Archive for the ‘Shirtlessness’ Category

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A 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.

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Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Gesture, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Masculinity, Metonymy, Movies and tv, Shirtlessness, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

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).

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Posted in Costumes, Gay porn, Homosexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, My life, Shirtlessness, Signs and symbols, Spelling | Leave a Comment »

The hollow

September 18, 2019

In a comment on my 9/14/19 posting “Clavicular knobs” (aka Ricardo’s acromia), Robert Coren writes about “the hollow space above the inner end of the collar-bone”, and I confess to not knowing a name for it. Roger Phillips (in England) fills in:

It’s not in Merriam-Webster, but all my British dictionaries have “saltcellar” for the collarbone pit. The first OED citation is:

[1870 O. Logan Before Footlights 26] I was a child of the most uninteresting age..a tall scraggy girl, with red elbows, and salt cellars at my collar-bones, which were always exposed, for fashion at that time made girls of this age uncover neck and arms.

The item has a complex social and cultural distribution, but knowing this much eventually led me to the technical term from anatomy: the suprasternal, or jugular, notch. Sometimes referred to in ordinary language as the hollow of the neck or the neck hollow.

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Posted in Dialects, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Names, Shirtlessness, Technical and ordinary language, Variation | 3 Comments »

Oh Canada baby, ripple my maple leaves!

July 1, 2019

Today 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.

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Posted in Dance, Language and the body, Movies and tv, Shirtlessness, Signs and symbols | 2 Comments »

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

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Posted in Captions, Gender and sexuality, Language of sex, Movies and television, Phallicity, Shirtlessness, Signs and symbols, Underwear | 2 Comments »

Follow-up: John Rechy

May 26, 2019

Yesterday’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.

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Posted in Books, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Music, Shirtlessness, Writers | 10 Comments »

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.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and plants, Movies and tv, Shirtlessness | Leave a Comment »

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.

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Posted in Language of sex, Movies and tv, Shirtlessness | 2 Comments »

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.

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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Holidays, Language and plants, Music, Portmanteaus, Shirtlessness | 1 Comment »

Control your johnson

April 7, 2019

(Lexicographic news for penises, but nothing more alarming than that.)

From a friend in the lgbt precinct of Facebook on the 4th:

Passed a Johnson Controls van on the way home from work. I’ve always said if you have to hire a company to control your johnson you’re in real trouble.

Remarkably, the slang johnson ‘penis’ seems not to have appeared on this blog. But first, the Johnson Controls company (which does not concern itself with penises) and the movie Bad Johnson (which is all about them).

(more…)

Posted in Language and the body, Movies and tv, Shirtlessness, Slang, Trade names | 5 Comments »

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