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”.
Archive for the ‘Shirtlessness’ Category
Revisiting 38: More male beauty
November 25, 2019A man, his hands, his pants
October 5, 2019(That’s AmE pants, roughly equivalent to BrE trousers. This posting is about men’s clothing and men’s bodies and gets fairly racy — it starts with a guy with his hands in his pants and sex on his mind — so some readers might want to exercise caution.)
So you’re a straight white guy, from North America or some place culturally similar. A photographer wants to take your picture. How do you pose your body? In particular, what do you do with your hands? More generally, what do you do with your hands when they’re not actually involved in your current activity? Then, what role do your lower garments — trousers, shorts, maybe underpants — play in the placement of your hands? And what, if anything, does your choice of placement signify?
So: adventures in hand-pants (or manual-bracal) kinesics.
Musclemen from Mars
September 29, 2019(There will be rampant male shirtlessness. Just a friendly warning, or an invitation, depending on your tastes.)
It’s a Zippy strip (today’s!). It’s another gender note (about masculinity). It’s yet another shirtless posting (shirtlessness as a prime masculinity display, in fact.) It’s about umliterature (physique magazines, in particular). And about camp (Flash Gordon). And of course, since the arousing shirtless campy musclemen are from Mars (or possibly Mongo), about SF. And finally, tucked in there inconspicuously in the last panel is an antique Griffithian self-referential surprise (from 1973):
(#1)
Male superheroes are extravagant embodiments of masculinity: they are, to start with, embodiments of great human power (conventionally associated with men), and then they have superhuman powers beyond that; their costumes are designed to encase their bodies, but tightly, so as to suggest, reveal, or exaggerate every bit of gendered anatomy (the broad shoulders, the musculature of the arms, torso, and thighs, and the genital package). (Beyond the powers and the costumes, there are the conventionally hyper-masculine faces.)
The strip begins with superheroes on this planet, but it ends, in the lower right corner, with (hunky) superheroes in space — “Musclemen from Mars” is what the Dingburgers are reading — and it turns out that space-traveling superheroes (as exemplified by Flash Gordon) are given to frequent bouts of shirtlessness (mostly while performing their feats of manly derring-do, but sometimes during the virtually obligatory shirtless torture scenes).
Oh Canada baby, ripple my maple leaves!
July 1, 2019Today is Canada Day, Canada’s national day, celebrated in many ways, perhaps most remarkably in this display of national pride — “hot shirtless muscle jocks in Canadian themed pants”, according to one of the many Pinterest sites on which it’s reproduced — which came to me from Tim Evanson, who thought that they might be a Canadian sports team of some kind (they certainly are fit):
(#1) The Canadian Thunder team: Bobby Ryan, Carlo Spina, Michael Scratch, Daniel Bennato, Vince Johansson and Malcolm Foster
Yes, a team, and yes, certified Canadians (I’d feared they’d turn out to be American male models hired for the photo, but, gratifyingly, not), and the men are no doubt accomplished athletes, but they aren’t a sports team.
The Magnificent WaterSports
June 19, 2019(Men’s bodies and mansex, not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
In the Daily Jocks mailing yesterday, this heavily sexualized ad for WaterShorts swimwear (in black, aqua, lime, and coral), the first swimwear from the premium homowear company PUMP! (an old acquaintance on this blog) — with a caption of mine in run-on free verse:
(#1) The Magnficent WaterSports
Follow-up: John Rechy
May 26, 2019Yesterday’s posting “High 5 from a bison”, all about number(s), ended with some exposition of John Rechy’s 1967 novel Numbers, about a male hustler collecting lots of tricks — numbers of numbers — on the streets and in the parks of Los Angeles. Now two follow-ups: Soft Cell’s (“Tainted Love”) musical tribute to the novel, and notes on Rechy’s life and career, still going at 88.
Annals of fruity goodness: the strawberry file
May 20, 2019(Warning: It ends with indirect allusion to mansex and with two shirtless actors, arms around each other’s shoulders, showing their stuff in their underwear.)
A recent posting in the My Home is California group on Facebook:
(a) I dreamed of photographing a sliced strawberry …, thinking it was a fruit. It is actually more closely related to a rose.
To which I now respond, first:
(b) I dreamed of photographing a sliced potato, thinking it was a vegetable. It is actually more closely related to a petunia.
And, second:
(c) I dreamed of photographing James Franco, thinking he was a fruit. He is actually more closely related to a piece of meat.
It’s come around again
May 7, 2019(Consider the topic before reading on.)
That would be National Masturbation Day, May 7th, today — launching National Masturbation Month, lusty May:
(#1) From my 5/4/18 posting “Then, if ever, come lusty days”
(#2) “Black Solo” (from the Porn for Women TV site), cropped
Specifically, self-lust, self-pleasure. A regular topic on this blog — write about what you know, they say, and I’ve been practicing this one for about 67 years — also an occasional hook for movie comedy.
A coincidence of days
May 6, 2019(Several shirtless people, in case that annoys or distresses you, but otherwise mostly about music.)
According to my calendar, today is both World Naked Gardening Day and World Accordion Day, which naturally led me to imagine a naked gardener playing the accordion. But my calendar turns out to be half wrong: World Accordion Day is fixed on May 6th; World Naked Gardening Day, on the other hand, is a movable feast, the first Saturday in May, which this year was the 4th.
However, the two occasions did coincide exactly in 2017, and at least one accordion-playing gardener squeezed nude for that occasion.
