Archive for the ‘Masculinity’ Category
May 22, 2026
Yesterday, in my posting “Sir, I bring you a token of my subservience”, a Zippy strip in which Griffy addresses a Muffler Man, offering the fiberglass giant a phallic offering to his superior masculinity. It turns out that this strip is a reworking of the text from an earlier strip on a similar theme. And there we have the two-strip set-up for today’s discussion:
(#1) [The 5/21/26] strip “Tired Out”, with, oh dear, the alpha male theme made explicit; it is, in any case, all about (hyper)masculinity vs. inferior masculinity
(#2) The 6/2/17 strip “Rubber Fire”, showing (hyper)masculine contempt for analytic academics (I am, of course, the very model of the modern analytic academic, so eat my shorts, brute boy)
(more…)
Posted in Address terms, Art, Books, Count & Mass, Insults, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Phallicity, Pop culture, Pragmatics, Signs and symbols, Vaginality | Leave a Comment »
May 21, 2026
The crucial moment of today’s (5/21) Zippy strip, in which Griffy addresses a Muffler Man, offering the fiberglass giant a phallic offering to his superior masculinity. It’s hard to know where to start with this — and then it turns out that this strip is a reworking of the text from an earlier strip on a similar theme.
(#1) Today’s strip “Tired Out”, with, oh dear, the alpha male theme made explicit; it is, in any case, all about (hyper)masculinity vs. inferior masculinity
(#2) The 6/2/17 strip “Rubber Fire”, showing (hyper)masculine contempt for analytic academics (I am, of course, the very model of the modern analytic academic, so eat my shorts, brute boy)
Just to get the two strips on display, for discussion to come. My l life has been overfull, but almost entirely in wonderful ways, and that’s something else for me to talk about.
Posted in Academic life, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, My life, Phallicity, Pop culture, Signs and symbols, Vaginality | Leave a Comment »
May 16, 2026
(men’s bodies and sex between men, sometimes described in street language, so entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
Two gay porn scenes in which the partners take evident pleasure in their sex, as shown by the exchange of broad smiles during their acts (of enthusiastic manual, oral, and anal sex); each is experiencing pleasure himself and the satisfaction of pleasuring someone else, and together they are sharing socio-pleasure, the enjoyment of the company of others.
(more…)
Posted in Effeminacy, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Masculinity, Pleasure | Leave a Comment »
May 12, 2026
(tales of man-man sex, some of it in very plain street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest)
A story from my times at the gay baths, this one not previously reported on. From 1980, at the Club Baths of Toronto, a night out during the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association in Toronto, at which I gave a paper (“Internal” and “External” Evidence in Linguistics) in a symposium on “The Problem of Data in Linguistics”, now viewable on-line here.
The story has a poignant sequel in my current life as a solitary 85-year-old gay man with a lifelong high sex drive, which I’ll put off for a later posting because this one will be lengthy.
(more…)
Posted in Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Masculinity, My life | Leave a Comment »
May 8, 2026
Spurred by Max Vasilatos’s show-n-tell at the most recent (5/3) soc.motss get-together on Zoom, some material on the S&M graphic artist REX, assembled from material in his Wikipedia entry; the summary paragraph:
REX (1943 – March 2024) was an American visual artist and illustrator closely associated with gay fetish art of 1970s and 1980s New York and San Francisco. He avoided photographs and did not discuss his personal life. His drawings influenced gay culture through graphics made for nightclubs including the Mineshaft and his influence on artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe. Much censored, he remained a shadowy figure, saying that his drawings “defined who I became” and that there are “no other ‘truths’ out there”. REX died in Amsterdam in late March 2024.
(more…)
Posted in Art, Clothing, Gay porn, Homosexuality, Hyperbole, Language and the body, Language of sex, Masculinity, My life | Leave a Comment »
March 25, 2026
(well, yes, deeply about sex between men, considered analytically but described in the most direct street language, so entirely inappropriate for kids and the sexually modest)
Today’s topic combines the interests of my two previous postings
— on 3/24, “Luke Adams and the power bottoms of the pre-pandemic days”
— on 3/25, “The power of the normative gender binary”
and introduces as a side theme one of the overarching ideas of my work in both gender & sexuality studies and linguistics, that of pervasive variety / variability.
— as slogans: There are a great many homosexualities | There are a great many masculinities
Along the way, we’ll engage with four great bottoms from gay porn: Tannor Reed, Johnny Rapid, Kevin Wiles, and Trent Atkins.
(more…)
Posted in Effeminacy, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Masculinity, Variation | Leave a Comment »
March 25, 2026
From my 3/19/26 posting “Annals of derogation: homo”:
fairy-boy was the primary verbal abuse directed (inexplicably) at me in childhood, along with (equally inexplicable) accusations that I wanted to be a girl
The abuse was inexplicable to me when I was a kid, but though I was a canny child, there were ways of the world I did not yet appreciate, and among them was the power of the normative gender binary — whatever deviates from normative masculinity is necessarily feminine (and therefore unacceptable in a male person). Some material from this blog on the subject …
(more…)
Posted in Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language of sex, Masculinity | Leave a Comment »
March 24, 2026
(about gay porn performers, their bodies, their presentations of themselves, and their role preferences in sex with other men, all discussed in street language — so, way too raunchy for kids or the sexually modest)
A TitanMen gay porn sale mailer from 3/23 features Luke Adams, the smiling, athletic gay porn performer and great power bottom of the time — he made porn from 2014-22 — just before the coronavirus raged (in 2020-23):
(#1) Jesse Jackman and Luke Adams (genitals fuzzed out for WordPress modesty) in Beef (originally released 1/11/18)
(more…)
Posted in Facial expression, Gay porn, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Masculinity | Leave a Comment »
March 13, 2026
Following up on yesterday’s (3/12) posting “Masculine flamboyance” about the political commentator Jon Favreau’s presentation of himself in an advertisement for Crooked Media’s Pod Save America show: as an impish hunk: impish via a half-smile; hunk via a display of his muscular forearms, signs of a ripped body. (I could also have noted his neck muscles and the solid torso beneath his t-shirt):
(#1) JF on display
This is a pose for the camera, so what we see is some mixture of (a) what we might think of as a picture of one of his “natural” personas (unconsciously composed), just being who he is (as if that were a simple thing) and (b) a calculated presentation, with some conscious thought devoted to choosing elements of his presentation for the photo. I would guess that some part of the image was calculated — perhaps, the light dusting of facial scruff, conveying masculinity (in case you might have doubts, given the flamboyance of JF in action, as described in yesterday’s posting).
(more…)
Posted in Books, Effeminacy, Facial expression and gesture, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Identities, Language and politics, Language and the body, Language of sex, Masculinity, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »
December 5, 2025
A short video that came by me this morning, with some guy’s idea (off the top of his head) of the top five things that men actually want for Christmas; you really don’t want to see the original source. The larger point is that such a list is a distillation of someone’s beliefs about what men are really like — or, more accurately, what real men, normative men, are like.
I would prefer to think of it as a list of things men might not have thought of themselves. So: not want they really want, but what they might like yet might not know about or have thought of getting for themselves. That makes more sense. Ranking the items makes no sense at all.
I am, of course, far off normative American masculinity, so recommendations for such a person pretty much just slide off me, as they do in the annual lists for Fathers Day.
(more…)
Posted in Gifts, Holidays, Masculinity | Leave a Comment »
