Archive for the ‘Clothing’ Category
December 4, 2019
A generic penguin ban sign (sold on Amazon, a CD Visionary no-penguins button):
(#1) What’s banned? Spheniscid birds. Why? Who knows. (They smell. They steal fish. They get underfoot. Whatever.)
and a ban — in a list of prohibitions against public vice or indecency — on the door of Loretta’s Authentic Pralines on N. Rampart St. in New Orleans (photo from the TripAdvisor South Africa site):
(#2) What’s banned? Who knows. Why? Because they’re a vice (like drinking or smoking) or are indecent (like profanity or nudity), presumably the latter.
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Posted in Clothing, Context, Language and food, Metaphor, Penguins, Race and ethnicity, Relevance, Semantics, Slang, Sociocultural conventions | 2 Comments »
November 25, 2019
A return to the subject of my 3/10/16 posting “Male beauty”, on cultural categorizations of attractiveness and masculinity, primarily as evidenced in facial characteristics. Adding to the mix (a) yesterday’s posting on my man Jacques Transue as a young “dreamboat” (“Him, 55 years ago”); and (b) repeated passing references here to the Clint Eastwood of the tv series Rawhide (1959-66) as “young and beautiful, but ruggedly handsome”.
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Posted in Actors, Categorization and Labeling, Facial expressions, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Photography, Shirtlessness | 1 Comment »
November 20, 2019
(Later in this posting there are a couple of raunchy men’s underwear ads, and some cautiously worded references to men’s bodies and mansex, so some readers might want to exercise caution.)
Ruthie and Joe in the One Big Happy from 10/9:
(#1)
Three senses of (ir)regular in just four panels. All traceable ultimately to the Latin noun regula ‘rule’, with rule understood as in NOAD:
noun rule: 1 [a] one of a set of explicit or understood regulations or principles governing conduct within a particular activity or sphere: the rules of the game were understood. [b] a principle that operates within a particular sphere of knowledge, describing or prescribing what is possible or allowable: the rules of grammar. …
The range of senses of regular is impressively large, and illustrates a whole variety of mechanisms of semantic change; the three senses above are a microcosm of this greater world.
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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Clothing, Homosexuality, Inflection, Language change, Language in advertising, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Metonymy, Movies and tv, Underwear | 2 Comments »
November 18, 2019
(Hunky young men with very little on, in a sexualized context, so not for everyone.)
The Daily Jocks ad for 11/13, with ad copy, plus a caption, and then further illustrations for the caption:
(#1) “Introducing the Covert collection by [fantasy homowear company] CellBlock13: This jockstrap features a snap off pouch made of luxuriously smooth coated PU [polyurethane] that showcases your goods just right, and extra-soft fleece w/ u-bulge on the inside will feel great against your package. Available in Red, Blue & Khaki.”
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Posted in Books, Captions, Gender and sexuality, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
October 31, 2019
For the dead season, Grim Reaper cartoons from Will McPhail. For today, Halloween, the GR goes trick-or-treating in the city:
(#1) ReaperWeen in McPhailia
And for tomorrow, the Day of the Dead, a whole series about the GR searching for a fashion look; the title image:
(#2) The New Yorker‘s Daily Shouts column from 1/28/19, “Death finds a signature look” by Will McPhail — in which the GR tries five experiments in fashion before settling on his signature black hooded robe and scythe
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Posted in Comic conventions, Fashion, Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture, Signs and symbols, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
October 23, 2019
For LGBT History Month, some notes on a little piece of that history in linguistics, in the loose network of academic acquaintanceship that formed at the Linguistic Institute at UC Santa Cruz in the summer of 1991: OUT in Linguistics, OUTiL, OUTIL (the abbreviation pronounced /áwtǝl/, through some wags joked about its being French outil /uti/ ‘tool’, with the expected sexual slang use). A notice went out on the Institute mailing list for an informal social gathering of the new group, with a characterization that then varied, from occasion to occasion, in its list of invitees; a version from several years later:
The group is open to lesbian, gay, bisexual, dyke, queer, homosexual, trans, etc. linguists and their friends. The only requirement is that you be willing to be out to everyone on the list as lgbt(-friendly); it’s sort of like wearing a pink triangle.
This was at a Linguistic Institute, so no one was fussy about who counted as a linguist; if you wanted to hang out with rest of us for the summer, you were welcome. Just so with OUTiL; if you wanted to hang out with the rest of us for an hour or two, you were welcome. OUTiL, however, was primarily social, and that was an excellent thing, especially at the time.
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Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, History, Holidays, Homosexuality, Linguists, My life | 1 Comment »
October 20, 2019
(About gay porn as a genre, therefore matter-of-fact discussion of men’s bodies and mansex, though not in particularly graphic terms; the explicit stuff, with penises, is in a 9/21 posting “Costume fantasy porn” on AZBlogX. But probably not suitable for kids or the sexually modest; you can use the cast photo in #1 below as a gauge.)
Text from the Queer Me Now site on 8/18/19, about “Dominic Pacifico’s [2019] Sands Of Time Starring Taylor Reign, Casey Everett, Julian Grey & Zario Travezz”:
(#1) (l-to-r) Grey, Everett, Reign, Travezz, in scraps of shredded white cloth, in the desert sands of post-apocalyptic 2049: affectless in a barren land
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Posted in Clothing, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality | 1 Comment »
October 16, 2019
(A lot about jockstraps and their contents, so not to everyone’s taste.)
Following on my postings about butch fagginess in men’s underwear, more intersections of styles of masculinity with styles of homosexuality, still with men’s underwear as signs of these styles.
The background, from my 10/14 posting “Space Candy”
(#1) A (candy) pink jock in PUMP!’s playful Space Candy line, with my note: “a pink jockstrap nicely combines max-macho in the underwear world with high-faggy in color symbolism”
Pink jockstraps (which deserve a separate posting [this is it]) generally take us off the end of the pier at the butch-faggy boardwalk: what we’ve got there is usually a stone-solid muscle queen, a guy with the best of male musculature, in a way-high homo presentation of self.
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Posted in Color, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Phallicity, Sociocultural Roles, Underwear | 1 Comment »
October 14, 2019
(Highly sexualized men’s underwear, leading to blunt talk of men’s bodies and mansex. Lots of other content, but this is enough to put it out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest.)
Today’s Daily Jocks ad, for a new line of underwear for the PUMP! company — the image is meant to be outrageous, fey, macho, and funny, all at once — with their ad copy:
(#1) The all new Space Candy Collection from PUMP! has launched. A new take on PUMP’s classic shape, available in Space Candy Pink & Purple. [available as a boxer (boxer brief), (low-rise) brief, and jock]
An image crammed with content — incuding those little candy-themed patches on the front (on the hip or pouch) and the back (on one cheek) of the garments.
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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Color, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and plants, Lexical semantics, Masculinity, Metonymy, Movies and tv, My life, Phallicity, Signs and symbols, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
October 12, 2019
(Underwear models performing displays of their bodies as sexual objects and, through their attire, stance, and facial expression, projecting personas. So: definitely carnal, but not down and dirty — mostly reflections on styles of masculiity and styles of male homosexuality — but not to everyone’s taste.)
The Daily Jocks ad from the 9th is another in a series of DJX Varsity mesh offers featuring a forbiddingly / seductively hyper-masculine character I’ll call the MeshMaster, from the tough-top persona the character projects. But this time the MeshMaster has accessorized with a bit of high-gay fashion, a neon pink harness under his black mesh crop top:
(#1) Macho on the outside; on the inside, behind the black mesh curtain, flamboyance — which he secretly treasures (his right hand, inside, pointing to the harness, is the visual center of the composition)
Yet another chapter in what I’ve called butch fagginess, sending mixed messages: simultaneously high-macho and flagrantly gay.
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Masculinity, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
