Three recent cartoons: a Calvin and Hobbes for the 4th of July, and two One Big Happy strips in which Ruthie copes with the language she hears:
Archive for the ‘Sociocultural conventions’ Category
From a child’s viewpoint
July 4, 2017Hitchhiking
April 1, 2017(Lots of mansex talk in plain terms. Not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
You find that you’ve wandered into a gay porn flick and you’re on the road: in fantasy L.A., on Santa Monica Boulevard or on the Pacific Coast Highway along the beach or somewhere similar; or in fantasy Country & Western territory, maybe outside of Nashville or along Route 66 south of Bakersfield or on the West Texas plains or somehere similar. You’re either driving or hitching.
If you’re driving, there will soon be a hitchhiker by the side of the road, and he will your fantasy man, a William Higgins SoCal twink or a Joe Gage blue-collar hunk. When you pick him up, he’ll give you what you need. You do him, he does you, you trade, whatever. You get whatever you need.
If you’re hitching, there will soon be a driver along the road, and he will be your fantasy man, a SoCal twink in a red convertible or a blue-collar hunk in a dusty pickup. When he picks you up, he’ll give you what you need. Same deal: you do him, he does you, you trade, whatever. You get whatever you need.
One manifestation of the fantasy: grease-monkey boy in board shorts and ballcap. Curly hair, SoCal spread-lip smile. Ready to roll.
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Ruthie copes
March 28, 2017Two recent One Big Happy strips, featuring Ruthie: the sign strip and the ladder strip
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The invention of the X job
March 24, 2017(Sex acts up the wazoo, so very much not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Passed on by Gregory Ward, this entertaining Onion video “This Day In History: The Invention Of The Handjob”, in which
Handjob inventor Fred Gilgoff describes the inspiration for the two-person masturbation technique [invented this day 60 years ago].
The conceit is that the hand job technque was devised, much in the way that the Heimlich maneuvre was devised, and that before Gilgoff’s great discovery, people had no effective technique for manually getting one another off. (According to the video, the hand job breakthrough was followed by a string of others: the blow job, the rim job, and fisting.)
Characters
January 11, 2017Characters, most of them cute, from Japanese anime, manga, animated cartoons, computer games, books, and consumer goods of all sorts, in news that’s come my way recently: an Economist story about Mario; California license plates featuring Totoro; plus a note on perhaps the most famous of these characters in the U.S., Hello Kitty; a news story on a new character, Aggretsuko; a note on one of my favorites, Afro Ken; a look back at Tarepanda on this blog; and a glance at the character Pingu, who’s not Japanese.
Gay Santas 2016
December 16, 2016(References to male bodies and man-man sex.)
Another chapter in the annual celebration of cultural, as opposed to religious, Christmas — a set of customs and practices that includes, among other things (in the U.S.), Christmas trees, mistletoe, eggnog, Christmas cards, Christmas presents, garlands, Christmas cookies, fruitcake, sentimental reverence for snow, gingerbread, roast turkey (or duck or goose), Christmas songs, Christmas ham, secret Santas, colored lights, red and green everything, candy canes, television shows, a zillion Christmas movies (more appearing every year), wreaths, and of course human Santa Clauses: soliciting charitable contributions on the street, taking gift lists from children in malls and stores, and handing out gifts at children’s parties.
Plus gay Santa Claus images, some of them of men just posing in Santa drag with a homoerotic subtext, many of them behaving flamboyantly gaily: cavorting with the three gay reindeer (Dancer, Prancer, and Vixen, but especially Prancer), exposing themselves in public, molesting handsome young men, and kissing Daddy under the mistletoe (or more flagrantly, performing acts of enthusiastic m2m sex with him under the Christmas tree).
From the stupendous array of gay Santa goodies available, I’ve chosen only five this year: all but one found on Tumblr; three photos of men in costume, two drawings; all with beards; none of them X-rated (despite a rich lode of phallically explicit images to choose from), but one just barely not; all but one showing Santa with his characteristic cap; and several combining the gay Santa theme with a gay geek or nerd theme.
Graduation Day
May 27, 2016The cover of the May 30th New Yorker, “Commencement”:
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A standard exercise on this blog: what do you have to know to understand what’s going on in this drawing? To see why it might be funny? (It could, of course, just be an affectionate portrait of an event of the season, not meant to be funny.)
On urinals and the conventions of the men’s room
January 1, 2016I have need (for a posting in preparation) to talk about the classification of urinals, the naming of the types, and the sociocultural conventions that surround their use.
Start with Wikipedia:
A urinal … is a sanitary plumbing fixture for urination only, predominantly used by males. [And mostly used in public places rather than in private houses, where toilets serve as fixtures for urinating while standing up.] It can take the form of a container or simply a wall, with drainage and automatic or manual flushing, or without flush water as is the case for waterless urinals.
The different types of urinals, be it for single users or as trough designs for multiple users, are intended to be utilized from a standing position (rather than squatting or sitting).
One crucial distinction is clear in this: single-user fixtures vs. multi-user fixtures. The multi-user type is sometimes called a gang urinal (parallel to gang shower), and that’s the label I’ll use here ; the single-user type, as the most common form of urinal in many places, has no standard name; I suggest the name solo urinal.
The other crucial distincrion is not clear in the Wikipedia passage above: between urinals that are hung from a wall (which I’ll call mounted urinals) and those with their base on the floor (which I’ll call standing urinals); again, mounted urinals are the most common type in many places, so that in many places unmodified urinal refers to the default type, a mounted solo urinal.
In any case, that gives us a four-way distinction, with many design details possible for each type.
Paddington Bear
January 13, 2015A charming and perceptive piece from Sunday’s NYT Book Review : “Please Look After This Bear” by Pico Iyer, about the Paddington Bear books, which Iyer sees as (among other things) social commentary. The beginning:
When Paddington Bear landed in London in 1958, it was still quite a provincial place. Safe, settled, a little gray — no sign of the Beatles or the swinging ’60s yet — it upheld the ceremonial proprieties immortalized in [the film] “Brief Encounter” and [the book] “84, Charing Cross Road.” Men wore ties to dinner, women skirts; the post-nuclear nightmares and beatnik explosions of America were barely visible on occasional television screens. Yes, the likes of the Trinidad-born novelist Samuel Selvon were beginning to give voice to other realities in works like “The Lonely Londoners,” but if a British family’s name was Brown, you could be fairly sure its skin was not.
The news for cats
August 10, 2014From Jeanne Dusseault, a link to the eccentric webcomic Breaking Cat News by Georgia Dunn. The latest installment (headline: “The man is taking a shower”), of August 6th:
The conceit: The strip shows bulletins from Cat News, a program by and for cats — in particular, the three cats of Dunn’s household (Lupin, Puck, and Elvis). The cats view everything from their point of view, and the views of the humans in the household (known to the cats only as The Woman and The Man) are either irrelevant or inscrutable. Many cross-species failures of communication result, as in the fourth panel above, where Puck (the black cat) can’t understand why The Man stands in a closet to get clean when he has a perefectly good tongue.