Gender and sexuality | Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Archive for the ‘Gender and sexuality’ Category

Cartoony days

June 2, 2016

(This takes a turn to sexual politics that some — though not, I think, Bill Griffith — might find surprising.)

Today’s Zippy offers us some office soap opera between boss (Don) and employee (Ms. Carlisle), from the point of view of Ms. Carlisle:

(#1)

The topic is a familiar one in Zippyland: cartoonishness or cartooniness, indicated by various physical characteristics — noses, eyes, eyebrows, ears, jawlines, and mouths. In Zippyland, of course, everyone’s a cartoon character and they’re all dressed like one, but some of them are “realistic”, normal, regular folks,, while others are flagrantly cartoony.

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Posted in Comic conventions, Dialects, Gender and sexuality, Language acquisition, Language disorders, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

Nefarious morning name

June 1, 2016

Yesterday’s morning name: the adjective nefarious. From NOAD2:

(typically of an action or activity) wicked or criminal: the nefarious activities of the organized-crime syndicates. ORIGIN early 17th cent.: from Latin nefarius, from nefas, [stem] nefar– ‘[a] wrong’ [that is, ‘something contrary to divine law’] (from ne- ‘not’ + fas ‘divine law’) + -ous.

Two notes on usage, the first having to do with ‘something contrary to divine law’ — directly following from the Latin nefārius (embedded in Church teachings) — the second an ordinary extension of the sense ‘wicked or criminal’ (of an action or activity’).

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Lexical semantics, Morning names | Leave a Comment »

Immoral Day 2016 and gay military porn

May 31, 2016

(Talk of men’s bodies and male-male sex, but nothing actually incendiary, and the explicit images are in my posting “Memorial Day military porn” on AZBlogX, not here.)

I start with yesterday’s Frazz, for the holiday:

(Hat tip to Robert Coren.) In my AZBlogX posting you can see the Channel 1 Releasing / Dirk Yates tribute to Immoral Day, in pornstar flesh (represented there by DJ, or D.J., Carlton in the 2008 flick Duty Weekend) offered for sale to celebrate American military men, democracy, and capitalism. As for capitalism, every American holiday, no matter how solemn its purpose, has been bent to serve commerce, and Memorial Day is no exception; plus, if there’s stuff to be sold, the gay porn studios are hard on the case.

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Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

Male photography: Leo (and Mikele)

May 28, 2016

(Mostly about male art, not much about language. Sexy, but far from incendiary.)

It started with a mailing, weeks ago, from this aggregation site that keeps sending me ads (mostly lame) for gay porn (from an assortment of addresses), with this image, which it touted as a hot item I should pay for:

(#1)

This is a cool, and funny (and meant to be funny), piece of male photography showing a relationship between two hot (and very playful) boyfriends (Mikele on the left here, Leo on the right). Way sexy, but meant as art, not — primarily, anyway — as jack-off material. It’s part of a big portfolio staged mostly by Leo, material that I hope he will get published in book form. Maybe the aggregation site just gratuitously lifted this shot from the net, maybe they paid Leo for it (though I seriously doubt that), but what it is not is just amateur porn, which is what the (apparently Chinese) aggregation site was trying to sell it as.

Here: more of Leo, and some of the lovers together, a selection from Leo’s portfolio, available via his bahamvt Tumblr site, where @leotakespix says:

Just some nerd living in Rome. THIS IS MY ONLY ACCOUNT Exclusive cuddle buddy of @mikeletakespix. Open to partnerships with brands.

The man needs an agent. Seriously.

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Photography | 1 Comment »

Male art: two views

May 22, 2016

(Despite the topic, the content of this posting is decorous.)

(Important proviso: in order to make the two books under discussion here comparable, I’ve focused entirely on male homosexuality. But the Reed book is even in its coverage of homosexuality and art for both sexes.)

Two books that came to me about the sane time in 2011 and have languished on my desktop ever since (I work very slowly and am easily distracted):

Christopher Reed, Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas (Oxford Univ. Press, 2011)

Kevin Clarke, Porn from Andy Warhol to X-Tube: A Photographic Journey (Bruno Gmünder, 2011)

The books are very different in tone: the Reed is a scholar’s book (about the interdependence of art and homosexuality in the Western tradition), the Clarke an enthusiast’s book (about the high-end gay visual porn business, mostly in the U.S.). Reed is nicely but modestly illustrated, Clarke is lavishly illustrated in the Gmünder tradition, with many full-page displays of pornstars. But the two books overlap, especially in the figure of Andy Warhol.

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Posted in Art, Books, Categorization and Labeling, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Phallicity | Leave a Comment »

Joe Dallesandro

May 17, 2016

(About art and gay porn, but not much about language.)

A tribute to the Warhol superstar Joe Dallensandro in his youth, in preparation for writing about two very different art books from 2011 — Kevin Clarke’s Porn from Andy Warhol to X-Tube (a survey of American gay porn and the business that creates it) and Christopher Reed’s Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas — that nevertheless share several points of interest, of which Andy Warhol is a prominent one.

JD is pictured in the Clarke book, in a stunning full-page reproduction of a Bruce of L.A. photo (a full-frontal shot of JD in a pitsntits pose, with a half-hard penis), from Bruce’s only photo-shoot with JD (in the 1960s) — viewable in a posting (“Joe Dallessandro in his youth”) on AZBlogX, along with another photo from the same session, showing a naked and pensively tumescent JD in profile (with an inscription to Reed Massengill).

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Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, My life | 5 Comments »

Pretty in pink: my homo pony

May 14, 2016

Yesterday, I posted, in “Two extravagant mani-corns”, two homoerotic photos of hunky men dressed as unicorns: #1 elaborately posed, #2 an unposed shot taken on the fly at this year’s Coachella Festival. I quickly discovered the photographer for #2, but failed to identify either the photographer or the model in #1. But that’s been remedied, in Facebook by David Preston, in a comment on my posting here by reader R: the photo comes from the studio Exterface (an obvious play on interface), and the model works under the professional name David Morgan. But both my informants noted that the shot in #1, extravagant though it was, was only the tamest in a wild portfolio of photos, three more of which I’ll post here.

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Male art, Photography | 1 Comment »

stroke

May 13, 2016

(About masturbation and its accompanying vocabulary, so probably not for kids or the sexually modest.)

The news for penises: the occasion is (International) Masturbation Month (the merry month of May), the news is the sexual verb stroke ‘masturbate, wank, jack off’ (both intransitive and transitive) — a specialization of the tactile verb — and the impetus for this posting is a Kink Store ad touting masturbation sleeves (aka cocksleeves) under the names stroking toys, cock strokers, and auto strokers. In particular the ONYX device, vividly illustrated in action in an image on AZBlogX.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Phallicity | 2 Comments »

Jason Phoenix redux

May 12, 2016

(About lines between real life and invented life — as it happens, in the world of gay porn, using the model / actor Jason Phoenix as a case study, though genre clashes between non-fiction and fiction are pretty much unremitting. But there’s no getting around the fact that there’s a lot of talk here about men’s bodies and man-man sex, so the posting is not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Jason Phoenix (hereafter, JP) has retired from gay porn, but he is revived, again and again — he is a phoenix, after all — by Channel 1 Releasing and its subsidiaries (most recently in a sale ad yesterday, noted in AZBlogX), including two managed by Dirk Yates and his associates. One has been filming

“Straight Military Guys Doing Not-So-Straight Things” for nearly 30 years. (link)

(the conceit is that the guys are straight amateurs doing it only for the money) and the other provides flat-out gay porn, performed by professionals. But the studio regularly blurs the line between the two enterprises by presenting the pros as military naifs off the street. JP is an interesting case because it seems he did start out as a military naif off the street.

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Posted in Fiction, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality | Leave a Comment »