Taking off from a delightful ad for Romperjacks on Facebook back in November and December:
Here I give you the ad photo, and inventory some of the things it inspires me to write about in future postings (several being themes from earlier postings on this blog).
What I posted to Facebook on 4/8, on the occasion of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation as an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court. My follow-up said that, yes, the reference was to Agee (the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, on which more below) and added:
I can’t begin to say how pleasing KBJ’s appointment is to me.
To amplify a bit. This is not the Promised Land, but it is nevertheless a Big Fucking Deal. One of the things about my hero John Lewis that moved me especially was that he truly believed that we could reach the Promised Land in this life (not in an afterlife on Jordan’s other bank) — just not in his life, it would take some time. [More below on Lewis and this astonishing bit of faith on his part.] Meanwhile [Lewis believed], we have to keep moving on the path. KBJ is a highly visible step on the path, and that’s a big thing, a moment of joy.
(There will be a few excursions in passing about men’s bodies and man-on-man sex. If you can manage an appearance or two of the sexual verb fuck, you’ll be ok.)
From Ann Burlingham a couple days ago, a greeting card with a photo from the 2020 Australian Firefighters calendar, showing a man and his dog:
(#1) How to read the man, how to read the dog, and how to read the relationship between them
It turns out that there’s an amazing amount of content packed into this photo — I’ll try to reveal a bit of it here — and the photo leads to much more, including andirons, Dalmatians, lexicography, and the cartoonist George Booth.
(hunky men modeling underwear or underwear-adjacent garments, classical male nude statuary, references to the male body in sometimes intimate detail, so some might want to exercise their judgment about this posting)
Today’s Daily Jock’s e-mail ad offers an eye-catching vision of an ideal male body, an athlete posed at rest, his gigantic sculpted musculature held powerfully in reserve as he strikes an attitude of Greco-Roman male beauty, his unfocused gaze directed down and to the side. A decidedly modern and calculatedly homoerotic presentation reproducing the pose of the Westmacott Athlete, from a very different aesthetic and cultural context, in which the beauty of a boy athlete conveys the moral ideals of goodness and truth embodied in balanced strength, nothing in excess.
The DJ ad for the Cellblock13 Kennel Club Bandit collection of harnesses and jockstraps (available in four intense colors), marketed as fetishwear — that is, as homowear, for display, rather than as gymwear, in actual athletic gear:
(#1) Bandits in intense blue (they also come in intense red, pink, and gray), worn by a superhumanly muscled model; try to imagine him as sculpted in warm brownish marble
(Note the title. Stud hustling and men tricking with men, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
The Daily Jocks ad in my e-mail on 2/7 reproduces the archetypical cruise pose, deployed in both hustling (for sale) and tricking, or hooking up (for play), by men for men:
(#1) [ad copy:]
NEW: UTILITY SHORTS
BE READY FOR ANYTHING
Everyday practicality with weekend style, your new favourite shorts have arrived at DailyJocks.
(Attractive men modeling underwear, some of them contemplating their genital packages. But nothing raunchy.)
Yesterday’s Daily Jocks ad with the model I’ve called Helgi in Helsinki Athletica Kasper long johns, contemplating his own handsome body:
(#1) Helgi4, following three previous DJ photos of this model set in a trendy bathing room; like Helgi2 and 3, modeling long johns, this time in an off-white with just the slightest touch of pink (a shade DJ calls Dusty Pink); like Helgi1, casting his gaze downward to admire, Narcissus-like, the weighty excellence of his own genital package, but now sliding his right hand down his firm belly under the waistband of his underwear (man’s got a hand in his pants)
(Men in various states of undress, visibly tumescent while minimally clothed, looking for sex with other men — so not for everyone.)
Yesterday’s mail ad from Daily Jocks, a carefully composed, even elegant, presentation of a muscular young man posing in fashionable form-fitting long johns that highlight his weighty package, while he fixes us with an intense gaze that gay men use in cruising for sex with other men (in another context, it’s the intense, fixed smoulder that straight men use in trolling for sex with women):
(#1) Call him Helgi (it’s Scandinavian and heroic); he’s posing in the trendy bathing room from two other recent appearances of his — on 11/12 in a much cruder pose but still in Helsinki Athletica long johns; and then on 11/3 in very brief white DJX Signature briefs, apparently contemplating the excellent penis contained within
I’ll revisit those two appearances (with notes on the sociosexual worlds of gay men) and then turn to the English garment lexicon, focusing on long johns, tights, leggings, and the union suit.
But first, a bit more about the presentation of Helgi in #1.
(men’s bodies, references to sex between men, so inadvisable for kids and the sexually modest)
From ads in my e-mail recently, these two male faces, with (lots of) context removed:
(#1)
(#2)
The question is how we read these faces, what we see in them, and that turns out to be an enormous question, in part because our responses are a compound of many different kinds of judgments, all of which are complex and variable in themselves.
The faces are not without context. They are, to start with, faces in poses (these faces are in static photos; if we had them in motion, there would be even more information to cope with).
Suppose we got them in a neutral pose, facing the camera. What we’d be looking at then would be a compound of a basic face overlaid by a facial expression, and we’re accustomed to assigning an interpretation to both of these things. And these interpretations are essentially never unique.
(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.
