing them from attractive asses on women):
muscular glutes, muscular male buttocks
his (beautiful) fuckable ass (cf. NOAD‘s entry for the adjective fuckable: vulgar slang (of a person) sexually attractive)
That is, both handsome and useful / functional / utilitarian. In a version I first heard as applied to me, at the gay baths, long ago in an earlier life. (As I was reminded by a gay friend many years ago: Remember, you’re not just a wonderful human being, you’re also a piece of meat. Well, actually, two pieces of meat: your cock and your ass.)
May 8, 2026 at 10:45 am |
Thank you for the reference to your article on “abessive”. As a student of Russian (long, long ago) and curiosity about languages in general, I found it a fascinating exposition in the domain of cases.