Archive for the ‘Language of sex’ Category

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“A place for us to see each other”

May 12, 2024

(Some photos of male bodies and allusions to sex between men, but no naughty bits and no street language — just not to everyone’s taste)

The end tag to a New York Times story, “At Frieze, Photographer of Gay Life Seeks ‘a Place in the Sunshine’: Stanley Stellar has documented gay New York, on the streets and in his studio, for decades. Now he steps onto his biggest stage”, by Erik Piepenburg, on-line on the NYT website on 5/3 (in print on 5/4); from the story:

From May 1-5 [AZ: yes, the event is now over; my life has been difficult, and I’m doing the best that I can], Stellar will step onto possibly his biggest stage when Kapp Kapp, the queer-centered TriBeCa gallery run by the twin brothers Sam and Daniel Kapp, shows his work at Frieze New York, the annual international art fair that returns to the Shed at Hudson Yards.

On view will be 15 of Stellar’s “Piers” photographs: assertive portraits and lazy-day snapshots of the mostly gay men who claimed the decrepit West Side piers as social and sexual turf in the 1970s and ’80s. Many photographs will be shown in color for the first time; “Stanley Stellar: The Piers,” a related book of photos, has been reprinted timed to the fair.


(#1) “Piers Roof July 1, 1978”

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Posted in Art, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Male art, Photography | Leave a Comment »

The gay handshake

May 11, 2024

(It’s about men going down on men, in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest)

A subtopic extracted from a posting (in preparation) on Stanley Stellar’s career in male photography (previous posting on this blog: on 5/8 in “Stanley Stellar’s couch”), during which he has amassed a trove of tens of thousands of photos, almost all set in NYC (and is still at it). One part of his work is devoted to depicting the beauty of the male body; for this he solicits men to pose for him (that’s why his e-mail address is on his website). These men are of various sexualities.

The remainder of his work he thinks of photographing the gay community:

— chronicling Pride parades (in all their complexity)

— showing street life in gay neighborhoods and at locations of gay sociability — both places populated by an assortment of lgbt+ people, plus some others

— and recording the places of cruising and tricking for men who have sex with men: what I’ve called the subterranean world of sex between men in public

This subterranean world: cruising spots in public parks, the famous trucks in NYC’s West Village back in the day, gay baths and sex clubs, t-rooms (mensrooms repurposed for sex between men), and so on — including Stellar’s special province, the West Side piers in NYC. All places where sex between men (especially cocksucking, which is quick and easy, and requires no special preparation or clean-up, so can be smoothly managed pretty much anywhere) is available in spaces that are in some sense public and are open to other like-minded men but are carefully concealed from outsiders (hence, subterranean).

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Posted in Art, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and society, Language and the body, Language of sex, Male art, Photography, Social interactions | Leave a Comment »

Tool time: the hose end pressure controller

May 7, 2024

(Warning: this posting will immediately descend to crude jokiness on male genitals and masturbation, so it’s not to everyone’s taste)

To celebrate Masturbation Day, today’s notable occasion (in my household, every day is jack-off day, but the celebratory holiday comes around only once a year): the Zwicky Linemaster hose end pressure controller, from a vintage UK ad for aviation supplies (advertised on eBay), with its language repurposed here to cover the fluid pressure of ejaculation (which varies considerably in the male population, while being largely out of conscious control):


(#1) The ad from eBay, for some Zwicky Limited (of Buckinghamshire in southeast England) aircraft equipment, for controlling hose pressure during fueling

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Posted in Ambiguity, Furnishings and tools, Gay porn, Language and the body, Language of sex, Logos, Slogans | Leave a Comment »

Jason Lloyd’s cartoon gay world

May 4, 2024

(or maybe his gay cartoon world. either way, this posting gets right into men’s bodies and sex between men, in plain talk, so it’s totally not for kids or the sexually modest)

Encountered on Pinterest some time ago, an item from the Jason Lloyd Art website, with a work much like this one, two men in the act (but without a visible penis, so I can show it to you here):


(#1) “Just Relax” — I think Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s 1983 hit song is an inevitable association here — is about taking pleasure in getting fucked, and it’s in JL’s least cartoonish and most realistic (but soft-focus) style, which can be either simply erotic (and touching) or actually pornographic (and arousing), depending on how you approach it

All of JL’s work is at least somewhat simplified in its lines, and most of it is straightforwardly cartooning, all of it skilled, some of it notable.

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Posted in Captions, Cartoonists, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Male art | 2 Comments »

Rabbit hordes will shake the darling buds of May

April 30, 2024

🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate April; this is Lepus Eve, that fearful moment before the rabbit hordes of May descend, in a cloud of fragrant muguets, to ravish and despoil the golden youths of spring, the band of bros, of buddies, bonding to spread their seed and alliterate aimlessly: Bunnies Bash Buds

Two images for the day: a cinematic account — Night of the Lepus — of the threatening rabbit hordes; and just one of those adorable buds at risk in this moment of peril: Dean Young. serving as the embodiment of the vulnerable golden youths of spring.

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Posted in Art, Gay porn, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language acquisition, Language and religion, Language and the body, Language of sex, Movies and tv | 3 Comments »

Surely there’s a word for this

April 22, 2024

… many people’s reaction to the cartoon psychiatrist (in my 4/20 posting “Charlie on the couch”) admitting to her patient Charlie the StarKist tunafish:

you’re my first patient with a fear of not being eaten

Well, not an everyday word, but a specialized medical term, a bit of arcana from abnormal psychology.

There are, remarkably, two terms (one using the Latin ‘devour’ stem, one the corresponding Greek ‘eat’ stem) for ‘fear of being eaten’, so from these we can compose terms for ‘fear of not being eaten’.

Here you will object that this is a profoundly silly exercise; surely, such a term would have no utility in the real world. But no, there turns out to be a documented paraphilia centered on a erotic desire to be eaten (in the imagination), and in the world of this kink — very far from a top paraphilia, but a real thing —  fear of not being eaten, of not having this desire satisfied, would also be a real thing.

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Posted in Derivation, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Morphology | Leave a Comment »

The Tunnel of Self-Love

April 16, 2024

From the annals of cartoon understanding: about today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, in which an unaccompanied young man in classical Greek attire inquires about the reflectivity of the water in a Tunnel of Love:


(#1) In case you didn’t recognize (a pop-cultural version of) the figure of Narcissus from Greek mythology, the young man sports a buckle with a big N on it; meanwhile, you need to recognize another piece of pop culture, the amusement park ride the Tunnel of Love (which largely disappeared about 80 years ago as an actual amusement park phenomenon, but lives on as a trope in songs, movies, and tv shows) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)

So, yes, you need to bring cultural knowledge to bear on understanding the cartoon — to seeing that it’s hilarious that a Narcissus figure would buy a single ticket for a ride through a Tunnel of Love (designed to provide about 6 minutes alone in the dark for couples to get steamy with one another) and want to know how reflective the water in it is: can I see myself in it?, he needs to know; can I become one with that beautiful man in this dark monument to love?. But all this cultural knowledge is second-hand, coming to us through the distorting, simplifying lens of pop culture: not the myth of Echo and Narcissus, but just a guy foolishly falling in love with himself; not actual amusement park rides, but their pop-cultural echoes in cartoons and the like.

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Posted in Art, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Myths, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Give your boys the love they deserve

April 11, 2024

(About naughty bits — men’s testicles and women’s breasts — so not to everyone’s taste.)

From the ads of brands site, “Ad of the Day | Manscaped Gives Men’s “Boys” the Love They Deserve”, from 3/8/24:

There’s a lot of data out there about men but only one truth… 100% of men think their “groin” is the most important part of their body. [AZ: I’d like to dispute that, since I’m deeply attached to my heart and my brain; and since if I had to choose between losing my testicles and losing my arms or my legs, I’d happily give up my balls; but that’s a topic for another day] But the problem is almost all of them feel uncomfortable talking about it. Especially when it comes to grooming. [AZ: looking ahead and clarifying this murky text, what Manscaped is deprecating here is hairy testicles, not pubic hair in general or testicles in general]

The goal for “The Boys” campaign was to stop treating male groin grooming like it’s some kind of taboo. It’s 2024 afterall, we need to normalize groin grooming for the benefit of men (and their partners) everywhere.

The challenge? How to talk about men’s nether regions in a TV-safe way. Enter the visual metaphor. The spot depicts the…you know what… as a pair of miniatures identical to every full-size male character, always attached to him at hip height. The visual allowed us to showcase exactly what the product was designed to do by changing the miniatures’ hairstyles throughout the spot.


(#1) His boys before manscaping


(#2) His boys after manscaping

This visual metaphor opened up a whole world – one where every male would have two identical groomed boys. The jokes unfolded naturally as the boys behaved like men’s body parts — bobbing around whilst jogging or floating to the top of a hot tub. And the ungroomed boys, well, they had a rough time of it [AZ: they were sweaty and uncomfortable and nowhere near as cool as other men’s boys] until they finally got a little love via The Lawn Mower® 5.0 Ultra, MANSCAPED’s newest groin and body hair trimmer.

You can watch the Manscaped “Give your boys the love they deserve” 2024 Super Bowl commercial here. A shorter version has gotten lots of play on tv.

(more…)

Posted in Language and the body, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Metaphor | 3 Comments »

I am a camera

April 6, 2024

No, I’m not roaming inter-war Berlin like Christopher Isherwood, passive, recording; I am not a figurative camera. But I now wield a camera, an alarmingly small digital camera that does so many things it’s hard to figure out how to just, as they say, point and shoot, and then download the pictures to my computer so I can show them to you. It’s taken me several days, but I have managed two photos on subjects of interest. A bright red amaryllis blooming on my worktable (one of five waxed amaryllis bulbs I got in a post-Valentine’s Day sale at Holland Bulbs of Holland MI). And five tiny (just over an inch long) brass castings of motos-couples getting it on in an assortment of positions (tiny, but with fingers and simple facial expressions) — entertaining artwork, shown here watched over by a fabulous portrait sketch by John Singer Sargent (which has its own sexy story). (But definitely sexy, so I suppose that #2 is off limits for kids and the sexually modest.)

Here are the shots, and then very brief commentary.

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Posted in Art, Language and plants, Language and the body, Language of sex, Technology | 4 Comments »

The headline writer’s dream story

March 21, 2024

Yesterday’s news from East Sussex (the old original Sussex, in southern England), a Sussex News story (by Jo Wadsworth) that kicks off with this juicy summary sentence:

A handyman who masturbated over a tenant’s knickers has been acquitted of criminal damage. 

The story is pretty much unavoidably raunchy, given the nature of the offense; nobody writes stuff like commit an obscene act these days. The reporter used the technical and punchier masturbated in the intro, I’d imagine because it was compact, but then opted for the euphemistic pleasured himself in the full story, which continues:

Simon Lawrence, 55, had been called to fix a faulty washing machine when he entered Joanna Hatton’s bedroom at the cottage she rented with her partner Thomas Jones.

But he didn’t realise the couple had installed a motion sensor camera there to watch their cat.

The couple were driving to Somerset for Christmas when Joanna got an alert on her phone that the camera had been activated on 19 December, 2022.

She watched in horror as Lawrence laid out her underwear on the bed and began pleasuring himself.

The reporter must have yearned to use the British slang wanked, which is vulgar but what ordinary people say in the UK. But you can’t talk like that in a respectable newspaper (though the tabloids can go pretty far).

But there would be room to veer towards vulgarity in the head; in fact, this is a dream story for an alert headline writer, who while casting about for alternatives to masturbated, to knickers (which is kind of giggly slang but not vulgar, and which doesn’t have to get into the head), and to be acquitted (which is legalese), might hit on the possibility for a somewhat rude pun on ‘masturbate’ vs. ‘be acquitted ‘, via the phrasal verb get off.

Or, of course, a headline writer might go for get off rather than be acquitted just because it’s a bit shorter (writing heads is sometimes like solving a devilishly complicated puzzle), in which case they could come up with the actual Sussex News headline in all innocence (until the laughter rolled in):

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Posted in Ambiguity, Headlines, Language and the law, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Puns, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

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