The Wayno/Piraro Bizarro from yesterday, on running evolutionary errands:

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)

Venture Fish crawls out onto land, no doubt to return after foraging there, then will venture onto land again, and in time its descendants will have become amphibians, and then, well, you know the story.

But why does Venture Fish go on land? It insists on doing this for some reason — the primary reason for the act —  that is inscrutable to its aquatic companion, but Home Fish asks that Venture Fish meanwhile run an errand: fetch some things on the trip, thus supplying an additional, secondary reason for the act.  Home Fish uses the format BACKGROUND CONDITION + REQUEST:

BACKGROUND CONDITION: If you’re going out / Since you’re already up / As long as you’re up / While you’re up / …

+ REQUEST: (could you / would you / why don’t you / please /…) VP-BSE

— made famous in the slogan for an early 1960s ad campaign:

as long as you’re up get me a Grant’s

A Grant’s exemplar:

(#2) Grant’s is a blended Scotch whisky bottled by William Grant & Sons in Scotland (Wikipedia link)

Gender and language note. Though I left no gender flags in my comments on #1 above, you probably took Home Fish to be female and Venture Fish to be male, and you might want to reflect on those genderings.

In #2, the stationary member of the pair is given as male, and almost everyone took the Scotch-fetcher to be female. This was widely viewed as sexist at the time: the woman is being asked to serve the man. Later ads, in which the professional male was replaced by a fashionable or artistic woman, while intended to redress the gender differential, only made it worse, at least in the eyes of many viewers, who saw the woman as offering her charms and talents in exchange for the favor.

The differences between #1 and #2 are then worth further reflection. It would would seem that at least part of the answer has to be with fetching things inside vs. outside the home.

#1: Why go away? Four possible purposes:

— A: to run an errand, to fetch something. The explicit secondary purpose in the cartoon.

— B: to go on a quest, a journey to maturation, to find oneself. The purpose suggested by the title Wayno gave #1 on his blog: “Walkabout”. From Wikipedia:

Walkabout is a rite of passage in Australian Aboriginal society, during which males undergo a journey during adolescence, typically ages 10 to 16, and live in the wilderness for a period as long as six months to make the spiritual and traditional transition into manhood.

They then return home. But that would be a very long time to wait for the delivery of a grocery item.

— C: to leave home to take up adult life elsewhere. Cue the Beatles’ “She’s Leaving Home”. From Wikipedia:

“She’s Leaving Home” is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, written by Paul McCartney and John Lennon, and released on their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Paul McCartney wrote and sang the verse and John Lennon wrote the chorus, which they sang together.

You can listen to the 2009 remastered version here (#3).

— D: to abandon a previous life entirely. They go out for a loaf of bread, or possibly some mealworms, and just never come back. It happens. Cue Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart”. From Wikipedia:

“Hungry Heart” is a song written and performed by Bruce Springsteen on his fifth album, The River. It was released as the album’s lead single in 1980…

Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack
I went out for a ride and I never went back
Like a river that don’t know where it’s flowing
I took a wrong turn and I just kept going

You can listen to the official audio here (#4).

— E: for some social purpose, especially for male sociability, activities with one or more buddies (the guys, the boys). Sports events, hunting and fishing together, drinking together, going to strip clubs, things men in our culture do with one another, customarily without the company of female companions. Venture Fish is probably going out to score some larvae with his buddies, or for a gang spawn.

#2: the ghost cartoon. Apparently, a fair number of people who only dimly remember the Grant’s ad campaign in #2 have a vivid recollection of a New Yorker cartoon take-off on its ads and their slogan. The cartoon they recall has a male figure much like the one in #2, but at a desk, with piles of books and papers on it as well as the typewriter; he is obviously a writer or scholar of some kind, and the caption has him saying (to an out-of-frame character):

As long as you’re up, get me a grant.

I myself remembered this cartoon with great affection. I believed it to be the work of New Yorker cartoonist Charles Saxon, known for skewering the affectations of urban upperclass men. From Wikipedia:

Charles David Saxon (November 13, 1920 – December 6, 1988) was an American cartoonist known for his work for The New Yorker.

… Much of his New Yorker work gently pokes fun at the privileged denizens of prosperous suburbs; unusually, he wrote his own words, often highlighting clichés, as in an image of well-fed executives in a boardroom, the chairman stating “Of course, honesty is one of the better policies.”

Get me a grant would be so Saxon; if the cartoon were being done now, it would be by William Haefeli (who might even bring the addressee into the frame, making him the speaker’s male partner; the world has changed a lot in the last 60 years).

The only problem is that, apparently, there never has been such a cartoon, in the New Yorker or anywhere else. It’s a ghost memory, composed of shards of separate actual events, reconfigured in many ways. As I point out every few months on this blog, our memories are deeply undependable in their details; they are cobbled together from bits of real stuff, reworked by hearsay and imagination and often (unintentionally) altered so that they’re better stories than the actual events. Even when we are absolutely certain of their accuracy. (A lot of people get really angry when I point this out, but there’s a gigantic literature on the subject and I’ve looked at a fair amount of data first-hand.)

What do I know to be true? First,  As long as you’re up, get me a grant (or close variants of it) is actually well-attested as a purely verbal joke, without a drawing attached. Going back to the time of the Grant’s ads. For example, it’s the title of an article in Esquire magazine of June 1966: “As Long as You’re Up, Get Me a Grant” by Anonymous. And it continues to be used in pieces offering advice to grant applicants.

Second, there were at least two magnificent joke cartoons taking off on the Grant’s slogan in the early 1960s, but not involving grant in the ‘award, subsidy’ sense. From the celebrated cartoonist George Price of the old New Yorker and from the celebrated pinup artist Alberto Vargas.

From Price in the New Yorker on 12/21/63:

(#5) A wonderfully convoluted joke, involving the transposition of grant and up, Ulysses S. Grant for grant, and Up in the brand name 7-Up (naming a beverage parallel to Grant’s whisky). Also a joke that would be very hard to tell in words alone.

I suspect that anyone recalling a New Yorker cartoon — and that includes me — is recalling this one, which is just hugely more intricate than the simple and memorable get me a grant.

From Wikipedia on the artist:

George Price (June 9, 1901 – January 12, 1995) was an American cartoonist who was born in Fort Lee, New Jersey. After doing advertising artwork in his youth, Price started doing cartoons for The New Yorker magazine in 1929. He continued contributing to the New Yorker well into his eighties, displaying a talent for both graphic innovation (many of his cartoons consisted of a single, unending line) and for a wit that somehow combined the small issues of domestic life with a topical sensibility.

Then there’s the Vargas, from the May 1965 Playboy:

(#6) grants / pants

I seem not to have posted on Vargas before, but here are a few basic facts from Wikipedia:

Joaquin Alberto Vargas y Chávez (9 February 1896 – 30 December 1982) was a noted Peruvian painter of pin-up girls. He is often considered one of the most famous of the pin-up artists.

… Vargas’ artistic work, paintings and color drawings, were periodically featured in some issues of Playboy magazine in the 1960s and 1970s.

BACKGROUND CONDITION + REQUEST jokes more generally. Not involving /grænt/. A rich joke genre, turning usually on a contextually surprising or preposterous REQUEST. Two New Yorker examples, one from Charles Saxon himself (but in 1987) and one from a newcomer to the magazine, Karen Sneider, in 2019:

(#6) From 10/5/87

(#6) From 7/8/19 (note the eyelashes, conventionally indicating a female fish)

The queer option, not yet taken. I was mildly surprised to discover that the tag while it’s up (referring to an erection) seems not to have been exploited in the title of gay porn. Possible dialogue: “Oh look, Joey’s got a boner! While it’s up, let’s use it, guys!” Ok, maybe too subtle for the genre.

(Sex toys and all they bring with them, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Today, a leek (for St. David’s Day, March 1st), but yesterday (the intercalary day February 29th) a leap.

The mail arrives and wow! (you exclaim) there’s a Leap Day flash sale at the Guy Gear Store, just for today! You have visions of well-designed equipment for hunting, fishing, and camping; cool bikes; hot athletic shoes;  t-shirts for teams, bands, and plain ol’ aggression; tools Craftsman never dreamed of; electronics to rule the world of the future; and all that good guy stuff.

And then you examine the ad in detail:

(#1) Quick! Identify the three sale items in the ad; the model’s shapely buttocks are not actually on offer

Probaby not your father’s idea of guy gear.

Answers to the leap quiz, from left to right:

a Firefly Contour Plug — a silicone butt plug / prostate stimulator that glows in the dark; it comes in three sizes

the Renegade PSI Pump — “a sophisticated penis pump with built-in pressure gauge for precise pumping session”

an aluminum cock ring, size large (the Guy Gear Store doesn’t tell you this, but it can also serve as a modernist napkin ring)

(Personal notes: I have good things to say about some anal probes (cousins of the Firefly above) and many cock rings (adjustable leather ones on myself, and other types, like the metal number above, to admire on other guys), but I’m deeply dubious about penis pumps, which are advertised as treatments for small penis size and erectile dysfunction.)

As for cock rings, we get this store illustration of what they can do in practice:

(#2)

Then two things: another bash at categories and labels, in the domain of sex toys (where I ventured back in 2013); and a lot about the uses of gear (and its complex associations with masculinity).

The domain of sex toys. From my 2/18/13 posting “Commercial categories: gay sex toys”, about the (quite extensive) section of the TLA Video on-line catalogue devoted to gay (male) sex toys:

There turns out to be a pretty rich category structure here, involving a number of categories that (not surprisingly) have no ordinary-language labels. A category structure devised for the users of these items, by their designers, manufacturers, and sellers.

We see much the same thing on the Guy Gear Store site, though the category structure there isn’t as complex as on the TLA Video site. They initially list five categories:

anal toys, cock & ball, lubes, fantasy & fetish (nipple clamps, wrist cuffs, collars, ball gags, crops, and more), undergear (most of it highly pouch-focused)

and then add four more:

masturbators, dildos, accessories (the Toy Cleaner product, for instance), penis enhancement

As at TLA Video, the categories include a number that are familiar to the users / customers, though not necessarily under the labels Guy Gear uses: ANAL-TOYS and UNDERWEAR (labeled undergear), for example. Others are categories of commerce, with names created by the makers and sellers: masturbators and penis enhancement, for instance.

gear. The short version of the story from NOAD (which tries to put the currently most frequent usages first in its entries):

noun gear:  1 (often gears) one of a set of toothed wheels that work together to alter the relation between the speed of a driving mechanism (such as the engine of a vehicle or the crank of a bicycle) and the speed of the driven parts (the wheels). … 2 [a] [usually with modifier] equipment that is used for a particular purpose. [b] informal clothing, especially of a specified kind: designer gear. [c] informal a person’s personal possessions and clothes. [d] Nautical a ship’s rigging.

It won’t be entirely obvious from this entry — in part, because of the way the NOAD definitions are framed — but in fact the various referents of gear are, for the most part, strongly associated culturally with the activities and interests of men, so that the word gear in many of its uses evokes masculine associations as well. I’ll call these associations, for the referents and for the word, brosociations; gear is, generally, strongly brosociated.

As a result, the choice of gear, rather than some alternative item (equipment, clothing, belongings) can be used to index masculinity; to supply masculine connotations where they would otherwise be absent (with reference to skin-care products, for example); and to reinforce and intensify explicit masculine associations (in gay-related contexts, in particular, as in the Guy Gear Store).

This turns out to be a much bigger topic than I had anticipated, so my comments here are just exploratory.

But to start the discussion, I ‘ll point out that NOAD‘s sense 1, with mechanical gears, puts us solidly in a context that in our culture is traditionally the province of men: mechnical apparatus of all kinds. And that its sense 2d takes us into another, the world of ships and sailors. In fact, its sense 2a takes us into still another, since the actual uses of gear here involve not just any kind of equipment, but specifically tools, again conventionally in a male territory.

Senses in greater detail. A (fairly drastic) boiling-down of the relevant material in OED2’s entry for the noun gear:

I. Equipment
1. a. collective singular… Apparel, attire, dress, vestments [from a1350 on]
2. Armour, arms, warlike accoutrements [from c1275 on]
3. a. Accoutrements of a riding horse, or his rider [from a1400-50]

II. Apparatus
5. a. Apparatus generally; appliances, implements, tackle, tools [from a1400 on]
b. The organs of generation. Now only slang. [1st OED2 cite 1675] [GDoS has slang gear for the female genitals from the 14th century on, then for the male genitals from the 16th on]
6. Machinery
a. A combination of wheels, levers, … [1st cite 1523]
8. Nautical. Rigging in general; ‘the rigging of any particular spar or sail’ [1st cite 1669]

III. Stuff
9. a. Goods, movable property, household necessaries and utensils [from c1380]

The earliest cites are in solidly male territory, warfare. And much of the rest of it involves extensions to other culturally masculine domains (even to the male sexual bodyparts); in particular, gear for ‘apparatus’ has become strongly associated with tools: men use gear ‘tools’, while women mostly use equipment or supplies (or, in the kitchen, utensils). (These are tendencies, not rules.)

Two notable exceptions. First exception: gear ‘stuff’, which seems to be largely free of gender associations. (My 16-year-old grand-daughter reports that this usage is normal for her, as in the dialogue “What’s in the bag? Oh, that’s my gear” (‘my stuff, my belongings’). Otherwise, she might use my gear to refer to her drawing supplies — she’s serious about her artwork — the way her mother and other photographers use gear to refer to their cameras and other equipment of their craft. But probably not in any other context.)

Second exception: gear ‘clothing’, which turns out to be pretty complex. A clothing seller offering gear is, first of all, offering casualwear, and probably special-purpose apparel: activewear or sportswear (including workout clothes). So we get things like the Guy Gear men’s clothing and sportswear shop in Sylmar CA:

(#3) Offering team wear, t-shirts for bands, streetwise t-shirts, flannel clothing, jeans, athletic shoes, etc.

And we get the gear.com site (roughly comparable to REI, Patagonia, and North Face — outdoor retail stores) selling adventure gear for skiing, climbing, and camping; bags and backpacks; and clothing for these activities (both men’s gear and women’s gear).

And of course the UnderGear / Undergear marketing company (often posted about on this blog), offering premium men’s underwear, primarily for gay men to use, for whatever purpose suits them.

(So there’s a hint in all of this of clothing as tools.)

The word gear as providing masculinity. If you want to promote a product that normally would lack masculine associations as an item for men, you can tap brosocial gear. As here:

(#4) Guy Gear toiletries for men

The ad copy, very heavy on the toiletries as grooming tools:

issimo guy gear tri wash hair, face and body wash and issimo guy gear face art shave emulsion are formulated for the gentleman who needs to simplify his daily routine. Cleanse face, hair and body with one effective formula formulated for all skin types and follow with issimo guy gear face art, a clear shave emulsion whose main purpose, in addition to keeping the facial hair (or body hair) visible during a shave, does NOT draw out beneficial oils from the skin. issimo guy gear face art provides proper lubrication for the blade, and conditions the skin all in one swoop.

The word gear as jacking up already explicit masculinity. In gay contexts, where we’re already awash in men with men, but edgily, because any mansex or male-male desire smells like femininity to some people. So gay men are inclined to pile on as many brosociations as we can get. Hence (gay) Guy Gear.

Alternatives to gear. A summary adapted from the NOAD thesaurus for the word, keyed to three subsenses in the NOAD entry. This can then serve as material for further investigation of the connotative consequences of choosing gear.

[sense 2a] EQUIPMENT equipment, apparatus, paraphernalia, articles, appliances, impedimenta; tools, utensils, implements, gadgets; stuff, things; kit, rig, tackle, odds and ends, bits and pieces, trappings, appurtenances, accoutrements, regalia; archaic equipage.

[sense 2b] CLOTHES clothing, garments, outfits, attire, garb, dress, wear; informal togs, duds, getup, threads; formal apparel

[sense 2c] BELONGINGS belongings, possessions, effects, personal effects, property, paraphernalia, odds and ends, bits and pieces, bags, baggage, luggage;  Law chattels; informal things, stuff.

(There will be penis allusions, but nothing actually raunchy.)

My morning names of 2/26, which arrived three in a bunch, all tum-words, all body-related, but in two different ways:

(a) noun tumor, a tissue growth

(b) adj. tumid, enlarged or distended (as applied to erect penises in particular, but to other things as well)

(c) adj. tumescent, ditto, but more strongly evoking penises

(a) has a somewhat medical tone, but has been taken into everyday usage. The other two are elevated in tone, distanced from carnality; they sound literary or technical. When I came fully to consciousness, I realized that all three traced back to the Latin tum– stem in tumere ‘to swell’. It’s all about swelling; (a) has gone in one direction of semantic specialization, (b) and (c) in another.

And then, of course, there turned out to be more, stuff I hadn’t anticipated at all: the nouns tumulus ‘ancient burial ground’ (they are mounds) and tumult ‘loud noise, disorder’ (the sound rises).

Where will it end? Is a tummy so called because the bellies of babies are often rounded and the bellies of pregnant women are distended? (No. So the antacid Tums is irrelevant to this story.) What about the bodyparts scrotum and rectum, or even the proper name Tatum, suggesting Channing Tatum and his impressive endowment? (No, a thousand times, no. And you should be ashamed of yourselves for having suggested it.)

The initial three (with the Latin stem embroidered upon by various affixes from that language), one by one:

(a) tumor. From NOAD:

noun tumor (British tumour): [a] a swelling of a part of the body, generally without inflammation, caused by an abnormal growth of tissue, whether benign or malignant. [b] archaic a swelling of any kind. ORIGIN late Middle English: from Latin tumor, from tumere ‘to swell’.

The oldest uses with the agentive/instrumental suffix –or just denote a swelling, something that has swollen. But then specialized to a tissue growth, especially a malignant one. (My man Jacques’s brain tumor was a medulloblastoma. No illustrations here, though the net provides a strangely jaunty cartoon about this particular affliction in children, where it is the most common form of brain cancer.)

(b) tumid. From NOAD:

adj. tumid: 1 (especially of a part of the body) swollen: a tumid belly. 2 (especially of language or literary style) pompous or bombastic: tumid oratory.

It has the derivational affix –id of humid, pallid, stupid, torrid, acrid, morbid, etc. The word is medical / technical or literary, as in the examples above, and in this example from the on-line Merriam-Webster:

He’d just been in a fight, and was nursing his tumid lip

(#1) Another tumid lip: an angioderma of the lip (from the Merck Manual site)

The adjective collocates especially often with penis, as a counterpart to tumescent, the two serving as very elevated alternatives to formal erect and colloquial hard. Illustrations of the referent abound on AZBlogX, of course, but here’s an especially entertaining instance of the locution tumid penis, from Karen Mercury’s The Hinterlands (a 2005 umliterary paperback):

(#2) … and on from there, as the author struggles with stylistic lexical choices

The publisher’s material describes the book, with a mostly straight face, as historical fiction plus romance novel. The plot summary begins:

The year is 1896. In the vast network of the Niger Delta waterways, where palm oil and blood flow from the hinterlands, the ancient Kingdom of Benin is under siege. Legendary trader and leopard hunter Brendan Donivan battles to protect his adopted homeland’s sacred civilization from the colonial expansion of the British, while balancing his commerce with the whiteman’s world. Life is not exactly easy. And it’s about to get worse. Enter Elle Bowie, New York anthropologist. She says she’s come to study clitoridectomy. She claims the crazy Texan traveling with her, the one whose jungle attire consists wholly of a Stetson, boots, and a gun, is her husband.

Yeah, sure.

(c) tumescent. From NOAD, where the sex now gets into the actual entry:

adj. tumescent: 1 swollen or becoming swollen, especially as a response to sexual arousal. 2 (especially of language or literary style) pompous or pretentious; tumid: his prose is tumescent, full of orotund language.

More complex morphology, with two Latin-derived affixes –esc–ent in sequence, as in fluorescent, putrescent, effervescent, incandescent, phosphorescent, etc.

I believe that tumescent and tumescence have become so firmly associated with sexual arousal and erection that most people would now take these senses to be basic, so that expressions like tumescent prose are viewed as metaphorical.

In any case, the items have become conventionalized in some medical contexts, for instance in the terminology noctural penile tumescence (NPT) and tumescent anesthesia.

NPT is the phenomenon known informally as morning wood and more formally as noctural erection(s): spontaneous erection(s) during sleep and, especially, on awakening. Entirely normal, but of course a source of embarrassment, jokes, and (inevitably) porn. A cute Medical News Today illustration of the first:

(#3)

And the cover for a DVD of the third type:

(#4) Amiable muscleman Landon Conrad on the cover, sporting NPT; brief discussion in my 1/4/11 posting “Morning wood”

As for tumescent anesthesia, the procedure was news to me; it’s amazing what you can pick up on the net. From Wikipedia:

Tumescent anesthesia is a surgical technique for delivery of local anesthesia. It also makes the target tissue firm and turgid from absorbed water, which can aid certain procedures. It was originally devised for use in liposuction, but has since been applied to other surgical situations, including plastic surgery, burn care, and vascular surgery. It is a relatively safe way to achieve extensive regional anesthesia of skin and subcutaneous tissue with a high total dose but a low risk of systemic toxicity. The subcutaneous infiltration of a large volume of very dilute lidocaine and epinephrine causes the targeted tissue to become swollen and firm, or tumescent, and permits otherwise painful procedures to be performed on patients without subjecting them to the inherent risks of general anesthesia, and with reduced blood loss due to the vasoconstriction induced by epinephrine.

There are illustrations, which (in contrast to Landon Conrad) are startlingly unarousing.

Bonus item (d) tumulus. From NOAD:

noun tumulus: an ancient burial mound; a barrow.

So called because it’s a swelling on the ground. As here:

(#5) From the Ancient Origins site: “The Outstanding Megalithic Necropolis that is the Tumulus of Bougon” (in the Deux-Sèvres department of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region in the western part of France) on 9/29/17

Bonus item (e) tumult. From NOAD:

noun tumult: [a] a loud, confused noise, especially one caused by a large mass of people: a tumult of shouting and screaming broke out. [b] confusion or disorder: the whole neighborhood was in a state of fear and tumult | his personal tumult ended when he began writing songs.

So called because the level of noise swells in the rioting or disorder. I am not making this up.

Any number of scenes of disorder would have done as an illustration, but I chanced to come on a striking exploitation of the noun in advertising, to name a trendy product. From the Beverage Daily site, “Coke hopes revamped adult soft drinks brand will cause Tumult in Europe” on 4/9/12:

(#6) Flavors included maltée ‘malty’ (apple and malt barley) — above — and fruitée ‘fruity’ (apricot and pear)

Beside the point: tummy. Yes, tummies are often rounded, you might even say swollen, especially in babies and pregnant women, but the tum of tummy has nothing to do etymologically with the Latin ‘swell’ stem. (I know, by the time we got to tumult, you were softened up to entertain pretty much any damn etymology.)

A cute baby and its naturally somewhat rounded tummy:

(#7) (photo from the Parents magazine site)

And tummy exploited in commerce, in “Tums for the Tummy”:

(#8) The Tums logo

(#9) A big pile of Tums

From Wikipedia:

Tums is an antacid [in chewable tablets] made of sucrose (sugar) and calcium carbonate (CaCO3) [now] manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline in St. Louis MO. They are also available in a sugar-free version. It is an over-the-counter drug, available at many retail stores, including drug stores, grocery stores and mass merchandisers. It provides relief from heartburn and indigestion (“sour stomach”).

But if tummy has nothing to do with swelling in Latin, where does it come from? NOAD has the straight dope:

noun tummy: informal a person’s stomach or abdomen. ORIGIN mid 19th century: child’s pronunciation of stomach.

As for scrotum, rectum, and (Channing) Tatum, arresting as these names are, they’re completely irrelevant here. But you knew that, didn’t you?

(Intended as an entertainment in tough times. There will, however, be male bodyparts and mansex, in sometimes very plain language, so in general not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

It starts with a regular feature of this blog: advertisements for premium men’s underwear that treat men’s bodies simultaneously as the engines of vigorous athletic pursuits and as the loci of hot sex between men. And, correspondingly, that view the underwear — especially the quintessentially masculine undergarment, the jockstrap — as simultaneously a piece of sports gear and a vehicle for sexual advertisement, displaying a man’s package prominently in front and his bare buttocks behind.

Exhibit #1 is a Daily Jocks ad from 3/31 for a jockstraps sale, featuring a muscular model with a remarkable bubble butt, who is sporting a handsome deep red jockstrap with matching harness and socks, while poised midway between the position for doing pushups and one offering his ass for sex.

The accompanying jockstrap sale catalogue then takes us on a jaunt from Surry Hills, near Sydney NSW in Australia (where the Supawear company has its headquarters) through Hawaii and northern California (Berkeley and Sunnyvale) to San Pedro Town in northern Belize. And then back by plane from San Pedro to Sydney.

But first, below the fold, the world-class bubble butt on display, with a fanciful caption of my own devising:

(#1)

Sporking

from Buttpush,
Versatilio can
pivot in seconds to
Pushup or to
Humped Up in Heat

responding to the
exigencies of the
occasion

The point is that what Versatilio is doing is neither a good pushup nor a good humping up to get fucked, though he can move from the position in #1 to either of these pretty easily. Well, he’s a jock; he’s good with his body.

For comparison, first, an illustration of good form for pushups:

(#2) From the site of POWER: Chiropractic Health Center in Longmont CO (I note, but will not comment on, “maintain a perfectly flat position when going down”)

When doing a pushup, it’s no butt in the air.  If you’re humping up to get fucked, that’s pretty much the whole point.

So, from my 12/30/18 posting “Sexual displays > offers: prone, supine, lateral”, in a section on prone displays of the naked male body, focused on the model’s buttocks (this is a version of a more explicit AZBlogX piece):

Many gay men, responding to their predilections and desires, would look upon these butts and find them arousing, would be inclined to view them as implicit offers; but they’re just posed bodies. Sometimes, however, the offer is explicit: the subject spreads his legs and humps up his ass, making his asshole available (and his cock and balls visible), as here:

(#3) Richard Vytniorgu, spread and humped up…

Spread and humped up, … in a variant of the prone position, but now offering his body. He could be easily fucked in this position, or he could raise himself up on his knees, offering himself for a doggie fuck

That’s all about exhibit #1. Intrigued by the jockstrap there, I went to the Daily Jocks sale page to see what other jocks they had on offer. And found some wonderful stuff.

The Jockstrap Trail. The DJ ad copy:

Don’t hide your best assets – feel sexy and confident in our designer range of men’s jockstraps underwear … guaranteed to turn heads and enhance all of your best features.

(Note that no athletic functions of the jockstrap are touted here. It’s confidence, fashion, and attractiveness to other men.)

The first station on the trail: Sydney. Just one row of jocks from the Supawear company (headquartered near Sydney), in two different lines:

(#4) Two jocks from the Galaxy line, featuring intense bright colors; and two from the POW line, with fancifully patterned pouches — notably the Fruit Punch jock, with a variety of colorful fruits (you can see a strawberry and part of a pineapple)

The Galaxy jocks look like they would actually work as athletic supporters, albeit dramatic and fashion-conscious ones. The POW jocks have thinner bands and straps and strike me entirely as items of a costume rather than as functional jocks to sweat in. That’s not a complaint — I get a big kick out of the POW line — just an observation that they’re symbolic, not actual, gymwear. Their function is as homowear, to provide an entertaining wrapper for a guy’s dick and balls, one that an audience can appreciate, while making his ass available.

[Late-breaking addendum: a 4/2 mailing from DJ, with this ad featuring a Supawear POW Dessert pouch (you’re so sweet I could just eat you up):

(#5) A pouch of sweets (note to model: no teeth on that sucker, sucker! lick it and mouthe it, don’t bite!)

End of addendum.]

Surely fruit punch was chosen intentionally as a pattern and a name, evoking the slur fruit (now defiantly reclaimed by many of us fruits), and combining faggy fruit with aggressive punch — butch fagginess is all over the place. (Imagined dialogue: “Hey, dude, cute jock; can I fondle your fruit?”)

The second station on the trail: Hawaii. The power of associative thinking then kicked in and fruit punch led me to the commercial powerhouse of fruit punches: Hawaiian Punch:

(#6) (from the Hawaiian Punch company site)

Note that Hawaiian Punch is symbolically, not actually, Hawaiian; it incorporates some ingredients from Hawaii to create a southern California product that evokes Hawaii. Some official company history:

In 1934, A.W. Leo, Tom Yates, and Ralph Harrison developed the first Hawaiian Punch recipe in a converted garage in Fullerton, California [in Orange County]. They wanted a tropical-tasting syrup to add to their line of ice cream toppings sold under the trade name Pacific Citrus Products Company. “Leo’s Hawaiian Punch,” as the brand was called at the time, was sold to area restaurants, soda fountains, and ice cream manufacturers. The “Leo’s” was dropped from Hawaiian Punch several years later. The main ingredients of the first Hawaiian Punch recipe were shipped from the Hawaiian Islands, thus the origin of the name.

The graphic in #5 shows the company mascot, Punchy, who was the central figure in a famous ad campaign of the 1960s and 70s, exploiting a simple pun on punch:

From the Cartoons Plus site:

In 1962, the Atherton-Privett ad agency created a 20-second commercial to advertise Hawaiian Punch drink.

You can see the 1962 commercial here (#7).

The commercial was produced by John Urie and Associates in Hollywood. Jean Guy Jacques was the director; Bob Guidi and John Urie designed the two characters, Punchy and Oaf. Ross Martin did Punchy’s voice, “Hey! How ’bout a nice Hawaiian Punch?” and John Urie did Oaf’s line, “Sure”. Rod Scribner animated the commercials. Sam Cornell also worked on the later versions. Oaf never learned to say “No” and he was always punched. The commercial ended with Punchy leaning on a can of Hawaiian Punch, saying, “Wasn’t that a refreshing commercial?” The commercial won many awards.

The third station on the trail: northern California. The Hawaiian Punch ads turn on a pun on the punch of fruit punch. But then there’s a whole world of word play that turns on a pun on the fruit of fruit punch — employing the anti-gay slur fruit, now wielded, defiantly and also playfully, as an affirmation of queerness in a hostile world.

Two notable examples from northern California: gay radio in Berkeley, gay comedy in Sunnyvale.

From Wikipedia on the slang term fruit:

Fruit Punch was the first gay radio show in the United States, and possibly the world, which aired weekly from 1982–1987 from Berkeley radio station KPFA, the first listener-supported radio broadcaster in the United States.

(My first resonse was surprise that this came so late, given that Stonewall happened in 1969, and energized a series of defiant gay activist groups virtually immediately. But of course the commercial media were generally as least as hostile to lgbt folk as the wider culture.)

Meanwhile, KPFA 94.1 endures.

Then, south and on the peninsula, there was comedy. From the site of the Rooster T. Feathers comedy club in Sunnyvale CA, the show for 6/6/12:

FRUIT PUNCH! An Evening of Gay and Gay Friendly Comedy is back at Rooster T. Feathers Comedy Club. It’s a diverse evening of stand up comedy featuring gay and gay friendly comics from the Bay Area and beyond! All are welcome- Whether you’re Gay, Lesbian, Straight, Bi, Questioning or just like to get drunk and make out with everybody you see. San Francisco’s favorite fierce comedic tranny tart Pippi Lovestocking hosts with appearances by Natasha Muse, Beth Schumann, Jennie McNulty, Ronn Vigh and headliner Scott Silverman!

Rooster T. Feathers also endures.

The fourth station on the trail: San Pedro in Belize. Go back to #4 and look at the first two jocks in it — with SPRSYD on the waistband. Mystery initialism, not explained anywhere on the Supawear site, so far as I could see.

Was it a secret slogan — Show Prodigious Rear, Show Your Dick? SPRay SYDney? — or what?

Ah, SYD isn’t just an abbreviation for Sydney, it’s specifically the code for Sydney airport. Could SPR be an airport too?

Astonishingly, yes: San Pedro, in Belize (yes, Belize, the country on the Caribbean coast of Central America, in between Mexico and Guatemala). So a flight between SPR and SYD, halfway around the world (ca. 8,650 mis.) would be a SPRSYD flight. There don’t seem to be any actual flights, so we have to treat this as a flight of the imagination, merely evoking exotic Caribbean shores.

San Pedro, originally a small fishing village settled mostly by Mexicans, is now a very popular tourist destination, especially for scuba diving. Most San Pedrans speak both Spanish and English fluently, so it’s congenial to English speakers.

Besides the diving, San Pedro is famous for its annual Gran Carnaval, celebrated a week before Ash Wednesday. This turns out to be a festival of transgressive sex and gender, with a bonus of face and body painting. From Wikipedia on El Gran Carnaval de San Pedro:

It is meant for people to indulge in bodily pleasures that they will avoid during Lent. Men dress as women, and perform dances for money in the street, with a competition to see who performs the most outlandish dance. On the last day of the carnival people flood the streets to paint one another.

Well, you could do all of this at Mardi Gras in Sydney. Or you could do it in a more intimate and exotic location, and get the plus that you’re taking part in a genuine folk festival.

When you’re done, exhausted but refreshed (as one hopes to be after a ritual of sexual excess), you can take a SPRSYD flight of the mind back to Oz, completing the loop of the trail.

The bon appétit magazine mailing that came to me today: “Where to Order Your Favorite Pantry Staples Online: Your local grocery store is out of flour. The internet isn’t” by mackenzie fegan on 4/8/20:

(#1) An array of specialty staples to get you through sheltering in place

The full text:

For most of us, grocery shopping looks radically different these days. This is not the moment to pop to the store for that one specific thing you need or to plan leisurely visits to the artisan cheesemonger and the specialty butcher and that one tiny market that sells the labne [or labneh: yogurt cheese] that you like. And with many grocery stores running low on products like flour, beans, and yeast, chances are you’re working with some limitations.

Here’s your reminder that some of our favorite food products, from duck fat tortillas to briny oysters, can be found online and shipped nationwide, either directly from the producers or through specialty stores.

Yes! You can keep your shelves filled with those special kitchen staples that the local shops might be out of. The foods in the illustration aren’t identified in the ba piece, but here are identifications of four of the items:

Carmelo [brand name] Duck Fat Tortillas

Tre Torri [brand name] Tarantello di Tonno Rosso in olive oil: tarantello is bluefin tuna meat from the back abdominal muscles (not as rich as ventresca, from the belly, but vastly superior to ordinary canned tuna); the name is from the seaport of Taranto, in Apulia, which also gave us the name tarantella, for a dance, and tarantula, for a spider

Rancho Gordo [brand name] Yellow Eye (dried) beans

Tasmanian [brand name] Leatherwood Honey, from the leatherwood shrub, or small tree, of western Tasmania, Eucryphia lucida

I am, of course, familiar with butter, tortillas, dried pastas, canned tuna, nougat, dried beans, and honey, but not in any of these exquisite brands. (The cheeses aren’t named, but they are no doubt of equally exquisite provenance.)

The display is hugely pretentious, therefore inescapably funny. I was drawn immediately to Monty Python’s Crunchy Frog. From Wikipedia:

(#2) Mr. Milton (Terry Jones) in mid-description of “Crunchy Frog”

“Crunchy Frog” is the common name for a Monty Python sketch officially titled “Trade Description Act” (sometimes also known as the “Whizzo Chocolate Company” sketch), inspired by the Trade Descriptions Act 1968 in British law. It features a two health inspectors interrogating the owner of a candy shop about the increasingly bizarre ingredients in his confections, ending with the titular Crunchy Frog. Written by John Cleese and Graham Chapman, it originally appeared in episode 6 of the first series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and later appeared in several Monty Python stage shows. In the original sketch, Cleese and Chapman play the inspectors, while the candy shop owner is played by Terry Jones. In later versions, the second inspector is played by Terry Gilliam or left out of the sketch entirely.

Mr. Milton, the owner of the Whizzo Chocolate Company (Terry Jones) is approached by two members of the Hygiene Squad, Inspector Praline (John Cleese) and Superintendent Parrot (Graham Chapman). The officers confront him about the odd flavours that are used in the “Whizzo Quality Assortment”, and cite inadequate descriptions of his products as a violation of the Trade Descriptions Act. They ask him to explain the confection labelled “Crunchy Frog”. Milton describes it as an entire frog that has been coated with chocolate, using only “the finest baby frogs, dew picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in finest quality spring water, lightly killed, and then sealed in a succulent Swiss quintuple smooth treble cream milk chocolate envelope and lovingly frosted with glucose.”

… Other questionable items include the “Cherry Fondue”, which is “extremely nasty”, but not worthy of prosecution, “Ram’s Bladder Cup” (made from “fresh Cornish ram’s bladder, emptied, steamed, flavoured with sesame seeds whipped into a fondant and garnished with lark’s vomit”), “Cockroach Cluster”, “Anthrax Ripple”, and “Spring Surprise” (chocolate wrapped around two stainless steel bolts that “spring out and plunge straight through both [of the victim’s] cheeks”).

Who could not adore “Spring Surprise”?

The title. More on the advertising theme. “What’s on YOUR shelf?” alludes to a campaign of tv commercials for Capitol One credit cards, turning on the slogan “What’s in YOUR wallet?” (implicating that if it isn’t a Capitol One credit card, it’s not worth a damn). For example, Jennifer Garner for the Venture Card, which you can view here (#3). Or Samuel L. Jackson for the Quicksilver Cashback Card, which you can view here (#4): “The Quicksilver Cash Back card from Capitol One is the ultimate heavyweight cash back card with unlimited 1.5 percent cash back on each purchase every damn day.”

Listen up, mofos! That’s Samuel L. Jackson: he’s really tough, and he’s one of the great cinematic motherfucker-wielders (hence, the muted “every damn day”).

A new tv commercial for Naväge (sometimes just Navage) touts it as just the thing for current times:

Now is the time to make good nasal hygiene the new normal.

The commercial doesn’t seem to be available on-line yet, but here’s an earlier print ad:

“uses powered suction to relieve nasal congestion” (with a saline solution)

The brand name is, of course, a portmanteau, of nasal + lavage; on the latter, from NOAD:

noun lavage: Medicine washing out of a body cavity, such as the colon or stomach, with water or a medicated solution.

Reviews are mixed on the utility of the system for relieving chronic sinusitis and the like (though for a while as a child I had regular nasal lavage performed by a doctor, with pretty good results). But I’ve found no information about the wisdom of flushing mucus out of the nasal cavity in current times.

(Extremely minimally dressed men, with discussion of their bodies and of mansex in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Annals of men’s underwear, starting with some extremely minimal items, including one that claims to be anti-bacterial; notes on armpit and crotch sweat and its associated bacteria, with their characterstic smells and tastes; and (a surprise bonus) the advertised virtues of merino wool underwear and t-shirts.

Under the fold, I’ll start with two of the more remarkable minimalist items: the Echo Mesh jock pouch (and harness) from CellBlock13; and pro wrestler John Cena in a hot pink banana hammock.

The Echo Mesh jock pouch, in a Daily Jocks ad mailing of 5/13, a cock tease pose that’s so close to the line that the mailing came with a NSFW warning:

(#1) Unabashed homowear; note the model’s erect nipples and his adorable mini tit piercings

But wait — there’s more! Here he is in sideview:

(#2) Displaying a nobly muscular fuckable ass (and black socks to match the rest of his ensemble)

I find these poses incredibly hot (as they were intended to be for queers like me) and simultaneously quite funny, because of their extravagant intensity. (Get over yourself, Butch!)

(The ad copy merely says, rather laconically: “The Echo Mesh Jock Pouch and Harness are made from a sturdy, textured polyester/spandex mesh for length, fit and comfort.”)

The hot pink banana hammock, in contrast, is flagrantly outrageous heterowear, worn playfully by John Cena, who mostly would just prefer displaying his big dick, uncovered even minimally, with boyish glee. (So much cock display by straight guys is earnest, anxious, dick pics, which are really creepy; Cena flaunts his with gusto and a laugh.)

Hat tip from Mark Mandel to this posting on the TMZ site, “John Cena Wears ‘Hot Pink Banana Hammock’ … I Like ‘The Fit'”, on 4/24/20:

Forget boxers vs. briefs … John Cena rocks a BANANA HAMMOCK in his real day-to-day life because he likes the way it fits.

Yep.

The WWE superstar was doing an interview/photo shoot with Men’s Journal when he changed clothes between shots right in front of the reporter … revealing his “hot pink” banana hammock thong.

As the reporter put it … “Picture just some poor spandex holding on for dear life.”

When the reporter asked 43-year-old Cena if that was his usual underwear (and not some special piece for the photo shoot), John confirmed that he’s a hammock man, through and through.

(#3) Cena and his beloved pink thong

“It is [my underwear] … More for the fit, less for the color.”

Hey, if it works for you!!!

Naturally, we did some digging … that’s what we do … and found out this wasn’t just a one-off.

Cena famously rocked a black banana hammock thong during a WWE segment back in the day … while admitting he has a “thing” with nudity.

“I really honestly don’t know my thing with nudity,” Cena said … “It got to be like a joke. Like, I could use it to ease a situation up. There would be some tension and I would get naked. And, people would be like, ‘Alright it’s not that bad.”

(#4) Cena doing a cock tease. From the Gay Male Celebs (that’s male celebs for gays, not necessarily celebs who are gay males) site “John Cena Nude and Sexy Photos” from 4/10/19: “John Cena, a famous American wrestler, loves his body very much and is always happy to flaunt it. Recently he shared a video posing absolutely nude showing off his incredible chest, rippling muscles and big thick dick. And when he leaned over, he showed off his wonderful ass, and it looked very hot and sexy. This man undoubtedly loves to be the center of attention, and he deserves it.”

(The TMZ piece shows a clip with Cena in a huge fake Afro, a black banana hammock, and gold shoes. No good single shot that shows the whole costume, unfortunately. Cena comes off as a straight guy who spent a lot of time developing his body and delights in showing it off, and is cool with being a lust object for some large number of gay guys.)

[Digression on John Cena, who I seem not to have posted about, at least on this blog. From Wikipedia:

John Felix Anthony Cena Jr. (/ˈsiːnə/; born April 23, 1977) is an American professional wrestler, actor, rapper, and television presenter [originally a bodybuilder]. He is currently signed to WWE on a part-time deal. He is also the current host of Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? on Nickelodeon, and has starred in various films.

(#5) Cena in his work clothes

… Outside of his work in entertainment, he is known for his involvement in numerous charitable causes

On RAW, from Wikipedia: “WWE Raw, also known as Monday Night Raw or simply Raw, is an American professional wrestling television program that currently airs live on Monday evenings on the USA Network from 8:00–11:00 PM EST in the United States.”

Cena is famously hard-working and also entertainingly self-mocking. And his causes include campaigns against bullying (which he suffered from extensively as a boy) and homophobia. From Cena’s Twitter on the 7/4/16 [note: the 4th of July] The Independence Day video: “Celebrate the diversity that makes America great”, in part:

What really makes up this country of ours? What do we love? The people. Almost half the country belongs to minority groups. People who are lesbian, African American, bi, transgender, and Native American, and proud of it. After all, what’s more American than the freedom to celebrate the things that make us, us. This year, patriotism shouldn’t just be about pride of country. It should be about love. Love beyond age, disability, sexuality, race, religion or any other labels. Because the second any of us judge people based on those labels, we’re not really being patriotic, are we? Because love has no labels.

Good on him.

End of digression.]

More DJ minimalism. John Cena is lots of fun, but let’s return to our muttons.

From Daily Jocks on 5/12, the DJX Trough [as in pigs feeding] black jockstrap (with matching harness and socks):

(#6) Just the pouch, man; I snap my strap for you, buddy: compare to #1

This one actually seems playful, though he is clearly offering his body. (But I’ve posted a lot about this model, who I’m fond of, and now view as a kind of old sex buddy.)

The general copy from DJ about this line of underwear (sensitive to the current state of the world):

DJX  fetish wear has quickly became must have party wear for guys all around the world. Whether you are getting ready for the end of lockdown or just partying at home DJX has you covered.

The specific copy for #6:

Get party ready with the DJX Trough Jockstrap. Featuring a dual-layered breathable pouch, which is as soft to the touch as it is enhancing. You won’t want to take these off.

Oh yes, you will.

And then the DJ ad offer from 4/20, for the Obviously Apparel company, with not just pouch comfort but anti-bacterial properties:

(#7) An ad for the PrimeMan line of underwear, in several styles (brief, boxer brief, thong) and many colors

A range of the offerings:

(#8) Minimalist thongs and mini briefs; love those pouches

Crucially, this ad copy:

Uncomfortable underwear is more serious than scratchiness or getting a wedgie.

Obviously Apparel’s proprietary anatomical pouch and anti-bacterial material combine for a long-term comfort you’ll fall in love with.

Sex sweat meets skin bacteria. And yields the smell of a body. Which anti-bacterial substances are designed to defeat (and fragrances and deodorants are designed to mask).

I’ll use sex sweat as a technical term here (cruxisudor would have been a Latinate coining for the purpose), to refer to the sweat produced by the apocrine sweat glands in the crotch and the armpit, which is chemically distinct from the sweat produced elsewhere. Then, from my 3/5/17 posting “Body work, Part III: Axillary Delights”, about men’s fragrances and the smell of a man:

when the [sex] sweat hits bacteria resident on the skin, we get an interaction that produces a body odor. … Mostly in the armpit, secondarily in the crotch — magnified some by the axillary and pubic hairs, which trap both the sweat and the resident bacteria.

The axillae (and pubes). The mix of bacteria in these areas is more or less constant. Washing cleans things off, but plenty of bacteria remain — to yield a more or less constant smell for each of us, a smell that others are pretty good at recognizing (even in blind tests). And we have preferences in these smells: some people we’re attracted to, some we’re wary of, some we’re repelled by.

As the Wikipedia article on axilla notes, “These odorant substances [in the axillary region] serve as pheromones which play a role related to mating.”

In a double dactyl, from my 5/25/11 posting “Double dactylic sniff”:

Buggery muggery,
Musk and testosterone,
Masculine scents make a
Great-smelling mate;

Axillar pleasures plus
Cruxiodiferous
Signals send messages
Out to your date.

More than that: these scents — and tastes — can be powerfully satisying emotionally. Pleasures that can be savored by armpit nuzzling (see the 2017 posting) and also as one of the constituent satisfactions of cocksucking. Not only does your man’s cock smell and taste of these substances, in the act itself you’re burying your face in his crotch, inhaling the scent in his pubic hair and covering your face with his sex sweat. Then you get a mouthful of his sweet salty cum.

If the encounter went well, you’ll probably want to avoid washing your face or washing out your mouth, if you can, to hold onto the smell on your face and the taste in your mouth as long as possible, in sweet remembrance — but you should know that other people can detect his sex smell on you, and you might not want to impose that on them.

Lots of complexities here. Tastes, in sex sweat as in everything else, differ, wildly. As I noted in a 2/17/20 posting “Preference labels and little pockets”:

I had a strongly musky scent and taste, sort of like distilled lockerroom, which some men — fortunately, [my man Jacques] was one — found powerfully attractive.

Others were repelled by it. (J’s scent was sharpish, like a wheatfield with a tinge of testosterone. Sometimes more herbal, like coriander with a kick. Yes, though there’s a generally constant body scent, there are variations within a range from time to time.)

Then the bacterial mix can vary. In particular, rogue bacteria can tilt the scent towards a stink.

In the other direction, aggressive washing can’t eliminate the underlying scent, but it can leave an unpleasant soapy residue. Few people want to suck a cock, or lick an armpit, that tastes like soap.

And so I come to anti-bacterial underwear, like the PrimeMan line above. A consumer of dicks for sex would probably be wise to be wary of pubes and dicks suffused with an actually anti-bacterial substance; that’s the soap problem at a higher level. (In addition, the resident bacteria combine with skin oils to make a protective layer on the skin, to hold the line against really nasty microbes, so eliminating the bacteria could be an invitation to medical disaster.).

Now, a thought experiment, based on one of the routines of sex between men, in which a guy bent on sucking cock undoes his guy’s jeans, pulls them down to get at his crotch, in briefs, a jock, a thong, whatever — strokes his guy’s dick through the fabric and then in pointed foreplay mouthes it lovingly through the fabric, bringing it to a full hard-on (and then unveils the prize, the object of his desire, and engorges it). (The sequence can be viewed in thousands of gay porn flicks, and here the porn reflects the practices of everyday gay sex.)

The thought experiment has to do with the stage of mouthing through the underwear: would you do this if you knew the underwear was saturated with a putative antibacterial agent, like triclosan. (What the fuck would that taste like?) I think not.

It’s not easy to figure out what’s going on with the PrimeMan underwear, but I suspect that this isn’t it. I’m guessing that the garments are merely what’s called in the trade breathable: they allow sweat (with its accompanying bacteria) to be rapidly expressed though them, to evaporate in the outside air.

And that brings me to some recent reports from Ned Deily, who was (for no reason he could discern) assailed by on-line ads for Merino wool undergarments, whose great breathability is one of their big selling points.

Maintenant, revenons à nos moutons. Now quite literally; there will be sheep.

First, Ned was offered Woolx boxer briefs:

(#9) Merino wool (finer and softer than regular wool, so: soft and non-wrinkling, but nevertheless wool — it must be washed in cold water and air dried)

From the Woolx site:

Wool is exceptionally breathable and naturally wicks moisture away from the wearer to the surface of the fabric where sweat can evaporate – keeping you cool and dry.  Wool can absorb up to 30% of its weight in water and still feel dry to the touch, ensuring you won’t get the clammy, clingy feeling you can from other fabrics. The Lanolin in wool is naturally antimicrobial, killing the bacteria that creates odor, not only will you feel fresh and clean in Merino Wool underwear you’ll smell that way too!

Lanolin is wonderful stuff, but I see no evidence that it is actually antimicrobial. From Wikipedia:

Lanolin and its many derivatives are used extensively in both the personal care (e.g., high value cosmetics, facial cosmetics, lip products) and health care sectors such as topical liniments [to treat cuts, scratches, and abrasions, and to soften the skin]. Lanolin is also found in lubricants, rust-preventive coatings, shoe polish, and other commercial products.

I also wonder whether I’d find it comfortable to mouthe a cock through wool, even very fine and fabulous wool. Well, I wonder what it tastes like — like sucking a sweater? I wonder if anyone has experiences to report.

Ned was musing quizzically on the Woolx ad when an ad for Merino Unbound t-shirts arrived. He began to feel pursued by sheep.

The ad:

(#10)

From the site:

(#11)

It’s all in the breathability.

But the sheep, nos moutons. From Wikipedia:

(#12)

The Merino is one of the most historically relevant and economically influential breeds of sheep, much prized for its wool. The breed was originated and improved in Extremadura, in southwestern Spain, around the 12th century; it was instrumental in the economic development of 15th and 16th century Spain, which held a monopoly on its trade, and since the end of the 18th century it was further refined in New Zealand and Australia, giving rise to the modern Merino.

Today, Merinos are still regarded as having some of the finest and softest wool of any sheep.

… Merino [have] been domesticated and bred in ways that would not allow them to survive well without regular shearing by their owners. They must be shorn at least once a year because their wool does not stop growing. If this is neglected, the overabundance of wool can cause heat stress, mobility issues, and even blindness.

The miracle, and the curse, of selective breeding.

(Consider the title: not for kids or the sexually modest.)

(#1) Josh Rider and his baking pan; his half-hard dick has been cropped for WordPress modesty, but can be viewed in my AZBlogX posting today, “Josh Rider bakes raw”

Into the baking frenzy of coronovirus lockdowns strides utterly naked gay pornstar Josh Rider, for the NakedSword division of Falcon Studios, with a charming video about making brownies. While he earnestly prepares the batter, sporting enthusiastic smiles (and gives an entirely serviceable recipe), he occasionally plays negligently with his pornstar dick (half-hard in this portion of the video), but the focus is on the cooking. His delivery of the recipe sounds like someone chatting with a friend, not like an actor’s line readings, and not at all like the wooden readings porn actors often provide.

When the batter goes into the oven, he strokes his cock to its full 9 inches (uncut) and jacks off for us, his intense blue eyes firmly staring into the camera, locking his gaze with his viewers’. Then an admirable cumshot, with intense come face; crucial moments in screen shots below. Somehow it’s all sweetly light-hearted. A gem of a piece, worth watching as performance art.

(#2) Just before coming

(#3) Just after coming

(#4) A taste of cum as a further reward

(He doesn’t deal with anything sizzling or boiling or otherwise threatening to the body, so he excites no anxiety over his naked torso and exposed dick. But in general, there’s a reason why people wear aprons (and sometimes mitts) in the kitchen.)

The Falcon ad copy, relatively restrained for the genre:

Falcon Exclusive Josh Moore whips out his favorite brownie recipe and dives into the quarantine baking craze, but he does it better than anyone: NAKED! The devilishly handsome British beauty greases pans, sifts flour, cracks eggs and whips them, and his viewers, into a frenzy, all the while playing with his enormous uncut cock. Once the pan goes in the oven Josh finds himself with some time to kill and dives into everyone’s other favorite pastime, a hot J.O. session. So sit back and jack along in this sexy scene that will leave you asking “Brownies? What brownies?”

In celebration of Masturbation May, which ends in a couple of days, the short video is available free until the end of the month. (Other porn studios have other offers for the occasion,  but nothing quite like this one.)

My own contribtion to the month is a new Page on this blog on Masturbation postings.

Notes on Josh Rider aka Josh Moore. The persona he presents in Naked Baking is charming, playful, openly and apparently uncomplicatedly gay, utterly at ease with himself, and engaged with his audience (look at me, buddy! I’m doing all this for you). It takes a moment to get accustomed to his almost entirely untouched working-class English variety from Dover (in the southeast of England), and then that becomes part of the charm. He loves displaying his body and getting all sexed up, and some of it is intense, but none of it comes across as dirty, not even deliciously so. After a couple of minutes it just seems natural that he should be cooking naked, while occasionally playing with the foreskin of his cock. As any young man might.

His first porn work was for Lucas Entertainment in 2016, and since then he’s worked for a number of studios. Here he is in a rear shot for UK Hot Jocks:

(#5) A publicity shot of the man offering his ass for fucking. Rider is labeled Versatile in studio writeups, but in interviews he expresses a strong inclination to bottoming (a masculine bottom with a really big dick is some sort of ultimate lust object for a fair number of gay men; yes, the psychology is complex)

On his dick size, in my 2/17/20 posting “Preference labels and little pockets”, I provided the fanciful labels Porn Standard Dick (PSD) for 7″ and Porn World-Class Dick (PWD) for 9″ (possessed by only about 1% of American men). Rider’s stated position is that with a cock that big, he should use it to fuck other guys (big dicks being a common fetish) at least once in a while.

At least he’s 6 feet tall, so his cock isn’t completely out of scale with the rest of his body. That body is an athlete’s, not a bodybuilder’s, so he just looks like a guy who’s in really good shape.

Well, yes, I do find him enormously attractive. And of course I jacked off with him.

This is a piece of moderately raunchy silliness in a time of great difficulty. (I am trying, with increasing desperation, to write just one blog essay a day as proof that I’m Not Dead Yet, but I didn’t manage it yesterday, 6/30.) Most of it is directly or indirectly about penises, so some readers might want to avoid this posting.

A tv commercial for the Silver Bullet Hose proclaims:

Things that used to be big and bulky now fit in your pocket. Even your hose.

The commercial goes on about hoses and nozzles in gee-whiz fashion; it’s probably just enthusiastic salesmanship, but it would be hard to miss the playfully carnal subtext, of symbolic penises.

And the commercial extols the compact and easily portable, in the garden hose world — and, by extension, in the world of men’s bodies. As the possessor of a penis that fits comfortably into most trouser pockets, I applaud the attitude. All praise to the right-sized; let’s look to Michelangelo’s David.

A crucial part of the garden hose pitch is that the Silver Bullet expands to an impressive length when it’s called upon to perform its function. Oh. My.

The commercial. The one I saw:

(#1) On iSpot.tv “Pocket Hose Silver Bullet TV Commercial, ‘Hassle-Free’ Featuring Richard Karn” — a 2019 commercial: “The Pocket Hose Silver Bullet is a lightweight, expandable hose made with a bullet shell outer casing which can resist snags, wear and tear.” (The whole commercial can be viewed via iSpot.)

The Silver Bullet hose has a Turbo Shot Jet Nozzle. (I’ve enjoyed the company of men with turbo shot jet nozzles, and it’s quite something to see. I’ve always been a low-velocity, short-shot guy, but the internal experience is quite satisfyingly overwhelming for me, so it’s all good.) The hose is also advertised as “the hose that grows”. In fact, back in a 4/23/13 posting “More news for penises”, I noted

seeing an ad for the Pocket Hose on tv: “The Pocket Hose just grows and grows and grows, into a full-length hose.”

I don’t think any of this needs further comment.

hoses (and nozzles). The Page on this blog on “phallicity postings – general” catalogues a number of postings on nozzles and hoses. But it seems I haven’t actually looked at the lexical items in question.

From GDoS:

noun-1 hose: 1 (US) the penis, usu. large. [1st cite 1928 from Read’s Lexical Evidence] …

noun nozzle: 1 the nose or a nostril … 2 (US) the penis. 1994 G. Indiana Rent Boy 8: A bulky Italian guy with a fat not very long nozzle.

Though nozzle could in principle have been used metaphorically for the head of the penis and then been extended metonymically to the whole organ, it looks like its main route to phallicity was through the nose-penis metaphor.

From my 10/10/15 posting “Annals of phallicity: nozzles (and glycerin, lubes, and posing oils)”:

So a nozzle is a little nose (though actual nozzles are mostly bigger than actual noses), and the frequent use of nozzles as phallic symbols is another instance of the recurrent nose-penis metaphor

(See the nose entries on my phallicity Page.)

Matters of size. The Pocket Hose is both compact and handy (right-sized, I called it above) and also expandable into a hose monster (something of fable and fantasy). Best of both worlds.

On matters of penis size, see the Page on this blog on the subject. Most penises are in the range from 5 to 7 inches, which I will now refer to as right-sized. Below that, there are smaller penises, down to the micropenis level. Above that there’s world of big dicks, analyzed and labeled in my 2/17/20 posting  “Preference labels and little pockets”, which looks at  guys advertising 7, 8, and 9 inches, and provides a categorization of the world from 7 inches and up, with labels for a PSD (Porn Standard Dick) of 7 inches; a PWD (Porn World-Class Dick) of 9 inches; and a RM (Ripley Marvel) longer than that.

All this caused me to reflect on the labels given to product sizes (large economy size and all that).

Well, it turns out to be pretty much of a giant morass, with different products and different companies using vocabulary chosen on the fly; to cope properly, you need the actual dimensions, forget the labels. I fixed on mouthwashes as a test case, and did find a few labels used with some frequency:

travel size: either 1.2 oz. (really tiny) or 3.2 oz. (presumably the legal maximum for carrying onto an airplane)

regular size: 16.9 oz.

large economy size: 33.8 oz.

So large economy is twice regular. This doesn’t translate at all well into penis sizes, given that regular, right-sized penises are in the range of 5 to 7 inches; that would make large ones 10 to 14 inches, definitely RM territory. So clearly a scaling factor must be applied. This is left as an exercise for the reader.

Bonus: Pin the Hose on the Fireman. While searching on hose and nozzle material, I stumbled on the arch Last Night of Freedom site, offering accessories for stag parties (bachelor parties in particular) and hen parties (bachelorette parties or bridal showers). I’m not going back to analyze these elaborate cultural practices of the American white middle class, but will just run with it.

Thing is, what I got was the Pin the Hose on the Fireman (‘Is that a hose in your pocket or…”) game on the site. The ad poster:

(#2) With a firehat coyly placed over his hose; the actual game provides him with hoses

Text from the company:

One thing we have learnt is that blindfolding a group member and asking them to pin anything to a poster is always a very popular game. This pin the hose on the fireman is the latest in our collection of games all based around the tail and donkey concept.

The three foot by two foot poster is reversible with two hunky firemen to choose from and there are a total of 12 hoses available too. Unlike in the stick a dick geek edition these hoses don’t stick to the poster but it’s still fun all the same.

Yes, stick a dick.

Also available from the company: Pin the Cucumber on the Hunk, Pin the Junk on the Hunk, Pin the Macho on the Man, Pin the Torpedo on the Sailor, Stick a Dick – Hunk Edition. You hardly know how to choose.

An example of the actual materials, for Pin the Torpedo:

(#3) One of the posters, and an assortment of torpedo dicks (plus some pairs of aggressive testicles) for him

Sail on, silver boy!

Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro strip (Wayno’s title: “Farm to Slab”):

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)

A combination of two cartoon memes: the familiar Caveman meme, plus  a Remarkable Restaurant meme that’s a specialty of the Bizarro strips.

Plus the portmanteau word play in filet magnon (filet mignon + cro-magnon). And a subtle play on a systematic ambiguity between raw and cooked understandings in certain food names, in particular for cuts of meat. You ask for a filet at the Paleo Cafe, you get a hunk of raw meat.

Remakable Restaurants. Previous postings on this theme include two with restaurants catering to anteaters and serving ants, and one on a restaurant catering to dragons and serving knights in armor.

From my 5/29/18 posting “Chez Le Fourmilier”:

(#2)

A strenuous exercise in cartoon understanding: you need to be familiar with a certain kind of (seafood) restaurant, and to recognize both anteaters and a children’s educational toy known as an ant farm. And then to understand that the cartoon embodies a metaphorical translation from a seafood restaurant world to an anteater world.

(On such translations, see my 5/22/18 posting “I just can’t stop it”.)

Another version in my 3/27/20 posting “Chez Le Fourmilier II”:

(#3)

And then in my 5/21/20 posting “Knight bibs”. a restaurant serving knights for a clientele of dragons:

(#4)

Then in #1, a restaurant servng raw meat to cavemen. The ultimate paleo diet. From my 7/23/20 posting “Let’s go paleo”, outside another Remarkable Restaurant, the Totally Natural Foods Cafe, where “They appear to be chasing a mastodon around with rocks and clubs.”

(#5)

Implementing the Paleolitic diet, Paleo diet, caveman diet, Stone Age diet, or hunter-gatherer diet, right along with the appropriate hunting practices, for the appropriate prey.

From my 10/23/14 posting “Miss Florence and the Paleo diet” on the diet: “a modern nutritional diet designed to emulate, insofar as possible using modern foods, the diet of wild plants and animals eaten by humans during the Paleolithic era” (Wikipedia).

filet magnon. First the food, then the European early modern humans.

From Wikipedia:

Filet mignon (French, lit. '”tender, delicate, or fine fillet”‘) is a steak cut of beef taken from the smaller end of the tenderloin, or psoas major of the cow carcass, usually a steer or heifer. In French, this cut is always called filet de bœuf (“beef fillet”), as filet mignon refers to pork tenderloin.

The tenderloin runs along both sides of the spine, and is usually harvested as two long snake-shaped cuts of beef. The tenderloin is sometimes sold whole. When sliced along the short dimension, creating roughly round cuts, and tube cuts, the cuts (fillets) from the small forward end are considered to be filet mignon. Those from the center are tournedos; however, some butchers in the United States label all types of tenderloin steaks “filet mignon”. In fact, the shape of the true filet mignon may be a hindrance when cooking, so most restaurants sell steaks from the wider end of the tenderloin – it is both cheaper and much more presentable.

(#6) Filet mignon with mashed potato, string beans and mushrooms (Wikipedia photo)

The tenderloin is the most tender cut of beef, making it one of the more desirable cuts. This, combined with the small amount given by any one steer or heifer (no more than 500 grams), makes filet mignon generally the most expensive cut. Because the muscle is not weight-bearing, it contains less connective tissue than other cuts, and so is more tender. However, it is generally not as flavorful as some other cuts of beef (e.g. prime rib cuts). For this reason it is often wrapped in bacon to enhance flavor, and/or served with a sauce.

Then the early humans. From Wikipedia:

“European early modern humans” (EEMH) is a term for the earliest populations of anatomically modern humans in Europe, during the Upper Paleolithic. It is taken to include fossils from throughout the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), covering the period of about 48,000 to 15,000 years ago (48–15 ka), spanning the Bohunician, Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean and Magdalenian periods.

… The term EEMH is equivalent to Cro-Magnon Man, or “Cro-Magnons”, a term derived from the Cro-Magnon rock shelter in southwestern France, where the first EEMH were found in 1868. Louis Lartet (1869) proposed Homo sapiens fossilis as the systematic name for “Cro-Magnon Man”. W. K. Gregory (1921) proposed the subspecies name Homo sapiens cro-magnonensis. In literature published since the late 1990s, the term EEMH is generally preferred over the common name Cro-Magnon, which has no formal taxonomic status, as “it refers neither to a species or subspecies nor to an archaeological phase or culture”.

Still, even specialists often use the term Cro-Magnon (or Cro Magnon) in their writings, because of its familiarity. So in Marcel Otte’s book Cro Magnon (Perrin, 2008):

(#7) The cover shows an artist’s reconstruction of a Cro-Magnon man — looking very much like current humans; the caveman of cartoons is some composite of Neanderthal features and brutish fantasy

The raw and the cooked. Suppose I go into a modern restaurant and order filet mignon with new potatoes and asparagus on the side — and I am then presented with something like the filet mignon below, plus some raw potatoes and raw asparagus:

(#8) From the Kansas City Steak Company, “4 signature, butter-tender USDA Prime Filet Mignon, 6 oz each cut from the best of the best beef available” ($150) (signature, butter-tender, and best of the best, all in one short description!)

(Compare the filet magnon in #1.)

Now of course, this isn’t going to happen — well, it would be an outrage if it did — because the default for these three menu items (filet mignon, potatoes, asparagus) is that they are they are all cooked dishes, not raw material. Meanwhile, at the butcher’s shop, if you order filet mignon, you don’t expect to get something like #6.

In general, out of context, there’s a systematic (metonymy-based) ambiguity, for a large class of lexical items, which can refer to edible foodstuffs or to cooked preparations of them. As with other such ambiguities — for example, between reference to some concrete object or to a simulacrum of it — we largely negotiate these semantic spaces without appreciating the complexities in them.

We are good at using our background knowledge, information about the context we are in, and estimations of what other people are trying to achieve in our interactions, to pick out the appropriate interpretations of the words they use, and we rarely notice that all this stuff is happening off-stage.

From Ann Burlingham on Facebook yesterday, a heads-up:

I’ve been seeing this [Hanes Every Bod] ad, which it seems came out last year, and enjoyed the men singing about underwear in a way that women in ads usually sing about [here Ann extravagizes] birth control or antidepressants.

(#1) The end of the Every Bod ad: assorted body types (very heavy on variants of the young and fit) on the street, exulting in their underwear, every one of them displaying a notable pouch: Vouch for the Pouch! (see the sign)

Just to note that mass-market men’s underwear is rarely so pouch-conscious; that’s the province of premium brands, many of which are uncomplicatedly hawking homowear. More below.

AdAge: “Men sing about their body confidence: Ad from the Martin Agency aims to address male body anxiety” by Alexandra Jardine on 8/7/19 (a video of the ad is on this site):

It’s not just women who need to be more confident about their body size, as catered to by the likes of Dove. A new campaign from Hanes aims to “celebrate inclusivity and authenticity” as it shows men of all body shapes and sizes singing, Broadway musical-style, about how its underwear gives them body confidence.

Created by The Martin Agency, the campaign has a wide range of different types of guy — from muscular “gym bods” to “dad bods” and “average bro bods” — bursting into song about how Hanes’ underwear suits them just right. Hanes says it wants to address the “culturally driven body anxiety often associated with women but also faced by men.”

John Szalay, associate creative director at The Martin Agency, comments: “We felt that music was the best way to bring this idea to life because if you feel confident enough sing in your underwear in random places, you’ve got to truly be comfortable with yourself. We landed on an idea that establishes a fresh, new voice for Hanes that also feels big and thoughtful with a hint of fun.”

Pouchland. All of that is wonderful, as far as it goes, but the pouches are something of a surprise — not what you normally expect in a Hanes or a Fruit of the Loom ad, which traditionally feature Regular Guy models, whose genitals are downplayed, not prominently, obtrusively celebrated, as in #1. The guys in #1 have various body types (though still within a quite narrow range; they are, after all, fantasy characters in a commercial), but they all look like Underwear Gods, highly sexualized. (This is an observation, not a complaint; I am, after all, a great fan of pouches and their contents, and have no objections to men’s bodies treated as sexual objects.)

From my 10/19/10 posting “Underwear gods”, a quotation from Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003):

Eric watched them cross the street, stunted humans in the shadow of the underwear gods that adorned the soaring billboards. … men immortal in their muscle tone, in the clustered bulge at the crotchline.

Which leads us to Pouchland. From my 7/20/20 posting “Gay couple in Pouchland”:

[The two men] live in Pouchland, where every man’s junk is on display, just barely covered by a thin layer of cloth.

And all the junk is really protrusive.

Regular Guy underwear. First, a peek at a Macy’s ad, providing Regular Guys in underwear (briefs and boxers, respectively) for the 21st century:

(#2) More fashionable and colorful than the RGs of 20th-century newspaper ads, but far from Underwear Gods

Men’s briefs on a model necessarily have a pouch, because every guy has junk (even I, with my small penis, make a pouch in my unremarkable briefs). But only in Pouchland do they assert themselves urgently.

From my 11/20/19 posting “A regular festival of ambiguity”:

[regular guy is] mostly used for males and usually conveys normative masculinity (with all that comes with it: athleticism, competitiveness, emotional restraint, toughness, etc. though all in moderation, plus solid heterosexuality), along with openness, friendliness, fairness, and other likeable qualities, and also sociocultural averageness on a number of dimensions (celebrities, conspicuously rich people, artists and scholars, etc. will have a hard time counting as regular guys).

regular guys as objects of desire. The Regular Guy is a stock character of advertising, where he is especially devoted to selling things directed to men, like tools, sports equipment, shaving accessories, and men’s clothing, in particular swim suits and underwear (both highly gendered). This last category is of special interest to me, because such apparel can be invested with not only gender content but also carnally sexual content: the display of the nearly naked male body is available as a source of pleasurable response from suitably minded viewers (of either gender), no matter how innocently it might be intended.

In brief: underwear ads are always available for service as soft porn (for straight women and gay men) — this is not even slightly a novel observation — and models presented as regular guys have figured in such advertising for a long time.

Looks like Hanes might be willing to take things up a level here, moving into an Age of the Pouch.

(Totally unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.)

From the Raging Stallion gay porn studio, the 2020 flick Cake Shop, focused on cake ‘buttock’ and especially on cum as a culinary ingredient. The cover of the video, with the naughty bits fuzzed out:

(#1) At the top: Devin Trez, Jake Nicola, Wade Wolfgar — Trez and Wolfgar with long pendulous half-hard cocks you can view in an AZBlogX posting “Cake Shop” — and  below them, Beaux Banks and Donnie Argento, cupcakes in their mouths, their cakes (‘buttocks’) offered for fucking

There is much play on cakes ‘buttocks’ and on eating cum (that’s a queer thing).

Background: cakes and cum. Previously on this blog, in my 7/18/20 posting “Buttocks IV: cake(s) and tail”, on cake, cakes (and tail) as buttocks references:

both PL C[ount] cakes and M[ass] cake are slang of long standing, having been attested for at least 50 years

The posting then has a survey section on the usages.

Also, two postings on cum, seminophilia, and cum in or as food:

— on 5/22/18, in “The cumless cake”, on semen and seminophilia:

Actual cupcakes or larger cakes with a cum garnish or with a creamy topping of cum are sometimes depicted in porn, and maybe also composed in real life

— on 3/18/19, “Cum, sweat, and broccoli”, on cum in or as food, and on the magical properties of cum

Raging Stallion’s cake shop. The Raging Stallion summary of the flick is itself an over-the-top romp in advertising copy and porn talk, quite entertaining. The p.r. text (with some bits of porn-talk register highlighted in boldface):

Raging Stallion’s busy, bareback bakery ‘Cake Shop’ takes you on a behind the scenes look at two guys, a gay bakery dream and some very special ingredients! A sexually intense, gay porn comedic romp written and directed by award winner Steve Cruz, ‘Cake Shop’ delivers a hilarious group of all-natural, creampie kinksters who drop a lot of icing on each other’s cakes. Ex-lovers Wade Wolfgar and Jake Nicola set up shop, and their bareback bakery starts booming.

(#2) An amiable, high-macho Jake Nicola with a tiered tray of cupcakes (Jake happens to be one of my fantasy-men’s sex names; and Nicola comes with a furry chest, furry forearms, and furry thighs that stir my faggot desires — but that’s just my taste. Gay porn tries to supply something for everyone, of course, but this is a bingo for me)

Filling a special order for Donnie Argento’s first anniversary cake for his husband Sharok, Jake Nicola gets nasty with a raw three way right on the countertop. Donnie squats on a delectable dessert and Jake and Sharok bury their faces in the frosting, till their hardcore vers[atile] three way leaves Jake glazed in cum. Wade hires an assistant, sexy smartass Beaux Banks, who sneaks huge hung fuck buddy Devin Trez thru the back door to pound his back door. In the spirit of equality, the ‘Cake Shop’ caters to couples with differing beliefs, like a fictitious MAGA supporter played by Ricky Larkin and his antivax bride — till Beaux sabotages their big day and the new cashier, Draven Navarro, has to assuage the rage of the horned-up Ricky and drain his bull balls with a wet mouth and hot hungry hole. Health inspector Cain Marko pops by for a surprise visit, and Wade will do anything to make up for their code violations, including violating the inspector on the kitchen counter. With his job on the line, Beaux cooks up a scheme to ditch the cake shop for good. He calls up bad boy Romeo Davis for some booty call baby batter. As the health department finally puts an end to the rainbow confections, Draven Navarro comes up with a plan to save the business — by turning it into a porn studio with big dick stud Jason Vario fucking the daylights out of him. Jake and Wade face a bright new future, proving you can have your cock and eat it too, only at Raging Stallion’s ‘Cake Shop’!

The description of scene 1, which is even more over-the-top; I don’t recall having seen perky hole for a type of asshole before (many decades ago, when I had a side career as a sweet and easy fuck, I got a number of compliments on the attractions of my asshole, but never perky. Definitely a gigglicious adjective.)

Cake Shop’ owner, Jake Nicola greets his old flame Donnie Argento, who wants to surprise his husband, Sharok, with a special cake for their first anniversary. The secret ingredient he wants to add is his own jizz as the cream filling. Donnie is hot to trot and wants to extract it with Jake’s help, but the chef wisely suggests that they include his man. Sharok arrives, and the horny trio convene in the bakery for a three-way, bareback flip fuck with Donnie nude in position on the counter: rock hard cock, beefy butt and perky hole at the ready. Jake and Sharok strip down and take turns eating his ass, especially after Donnie squats down on the special dessert and gets his own cakes covered in frosting. Licking him clean, the boys get him primed and ready for a raw, deep-dick fuck as Jake’s thick prick pries Donnie’s ass open, and Sharok’s huge tool gets in for sweet, sloppy seconds. Donnie gives as good as he gets and he fucks his hubby hard, then climbs on the counter to sit on Jake while Sharok bangs the baker. Sharok blasts his seed in Jake’s hairy hole till Jake blows a load on his furry belly, then guzzles Donnie’s jizz in a cum-thirsty finish.

(Maybe perky is just part of ornamental adjective-talk in the gay porn register: horny trio, rock hard cock, beefy butt, perky hole, thick prick, huge tool, hairy hole, furry belly.)

On the matter of the construction of gay male sexual lives in porn (rather than the language used), I  remind you that the porn world is unrealistically fuck-oriented (sucking cock and getting sucked are the central features of everyday gay life; a fair number of men have no special interest in fucks, and for others they’re special events). But in gay porn, the slogan is pretty much:

Real Men love taking it up the ass.

It would actually please me if this attitude spread more widely (not just because when I was sexually active, I loved taking it up the ass), if only because it would help to subvert the intense misogyny that attends on women’s being the receptive partners in fucking, and then spreads to deep contempt for gay men, who are seen as utterly failed men, because, like women, they take dick (in their mouths or in their assholes, but anyway into their bodies).

(Well, it’s about perfumerie, but it’s Gaultier, he’s flagrantly homoerotic, and he’s going to take us to men’s bodies and mansex. So pieces of this posting are definitely not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Tim Evanson on Facebook today, with an image from a pharmacy window in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, Scotland:

(#1) Poster for Jean Paul Gaultier’s men’s fragrance Le Male, featuring a decidedly homoerotic shirtless sailor (credit: FotoFling Scotland)

Tim: Goodness, what ARE they selling?!?!?

AZ: They are selling sailors. Drenched in masculine scents. At very high prices.

McDonald Jason Richard: The best cologne for men in the world.

Background: sailors and sodomy. Sailors — virile, physically tough, young men living in very close quarters, traditionally in all-male groups away at sea — are classic fantasy figures of gay male sex, the fantasy being that they would turn to one another for sexual release, especially through sodomy. Correspondingly, in real life, sailors on leave were often cruised for sex by gay men, especially those who wanted to be fucked.

Records are sparse and undependable, but the reality seems to have been that though there was a certain amount of sodomy in various navies, it was never widespread. On the other hand, Hello Sailor! The Hidden Histor of Gay Life at Sea by Paul Baker and Jo Stanley (Kindle edition, 2003) tells the story of a sexual sub-culture of camp and drag on cruise ships:

(#2) caption from the TV Tropes site: “You come up on the poop deck often?”

From the publisher’s description on Amazon:

Estimates of the number of gay staff on cruise ships between the 1950s and 1970s hover around 30-40 per cent, while on some passenger lines (P&O seems to have been the gay-friendliest employer) the concentration may have been as high as 90 per cent.

The sailor-sodomy association then plays a significant role in the homoerotic power of the image in the Gaultier poster in #1. Gaultier thinks sailors are way hot, and he doesn’t shrink from the sodomy connection, but instead (as we’ll see) celebrates it and revels in it

Background: Gaultier and Le Male. On the designer, from Wikipedia:

Jean Paul Gaultier (born 24 April 1952) is a French haute couture and prêt-à-porter fashion designer. He is described as an “enfant terrible” of the fashion industry, and is known for his unconventional designs with motifs including corsets, marinières, and tin cans. Gaultier founded his eponymous fashion label in 1982, and expanded with a line of fragrances in 1993.

(Gaultier is openly gay; his male partner died of complications of AIDS.)

On the fragrance, from Wikipedia:

Le Male is a men’s fragrance created by Francis Kurkdjian for Jean Paul Gaultier in 1995. It has been manufactured by Puig since 2016, and was previously manufactured by Shiseido subsidiary Beauté Prestige International from 1995 until 2015. The fragrance was developed as a counterpart to the women’s fragrance Classique, which was introduced in 1993.

… Le Male is described as an oriental fougere men’s fragrance, a classification which is identified by the combination of “warm, woody, and spicy notes” and aromatic notes. The fragrance contains top notes of artemisia, mint, cardamom, and bergamot; middle notes of lavender, orange blossom, cinnamon, and cumin; and base notes of sandalwood, vanilla, cedar, tonka bean, and amber. Kurkdjian stated that the fragrance was simple to develop because “with vanilla, you don’t have to be as technical, whereas floral fragrances are very complex and very difficult to pull off.”

Kurkdjian described the Le Male bottle, a male torso wearing a marinière [see below], as “a motif to put it in the ‘Gaultier universe'” that represents “[Gaultier’s] idea of what men are about – being seductive, being sexual, [and] being adventurous.” The fragrance is packaged in an aluminum can, a motif Gaultier has used in his collections since 1980

The ads. A Le Male ad with even more naval symbolism, but with the model in a shirt:

(#3) A play on the recruiting slogan “Uncle Sam wants YOU”; note the bottle

The shirt in the ad is not just any sailor-style shirt, but a Gaultier design: La Marinière. From his site (in English):

(#4)

(#5)

Gaultier has used a large number of male models in his ads. From Attitude magazine, “A picture-based history of Jean Paul Gaultier’s ‘Le Male'” on 7/28/20

Everyone knows the iconic Jean-Paul Gaultier ‘Le Male’ fragrance bottles.

Emblazoned with the sailor-stripes motif that is synonymous with the designer and his brand, the bottle in the shape of a supersculpted man’s torso has been through many wonderful iterations [beginning in 1995].

Out of all these, the classic Gaultier model surely is the one introduced in 2000, seen in #1 and #3 above and now here:

(#6) (Attitude caption; photo from Jean-Baptiste Mondino): “The designer’s legendary sailor was brought to life by Jean-Baptiste Mondino, who shot many of the Gaultier advertising campaigns and filled them with robust, lusty sailors that made our mouths water.” (note the can)

The thing about Mondino is that he can project a wide range of sexual personas, from the very butch (a robust, lusty sailor) to the openly faggy, as in #6; often he presents himself as metrosexual.

Embracing sodomy. Note that in #5 Gaultier directly connects La Marinière to Fassbinder’s Querelle. From my 8/29/13 posting “Kissing the rose”, which has a section on Jean Genet and receptive anal intercourse (which the novelist  famously craved in real life), including the novel Querelle de Brest, prominently featuring sailors; the novel formed the basis for Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s last film, Querelle (1982).

Now visible on tv and on the net: Manly Bands, wedding rings and engagement rings for real guy guys: deeply masculine bands that avoid the mere prettiness of so many of the usual rings (and any possible associations with femininity) — and are advertised with over-the-top testosterone-steeped prose.

An ad from the net:

Need a wedding band that’ll make you wanna run up a flight of stairs to the Rocky soundtrack? These bestsellers’ll do the trick.

The content is about achieving great physical prowess, emulating a winning prize-fighter. The style of the text is studiously informal (that’ll, wanna, bestsellers’ll) and slangy (do the trick) — guy talk.

The copy on the company’s site is in fact much more elaborately gendered as masculine than this.

And then there’s the name Manly Bands.

manly bands. A fairly elaborate form of half-rhyme, in which the paired words have rhyming initial parts — /mæn/ and /bæn/ — but different following parts.

Then on the sociosemantic side, the item manly. Basic facts from NOAD:

adj. manly: [a] having or denoting those good qualities traditionally associated with men, such as courage and strength: looking manly and capable in his tennis whites. [b] (of an activity) befitting a man, especially in a traditional sense: the manly art of knife-throwing.

Near-synonyms include virile and masculine, but manly has a “poetic” feel to it that makes it sound faintly ridiculous in some contexts. To my ear, it’s more than a bit over-the-top in manly bands — like you should drop your voice to basso in pronouncing the manly.

Rings for real men. From the company’s site:

Buying a wedding band doesn’t have to suck

The best damn wedding rings period. Free shipping on most rings worldwide. Free Warranty. Freedom for your hand to look like YOU want it to look.

Whether you’re looking for men’s wedding rings or engagement rings, we’ve got you covered. Use the menu above to browse through the different manly materials we offer like damascus steel, tungsten, carbon fiber, wood inlays, and diamonds. Here at Manly Bands we only create really cool wedding rings for really cool folks, so if that’s you, and I’m sure it is, then click around to see what appeals

(Note: suck; best damn)

This is still quite modest, and the “How we work” section is jokey and self-mocking:

Each Manly Band is birthed from a different kind of manliness, wrapped with fire and testosterone and then shipped off with courage and kindness from our impenetrable warehouse fortress in Lehi, Utah, or our manly ring making lair in Canada.  [the site then provides ordering details]

The site caters to various different sorts of guy guys — there’s a section recommending wedding rings specifically for sports fanatics, beach bums, and burly guys.

But then we get to the actual rings, and the write-ups are absurdly overgendered.

Start with the names of the rings. The list of most popular styles (each indexing a type of high-masculine man):

— in tungsten: The Cowboy, the Baller, the Rockstar, the Gentleman, the Instigator, the Model, The Whiz

— in black zirconium: the Fitzgerald

Two examples, the Baller (could it have been cruder?) and the Whiz, with their ad copy.

(#1) One of several rings in brutal black; this is in black plated tungsten

Be the Baller: Fast cars, hot girls. You are the consummate bachelor who finally decided to settle down. Exude confidence with this sleek look.

(#2) Going more for a classy appearance; this in tungsten with 14k rose gold plated sleeve

Be the Whiz: Maybe it’s because you’re innovative as hell, but figuring out new business ideas is much more your jam than jewelry. We give you, a band to rule them all.

(About anatomical organs and sex between men, totally not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)

On the Naked Sword site yesterday (9/19), this remarkable ad for Fort Troff BOOF CBD suppositories (“It’s like poppers for your ass”):

The ad certainly made my morning yesterday; it’s so gee-whiz enthusiastic. “My hole has never felt so good” / “Made my ass so hungry”.

Back in a previous life, I was an enthusiast of anal pleasure, both with sex toys (though of quite modest size) and getting fucked (by cocks of many sorts), and I appreciate the importance of relaxing and opening your asshole if these practices are to be genuinely pleasurable. There are techniques for doing this, but they require some practice. (Or poppers, which famously relax the relevant muscles — but for various reasons poppers weren’t safe for me to use.) The idea that a CBD suppository in your asshole would do the trick, however,  is intriguing but also ridiculous.

But here’s the longer sales pitch from Fort Troff:

Take a chill pill. Or a FT BOOF CBD Suppository.

These butt shots deliver the awesome relaxation power of CBD so you can take bigger cocks and more.

We’ve teamed up with Foria, a company that is known as the BEST for potency and quality of CBD supplements. BOOF is a Premium Broad-Spectrum CBD Suppository, formulated for muscle relaxation, inflammation relief, and maximum pleasure. They harness the sensual power of hemp, which creates full-body relaxation and a clean, engaged mind. No, you won’t get fucked up or desensitized. There’s no THC. Your ass will simply feel really fuckin good.

Apparently, there’s very little that cannabidiol cannot do (Flanders & Swann: “Oh there’s nothing that a wompom cannot do”).

Now some background. First, a previous posting on this blog about the wonderful things CBD can do: from 2/9/18 in “Mary Jane comes to Palo Alto”, about two events at the Palo Alto Tacolicious restaurant featuring “crab plus CBD cocktails”, made with Sonoma Hills Farm fruit juices infused with cannabidiol (CBD) hemp oil; plus some background on CBD.

Then about Fort Troff. From the About section on the company page:

It all started with a sex party. A dark, warehouse-style sex party where anything could happen. To better serve the men who came back every month to play hard, our founder opened a shop inside selling the basics — quality cock rings, dildos, and lube. Today, our team still road-tests every single product, ensuring unparalleled quality and performance. We are 100% committed to you, our loyal customers, and have been since day one. Come play at the Fort.

The categories of their products: dongs, cock + ball, bondage, slings, gear, nip, electro, essentials (lubes, gloves, sheets, condoms).

And, finally, some words about CBD from a sober medical source, the Harvard Health Blog on the topic: from “Cannabidiol (CBD) — what we know and what we don’t” by Peter Grinspoon, MD on 8/24/18:

The evidence for cannabidiol health benefits

CBD has been touted for a wide variety of health issues, but the strongest scientific evidence is for its effectiveness in treating some of the cruelest childhood epilepsy syndromes, such as Dravet syndrome and Lennox-Gastaut syndrome (LGS), which typically don’t respond to antiseizure medications. In numerous studies, CBD was able to reduce the number of seizures, and in some cases it was able to stop them altogether. Videos of the effects of CBD on these children and their seizures are readily available on the Internet for viewing, and they are quite striking. Recently the FDA approved the first ever cannabis-derived medicine for these conditions, Epidiolex, which contains CBD.

CBD is commonly used to address anxiety, and for patients who suffer through the misery of insomnia, studies suggest that CBD may help with both falling asleep and staying asleep.

CBD may offer an option for treating different types of chronic pain. A study from the European Journal of Pain showed, using an animal model, CBD applied on the skin could help lower pain and inflammation due to arthritis. Another study demonstrated the mechanism by which CBD inhibits inflammatory and neuropathic pain, two of the most difficult types of chronic pain to treat. More study in humans is needed in this area to substantiate the claims of CBD proponents about pain control.

No mention, alas, of relaxing your asshole to accept large stiff objects for your sexual pleasure.

(Plain talk about sex toys for men and about male genitalia, so not for kids or the sexually modest. )

A Daily Jocks mailing back on 2/9 offers a novel solution to creating visually interesting ads for sex toys for men (primarily aimed at gay men) — devices designed to improve sexual performance or to provide solitary sexual pleasure (genital or anal), and in themselves not offering much to look at. The ads are playful, purely symbolic, takes on male genitalia.

The 2/9 mailing (“MACHO TOYS IS HERE”) has three images, the first two playful, the third with an image of an electronic toy.

Image 1. With the text:

FIND YOUR PERFECT FIT & GET 10% OFF

Macho Toys by DailyJocks stocks range of high quality realistic dildos moulded from real guys & a collection of premium electric toys including prostate massagers, vibrating cock rings & anal stimulators.

and the goofy image:

(#1) Yes, a balloon cock and balls, a balloon animal for gay men

Image 2. With the text:

DON’T SETTLE FOR LESS

High quality realistic dildos moulded from real guys

and another goofy image:

(#2) Phallic vegetables and fruits: eggplant, banana, pickle, carrot

I note here that it’s important that the arms that appear in all three of the 2/9 images are clearly male arms: the advertising is men for men.

Image 3. With the text:

RAISE YOUR VIBRATION

Premium electric toys including prostate massagers, vibrating cock rings & anal stimulators.

and an image of the Neptune Prostate Massager:

(#3) Not just a prostate massager, but a perineum massager as well, plus it’s electronic: it vibrates, under control of the device shown in this image

The full description of the massager:

Neptune Prostate Massager. Sale price $75.00.

Featuring du[a]l zone stimulation [massages both the prostate and the perineum] & a double beaded shaft[,] the Neptune Prostate Massager will pleasure you inside & out.

Featuring 10 intensities of vibration [to] massage you exactly how you like it.

My interests in these ads. I have two interests in these ads — as clever (eye-catching and entertaining) deployments of phallicity in ad design; and as thought-provoking material in my attempts to work out users’ implicit categorization of the domain of sex toys for men, specifically gay men (as another domain for my continued interest in categorization and labeling).

Digression. “Specifically gay men” because in my experience most straight guys are, or at least were, unaware of large parts of this world. I say this because there was a time when I found myself explaining cock rings to straight male friends. Common first question: do they actually work? (Oh yes.) Another common one: do they hurt? (Not if you’ve chosen a model that suits you. I described my favorite.)

For reference, from OED3 (Sept. 2019):

noun cock ring: … (b) a ring or band, typically made of metal, plastic, or leather, worn round the base of the penis (and scrotum) to help strengthen and sustain an erection. [1st cite 1970]

Note that this is the OED, but a very recent edition. Pretty much everybody seems to know about cock rings these days. And the devices even come in deliberately eye-catching and entertaining designs, like this one from my 6/10/18 posting “Rainbow moments”:

(#4) The Pride Cock Ring: fly the Pride flag at the base of your engorged penis!

Back to categorization. A previous, rather rambling, look at the male sextoy domain: my 3/1/20 posting “Guy gear”:

The domain of sex toys. From my 2/18/13 posting “Commercial categories: gay sex toys”, about the (quite extensive) section of the TLA Video on-line catalogue devoted to gay (male) sex toys:

There turns out to be a pretty rich category structure here, involving a number of categories that (not surprisingly) have no ordinary-language labels. A category structure devised for the users of these items, by their designers, manufacturers, and sellers.

We see much the same thing on the Guy Gear Store site, though the category structure there isn’t as complex as on the TLA Video site. They initially list five categories:

anal toys, cock & ball, lubes, fantasy & fetish (nipple clamps, wrist cuffs, collars, ball gags, crops, and more), undergear (most of it highly pouch-focused)

and then add four more:

masturbators, dildos, accessories (the Toy Cleaner product, for instance), penis enhancement

As at TLA Video, the categories include a number that are familiar to the users / customers, though not necessarily under the labels Guy Gear uses: ANAL-TOYS and UNDERWEAR (labeled undergear), for example. Others are categories of commerce, with names created by the makers and sellers: masturbators and penis enhancement, for instance.

I’m now prepared to make a preliminary proposal for a category structure that  catches the distinctions that I think are significant to gay men. As usual, the names of the categories (in upper case) are merely suggestive and (I hope) memorable names; they are labels, not definitions (or descriptions).

— at the top level, a distinction between VANILLA-SEXTOYS and BDSM-SEXTOYS

— within VANILLA-SEXTOYS, a distinction between two different functions of the sex toys: SOLO-PLEASURERS (devices providing solitary sexual pleasure) versus PERFORMANCE-ENHANCERS — the former including massagers (for the prostate and the perineum) , dildos (for anal pleasure), masturbation sleeves; the latter including cock rings, penis pumps and stretchers, and erection drugs, supplements, and lotions

— within BDSM-SEXTOYS, the categories are still unclear to me, though a  rough first cut might divide devices that provide pleasure through restraint from those that provide pleasure through pain. There’s a Wikipedia page giving a list of diverse BDSM equipment (cock and balls torture devices, cock cages, nipple clamps, wrist cuffs, collars, ballgags, etc.), thereby illustrating the complexities of categorization.

Yesterday’s Doonesbury has Mike (Doonesbury) and (his wife) Kim (Rosenthal) listening to a mock Prevagen® commercial in which the dietary supplement is openly hawked as a useless (but expensive) placebo for treating mild forgetfulness (with a digression in the 5th panel on a secret ingredient in it derived from the fabulously memorious jellyfish):

(#1)

The testimonials in Prevagen ads pretty much scream placebo effect. You take Prevagen in the belief that it will improve your memory — the ads say that it does —  and then in a while you perceive that your memory has indeed sharpened.

Then I’d been noticing recently how the people offering testimonials in Prevagen ads don’t actually claim that their memory has improved or that the product has reversed their memory loss, which is what they’d  say if the placebo effect was all that was going on. Instead, they merely testify, more indirectly, that they feel that things have improved, that it seems to them that their memories have sharpened. This is an extremely careful choice of wording.

Prevagen’s advertising is heavily focused on testimonials from real people who have used the product. Interviews present them in their home environments and develop brief sketches of their lives, turning quickly to health concerns, among them worries about failing memory.

Two recent interviews of couples. The first shows the placebo effect, the second the careful choice of indirect wording.

First, retired teachers and official North Pole residents Steve and Lea (video from iSpot.tv). In the video, they

explain their health issues that begun to worsen with age, specifically how troubling Steve’s problems with memory were. After taking Prevagen, Steve simply didn’t have to work so hard to remember things.

(Side note: people’s perceptions of decline in memory are not necessarily accurate; if you expect that memory declines greatly with age, Confirmation Bias leads you to see evidence of that. Some notes below on the ordinary, fairly modest, declines in certain kinds of memory with aging.)

The (from the Prevagen site), Norm and Szasz from Columbia MO:

(#2) “after about 30 days of taking [Prevagen], we noticed a clarity we didn’t notice before” — rather than something more direct, like “our memories were clearer than they were before”

(Meanwhile, the image says, baldly and directly, “Prevagen improves memory”. And note that the couple have been enrolled as “Prevagen Content Contributors” — which presumably gives the company the right to craft details of the wording the couple use in their interview.)

Significantly, the jellyfish do not appear in these two recent commercials. Apparently, there’s some history here. In fact, the commercials used to be bolder.

Some history. From the Harvard Health site, “FBA curbs unfounded memory supplement claims” by Robert H. Shmerling, MD, on 5/31/19, updated 9/29/20:

I must have seen the commercial for Prevagen 50 times. Perhaps you’ve seen it, too: “You might take something for your heart… your joints… your digestion. So why wouldn’t you take something for the most important part of you… your brain? With an ingredient originally found in jellyfish! Healthier brain, better life!”

Like many heavily-advertised supplements, this one makes many claims. The bottle promises it “improves memory” and “supports: healthy brain function, sharper mind, clearer thinking.” Never mind that the main ingredient in jellyfish (apoaequorin) has no known role in human memory, or that many experts believe supplements like this would most likely be digested in the stomach and never wind up anywhere near the brain. Oh, and the commercial doesn’t mention any risks of treatment or cost (though I found it online for $1 to $2/day).

But does this supplement actually do what it says? If it doesn’t, how can the manufacturer make these claims? And if apoaequorin is so great, why aren’t jellyfish smarter, as a colleague of mine wonders?

… As “proof” of power, a bar graph shows a rise from 5% to 10% to 20% over 90 days in “recall tasks.” But there’s no way to know what these numbers refer to, how many people were studied, or other important details. And no information is provided about effects on memory after 90 days. The fine print under the graph says that the supplement “improved recall tasks in subjects” without explaining what this means. While a company-sponsored study reported improvements in memory after people took apoaequorin, the published version demonstrated minimal improvement (summarized here).

The US Federal Trade Commission wasn’t convinced of the supplement’s benefits. It charged the supplement maker with false advertising back in 2012. In the legal filings, the company was accused of selectively reporting data and misleading the public by claiming that Prevagen is “clinically proven” to improve cognitive function. The lawsuit has not yet been decided.

But it appears that the company has trimmed its sails considerably, and moderated its claims. The jellyfish seem to be gone, and the dubious clinical studies too. And the wording of the testimonials has gotten a lot more cautious.

Background notes on memory. From the American Psychological Association site on “Memory and Aging”, the section on “What Brain Changes Are Normal for Older Adults?”:

Although new neurons develop throughout our lives, our brains reach their maximum size during our early twenties and then begin very slowly to decline in volume. Blood flow to the brain also decreases over time. The good news is that many studies have shown that the brain remains capable of regrowth and of learning and retaining new facts and skills throughout life, especially for people who get regular exercise and frequent intellectual stimulation. Although there are tremendous differences among individuals, some cognitive abilities continue to improve well into older age, some are constant, and some decline.

Some Types of Memory Improve or Stay the Same

A type of memory called semantic memory continues to improve for many older adults. Semantic memory is the ability to recall concepts and general facts that are not related to specific experiences. For example, understanding the concept that clocks are used to tell time is a simple example of semantic memory. This type of memory also includes vocabulary and knowledge of language. In addition, procedural memory, your memory of how to do things, such as how to tell time by reading the numbers on a clock, typically stays the same.

Some Types of Memory Decline Somewhat

Do you sometimes arrive at the grocery store and have trouble remembering what you are there to get? Do you occasionally have trouble remembering where you left your car in the parking lot? Or do you have difficulty remembering appointments such as what time you’re supposed to meet your neighbor for coffee? Episodic memory, which captures the “what,” “where,” and “when” of our daily lives, is to blame. Both episodic and longer term memory decline somewhat over time.

Other types of brain functions that decrease slightly or slow down include:

– information processing and learning something new

– doing more than one task at a time and shifting focus between tasks

[Then a section on “Possible Causes of Memory Problems”, beginning:] If you or a loved one is having memory problems that are more bothersome than you would normally expect, don’t assume that Alzheimer’s or another form of dementia is the culprit. Glitches in memory can be caused by many physical and psychological conditions that are reversible…

The section goes on the inventory these briefly.

There’s also a section on “Tips for Maintaining and Improving Your Memory”, including a subsection on “Don’t buy into ageist stereotypes about memory decline”.

Among the scent notes in the “unisex perfume” A City on Fire — burnt match is another, but that doesn’t require looking things up — from the Imaginary Authors company, whose remarkable fragrances come with synopses of fictitious works of extravagant fiction and with striking graphic-designer labels on their bottles.

The perfumes aren’t cheap — $95 for a 50 ml bottle ($38 for a 14 ml Traveler size, $6 for a 2 ml Sample size) — but then we don’t know how many bottles get sold, and how much the perfumes are actually worn, as opposed to being treasured and displayed as art objects with an olfactory as well as visual and textual dimensions.

Background: if you talk about them, ads beget many more ads. Ever since I posted recently about some remarkable men’s underwear that had come to me through ads on Facebook (as opposed to through my many postings on men’s underwear that comes to me in regular mailings from the Daily Jocks company) — see, for instance, my 1/19/21 posting “Pair of jockstrap” and my 2/6/21 posting “Is that an American flag in your crotch?” —  my FB account has been deluged with ads for still more men’s underwear, some of it quite handsome, a lot of it laughably extravagant.

And now that I’ve posted about some remarkably named and advertised men’s fragrances that had come to me through ads on FB — in particular, Abercrombie & Fitch’s Fierce, in my 1/30/21 posting “Cologne tease”, and then Testosterone Original Fragrance Paris, reported on in my 2/20/21 posting “Three remarkably named men’s fragrances” — I’ve experienced an avalanche of fragrance ads in my FB feed. By far the quirkiest of this often quirky company are the Imaginary Authors ads.

Details, details. Four stand-out names from from IA offerings, together with three of the most notable fragrance “notes” from each (these are scents, not, thank goodness, actually ingredients):

The Cobra and the Canary: leather, lemon, asphalt
The Soft Lawn: linden, oakmoss, fresh tennis balls
A City on Fire: cade oil, dark berries, burnt match
Bull’s Blood: patchouli, tobacco, black musk

(also available: a Whiff of Waffle Cone;  Cape Heartache; Decisions, Decisions; Every Storm a Serenade; Falling Into the Sea; Memoirs of a Trespasser; O, Unknown!; Saint Julep; Slow Explosions; Sundrunk; Telegrama; Whispered Myths; Yesterday Haze. The naming is itself an art form.)

For the last two items on the short list of four, the artwork on the labels and the company’s synopses of the associated fictions, together with a full list of scent notes and also tongue-in-cheek suggestions about when to wear the fragrances:

— A City on Fire

(#1)

notes: cade oil, spikenard, cardamom, clearwood, dark berries, labdanum, burnt match

synopsis: A brilliantly dark graphic novel, A City On Fire, is the story of two match-makers. Rupert literally fabricates matches in a factory on the waterfront while Frances writes a dating column for the city’s newspaper. Both are recluses who haunt the night’s shadows observing clandestine activities from afar but never partaking. That changes one fortuitous evening when they are both witness to the same high-profile murder and are forced to come together as an unlikely vigilante pair in order to save their own names.

Imaginary Authors developed this fragrance exclusively for Machus, a modern menswear retailer focused on forward concepts and clean classics in Portland’s Lower East Burnside neighborhood.

when to wear this fragrance: The refined smoke accord makes this an austere and luxurious scent for evenings on the town, whether with a special someone or alone and looking for trouble.

— Bull’s Blood

(#2)

notes: patchouli, rose, costus root, tobacco, black musk, bull’s blood

synopsis: Devante Valéreo was raised in a dusty Spanish village on the Balearic Sea [in the Mediterranean]. He fondly recalled going to the bullfights with his father, an ex-picador, and credited those early experiences with inspiring his most popular novella, Bull’s Blood. The book’s lurid tale of seduction garnered obscenity charges against the author. Though the charges were rejected by the court, a ban on the sale of his works persisted for a number of years.

A fixture in Barcelona, smoking cigarillos and writing in the cafés and bars into the night, Valéreo disappeared as a fugitive in 1967 after a highly publicized bar scuffle with American sailors, one of whom later died from his injuries. “A man who has killed,” he wrote in Bull’s Blood, “is a man who knows passion.”

when to wear this fragrance: This is a powerful scent for someone who knows what they want. Bull’s Blood is for those nights when you want to take the bull by the horns.

Notes on the notes. Just from these two items, another collection of scent vocabulary (mostly tied to ingredients, although the scents are likely to be synthetic rather than natural). I assume that readers are familiar with cardamom and patchouli, but that still leaves a fair number of other notes.

— cade oil. From Wikipedia:

Juniperus oxycedrus, vernacularly called Cade, cade juniper, prickly juniper, prickly cedar, or sharp cedar, is a species of juniper, native across the Mediterranean region from Morocco and Portugal, north to southern France, east to westernmost Iran, and south to Lebanon and Israel, growing on a variety of rocky sites from sea level up to 1600 m elevation. The specific epithet oxycedrus means “sharp cedar” and this species may have been the original cedar or cedrus of the ancient Greeks.

(#3) Cade shrub in southern France (Wikipedia photo)

… Cade oil is the essential oil obtained through destructive distillation of the wood of this shrub. It is a dark, aromatic oil with a strong smoky smell which is used in some cosmetics and (traditional) skin treatment drugs, as well as incense.

— spikenard. From Wikipedia:

Spikenard, also called nard, nardin, and muskroot, is a class of aromatic amber-colored essential oil derived from Nardostachys jatamansi, a flowering plant in the honeysuckle family [a now critically endangered wildflower] which grows in the Himalayas of Nepal, China, and India. The oil has been used over centuries as a perfume, a traditional medicine, or in religious ceremonies across a wide territory from India to Europe.

(#4) The wildflower in the mountains of Tibet (Wikipedia photo)

Historically, the name nard has also referred to essential oils derived from several other species, including some species in the closely related valerian genus and Spanish lavender, which have also been used in perfume-making and sometimes to adulterate true spikenard using more common, less valued materials.

— Clearwood (by Firmenich). The Perfumer Supply House site reports the

Firmenich Odor Description: Soft, clean version of Patchouli without the earthy, leathery and rubbery notes found in the natural oil.

(The Swiss company Firmenich (headquarted in Geneva) is the largest privately owned company in the field of fragrance and flavor.)

— labdanum. From Wikipedia:

Labdanum, also called ladanum, ladan or ladanon, is a sticky brown resin obtained from the shrubs Cistus ladanifer (western Mediterranean) and Cistus creticus (eastern Mediterranean), species of rockrose. It was historically used in herbal medicine and is still used in the preparation of some perfumes and vermouths.

(#5) Cistus ladanifer (Wikipedia photo)

… Labdanum is much valued in perfumery because of its resemblance to ambergris, which has been banned from use in many countries because it originates from the sperm whale, which is an endangered species. Labdanum is the main ingredient used when making the scent of amber in perfumery.

Rockroses merely resemble roses, and are taxonomically distant from them. See my 11/2/14 posting “Rockroses”.

— costus root. From Wikipedia:

Saussurea costus, commonly known as costus, kuth, or putchuk, is a species of [now critically endangered] thistle in the genus Saussurea native to India [at high elevations, as in the Himalayas]. … Essential oils extracted from the root have been used in traditional medicine and in perfumes since ancient times.

(#6) Costus root powder, for medicinal purposes

… An essential oil obtained from the roots is used in perfumery, incenses, and in hair rinses. It has a strong lingering scent that has the scent of violets at first, yet changes to a more unpleasant goat-like smell as it ages.

[Digression on the genus name Saussurea. A genus name built on a family name at which linguists’ ears prick up, since it belongs to Ferdinand de Saussure. From Wikipedia:

Ferdinand de Saussure (26 November 1857 – 22 February 1913) was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics and one of two major founders (together with Charles Sanders Peirce) of semiotics, or semiology, as Saussure called it.

[On his enormously influential Course in General Linguistics, see my 7/25/12 posting “Saussurean cartooning”.]

… [Laryngeal Theory:] While a student, Saussure published an important work in Indo-European philology that proposed the existence of ghosts in Proto-Indo-European called sonant coefficients. The Scandinavian scholar Hermann Möller suggested that they might actually be laryngeal consonants, leading to what is now known as the laryngeal theory. It has been argued that the problem that Saussure encountered, trying to explain how he was able to make systematic and predictive hypotheses from known linguistic data to unknown linguistic data, stimulated his development of structuralism. His predictions about the existence of primate coefficients / laryngeals and their evolution proved a success when Hittite texts were discovered and deciphered, some 50 years later.

But the genus name. De Candolle named the genus after Horace-Bénédict de Saussure (1740-1799) and Nicolas-Théodore de Saussure (1767–1845), Swiss scientists who were father and son.

Wikipedia on the father:

Horace Bénédict de Saussure (17 February 1740 – 22 January 1799) was a Genevan geologist, meteorologist, physicist, mountaineer and Alpine explorer, often called the founder of alpinism and modern meteorology, and considered to be the first person to build a successful solar oven.

… His great-grandson Ferdinand de Saussure was an important linguist and semiotician.

And on the son:

Nicolas-Théodore de Saussure (14 October 1767, in Geneva – 18 April 1845, in Geneva) was a Swiss chemist and student of plant physiology who made seminal advances in phytochemistry. He is one of the major pioneers in the study of photosynthesis.

… He was the second child of Horace-Bénédict de Saussure

… Nicolas-Théodore left no direct heirs, but he is the great uncle of Ferdinand de Saussure

The son was the plant scientist, but his very famous father got swept into the nomenclatural honors.]

— Black Musk is a synthetic musk created by The Body Shop company. From Wikipedia:

Musk is a class of aromatic substances commonly used as base notes in perfumery. They include glandular secretions from animals such as the musk deer, numerous plants emitting similar fragrances, and artificial substances with similar odors. Musk was a name originally given to a substance with a strong odor obtained from a gland of the musk deer. The substance has been used as a popular perfume fixative since ancient times and is one of the most expensive animal products in the world.

… Natural musk was used extensively in perfumery until the late 19th century when economic and ethical motives led to the adoption of synthetic musk, which is now used almost exclusively.

Further note on notes. Above, reference to musk as a base note in perfumery. From Wikipedia on the classes of perfume notes:

Notes in perfumery are descriptors of scents that can be sensed upon the application of a perfume. Notes are separated into three classes: top/head notes, middle/heart notes, and base notes; which denote groups of scents which can be sensed with respect to the time after the application of a perfume. These notes are created carefully with knowledge of the evaporation process and intended use of the perfume. The presence of one note may alter the perception of another — for instance, the presence of certain base or heart notes will alter the scent perceived when the top notes are strongest, and likewise the scent of base notes in the dry-down will often be altered depending on the smells of the heart notes.

(Hunky men performing suggestively in remarkable underwear, with a caption alluding to sex between men, so probably inadvisable for kids and the sexually modest.)

In an ad for a Daily Jocks late February sale, the model does a cock tease in his extraordinary golden shorts (DJX Liquid Shorts in gold, from the Circuit collection), with this ad copy:

Our ever popular Circuit Shorts, now available in metallic gold!

Stand out from the crowd in these unique liquid metal effect shorts, made from a premium foil-print fabric.

Featuring a secret pocket built into the waistband, perfect for storing your party essentials in. Also includes a drawcord at the waist for optimum fit. These shorts are designed to be form-fitting but still comfortable, with a light stretch in the fabric.

The ad’s image, with a caption of my own devising:

(#1)

Golden Boy does a cock tease

looking for a hot trick in his
golden Circuit Liquid Shorts,
GB pulled down a corner,
teasing his prey with a peek at the
black jock underneath, hinting at the
male gold waiting inside to be
handled and mouthed

From the DJX catalogue, a less lubricious display of the remarkable shorts, on an ordinary-guy model (displaying a notable moose-knuckle, however, and wearing a black harness, so it’s not your everyday presentation of self):

(#2)

(A right-at-the-line Daily Jocks ad today, with text that takes it over the line for kids and the sexually modest.)

The ad copy from Daily Jocks:

NEW DJX CIRCUIT
Step up your party look with the reimagined black circuit look.
Pair matching Jockstrap, Harness & Shorts.

(The name of the DJX Circuit Collection is a reference to gay circuit parties — on which, see below.)

The image is of Golden Boy (from a 2/27 posting) — hyper-masculine, with a hairy, sweaty, oiled, gold-toasted body — here with a hand in his jockstrap, and posed against a golden car.

My title for the composition:

Fired up for the grand finale,
Golden Boy jams a hand in his jockstrap

To which I’ve added a salacious caption:

(#1)

icon of the Gold Party in
Firetown Springs, GB
dances high and hard,
climaxes by
fucking his
Goldsmobile

GB’s previous appearance on this blog, in my 2/27/21 posting “Golden Boy does a cock tease”, with this image of him in his Liquid Shorts in gold:

(#2)

Allusions in the caption to #1: the name Firetown Springs is a mashup of the names of three gay holiday enclaves (Fire Island (NY), Provincetown (MA), and Palm Springs (CA)); Goldsmobile is a play on the automobile brand Oldsmobile (discontinued in 2004); high and hard is an allusion to drugs and sex at gay circuit parties; Gold Party is the name of an invented circuit party, on the model of the White Party (Palm Springs), the Black Party (NYC), the Red Party (Columbus OH), the Black & Blue Festival (Montreal), and the Purple Party (Dallas).

Circuit parties.From my 6/22/10 posting “Rivers of Babylon”:

[There have been] gay-themed “circuit parties” for over 25 years, [many] of them with color names.

… A circuit party is a one-day main event involving intense dancing for 24 hours, with accompanying sex, drinking, and (often) drugs, plus preceding events and following ones. Almost all of the participants (up to 20,000 of them at a really big party) are young gay men, many of them shirtless (or in underwear, or naked) most of the time.

More details in Wikipedia.

A hand in his jockstrap. In #1.  My 10/5/19 posting “A man, his hands, his pants” examines one hand (or sometimes two) in pants or underwear as a sexual gesture, often clearly fondling the man’s genitals (but on other occasions with non-sexual aims).