On Facebook yesterday, from Aric Olnes, following up on my “Sacrilegious puns for Pride Month” posting that day:
Below your [“Sacrilegious puns”] post on my newsfeed: rainbows 🌈 & penguins 🐧!!
(#1) ORIGINAL PENGUIN: A FULL LIFESTYLE CLOTHING BRAND (from Munsingwear, featuring the Munsingwear penguin mascot, Pete)
A cute, jokey, très gay guy in his simple rainbow stripes tank top (from the Original Penguin line of clothing), deliriously savoring a slice of rainbow cake (sold separately); still more little rainbow penguins on his shorts.
… on t-shirts from the Hear Our Voice on-line store (“empowering feminist clothing” — also clothing on Black, LGBTQ+, kindness, and disability rights themes), in a Facebook ad today (I believe the shirts are available from other sources as well). In the ad, a complex pun (both verbal and visual) on the song title “Proud Mary”; and then, elsewhere on the site, a pun on the religious exclamation amen.
(Much attention to men’s bodies, wearing nothing but what’s billed as fetishwear / kinkwear. Not over the raunch line, but possibly not to some readers’ tastes.)
It starts with some photos of ensembles of bulldog harness plus jockstrap, all in high-macho black, but differing in significant details — of the model’s body, the way his body is displayed in the photos, and the garments he is wearing. With respect to the oppositions
hairy – smooth
raw – refined
authentic – synthetic
(Much about men’s bodies and sex between men, in plain language — not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
An ad on my Facebook page yesterday, with (as caption) its teaser copy:
(#1) Now selling the Cellblock 13 Atlas Jockstrap / Harness at Jockstraps.com. If you are looking for a light-weight, affordable elastic harness and jock then check out this all new product
The model’s body and face, the (bulldog) harness, and the jockstrap are all hot (in my view as an appreciator of the underwear ad genre). But then the lines the harness and jockstrap form in the photographer’s composition make for a pleasing abstract composition on their own. And the model’s posture, his gestures, and his facial expression are all satisfyingly packed with allusions to art, both high art and popular art.
(Men displaying their bodies in underwear ads, leading to men in revealing leather, engaged in kinky sex — not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
Fun fetishwear for gay men, from the new brand Vaux. From the ad copy on Daily Jocks:
Vaux brings fetishwear inspiration from Cellblock13 & pairs this with fun prints to add a new twist to your underwear drawer.
and on the International Jock site:
From the makers of Timoteo and CellBlock 13: conceived during a visit to the Vauxhall district of South London, VAUX is a new brand created for and inspired by the diverse and ever-evolving queer community.
and, with more detail, on the Men and Underwear site, “Jockstraps and Matching Harnesses by VAUX and Cellblock13 at jockstraps.com” on 8/20/20:
The VAUX VX2 Harness is designed to accentuate your back and show off your chest. It is made of high-quality coated and printed neoprene with spandex piping in contrasting colours. This is a structured harness with adjustable snaps for fit and comfort. Two adjustable straps come down your torso, with metal hoops and hooks that connect to either your jeans or to Vaux VX2 Zipper Jock for a full gear look. The torso straps can also be removed if you choose to wear it strictly as an upper body harness. [There are also facemasks.]
(On homomasculinities, with plain talk about men’s bodies and sex between men. So not for the sexually modest, and at best inadvisable for kids.)
The Daily Jocks mailing yesterday (5/10), with an ad under the header “Mask for Masc?”:
(#1) [ad copy:] $10 MASKS: This reusable two-layer fabric face mask is manufactured from a high quality fabric. Get one for just $10 while stocks last
This is the underwear model I have been calling Aradesque, used in advertising largely to convey butch fagginess, here wearing a mask announcing quite publicly that he’s butch / masculine. So he’s claiming a gender identity that would normally be inferred from the clear evidence of publicly visible characteristics: stance, gesture, facial expression, and so on — it’s something you show, not something you announce.
As a result, announcing that you are masculine, macho, or butch suggests that you are unsure that the high (in your estimation) level of your masculinity can be correctly inferred from your visible characteristics, and so undercuts your claim; if you have to tell people how butch you are, you’re probably not very butch.
On the other hand, mask and masc make a cute pun. Maybe that’s all that’s going on in #1.
And then there’s the possibility that the character Aradesque is playing in #1 is boasting, with self-assurance, that he’s solidly masculine.
The problem with severely abbreviated messages is that they can convey so many different things. More on this theme below, on the sexual associations of unicorns.
Falling together this year on 5/7: No Pants Day (the first Friday in May); and, now that you have your pants off, the way is smoothed for you to celebrate a May 7th event, Masturbation Day, if you have a mind to.
(#1) An appeal from Comics Kingdom (an on-line platform for King Features Syndicate), with Dennis the Menace as their spokescharacter for the occasion; note the usage in the name of the day — AmE pants, referring to outerwear, vs. BrE pants ‘underpants’
(Underwear models doing their thing, seductively. Plus Michelangelo’s David and a naked Venus by Bouguereau. So not to everyone’s taste, but not over the line.)
Today’s Daily Jocks ad (for the Cellblock 13’s Cyclone 2.0 Singlet) reproduces poses of head and body from classical Greek sculpture, poses that previously appeared on this blog in another Daily Jocks ad, in my 6/20/20 posting “Ephebe with a big package” — the big package being, in both cases, the model’s genitals, covered but also ostentatiously on display.
A lightning posting of today’s Daily Jocks ad, for the sake of the half-rhyming title (conveying ‘a crop top for a hot jock’), plus of course the hot hunk displaying his body seductively:
CROP TOPS
At [Daily Jocks] we are always on the lookout for what’s trending for men in all things underwear, activewear and fetishwear, like crop tops.
Wait! Are crop tops for men making a comeback? They never went away, shop our range of crop tops from Varsity …
(Men’s bodies as sexual objects — women’s, too — and sex between men, all of this discussed in street language, with edgy images, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
At the intersection of the pinup-girl world (AZ Page here) and the premium men’s underwear world (AZ Page here), two recent ads from the Daily Jocks people: from 3/28, under the mail header “Model of the week: Freddy”, an ad for OnlyJox subscriptions, already of interest to me for its display of male buttocks as sexual objects for a male audience and for pushing the line between softcore and hardcore porn in doing so; and from 4/2, an ad for the DJ Easter sale, already of interest to me for its display of the front surface of the model’s body as series of sexual objects for a male audience, from the framing of his penis in a jockstrap though the sexualized presentation of his armpits, pectoral muscles and nipples.
The 4/2 ad is also quite clearly the photographer’s carefully composed re-creation of a classic pinup pose using a male model. And then I realized that that the 3/8 ad was in fact a bow to yet another classic pinup pose.
