Author Archive

Further adventures in Pouchland

July 21, 2020

(No street talk about men’s bodies or mansex, but the topic is men’s genitals displayed flagrantly though covertly — just barely covered — so this posting will not be to everyone’s taste.)

Following on my posting yesterday “Gay couple in Pouchland”, a report on two more pouch extravagances in the world of homo-inclined premium men’s underwear: one from the Austalian brand 2EROS, in their Aktiv NRG underwear line (trunk, brief, jockstrap) with “ventilated mesh panels”; and the other from the Daily Jocks DJX line, in their Amplify “lifting underwear” (jockstrap, brief, and trunk) — with the bonus of a hunky model with a sweetly furry belly (which will lead us to beer in Cleveland OH). (The Aktiv NRG model is extraordinarily, athletically, muscular, but he’s a smooth man.)

(more…)

But is it art? Two cartoon takes

July 21, 2020

In today’s cartoon feed, two contributions to the Is It Art? theme on this blog: from Rhymes With Orange (with a Caveman twist on the theme); and from Zippy the Pinhead (on responses to a public sculpture):

(more…)

Gay couple in Pouchland

July 20, 2020

… with vivid pops of genital color in their underwear, plus waistbands that celebrate peace and freedom, also exhibiting sharply differentiated roles in their relationship. Lots of stuff packed into just one Daily Jocks ad (for the Modus Vivendi Peace line of underwear) from 7/15. There will be plain talk about men’s bodies and mansex, so this posting is not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.

(more…)

Please don’t eat the flooring

July 20, 2020

Jeremy Nguyen in the 7/20/20 New Yorker:


(#1) “This is the precise reason I didn’t want bamboo flooring.”

Everybody knows that pandas eat bamboo, but what they eat is bamboo-bamboo, the shoots (and sometimes leaves and stems) of several bamboo species, not items made from the stems or fibers of the plant — furniture, other household furnishings, fabrics, and, yes, flooring.

Yes, the joke turns on a systematic metonymy, an ambiguity between reference to a plant and reference to items created from parts of that plant.

So: pandas and bamboo and metonymy too.

(more…)

Birdland

July 19, 2020

Two items, tenuously related by pigeons: an art exhibition of clay penguins (cf. clay pigeons); and the appearance of a cluster of birds on my patio this afternoon, including a pair of house finches (new to my place) and a mourning dove (the names dove and pigeon don’t correspond to any taxonomic distinction among the columbids), which methodically mined the patio territory for food for half an hour.

(more…)

Zipfixation

July 19, 2020

Today, Zippy returns to Billy’s Burg-O-Rama in Oxford MA (last visited in 2016), where he concludes that “Life is an endless panorama of o-rama word endings”:

(#1)

Against a background of the inventive food establishment name Burg-O-Rama, Zippy cites early examples of –orama words that served as the models for the development of the libfix -((o/a)r)ama.

(more…)

Buttocks IV: cake(s) and tail

July 18, 2020

(It’s about slang, but there are going to be buttocks, mostly men’s, some startlingly bare, so this posting will not to be everyone’s taste.)

Following up on yesterday’s posting “Buttocks III: (mainstream) art, male art, porn”, Timothy Riddle offered some recently fashionable slang for ‘buttocks’: the M(ass) noun cake, as used by (straight) pornstar Johnny Stone (who has a famously fine ass, and is proud of it, even though it’s not an especially relevant feature in his porn work); and by DC Comics on its Twitter site, showing a photo of the superhero Nightwing (the former Robin / Dick Grayson), played by Brenton Thwaites, who’s also famous for his fine ass, which is much featured on the series.

So: into still more buttocks slang, both M cake and (more commonly) PL C(ount) cakes.

(more…)

Buttocks III: (mainstream) art, male art, porn

July 17, 2020

A follow-up to two earlier postings today, about art works of various kinds focused on the male buttocks. The first, “Buttocks display” was largely about men’s premium underwear ads celebrating male buttocks — work by professional photographers (using professional models), carefuly posed and lit, and often very artfully framed, but also clearly attentive to the sexual desirability of the models’ bodies. Art with a homoerotic eye. One brand of what is known as male art. (For a collection of books on the genre, see the Page on Male art on this blog.)

The second posting, “The art of the buttocks”, looked at some mainstream art — notably, paintings by the early 19th-century artist William Etty (who specialized in nudes of all sorts).

And then there’s frank (gay) porn, in which buttocks play a central role (because anal intercourse does). Covered very extensively on this blog (see the Page on pornstars on this blog).

(more…)

The art of the buttocks

July 17, 2020

In response to my “Buttocks Display” posting this morning, Sim Aberson wrote to say he expected the posting would have been about this entertaining (but superficial) posting on the Nerdist site, “Museums Fight Over Who Has the Best Butt Art” by Lindsay Romain on 7/8.

Now, I was providing an annotated inventory, specifically of my blog postings (not of the literature in general), specifically on male buttocks displayed as objects of sexual desire, but that’s just one small corner of the world of male nudes in art. In fact, the Nerdist piece is even more general than that.

(more…)

Buttocks display

July 17, 2020

(Warning: below the fold, naked male buttocks displayed as objects of sexual desire — so not to everyone’s taste.)

An announcement of a new Page on this blog (in the “Xblog essays” section, of rough-edged gay stuff), inventorying postings — annotated, with quotations — on the display of male buttocks as objects of sexual desire. From the prefatory material:

postings listed here are from AZBlog; postings on the LiveJournal blog AZBlogX — http://arnold-x-zwicky.livejournal.com — routinely show buttocks as objects of sexual desire, in displays of the body and in depictions of mansex

this Page is a work in progress; the first draft listed postings only from 8/11/17; earlier postings are added from time to time

(more…)