Archive for the ‘Shirtlessness’ Category

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Le Male, the men’s fragrance

September 7, 2020

(Well, it’s about perfumerie, but it’s Gaultier, he’s flagrantly homoerotic, and he’s going to take us to men’s bodies and mansex. So pieces of this posting are definitely not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Tim Evanson on Facebook today, with an image from a pharmacy window in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, Scotland:


(#1) Poster for Jean Paul Gaultier’s men’s fragrance Le Male, featuring a decidedly homoerotic shirtless sailor (credit: FotoFling Scotland)

Tim: Goodness, what ARE they selling?!?!?

AZ: They are selling sailors. Drenched in masculine scents. At very high prices.

McDonald Jason Richard: The best cologne for men in the world.

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Posted in Books, Clothing, Fashion, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language in advertising, Movies and tv, Shirtlessness | 3 Comments »

Daniel Goddard

August 28, 2020

Tim Evanson on Facebook today observed that Daniel Goddard (born 8/28/71) is now 49. Happy birthday, Daniel.

Goddard was the star of the the Beastmaster tv series, which has provided me with many cheap-pleasurable hours of viewing, in which his very attractive shirtlessness played a significant part (though his physical acting, his smiles, the excellent supporting cast, and the entertainingly preposterous plots were significant contributions).


(#1) The characters Tao (played by Jackson Raine) and Dar (Goddard): well, yes, Goddard’s admirable torso and arm muscles (not to mention his sweaty body and surprisingy erect nipples), but it’s also a depiction of supportive male friendship, and that’s important

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Posted in Actors, Movies and tv, Shirtlessness | 2 Comments »

Spontaneous erections

August 13, 2020

(About penises and nipples, in plain talk. Not for kids or the sexually modest.)

The original spur for this posting was a magazine piece (which I can no longer locate) by a woman complaining about guys getting visible hard-ons in everyday contexts. Why, the writer wondered, can’t men control their hormones in public? Are they just uncivilized beasts?

The fact is that almost all men experience spontaneous, or random, erections, often to their great embarrassment. The triggers are many and complex. When I was a horny teenager (and masturbating, mostly swiftly, around six times a day, to sexual fantasies of my own devising), riding on a bus produced a motion that provoked gigantic unwelcome hard-ons that were very hard to conceal. Other young men get intractable hard-ons in situations of great social anxiety — such as, alas, speaking in public in front of an audience. (There’s more; see below.)

What’s more, an enormous number of people, female as well as male, get spontaneous nipple erections in all sorts of non-sexual situations. Our bodies do a lot of this on their own, without any input from our thoughts. Yes, sexual thoughts and images can trigger these stiffenings, but a lot of it happens out of our consciousness.

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Posted in Language and the body, Phallicity, Shirtlessness | 2 Comments »

The measure of a man: HTC

July 30, 2020

(Scantily clad men flaunting their bodies, so not to everyone’s taste.)

Two representations of the male body, head to thigh, celebrating masculine faces, masculine bare torsos, and the male genitals. HTC — head, torso, crotch — images.

Previously, in yesterday’s posting on this blog, “Portrait of man: the head and bare torso image”, about HT images:

the head and bare torso image: In a painting, a drawing, a sculpture, a photograph: the face projecting a persona, an identity, a character; the naked torso presenting this character as a carnal being: an embodiment of gender, a sexual object, and an assertion of vitality.

Now add to this the crotch, at least minimally clothed, but containing and hinting at the male genitals within — so substantially magnifying the sexual messages of the torso.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Language and the body, Masculinity, Shirtlessness, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

Portrait of a man: the head and bare torso image

July 29, 2020

On HT (head + torso) images of men.

In a painting, a drawing, a sculpture, a photograph: the face projecting a persona, an identity, a character; the naked torso presenting this character as a carnal being: an embodiment of gender, a sexual object, and an assertion of vitality.

The briefest of introductions to my first response on seeing this photograph of two men on a beach (with surfboards in the background), so that their shirtlessness is natural in the context:


(#1)  Alex Schulze (left) and Andrew Cooper (right)

— which was, basically, “Ooh, how adorable! And hot!” (I am capable of being as superficial as anybody around; though context is everything.) Good-looking faces, though far from movie-star quality, and wonderful crinkly-eyed smiles. Naturally fit swimmers’ bodies — well, they’re surfer dudes — which please me greatly.

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Posted in Actors, Facial expression and gesture, Language and sports, Movies and tv, Shirtlessness | Leave a Comment »

In the political news: catalectic trochaic tetrameter

March 2, 2020

(This is a new posting, intended as a reconstruction of and replacement for a “Catalectic trochaic tetrameter” posting of 3/1 that was somehow destroyed by WordPress, in such a way that if you try to access the posting under that name you are now automatically re-directed to my 3/1 “Guy gear” posting, which is intriguing but not the same thing at all. This “In the political news” posting quotes some sexual street talk but isn’t about men’s bodyparts or mansex, so I’m not warning anyone off. But it’s not all sunshine and roses.)

A Facebook dialogue from 2/29:

Gadi Niram: I don’t know what the deeper meaning might be here, but “Klobuchar and Buttigieg” has the same stress pattern as “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern”.

Arnold Zwicky: A line of catalectic trochaic tetrameter – SW SW SW S — incredibly common in folk verse of all kinds, and elsewhere. Including: “Lord what fools these mortals be”. Not to mention one reading of: “Captain of our fairy band”. And, from a recent posting of mine: “Lincoln Darwin Valentine”.

From my 2/13/19 posting “Captain of our fairy band”:


(#1) Captain of our fairy band: Lincoln Darwin Valentine (a double dose of CTT; note that double dose of CTT is itself CTT)

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Music, Poetic form, Shirtlessness | Leave a Comment »

Golden jubilee

February 26, 2020

For gay men of Gen X now achieving their Golden Year: Surfing for Ulysses:



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Posted in Holidays, Movies and tv, Shirtlessness | 1 Comment »

The year in spam

December 31, 2019

The most recent posting on this topic: on 3/5/19, “Another 100k spams”, where I noted that the number of spam comments here (since the blog started in December 2008) passed 5,600,000 on 3/3. Some were automatically deleted by WordPress software, a great many more were made available for bulk deletion (or individual inspection) by me, and some were submitted to me individually for moderation. In periodic spam attacks, comments spam arrives at the rate of more than one per second (until the software wrestles it to the ground again).

That was 3/3. On 7/23, the count passed 5,700,000. And then, yesterday (12/30), 5,800,000. 6 million beckons! (Probably not next year, but soon.)

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Posted in Actors, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Phallicity, Shirtlessness, Signs and symbols, This blogging life | Leave a Comment »

Two actor POP days

December 13, 2019

It’s Eva Marie Saint Lucy’s Day and, in today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro combo, a Kurt Russell terrier bounds in:


(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbol in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there’s just one in this strip — see this Page.)

First, Kurt Russell and the Russell terrier. Then Eva Marie Saint and St. Lucy’s Day. In both cases, a member of what I’ve called the Acting Corps (see the Page on this blog), with a name in a POP (a phrasal overlap portmanteau; see the Page on this blog).

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Posted in Actors, Holidays, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Shirtlessness, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »

Revisiting 38: More male beauty

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 »

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