(About penises and nipples, in plain talk. Not for kids or the sexually modest.)

The original spur for this posting was a magazine piece (which I can no longer locate) by a woman complaining about guys getting visible hard-ons in everyday contexts. Why, the writer wondered, can’t men control their hormones in public? Are they just uncivilized beasts?

The fact is that almost all men experience spontaneous, or random, erections, often to their great embarrassment. The triggers are many and complex. When I was a horny teenager (and masturbating, mostly swiftly, around six times a day, to sexual fantasies of my own devising), riding on a bus produced a motion that provoked gigantic unwelcome hard-ons that were very hard to conceal. Other young men get intractable hard-ons in situations of great social anxiety — such as, alas, speaking in public in front of an audience. (There’s more; see below.)

What’s more, an enormous number of people, female as well as male, get spontaneous nipple erections in all sorts of non-sexual situations. Our bodies do a lot of this on their own, without any input from our thoughts. Yes, sexual thoughts and images can trigger these stiffenings, but a lot of it happens out of our consciousness.

Penile erections. From the Medical News Today site, “Are random erections normal?” by Aaron Kandola on 3/31/18:

Males often experience erections, sometimes called boners, without physical or psychological stimulation. While it is usually not a cause for concern, it can feel embarrassing.

Random erections are normal in adolescents and adults, especially when waking up. Fluctuations in testosterone may be responsible.

… An erection is often triggered when an individual becomes aroused by thinking about, seeing, or feeling something or someone who is sexually exciting.

The brain sends signals that widen the arteries connected to the penis, allowing more blood to enter. The veins that usually carry this blood back to the rest of the body shrink. This results in the penis swelling and stiffening, forming an erection.

Erections that occur without sexual stimulation can have several causes.

Nocturnal penile tumescence, which is sometimes called morning wood, may be caused by hormonal changes during the night or physical stimulation from contact with the bed sheets.

A healthy male will typically experience 3 to 5 erections while asleep, each lasting 25 to 35 minutes.

Levels of hormones also fluctuate throughout the day, particularly testosterone, and this can cause random erections.

All of this is intended to be encouraging to your typical man. The first lesson is that boners happen. Actually, a lot.

From my 3/30/15 posting “Still more news for penises”,  on the Bilerico site, “Behold ‘Groin Gazing,’ a Fashion Spread Starring Boners”, filed by John M. Becker on 3/6/14:

Montreal-based photographer Claire Milbrath has an intensely erotic yet basically-SFW new series of fashion photos featured on the global youth media website Vice.com. It’s not your conventional fashion photo spread, though, in the sense that it doesn’t focus on clothes, hair, or accessories.

Instead, the star of the show is the boner — or rather, the bulge in a guy’s pants when he’s sporting one.

(#1) The Boyfriend (from the Groin Gazing site)

It’s called “Groin Gazing,” and each provocative image features a tight shot of a clothed male model’s crotch. Every subject is visibly aroused.

(The sort of thing the magazine writer was annoyed by.)

More broadly, from my 1/30/20 posting “Medical news not for penises”:

Now, boners, they’re all over my blogs. Tons of them on AZBlogX. But on this blog, plenty of moose knuckles (there’s even a Page on moose-knuckle postings), and moose knuckles are just boners under wraps.

(#2) The cover of the magazine (without a visible boner)

There’s even a Boner magazine. Of course there is. The surprise is that it’s in German: a gay magazine for German-speaking areas of Europe.

Inadequate boner. The second lesson from the Medical News Today site is to comfort men who sometimes fail to get a fully hard erection. Again, the message is that it happens sometimes, to almost every guy. (Indeed, anxiety about performing, about providing a fully hard cock for your sexual partner, can make it hard to achieve.)

Yes, there is erectile dysfunction, and roughly half of all men over 50 are reported to experience it, but the message is that it can be treated as a medical condition. Via sildenafil (Viagra), vardenafil (Levitra, Staxyn), tadalafil (Cialis) or avanafil (Stendra), oral medications that reverse erectile dysfunction by enhancing the penile effects of nitric oxide, which the male body produces naturally.

As it happens, I haven’t achieved a fully hard erection for many years. But I am unwilling to add another medication to the dozen I’m already taking, and in fact I have no real need to get a full boner any more. I haven’t had any kind of sexual experience with another person for at least 15 years, so I don’t actually need a really hard dick for my guy’s hand, mouth, or asshole. It’s all fantasy sex now, and (as I’ve noted here before) I have a very high sex drive — have had for 70 years — coming from one to three times every day (sometimes in quickie jack-offs, sometimes in longer more elaborate interludes with gay porn or with a sound track I supply out loud for myself (I enjoy dirty sex talk immensely).

But this is not to say my dick doesn’t get aroused. Actually, aroused a whole fucking lot. When I call it up for jack-off time, of course, but many times during sleep, and in an astonishing number of random moments during the day, with no obvious trigger. It just happens, the way it did when I was 15, except that I just get a bit stiffer, I sense it (oh wow, that feels nice), and I exude pre-cum. (My briefs are always something of a sex mess, with dried splotches of pre-cum and actual cum in them.)

There seems to be no guidebook for this experience, of what’s sometimes called semi-erection or soft erection. It’s apparently viewed by everyone as a medical issue to be fixed, but for me feels just like a way of life, indeed pretty much like the way of life I’ve had since puberty kicked in when I was 10, but now without the stiffies. In fact, if one of my fantasy men turned up, hungry to suck my cock, I’m ready to shoot a big load in his mouth (instead of in my hand or in my pants); he wouldn’t get the sensation of a hard dick in his mouth — though for gay men this is admittedly a major psychological satisfaction of sucking dick — but it would be an easy blow job, and he’d still get a blast of my sweet and salty cum.

Nipple erections. From Cosmopolitan magazine “This is why you get nipple erections” by Dusty Baxter-Wright on 8/31/16:

Nipples are weird and wonderful things; they go hard when you’re turned on and stick out like sore thumbs when you’re cold – and sometimes, just go hard for no apparent reason.

Only it turns out there is a reason behind the often unpredictable erections (bet you’ve heard that one before), and it’s down to a highly specialised type of nerve cell that does nothing else except generate nipple erections [and goose bumps, aka piloerection].

The topic will bring us to both piloerection and horripilation. Vocabulary delights.

From Wikipedia:

Goose bumps or goosebumps are the bumps on a person’s skin at the base of body hairs which may involuntarily develop when a person is tickled, cold or experiencing strong emotions such as fear, euphoria or sexual arousal.

The formation of goose bumps in humans under stress is considered to be a vestigial reflex. Its function in other apes is to raise the body’s hair, and would have made human ancestors appear larger to scare off predators or to increase the amount of air trapped in the fur to make it more insulating. The reflex of producing goose bumps is known as piloerection or the pilomotor reflex, or, more traditionally, horripilation. It occurs in many mammals; a prominent example is porcupines, which raise their quills when threatened, or sea otters when they encounter sharks or other predators.

…  The phrase “goose bumps” derives from the phenomenon’s association with goose skin. Goose feathers grow from spores in the epidermis which resemble human hair follicles. When a goose’s feathers are plucked, its skin has protrusions where the feathers were, and these bumps are what the human phenomenon resembles.

… In humans, goose bumps can even extend to piloerection as a reaction to hearing nails scratch on a chalkboard, listening to awe-inspiring music, or feeling or remembering strong and positive emotions (e.g., after winning a sports event), or while watching a horror film.

So nipple erections and goose bumps are physiologcally the same mechanism. I await reports of people whose nipples get hard from awe-inspiring music, cold weather, or fear. (For me as a queer guy, men’s nipples are potent sources of sexual pleasure, both giving and getting, as well as servng as signs of sexual arousal.)

The basic text on this blog is my 2/25/17 posting “Displaying your nipples”, with some arresting photos:

(#3) “A nice torso shot of a guy with erect nipples”

and with a section on nipple enlargement: “if you’re into this, the goal is pencil eraser nips“, as here:

(#4)

In my wild gay youth, I attended sexually to several hard-tit guys (whose nips were a source of both great pride and great pleasure for them). Sucking on pencil-eraser nips is like sucking on small very hard dicks. A minor-league sexual pleasure in my book, since it lacks the immersion in my guy’s crotch, with the smell and taste of his sex sweat. But not negligible.

Most guys with erect nipples are much less startling than #4. They’re more subtle, but nevertheless convey arousal. Two examples.

From my 12/3/15  posting “José Parra”:

(#5) “model José Parra displaying his muscular body and offering his crotch (and one armpit) in a wrestling singlet” (and with sweet erect nipples)

And from my 4/2/17 posting “Corey Saucier”:

(#6) “a head and torso shot with hot nips” (plus the Cruise of Death facial expression)

In contrast, two adorable shirtless guys with everyday nipples:

(#7) 4Ocean’s Alex Schulze and Andrew Cooper

Among  a great many other shirtless men  in my postings; I delight in male torsos paired wth faces, and most of them have soft nips.

Tim Evanson on Facebook today observed that Daniel Goddard (born 8/28/71) is now 49. Happy birthday, Daniel.

Goddard was the star of the the Beastmaster tv series, which has provided me with many cheap-pleasurable hours of viewing, in which his very attractive shirtlessness played a significant part (though his physical acting, his smiles, the excellent supporting cast, and the entertainingly preposterous plots were significant contributions).

(#1) The characters Tao (played by Jackson Raine) and Dar (Goddard): well, yes, Goddard’s admirable torso and arm muscles (not to mention his sweaty body and surprisingy erect nipples), but it’s also a depiction of supportive male friendship, and that’s important

On the series, from Wikipedia:

Beastmaster is a Canadian/American/Australian television series that aired from 1999 to 2002. It was loosely based on the 1982 MGM film The Beastmaster, which was itself loosely adapted from the novel The Beast Master by Andre Norton. The series aired 66 episodes over three complete seasons.

… Dar (Daniel Goddard) is the last survivor of his tribe. He wanders the lands seeking his lost loved one, Kyra (Natalie Jackson Mendoza), protecting the oppressed and the animals. His friend Tao (Jackson Raine) — a fearful, psychology-attracted young man — helps him in his quest; Tao is a scholar and a medicine man.

The crucial plot point is that Dar can speak (wordlessly) to the animals, and sometimes can inhabit their beings.

And on Goddard, from Wikipedia:

Daniel Richard Goddard (born 28 August 1971) is an Australian American actor and model. He is known for his starring role as Dar on the syndicated action drama BeastMaster, based on the 1982 film The Beastmaster, and for playing Cane Ashby on the CBS daytime soap opera The Young and the Restless from 2007 to 2019.

Goddard is (not unreasonably) body-proud, as you can see from this 7/30/14 Twitter posting showing off his body:

(#2)

The background. From my 11/18/14 posting “The Beastmaster”:

an old favorite, the 1982 action/fantasy movie The Beastmaster. A very silly entertainment, starring Marc Singer and his fabulous physique (he’s in nothing but a loincloth for most of the movie) and big smile, plus a sizable cast of animals.

And then the syndicated tv series.

(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).

From Ryan Tamares, a gay Xmas and pandemic-chasing card “Adam Likes Santa: Red Santa”, featuring cartoonist Bobo Nisi’s gay bear character Bobo-Bear (sometimes Bobobear or Bobo Bear):

(#1) The card

(Also demonstrating some newly recovered abilities of mine at formatting my blog postings.)

On the Bobo-Bear Facebook page:

A supermarket worker who dreamed to draw, bought some pencils, moved to London and now shares his art on t-shirts. Follow if you like bears [of the gay male variety]. Grrr!

Drawn by Bobo Nisi, a supermarket worker who dreamed to draw, said goodbye to the aisles, bought some pencils and imagined these gay sexy bears.

An overview of some Bobo-Bear characters:

(#2) Six characters

The Bobo-Bear site also sells merchandise (of course):

(#3) Shirtless Bobo-Bear modeling a mask

(#4) Bobo-Bear swimwear, with a butt bear

(Yes, about male bodies and sex between men, often in plain terms, so not for kids or the sexually modest)

It begins with an e-mail ad for some recent Raging Stallion gay porn; the DVD cover photo has as its central figure the pornstar Cole Connor as a hypersexual race driver, who stares intently into our eyes while holding his workshirt open to display his attractively muscled, lightly furred left pec and the erect nipple at its center: his nipple and pec as objects of our sexual desire.

(#1) Massively alliterative Fuck Me Fast and Furious, a straightforward play on the title of the first of the Fast Saga of action movies

The cover is about male torsos: Connor with his half-bared torso; a guy on one side with his shirt more open, to display a long pornstar dick resting against his belly (fuzzed out for WordPress modesty); and on the other side a fully shirtless guy, his right hand splayed over his abs, with his fly open to suggest access to his pornstar dick. The cover offers hot masculine action, symbolized by the red racecar at the bottom of the cover.

On the porn flick, from the Fagalicious blog, “Raging Stallion: Darenger McCarthy bangs Cole Connor raw in “Fuck Me Fast and Furious” on 12/31/21:

So there’s the model for the porn flick, the 2001 action film The Fast and the Furious.

Then there’s the model for the title of this posting: the song “A Bushel and a Peck”, from the Broadway musical Guys and Dolls (from 1950), with the first line: “I love you, a bushel and a peck”. (The song was performed by the character Adelaide and a chorus of showgirls as part of their nightclub act at the Hot Box — whose name seems to be a raunchy play on the name of the Music Box Theatre in NYC. That will lead me to raunchy uses of boxboy in gay male contexts.)

But first, on men’s nipples: baring them in public; these nipples as sources of sexual pleasure (for themselves and for other men); and men’s clothing that highlights pecs and nipples. Yes, it’s Torso Time.

Papillary pleasures. From two previous postings.

— from my 2/25/17 posting “Displaying your nipples”, first, about men barred from baring their nipples — too overtly sexual — in public. This photo —

(#2) Brave male protesters each baring an illegal nipple on the beach in the 1930s (there were protests in Coney Island and Atlantic City, for example); then in 1936, it became legal to expose nipples in New York state

The plants, the music, the clothing! There are three parts to this posting. Part 1 is about plants, specifically a Hydrangea macrophylla now blooming on my patio for the first time since 2017. Part 2 (which ends up with Randy Rainbow doing a fabulous barbershop quartet performance — just the music, ma’m) and Part 3 (which ends up with the superhot Argentine fashion model Maximiliano Patane posing shirtless) are tied to Part 1 by the color dusty rose (a type of pink), some mental association, and some sheer accident. The color, from the Color Codes site:

(#1) In actual practice, the color label covers a range of hues, some lighter, some brighter, some pinker

From dusty rose by association to the song “Lida Rose” and to Randy Rainbow’s performance of it. Also from dusty rose in a search for men’s clothing in the color (after a search for clothing in this color got tons of women’s clothing, mostly lingerie and wedding dresses, and nothing for men; the color is clearly highly gendered), by happy accident to a photo of an extremely steamy and wildly hirsute Patane modeling a suit in that color. Which led me to the model more generally; my ignorance of the world of high fashion is both wide and deep, but for Patane a 2016 spread on him (“hotter than California weather”) in Out magazine provided shirtless delight.

And then I was able to tie all three parts together in a brief parody of “Lida Rose”, in which the singer speaks to his lover Max using the pet name Dusky Rose for him.

Part 1. The plant part, about my bigleaf hydrangea plant, Hydrangea macrophylla. From my 6/2/17 posting “Pride Time #1: the pink and the purple”:

The red hydrangea. Well, neon pink. When I got it, it had blue flowers, with instructions to use acid fertilizer to keep it blue. Instructions I didn’t follow, so I discovered that the flowers were a deep pink, not your usual pink hydrangea, like this one:

(#2)

On the next blooming, the flowers were flaming pink instead of blue, and now, in season 3, the plant turns out to be a red cultivar. Well, deep screaming neon pink. On my patio yesterday:

(#3)

Now — today in June 2022 — I have the first flowers since 2017, these dusty rose flowers — modestly pretty, rather than screamingly pink, apparently through the miracle of soil and plant chemistry:

(#4)

(No big leaves, despite the macrophylla name, just bare stems with buds, thanks to powdery mildew. But at least the slugs, rats, skunks, and squirrels didn’t just strip the plant of its leaves, as they did for years and years. Unfortunately, the flowers aren’t lasting long under the onslaught of days of very high temperatures, in the 90s F.)

Part 2. The musical interlude. The color name dusty rose clanged with “Lida Rose” for me; I know, show tunes, show tunes, show tunes. This one’s sung in close harmony by a barbershop quartet. What is, for me the crucial verse:

Lida Rose, I’m home again, Rose
Without a sweetheart to my name
Lida Rose, how everyone knows
That I am hoping you’re the same

It’s from The Music Man (music and lyrics by Meredith Wilson), which opened on Broadway in 1957, with an excellent film adaptation in 1962. I can still do chunks of it from memory. So “Lida Rose” popped up right away.

I’d intended to insert here the YouTube video from the movie, but then I stumbled on some gold: “Lida Rose” / “Will I Ever Tell?” from the Randy Rainbow Show. Not doing his wickedly inspired gay-political shtick, just singing his heart out, beautifully, on all the parts:

(#5) You can watch the YouTubevideo here

Part 3. The clothing part, in which my efforts to find some dusky rose men’s clothing led me to this:

(#6) Hombre en rosa oscura: Maximiliano Patane modeling a dusky rose suit for the Mexican department store El Palacio de Hierro (photo: David Roemer)

Faced with this remarkable photo, I went on to investigate MP (apparently, he’s been world-famous for a long time, just not in my world). An Argentine model working the runway since 2011, for many different agencies, he’s now 41 years old. He’s tall — 6ʹ 1.5ʺ — and slim, almost gaunt, but very very hot, as you can see in this 2016 photo for Out magazine:

(#7) Wow, how a dusky rose is blooming!

All that remains is to sing to him:

Dusky Rose, I’m home again, Rose
Without my sweet Max in my arms
Dusky Rose, how everyone knows
That I am longing for your charms

(about bodies, mostly men’s, and clothing that exposes parts of those bodies, either by complete absence of an item of clothing, or by the absence of part of such an item; there will be plenty of male buttocks on view, and there will be discussion of men’s bodies, sometimes in street language — so not to everyone’s taste)

About items of clothing or parts of such items that are missing, lacking, absent.  (I’ll explain the adjective abessive in a moment; it does some of the work of the English derivational suffix –less or the preposition without, but is of wider applicability.) Two topics in this area are standing preoccupations of this blog: (re: absent items of clothing) male shirtlessness; and (re: absent parts of items of clothing) the assless / bottomless / backless nature of jockstraps.

The actual entry point to this posting came on Facebook on 5/9/19, when John Dorrance asked about the first use of assless chaps and Season Devereux  responded ,”Aren’t all chaps assless though?” To which I replied:

Yes indeed. The assless in assless chaps is an appositive, rather than restrictive, modifier — used to remind the hearer that chaps do in fact lack an ass, or to emphasize this fact in context — cf. appositive ‘chaps, which are assless’ vs. restrictive ‘chaps that are assless’, which is pleonastic.

It will take a little while to work up to chaps as abessive clothing: in this case, an item of clothing that lacks one of its parts (they’re assless) — in fact lacks two, since they’re also crotchless (chaps are essentially outerwear leggings of leather, held up by a belt).

Exploring abessive clothing quickly can take us far afield, and I’m not sure at this point how far I’m willing to go, so I’ll just dig in and see what happens. Come walk with me.

The adjective abessive. From OED3 (Dec. 2011) on the adjective abessive:

Designating, being in, or relating to a case in certain Finno-Ugric languages, esp. Finnish, which expresses the absence of something.

First thing: the reference is to an inflectional case form, available at least for nouns (and perhaps also for modifiers of nouns), and since it’s inflectional, in principle available for all nouns.

Second thing: the abessive is a local, or concrete case (vs. a grammatical case), with concrete semantics (glossed in English ‘missing, lacking, absent, -less’), like the comitative case (conveying ‘along with, accompanied by’) and instrumental case (conveying ‘by means of’) and opposed to a case that marks syntactic function (like nominative case, canonically associated with grammatical subjects; accusative case, canonically associated with grammatical direct objects, etc.).

Third thing: historically, abessive has been used only for certain Finno-Ugric languages, but of course it’s available as the label for a case with this semantics in any language.

[Digression on terminology and semantic content. From Wikipedia, on this case:

In linguistics, abessive …, caritive [or] privative … is [the name of a] grammatical case expressing the lack or absence of the marked noun. In English, the corresponding function is expressed by the preposition without or by the suffix –less.

The name abessive is derived from abesse “to be away/absent”, and is especially used in reference to Uralic languages. The name caritive is derived from Latin: carere “to lack”, and is especially used in reference to Caucasian languages. The name privative is derived from Latin: privare “to deprive”.

abesse and carere are stative intransitives, so abessive and caritive are good names for a case of absence or lack. But privare is a change-of-state verb, and would be best used for a case of (inchoative) loss or (causative) removal.

My 10/26/19 posting “The caritive”, reports the announcement of a conference on caritive / privative / abessive constructions (not just case forms) — using the case names as (alternative) labels for the semantic content associated with the cases, but also expressible in other ways, and also suggesting a refinement of this semantic content to distinguish absence of something from lacking it from being missing it (with lacking and missing involving the expectation of it, while absence is neutral in this regard):

Caritive / privative / abessive constructions cover a range of meanings that are, or at least can be, discriminated by lexical means: the range from neutrally  not having something through lacking something expected to being missing something crucial.

(Compare The statue has no head / The statue lacks a head / The statue is missing its head.)]

Fourth thing: once we have the adjective available as a label for a concrete case, it’s open for metaphorical extension to other domains — in particular the clothing domain, where it could be used to refer to clothing that’s missing, lacking, or absent, or to clothing with some part missing, lacking, or absent. And this turns out to be a useful metaphorical extension, providing us with a one-word term for familiar concepts that can be named only awkwardly in ordinary English.

So: welcome to the world of abessive clothing, of two types, which I’ll refer to as the shirtless type (with reference to the wearer of an item of clothing, conveying that they are without this item, that they do not have this item on, that they are missing this item) and the assless type (with reference to an item of clothing, conveying that it is without some part, that it doesn’t have this part, that this part is missing).

The two model adjectives, shirtless and assless. With illustrations both routine and extravagant.

shirtless men. Displaying their torsos. First, routine examples:

(#1) Surfer dudes Alex Schulze and Andrew Cooper in a tv ad for their 4Ocean company

Then, something raunchier:

(#2) DVD cover for a Raging Stallion gay porn flick; the cover is about, among other things, male torsos

assless jockstraps. (That’s appositive adjective assless, since jockstraps by definition lack an ass.) First, a routine example, of a relatively canonical jockstrap:

(#3)

Then something playful in neon pink:

(#4)

And, finally, something outrageous in pink lace:

(#5)

A few more examples.

— type SHIRTLESS: (under)pantsless: – (going) commando; shoeless – (going) barefoot(ed); braless (of a woman)

— type ASSLESS: sleeveless (of shirts); midriffless / bottomless (of shirts) – in crop tops; crotchless (of lower-body garments of many sorts)

On some of the abessive vocabulary. I’ll start with the various nouns bottom and some of the abessive adjectives bottomless.

bottom, bottomless. From NOAD:

noun bottom (usually the bottom): 1 [a] the lowest point or part of something: the bottom of the page | she paused at the bottom of the stairs. [b] the part on which a thing rests; the underside: he sat on the bottom of an upturned bucket. [c] the ground under a sea, river, or lake: the liner plunged to the bottom of the sea. [d] the lowest surface on the inside of a container: place the fruit on the bottom of the dish. [e] the seat of a chair. [f] the lowest position in a competition or ranking: he started at the bottom and now has his own business.[g] the basis or origin: there’s a mad scientist at the bottom of it all. [h] (also bottoms) the lower half of a two-piece garment: pajama bottoms | a skimpy bikini bottom. [i] (bottoms) another term for bottomland. [j] the lowest part of the hull of a ship, especially the relatively flat portion on either side of the keel. [k] archaic a ship, especially considered as a unit of transport capacity. 2 chiefly British the buttocks: he climbs the side of the gorge, scratching his bottom unselfconsciously. … 5 vulgar slang a man who takes the passive role in anal intercourse with another man.

Add to this (not in NOAD):

bottom 6: the part of a garment that covers a person’s buttocks [metonymy from bottom 2]

And then:

adj. bottomless: 1 [a] without a bottom: plant mint in a bottomless bucket sunk into the ground. [b] very deep: the cold dark sea in whose bottomless depths monsters swam. [c] (of a supply of money or other resources) inexhaustible: I don’t have a bottomless pit of money. 2 naked below the waist [i.e., lacking a bottom 1h]

Add to this (not in NOAD):

bottomless 3: (of underwear) lacking a covering for the buttocks [from bottom 6]

bottomless 4: cropped at the bottom [from bottom 1a] (i.e., lacking an expected bottom — the sense in which crop tops are bottomless, hence baring the midriff; see my 8/2/18 posting “Male crop tops!”)

From bottomless as applied to underwear — in which bottom ‘buttocks’ is evident — we go to two rough synonyms, one (backless) lacking any sense of carnality, neutral in tone, one (assless) incorporating the vulgar slang ass ‘anus; buttocks’.

back, backless. NOAD on the noun back:

1 [a] the rear surface of the human body from the shoulders to the hips … [e] the part of a garment that covers a person’s back … 2 [a] the side or part of something that is away from the spectator or from the direction in which it moves or faces …

To which we must add a metonymical sense not in NOAD:

1g the back [in sense 2a] part of a garment

Then the adjective backless:

(of a woman’s garment) cut low at the back: a backless lycra dress. [from back 1e] [looking ahead a bit, label this sense [b]]

But, not in NOAD, a more general sense of backless for garments:

[a](of a garment) lacking its back [in sense 1g]

Now we have the usages in which jockstraps can be said to be backless (by definition), and chaps as well (again by definition). Or bottomless. Or assless.

ass, assless. To start, the briefest of stories, on the noun ass-2 in NOAD:

North American vulgar slang [a] a person’s buttocks or anus. … [roughly corresponding to BrE arse]

Then a fuller treatment from OED2 on the noun ass-2:

1. a. A person’s buttocks; the bottom, the backside. Also: the anus; the rectum. Also occasionally: an animal’s rump, anus, or rectum. [1st cite a1672] b. The bottom or rear of an object. [metaphorical; 1st cite 1700] c. The part of a pair of trousers which covers the buttocks; the seat of the trousers. Also occasionally with reference to other garments. [metonymical; 1st cite 1888; representative cite: 1978 E. Rossi White Death A large German Shepherd dog .. proceeded to tear the ass out of his snowmobile suit.]

For the adjective assless we need to tap the resources of OED3 (Sept. 2018), which marks the item as “orig. and chiefly North American“:

1. Lacking buttocks, esp. prominent ones. Also: designating a walk, etc., in which the movement of the buttocks is minimal or not emphasized. [1st cite 1965; notable cite: 1966 Gilbert Sorrentino Sky Changes He’s flat, straight as a plank from his neck down to his ankles. .. An assless wonder.] 2. Of clothing: designed to expose the buttocks; lacking a part that covers the buttocks. [1984 Another Chicago Mag. A pair of assless and crotchless black spandex tights, these to go with his black engineer’s boots. 1996 Spy Prince .. wears assless pants. 2010 M. Knowles In Plain Sight All I had to wear was the thin, assless hospital gown.]

Sense 2 is the abessive-clothing sense. and it’s used especially for lower-body clothing  that normally has the buttocks covered. This is the world of backless / bottomless / assless tights, briefs, shorts, jeans, trousers, whatever. Just four examples from the enormous number that have appeared on this blog:

(#6) From my 6/4/17 posting “Pride Time #3: On the menswear watch”:

Like chaps, but they’re shorts. Well, jockstraps are backless by nature, and there are also backless thongs, backless briefs, and backless singlets, as well as backless pants, and all of these things  are available in leather, so why not backless leather shorts? Indeed there are — I suppose we can call them chaplets — and on the Ducati motorcycle guy in [#6], they’re very fetching.

(#7) From my 10/17/18 posting “PUMP!ing it up”: the Creamsicle Access Trunk by PUMP!

(#8) From my 3/31/19 posting “Moon shorts 1: the Moons”: Moon Shorts by Barcode Berlin, with see-through mesh rear, in yellow

(#9) Bottomless boxer briefs on a model who works under the professional name Cristiano Lorenzi

Back to chaps. Now we cycle back to (assless) chaps, where all this began. From Wikipedia:

Chaps … are sturdy coverings for the legs consisting of leggings and a belt. They are buckled on over trousers with the chaps’ integrated belt, but unlike trousers, they have no seat (the term “assless chaps” is a tautology) and are not joined at the crotch [that is, they have no crotch either]. They are designed to provide protection for the legs and are usually made of leather or a leather-like material. Their name is a shortened version of the Spanish word chaparajos. Chaparajos were named after the chaparral (thick, thorny, low brush) from which they were designed to protect the legs while riding on horseback. Like much of western American horse culture, the origin of chaparajos was in the south of Spain, from which it then passed on to the part of New Spain that later became Mexico, and has been assimilated into cowboy culture of the American west. They are a protective garment to be used when riding a horse through brushy terrain. In the modern world, they are worn for both practical work purposes and for exhibition or show use. Chaps have also been adopted for use on motorcycles, particularly by cruiser-style motorcycle riders.

… Chaps are also popular in fetish fashion and the leather subculture, where they often are tightly fitted and worn without jeans or other garments layered beneath them other than a codpiece. They can be made of leather, patent leather, rubber, or vinyl and are worn for decoration serving no protective purpose.

First, some chaps designed for motorcyclists: Harley-Davidson men’s leather chaps, worn over jeans:

(#10) Front view: crotchless

(#11) Rear view: assless

And now, from Mr-S-Leather, for gay men, outside-zip leather chaps:

(#12) Front view, with a leather codpiece concealing but advertising the wearer’s dick

(#13) Rear view, exposing the wearer’s ass

By the way, well-made gear like this, using high-grade leather, is not at all cheap.

Future thoughts. This closes the original topic, but in collecting this material, I came across topics clearly related to this one, namely verbs of absence, loss, and removal; plus the verb moon ‘expose ones buttocks’ and the act of mooning.  Possible topics for future postings. But not today.

(Charms of the male body, plus a striptease song, so not to everyone’s taste)

A Daily Jocks e-mail ad in my mailbox today, with this beautifully composed male figure:

[AMZ caption:] Let me entertain you … I’m very versatile

The actual ad copy (offering 35% off):

Missed out last time? Our once a year Long Johns sale is happening this weekend at DailyJocks.
These Helsinki Athletica Long Johns have SOLD OUT completely during the previous 3 seasons so don’t miss out!
Made from premium modal which forms to your skin for ultimate comfort, whilst showing off your best assets.

My original idea was to do a burlesque of the lyrics from “Let Me Entertain You” from the musical  Gypsy — which has become a kind of striptease anthem, instantly evoking bump and grind. Having studied these lyrics for a while, though, I’ve decided they really can’t be improved on as a commentary on Helsinki Long John Dong. Never tamper with perfection (especially if it comes from Stephen Sondheim):

Let me entertain you
Let me make you smile
Let me do a few tricks
Some old and then some new tricks
I’m very versatile

And if you’re real good
I’ll make you feel good
I’d want your spirit to climb
So let me entertain you
We’ll have a real good time
Yes sir!
We’ll have…
A real good time!

About the song. Very briefly, from Wikipedia:

“Let Me Entertain You” and “May We Entertain You?” are two songs from the musical Gypsy. The former is the more popular [striptease] reprise of the latter. “May We” is performed by [adorable kiddies] Baby June and Baby Louise, while “Let Me” is performed by [the smokin’ hot adult ecdysiast] Louise. The song was written by Jule Styne (music) and Stephen Sondheim (lyrics)

It begins with an arresting photo on Pinterest yesterday showing two beautiful young men in each other’s arms:

(#1) From the Fashionably Male website, “STOP & STARE Alexan Sarikamichian New Work: Agus & Adriel” on 9/26/17 — a fashion spread by the film-maker AS featuring two beautiful young models, Agustin Bruni and Adriel Pino, presented as in a bromance in which the young men “experiment with new feelings about sex, brotherhood, camaraderie”

AS is then the thread leading to the third male model, Severiano Astrada, a hunky young man projecting a tough-guy exterior as the main character in AS’s short film Severiano (2018); and to the fourth, Roman Stubrin, sometimes playful, but mostly offering an unsettling gimlet stare, intense and riveting — in an AS / Benjamin Baccetti film project (in progress) focused on him, and in an extraordinary 2024 fashion piece about him on the Spanish fashion site Fucking Young!

In Modelworld, everybody does underwear ads. Including all four of our models / actors. Everybody in their skivvies now!

(#2) Agus and Adriel, shot by AS (exhibiting his recognizable photographic style)

(#3) Roman, shot by Lucas Ricci (on the Fucking Young! site)

(#4) From the Fashionably Male site “Postman Fashion” on 8/25/15: a boyish Severiano, shot by Jo Herrera (in a totally different style)

Agus, Adriel, and Severiano are (like AS) from Argentina, Roman from Spain. (Actual biographical information about male models is surprisingly hard to come by, although there are sites giving their body measurements and clothing sizes.)

Alexan Sarikamichian. From the Altered.LA production company’s website, “ALTERED.LA Welcomes Director Alexan Sarikamichian to Roster” on 8/31/23:

Alexan started his career in film production at the Universidad Del Cine (FUC), where he met Argentine film director Eduardo ‘Teddy’ Williams. From there, he went on to develop the production of three short films, with ‘Pude ver un Puma’ being nominated for the Cinefondation Cannes Festival. His work on the short ‘La Donna’, directed by Nicolas Dolensky and starring actress Erica Rivas, also won numerous nominations across the global festival circuit. In addition, Alexan currently has two projects in post-production: a love story shot in Argentina on 16 mm film, and a short centred around the theme of ghosting.

The influence of cinema is notable in Alexan’s broader creative pursuits, recently producing music videos for many renowned national and international musicians. He has collaborated with a host of acclaimed Latin artists, including prolific Argentine actor Ricardo Darín, singer and actress Lali Espósito and pop artist Sebastián Yatra.

With a pursuit of beauty and aesthetics at the core of his projects, Alexan also has a passion for men’s fashion and has created campaign videos for brands such as Maria Cher, Blackmamba and Santiago Artemis.

AS has directed many short films: character studies of sex, love, and friendship between beautiful young people, with passionate female characters.

(#5) Severiano posing naked (and dead serious)

[from Alexan Films:] Severiano is the reflection of a lost youth. He recognizes himself in his neighborhood  [in Buenos Aires] and his friends are his only support. As in a teenage dream full of nostalgia and melancholy, Severiano lives through his days of youth and adulthood, where the present and the uncertainty of his future seem to be coming together.

The film is in rapid, slangy Spanish with appalling English subtitles. Oh yes, pretty much everybody smokes. All in all, I was reminded, pleasantly, of the French Nouvelle Vague movies of the 1950s and 60s.

Roman (Stubrin). Finally, we come to Roman. In an AS / Benjamin Baccetti film project (in progress) focused on him, and in an extraordinary July 2024 fashion piece about him on the Spanish fashion site Fucking Young! (fuckingyoung.es ), shot by Lucas Ricci.

A screen capture from the Roman film:

(#6) Roman unbuttoned (and staring at his phone, not us)

And then three more shots from the Fucking Young! fashion spread (to go along with #3 above):

(#7) The startling first shot, one of several of Roman with that tarantula

(#8) Roman modeling some extravagant fashion — and performing a (two-sided) pitsntits display, showcasing his armpits and his pectoral muscles (with the nipples on them)

(There’s a pits ‘n’ tits Page on this blog listing postings with such displays; they are very common in men’s underwear ads and in ads for gay porn)

(#9) Roman playing Just An Ordinary Guy, tank top and jeans (but also remarkable sunglasses)

Roman’s usual facial expression for fashion shoots, in full display in #3, is one that glowers I don’t give a shit — perhaps as a counterbalance to the beauty of his face and the slimness of his body. Masculinity must be served.

It started with this rich (but baffling) painting on Pinterest a little while back:

(#1) A young boy, standing in a lake or river, holds up a fish he has caught on a line, while a band of intense light (a rocket launching?) shines from the far shore — a work by Irish figurative painter Conor Walton (born in 1970), who does still lifes and commissioned portraits, but also a lot of allegorical figurative painting, on mythological, cultural, and political themes

Some searching on Walton’s website identified #1 as Walton’s Phaethon (2015), so the subtext is mythological; comments to come. That search led to a clearly myth-based painting — a male nude to boot  — showing Sisyphus. Then to a political / cultural painting featuring Vladimir Putin, except that it’s also about Slim Pickens’s character Major Kong in the movie Dr. Strangelove, and, yes, it’s another male nude. And finally to a monumentally complex painting on a cultural / political theme, Darwinian evolution.

There’s a lot more, but these four should give you a feel for Walton’s imaginative side.

Phaethon.  From Wikipedia:

Phaethon (Ancient Greek: Φαέθων, romanized: Phaéthōn, lit. ’shiner’) … is the son of the Oceanid [water nymph] Clymene and the sun god Helios in Greek mythology [AZ: the union of water and sun, as in #1].

According to most authors, Phaethon is the son of Helios, and out of a desire to have his parentage confirmed, travels to the sun god’s palace in the east. He is recognised by his father and asks for the privilege of driving his chariot for a single day. Despite Helios’ fervent warnings and attempts to talk him out of it, counting the numerous dangers he would face in his celestial journey and reminding Phaethon that only he can control the horses, the boy is not dissuaded and does not change his mind. He is then allowed to take the chariot’s reins; his ride is disastrous, as he cannot keep a firm grip on the horses. As a result, he drives the chariot too close to the Earth, burning it, and too far from it, freezing it.

In the end, after many complaints, from the stars in the sky to the Earth itself, Zeus strikes Phaethon with one of his lightning bolts, killing him instantly. His dead body falls into the river Eridanus, and his sisters the Heliades are turned to black poplar as they mourn him.

The luminous otherworldly painting in #1 isn’t a straightforward translation of the Phaethon story into an image, but merely alludes to it. It partakes of our world and of the myth world, but belongs to neither of them.

Sisyphus. The Walton painting:

(#2) Rest (2018): Sisyphus taking a break with the rock partway up the hill of his eternal punishment; a scene again bathed in otherworldly light

Sisyphus is a frequent cartoon meme, appearing many times on this blog. The meme is a special favorite of cartoonist Bob Eckstein; see my 9/19/23 posting “Never-ending rock & roll”.

Putin. And Major Kong too. Another male nude (Walton is an equal-nudity artist, with plenty of female nudes, especially from mythology, but I’m focusing on the male body here). Otherworldly light again, with ominous brutal overtones that cut into what would otherwise be just entertaining playfulness:

(#3) Tsar Bomba (2022): Vladimir Putin riding a nuclear weapon (recalling both a famous photo of Putin exhibiting his masculine power and also a scene near the end of Dr. Strangelove) and waving the Russian Federation flag (a horizontal tricolor: white, blue, red)

Ingredient one: this 2009 photo of a shirtless Putin riding a horse:

(#4) Vladimir, stud on horseback (from the Macho Putin series)

Ingredient two: from the 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Dr. Strangelove for short):

(#5) Slim Pickens as Major T.J. “King” Kong, who straddles a nuclear weapon and waves his cowboy hat for the U S of A as he rides the falling bomb to his death

Darwin. A crowded composition, with over a dozen figures in it: seven of them humans (from history, including Darwin himself, and from fantasy), the others not:

(#6)

xx

(Entertaining and enlightening, I hope, but definitely not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Yesterday, in my posting “Beau Butler’s shirt” (about shirt-lifting as sexual invitation, and gay porn actor Beau Butler as a practitioner), I ended with a photo of BB engaged instead in shirt-spreading (or -opening), to display his muscular torso (muscular but not ripped like a bodybuilder’s):

(#1) [from the caption there:] … a suave but intense BB

An unusual presentation for BB; he’s characteristically earthy, cheerily (even playfully) crude, brazenly shirtless, bearing with him an aura of powerful male sweat. But the guy in this photo is, as I said, suave — with styled hair (oh! much browner than in other photos, where it’s definitely black), elegant eyebrows, very light facial hair, and (another oh!) piercingly blue eyes. Meanwhile, the handsome light lavender shirt he’s spreading is much more stylish than the t-shirts BB wears when he’s not going shirtless. Even the shirt-spreading gesture is a smoother move, less overtly sexual, than the shirt-lifting of BB’s other photos in yesterday’s posting.

The anomalies pile up. Is this, then, actually BB, or is it a simulacrum of him, presumably AI-generated?

Almost surely a simulacrum, as I’ll argue in a bit. But first, one more (genuine) photo of BB — there are tons of them, mostly with him naked or minimally clothed, available in copies all over the net; most of them are clearly from studios he’s worked for — with him, wearing only boots and socks, doing a crude tush push, jokily advertising his availability as a really fine fuck.  Managing to be really goofy and really arousing at the same time. To compare with #1 above.

BB’s tush push. Here’s our guy, posed invitingly on a leather chair in a Falcon Studios PR shot (with some work, I could figure out which snowbound-in-a-cabin gay porn flick it’s from):

(#2) Observe the absolutely pristine boots — they have obviously never walked anywhere before this photo was set up — and the, well, pretty socks: butch boots (to comport with BB’s beefiness) and faggy socks (to harmonize with BB’s enthusiasm for getting fucked); the mixed message is part of BB’s allure as a porn actor

On the pinup / tush push. Discussion (with photos) in my 9/28/19 posting “Gender notes: the pinup push” of the pinup / tush push, a cheesecake pose (for a woman) commandeered jokily as a beefcake pose (for a gay man), in both cases as a sexual performance — the offer of the buttocks, representing a sexcavity (the vagina, or the male anus considered as a sexual organ), for a male audience.

But where does #1 come from? Not, apparently, from any of the usual gay porn studios, premium men’s underwear companies, or photographers specializing in male art (this is a world I know pretty well; it has provided me with considerable pleasure, not to mention a rich source of data for my research). All copies of the BB shirt-opening photo that I’ve found come, in fact, from a single source: the ManCrush site (for subscribers only), posted “by Gareth Johnson” on 9/30/24. Now, the URL for the photo is:

https://www.gtv.blue/beau-butler-2/

GTV, according to Wikipedia:

GTV Media Group, Inc. is a media company formed in April 2020 by Steve Bannon [AZ: yes, that Steve Bannon, former strategist for Helmet Grabpussy, former executive chairman of Breitbart News, and declared “infrastructure for the global populist movement”, supporting far-right conservative movements around the world] and Guo Wengui. The company operates GTV, a Chinese [specifically, PRC] media platform.

Mighty unsavory territory, to my mind.

Then gtv.blue appears to be a GTV channel for homoerotic material of all sorts, including the ManCrush site, which displays hot men (with postings — all apparently by “Gareth Johnson” — subtitled “We follow him hard”). So Steve Bannon and his Chinese partners are raking in money selling porn to fags like me (not that I’d subscribe to any of their offerings).

I am reminded of various mobs’ involvement in sex-oriented enterprises, including many gay baths, strip clubs offering women to straight men and men to gay men, massage parlors and other organized prostitution, and so on — with these enterprises bringing in income along with drug sales, numbers-running, protection rackets, gun-running, and the like, plus dubious construction and waste management companies.

I very much doubt that there is any political element in the involvement of Bannon and his people and of PRC companies in these these sex-oriented enterprises, any more than there has historically been in the involvement of the Mafia; Grabpussy’s followers and the government of the PRC are wildly antipathetic to homosexuality, as Mafia families have historically been, so they all look on activities like running gtv.blue just as doing business, generating income from society’s subterranean “dirty” counter-economy.