Archive for the ‘Sociocultural Roles’ Category
July 13, 2024
A surprise from my tiny family this morning, as my grandchild Opal presented me with two gifts: the children’s picture book The Pengrooms by Paul Castle (Paul Castle Studio, 2022), together with an adorable plushie toy of Pringle the Pengroom — Pringle, who is grooms with Finn (both sporting rainbow bow ties, in case you missed the same-sex theme). The cover of the book, showing the couple atop a wedding cake, with the publisher’s blurb:
(#1) Follow Pringle and Finn, two penguins with big hearts, as they deliver wedding cakes to their friends in the animal kingdom. Each cake tells a story, and each [same-sex] wedding offers a challenge that Pringle and Finn must face together. The Pengrooms is an enduring tale about love, diversity, and the importance of working as a team.
Pringle is larger than Finn — couples differ in many ways — but they’re equal partners as a team. The Pringle plushie:
(#2) Pringle, with a really big bow tie
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Posted in Books, Effeminacy, Gay voice, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and animals, Language and food, Penguins, Rainbow, Social interactions, Sociocultural Roles, Toys | Leave a Comment »
October 16, 2019
(A lot about jockstraps and their contents, so not to everyone’s taste.)
Following on my postings about butch fagginess in men’s underwear, more intersections of styles of masculinity with styles of homosexuality, still with men’s underwear as signs of these styles.
The background, from my 10/14 posting “Space Candy”
(#1) A (candy) pink jock in PUMP!’s playful Space Candy line, with my note: “a pink jockstrap nicely combines max-macho in the underwear world with high-faggy in color symbolism”
Pink jockstraps (which deserve a separate posting [this is it]) generally take us off the end of the pier at the butch-faggy boardwalk: what we’ve got there is usually a stone-solid muscle queen, a guy with the best of male musculature, in a way-high homo presentation of self.
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Posted in Color, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Phallicity, Sociocultural Roles, Underwear | 2 Comments »
June 4, 2018
About the N bro, used first as an address term and then as a referential N with several senses, and available as an element in N + N compounds: as the first element in Bro Code and bro subculture, as the second element in code bro (roughly) ‘guy into coding’ and (hat tip to Tyler Schnoebelen) the academic-cool character named Philosophy Bro. Then, thanks to Ben Barrett on ADS-L (on May 23rd), on to crypto bro / cryptobro, which looks like it might be a portmanteau of cryptocurrency (or cryptocoin(age)) and bro, but is probably better analyzed as a straightforward compound of the clipping crypto and the N bro.
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Posted in Address terms, Books, Compounds, Gender and sexuality, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Philosophy, Portmanteaus, Slang, Slogans, Social interactions, Sociocultural Roles | Leave a Comment »
October 12, 2017
(Mostly cultural analysis, focused on gay porn. But plenty of very plain talk about men’s bodies and mansex, so this is not for kids or the sexually modest.)
(#1)
The pizza boy archetype, as depicted by young Melbourne artist Allain de Leon in DNA Magazine, April 2013
The figure is a package of symbolic content and associations, among them: the desirable youth; the delivery figure, someone who comes to your door bearing pleasurable goods for money; pizza as an American cultural emblem of warm informal social associations; and a cluster of associations of food with sex, some more general, others specific to pizza slices and whole pizza pies
The trigger for this posting is a recent ad for C1R/Catalina Video, with a sale on a new release — Pizza Boy 4 – Slice of Pie — and the three earlier films in the series, starting with Pizza Boy: He Delivers (William Higgins, 1986). The ads, which are way XXX-rated, are available in a posting on AZBlogX (“Another slice of pizza boy”). But here: a salacious image of pizza boy Steve Henson from the first film, a classic of gay porn:
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Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language and sexuality, Narrative, Phallicity, Portmanteaus, Signs and symbols, Sociocultural Roles, Vaginality | Leave a Comment »
September 8, 2017
Hurricane Irma works its way through the Caribbean, now aiming at Florida. There’s nothing useful I can do at this distance, so I’ve been frittering away my time recalling the famous Irmas of my world — your list might well be different — namely Irma S. Rombauer, the Irma of Irma la Douce, and, top of the list, the Irma of My Friend Irma, the apotheosis, oh alas, of the Dumb Blonde stereotype in American popular culture.
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and gender, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Pop culture, Sociocultural Roles, Stereotyping | 4 Comments »
March 21, 2017
or: Horses and Cowboys, take 2.
The background, from my posting yesterday on “Save a horse, ride a cowboy”:
Mentions of [the phrase] refer to it as a “saying” or a “familiar saying”, but I haven’t been able to track it back very far. In fact, the trail seems to go back only to a 2004 song. From Wikipedia [on the Big & Rich song] …
Peter Reitan on ADS-L quickly reported:
One year earlier, different singer:
With roots in Manitoba and Rapid City, S. D., [Haley] Bonar – pronounced like “honor” – exudes the bright-eyed charm of a small-town girl, but with hints of big-city cynicism. On the CD’s opening track, “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy,” she half-heardedly dreams of a home on the range with horses and 12 kids. (The Star Tribune (Minneapolis), April 25, 2003, page E4)
It is not the same as Big and Rich’s “Hick Hop” rap of the same name.
You can watch it on Youtube here.
Different words, different music, totally different content and tone (it’s a woman’s touching fantasy about love with a wonderful cowboy). (And note that the phrase is in the title, but not in the lyrics themselves, suggesting it was a familiar expression.)
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Posted in Books, Formulaic language, Masculinity, Music, Sociocultural Roles | 1 Comment »
March 5, 2016
This morning’s Steam Room Stories (videos set in a fictional men’s steamroom, frequented by really fit men of various sexualities talking about sex) looked at Gay Stereotyping, with three instances, together doing a pretty good job of covering the politics of gay sexuality in a few minutes while getting off three entertaining Xmosexual portmanteaus: in order, bromosexual, promosexual, normosexual. You can watch the episode here.
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and sexuality, Sociocultural Roles | 1 Comment »
