Archive for the ‘Language and the body’ Category
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 »
October 3, 2019
Yes, this posting is about fucking — specifically about the syntax, semantics, and sociolinguistics of the sexual verb fuck in English, especially with reference to male-male anal intercourse (that is, men fucking men), so despite the high amount of technical linguistic content (NERD FLAG), it is (RAUNCH FLAG) thoroughly unsuitable for kids or the sexually modest. I mean, I’m going to talk about a lot of fucking in this piece, and I’m going to start with a guy getting (quite movingly) fucked by another guy, so some of you are going to have to, or want to, get the fuck out of here.
The impetus for this posting is a line from a short gay porn video on the IceGay site, “Brad McGuire And His Piggy [Dawson]”; McGuire, a dominant top into barebacking, is unloading a line of dirty sex talk onto the sexpig Dawson, whose aching desire is to get a load of hot cum in his ass after being enthusiastically screwed, doggie-style:
(#1) McGuire and Dawson, moving close to climax
McGuire: Work that dick, man. C’mon. Fuck me with that ass. [Big spangly note: McGuire fucks Dawson with his dick; Dawson fucks McGuire with his ass.] Yeah, c’mon, hungry pig. Yeah? That’s it. That’s it. C’mon, work for it [the desired load of cum]. Yeah. … Yeah, you work for that load. C’mon, fuck me with that ass, man. Fuckin’ pig.
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Posted in Argument structure, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Metaphor, Participant roles, Semantics, Syntax | Leave a Comment »
October 1, 2019
(About men’s bodies in very plain terms, and about the fantasy world of steamy male underwear models, and a bit about the social and sexual practices of gay male life, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Refections on yesterday’s Daily Jocks ad, officially for a Varsity mesh shoulder harness for men, but also featuring a mesh trunk — and a sexual gesture involving that trunk, which together with the model’s facial expression frames the scene as a fantasy of cruising for sex (between men).
The gesture skirts the line between covering the genitals and revealing them and also, independently, the line between protecting the genitals and fondling them, so it involves us in the question of what is permissible for display in various social contexts (in particular, in WordPress blogs like this one); the central photo might well be over the line in WP, so it appears here with the details of the gesture fuzzed over (though it’s reproduced unaltered in an AZBlogX posting “Skirting the lines” accompanying this one, along with another problematic photo and three unquestionably WP-unsuitable images).
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Posted in Facial expressions, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Phallicity, Underwear | 1 Comment »
September 28, 2019
(Dense with references to buttocks and their possible sexual portents, so not to everyone’s taste.)
From The Mary Sue site, “We’re All Kinds Of Obsessed With Nicola Scott’s Nightwing Drawing Highlighting His Assets: Gotham’s ass indeed”, by Kate Gardner on 9/20/19:
(#1) Dick Grayson evolves into pinup-push Nightwing (hat tip to Kim Darnell)
The title says it all. In her latest art depicting DC characters like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman throughout the years, comics artist Nicola Scott drew the evolution of Nightwing, a.k.a. Dick Grayson, ending with art of him in a pose usually reserved for male artists drawing female characters, and we’re totally obsessed with it. It’s about damn time that men had to push their tush out alongside their female counterparts.
A pose signifying (women’s) sexual availability, with a long history, but especially as made famous by movie star Betty Grable in 1943:
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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Metonymy | 1 Comment »
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 »
September 16, 2019
A few days back, an inquiry into a bodypart of personal interest to me: my 9/14/19 posting “Clavicular knobs”, in which these bony protuberances were illustrated on the body of a Scruff guy “Ricardo”. Ricardo’s photo cropped to focus on his shoulder handles:
(#1) Ricardo’s very visible clavicles, aka collar bones, terminating on either side in bony protrusions — an anatomical feature shared by my first male lover Danny and my husband-equivalent Jacques
I noted that clavicular knobs seemed to be very rare, even in lean-bodied men with very noticeable clavicles; and that Danny and I each believed we once knew a name for them but now we couldn’t recall it (or them).
First to arrive on Facebook with some nomenclatural clarity was Chuk Craig, who supplied the term acromion (Gk. ‘top of the shoulder’). Which led to the relevant joint, the AC, acromioclavicular, joint; to separated shoulders; and, in other directions, towards anatomical rarities (like protuberant acromia) and the psychology of perception and attention (if you’ve read my earlier posting, you’ve probaby been noticing clavicles a lot).
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Posted in Language and medicine, Language and the body, My life | 2 Comments »
September 14, 2019
A friend recently was approached on Scruff (the hookup site for men) by this young man — way too young for my friend and a continent away, but nevertheless worth a few moments of contemplation:
(#1) (some hair means ‘some torso hair, lightly furred chest’, no reference to his head hair)
No doubt others will have dwelt first on other of Richardo’s features, but I was immediately struck by the protruding knobs at the ends of his clavicles. Because my first male lover, from 50 years ago (the pseudonymous Danny of my writings about my sexual life), had them, and so did my man Jacques, and that means I look at them with great affection.
The clavicles are quite visible in lean men, but only a few of those men have the sweet bony handles.
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, My life, Names | 3 Comments »
August 15, 2019
In anticipation of a visit to Palo Alto’s Gamble Garden with motss.conners on Saturday, two items from my last visit to the garden (on 7/31): blue flax-lilies, which are neither flax nor lily plants, but do have bright blue berries; and dark purple, almost black, hollyhocks.
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Posted in Art, Color, Language and gender, Language and plants, Language and the body, Language play, Metaphor, Metonymy, Music, Names, Poetry | 1 Comment »
August 13, 2019
(Regularly skirting or confronting sexual matters, so perhaps not to everyone’s taste.)
Yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro takes us back to the Garden of Eden:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
The bit of formulaic language for this situation is a catchphrase, a slogan with near-proverbial status (YDK, for short):
YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE IT’S BEEN
The leaves are conventionally associated with modesty, through their having been used to cover the nakedness of Adam and Eve in the Garden — a use that then associates the leaves with the genitals, from which the psychological contamination spreads to the entire plant, including the fruits. You don’t know where that fig has been.
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Posted in Catchphrases, Culture, Formulaic language, Idioms, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Pragmatics, Proverbs, Slogans, Speech acts | Leave a Comment »
