Sunday’s morning name was the common noun wiles, but that led me to the adjective wily, the proper name Wile E. Coyote, and to people with the family name Wiles, in particular the mathematician Andrew Wiles and the gay pornstar Kevin Wiles. Actually, being who I am, I thought of Kevin first and then got to Andrew, but I’m going to take them in the other order here, because until I get to Kevin Wiles, there’s nothing especially racy here, but once I get to KW, we go deep into the world of men’s bodies and man-man sexual acts, and the posting turns into things that are definitely not for kids or the sexually modest. When I get to that point, I’ll raise a flag, and you can decide whether you want to bail out. That last section is certainly verbally X-rated, but though there are photos, the ones here aren’t visually X-rated; I posted the X-rated KW images (8 of them) on AZBlogX yesterday.

wiles. Start with the NOAD2 entry for the noun and verb wile:

wile noun   devious or cunning stratagems employed in manipulating or persuading someone to do what one wants.

verb [with obj.] 1 archaic lure; entice: she could be neither driven nor wiled into the parish kirk. 2 (wile away the time) another way of saying while away the time.

ORIGIN Middle English: perhaps from an Old Norse word related to vél ‘craft’

I note, as several other dictionaries do, that the noun wile is usually found in the plural, as wiles.

I also note that there’s an association between wiles and femininity. The collocations feminine wiles and her wiles are very frequent (though men are sometimes said to be using their wiles in various circumstances).

wily. The adjective related to wile(s). NOAD2: ‘skilled at gaining an advantage, especially deceitfully: his wily opponents‘.I thought at first that there was some association with masculinity — women use their wiles, men are wily strategists — but this is not borne out by frequency counts. What might, however, be true is that wiliness in women is seen as a bad thing: witches and temptresses and the like are wily.

Wile E. Coyote. A still:

(#1)

From Wikipedia:

Wile E. Coyote (also known simply as “The Coyote”) and The Road Runner are a duo of characters from the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons. In the cartoons, Coyote repeatedly attempts to catch and subsequently eat the Road Runner, a fast-running ground bird, but is never successful. Coyote, instead of his species’ animal instincts, uses absurdly complex contraptions (sometimes in the manner of Rube Goldberg) and elaborate plans to pursue his prey, which always comically backfire with Wile normally getting injured by the slapstick humor.

The characters were created by animation director Chuck Jones in 1948 for Warner Bros., while the template for their adventures was the work of writer Michael Maltese. The characters star in a long-running series of theatrical cartoon shorts (the first 16 of which were written by Maltese) and occasional made-for-television cartoons. It was originally meant to parody chase cartoons like Tom and Jerry, but became popular in its own right.

… While he is generally silent in the Coyote-Road Runner shorts, he speaks with a refined accent in these solo outings …, introducing himself as “Wile E. Coyote — super genius”, voiced with an upper-class accent by Mel Blanc.

You can watch “Chariots of Fur” here. The film, released in 1994, has its own Wikipedia page.

Bonus: discussion from geek.com about these animated cartoons:

Over the years, poor Wile E. Coyote suffered a lot of heartache and physical pain in his quest for sustenance. It almost seemed like he’d been cursed, and he was, in fact — by none other than animator Chuck Jones.

Jones was hired on at Leon Schlesinger Productions in the early ’30s, but it wasn’t until later in his career that he dreamed up Wile E. and the Road Runner. When he did, he created some very specific rules for the way things should play out in a Road Runner cartoon. There were nine “commandments” [well, guidelines] for the shorts, and if you’ve ever seen Wile E. Coyote in action, they’ll resonate with you:

(#2)

Rule nine really sticks out. How could Wile E. Coyote possibly be more humiliated than harmed after plummeting into a canyon, landing on solid ground, and having a multi-ton slab of rock crush him flat? Yet, having watched the cartoons for years, I know that’s exactly how things play out on the show. You can see the disappointment in his face, but the pain never really seems to bother him — which is just what Jones was going for.

Andrew Wiles. From Wikipedia:

Sir Andrew John Wiles, KBE, FRS (born 11 April 1953) is a British mathematician and a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford, specialising in number theory. He is most notable for proving Fermat’s Last Theorem.

The article, with its links, is pretty good on Fermat’s Last Theorem, too.

Kevin Wiles. Here I have a lot to say, and I’ll soon be into the high-gaysex content, so if you think you need to bail out, this would be a good time to do it. I’m not going to launch right into the, ahem, hard stuff, though, because I need to talk through some stuff about porn actors, their porn personas, and the characters they play in particular scenes. The first thing to say is that porn actors are real people, with real-life non-porn names and lives off the set.  So we have the porn actor Kevin Wiles (KW from here on out), the alter ego of a man whose name I do not know but whose writer’s voice I have heard, through some blogging he’s done; I’ll call him MX, for Mr. X.

MX is, I am pleased to say, still alive and apparently living happily in the Pacific Northwest; he hasn’t acted in porn for some time, probably because (according to my calculations) he must be pushing 50, which is old for a porn actor, even one who aged gracefully, as KW did. Others report that MX is amiable, an excellent friend, intelligent and thoughtful, intellectually inclined in fact, and has been so since he was a teenager. All this accords with the blogging he’s done abut the travails of having both a daily personal life and also an extraordinarily public life as the porn actor KW — something that has troubled some other reflective men who act in gay porn.

Reading between various lines suggests that MX has self-identified as (thoroughly) gay since the age of 15 or and has had a high sex drive since then. (But I could be wrong.)

Though a porn actor is asked to adopt a different persona for each character he plays, almost always he’s developed a more enduring persona, his “porn persona”, if you will, that cuts across different roles and indeed, helps to determine which roles he’s offered and which ones he’s willing to accept and how he will realize any particular role. A porn persona is built on physical appearance (including not only things like body type and hair color but also, very important in gay porn, dick size), the actor’s inclinations to certain kinds of behavior (in voice, gait, mannerisms, and so on), and the actor’s sexual tastes. KW’s porn persona builds, first, on his physical appearance — he has a twinkish body type (boyish and slender rather than hunky-muscular), a sweet rather than rugged face, hair usually classified as blond, though (as with many blonds in gay porn) the darkness of his hair ranges considerably and sometimes has a reddish tinge to it. He’s also shorter than most of the men he works with. Here he is  in a publicity shot, cropped to conceal the part that advertises KW’s sexual tastes (he has spread his legs and pulled his knees up, to display, that is, to offer, his asshole prominently) and also displays his quite substantial dick (the full shot is #1 in my AZBlogX posting on KW):

(#3)

On height, here KW is with the men he serves and services, Chris Thompson (left) and David Ashfield (right), in a scene from Spring Break (Falcon, 1986):

(#4)

(KW sucking cock in this scene in #3 and #4 on AZBlogX; you can watch most of the scene here.)

Even more stunning disparities in height and body type between KW and the hyper-masculine Chad Douglas in a scene from Big Guns (Laguna Pacific, 1987). After a quick set-up, we get Douglas saying “Shut up and suck!” to KW and quickly moving to fucking KW in a series of positions — three of them in #6-8 on AZBlogX, still another in this fuzzy screen shot, where KW is getting fucked in mid-air:

(#5)

(You can watch most of the scene here.)

Add to this, on the behavioral side of KW’s presentation as a porn actor: in voice, carriage, and everything else: neither notably butch nor notably femme, though his voice is “light” and pleasant rather than deep and growly.

On the grounds so far, KW would be (and in fact was) cast as a bottom, as boyish, blondish, relatively slight, and non-macho twinks typically are: pretty boys (like the guy in #3 above) get fucked. (Such men are, however, sometimes cast as tops, just for the pleasure that a reversal of expectation provides for the viewer. Even KW has topped on occasion.)

The casting is also concordant with KW’s sexual tastes, with a preference for bottoming. KW is, in fact, not just preferentially a bottom, he’s a power bottom. From my 5/4/11 posting on these men, where I mention pornstars with power bottoming woven into their porn personas (Jeremy Jordan, Trent Atkins, Brad King, Tag Adams, and Joey Stefano, with links to some AZBlogX postings; more names could easily have been added, and I unaccountably left out KW, who is unquestionably my all-time favorite power bottom in porn):

a power bottom is not necessarily a total bottom (many are versatile bottoms), but he is enthusiastically, passionately, receptive to being fucked

… These men are sometimes described as hungry bottoms [or cock-hungry bottoms], and are said to have hungry holes (attributing some agency to their assholes, while getting in some alliteration) or hot holes (the asshole as enticement and satisfaction, plus alliteration) or a combination (hungry hot holes, hot hungry holes, in an orgy of alliteration).

(There are power bottoms in real life, as in porn. Some of my best friends… In fact, when I was sexually active with other men — a long time ago now — I was preferentially a bottom, verging on power bottomhood. KW has always been a role model.)

Even the more mature KW was still decidedly cute, as in this publicity shot from later in his career, where he’s displaying his ass:

(#6)

(A note on butt display. A gay porn actor is sometimes shown in publicity shots displaying his butt as a code conveying that he plays a bottom in the particular film being advertised, and sometimes, in more general publicity (as in #6 here), as a code conveying that he prefers playing a bottom. But some actors, even those who never, or hardly ever, get fucked, are cool with butt shots in their publicity because they’re proud of their handsome butts, especially if they’re muscular.)

Bottoming (and submission — the two are closely related, at least in many men’s sexual imaginations) can be conveyed more subtly, as in the shot in #4, where Thompson and Ashfield both have their hands/arms on KW, indicating that he belongs to them: he’s their bitch, and is so treated in the actual scene.

Top and bottom roles are often conveyed in publicity not only by hands-on ownership but also by the positioning of the men’s bodies, with the top standing above the bottom (and behind the bottom, putting the bottom on display for the viewer) — reproducing the placement of other-sex couples in, for instance, wedding photos: husband over (and behind) wife. A typical portrayal, involving KW in the flick Foreplay (Midnight Men, 1986): top over bottom, bottom on display as the trophy of the top’s conquest:

(#7)

You can view the whole scene here. It’s interesting in that it illustrates a trope of gay porn: the conversion of the reluctant (bottom or cocksucker), or, possibly, the corruption of the innocent. Sometimes a character openly angles for sex (getting fucked, sucking cock) — faggot as seductress — but quite often a character is scripted as having no experience in serving another man’s cock and so as expressing reluctance to take a cock into his mouth or his asshole, but his partner pushes him into it, by force, by threats, or by cajolerie (“you’ll like it!”) — and, by golly, in mere moments the character is converted to wild enthusiasm for the act. In the scene from Foreplay, after the oral stage (in gay porn almost everybody, top or bottom, sucks cock, with at least minimal competence — a fair number of actors have to learn to suck cock and practice to hone their abilities — but some, like KW, are fools for cocksucking), KW’s partner moves to screw him, and KW’s character cries out “don’t!” three times, then seconds later he’s moaning “yeah yeah yeah” in sexual frenzy, a bitch in heat — and on to “fuck that!”,  “fuck it!” (referring to his ass), and so on, in a kind of ritual recitation of the formulas of sexual pleasure. He’s a very happy man, getting just what he wants.

Yes, everybody in porn sucks cock, but, as I said above, KW is something else. My AZBlogX posting on KW has a number of shots of him blissfully inhaling cock, including one (#5 there) from a scene in Behind Closed Doors (Falcon, 1989) with Jim Bentley as top and KW as bottom, but still in the oral stage of their encounter. Eventually, of course, Bentley goes on to fuck a pantingly receptive KW. You can watch (most of) the scene here. (Note: this scene was eventually re-released in a Falcon compilation called Bareback: Hard Raw Workout, which I believe is still on sale. Of course, KW’s scenes from vintage porn were all shot in pre-condom times, so they all show what we now call bareback or raw fucking.)

I’ve been reflecting on KW’s take on cocksucking and bottoming. In both cases, he goes well beyond mere willingness (after all, anyone can learn to perform these acts at least competently) and beyond enthusiasm, into something deeper and more intense, amounting to a kind of sexual orientation of its own, in which he submits with pleasure to another man by taking that man’s cock into his body (into his mouth or into his asshole) and worships it by having it become, in his sexual imagination, part of his own body. He absorbs that cock, as a symbol of the man it represents and the essence of his masculinity, and becomes one with it. He is deeply oriented towards cock (and consequently towards cum), as (I now say) an ubercocksucker or uberbottom (or both, as in KW’s case).

Thanks to a gay Facebook friend, I recently became aware of photographer and porn entrepreneur Paul Morris’s Flickr page, with really excellent male photography (I posted a bit here about Morris on the 6th) — and thoughtful comments by Morris on many of them. (To see the page, you need to “follow” Morris and also certify that you are of an age to view X-rated images.) I will eventually post more about this material, but Morris and his model Marcus Iron (who is, among other things, a gay pornstar) are ubercocksuckers (Marcus worships at gloryholes as well as on his knees in other settings), and Morris has written a number of thoughtful comments about their devotion to cocksucking. I note that Morris’s videos include the 2010 Suck Dick, Save the World (he means the title absolutely seriously) and the series Drunk on Cum (up to at least volume 6, subtitled Hard Training,in 2013). Two comments on Marcus Iron (from Morris’s earlier postings, a number of which are available on the net):

Marcus has a true cocksucker’s spirit: every dick is the first one he’s ever seen and, at the same time, he goes after it with the kind of skill that can only be honed through passion and experience.

This was the third big cock that Marcus sucked off during this day’s gloryhole session [I believe this was a day when Marcus took five loads]. He never met the guys he sucked off, didn’t want to meet or see them. Marcus understands that there are times when a big cock and a fine pair of balls dangling through a gloryhole can be everything you need, the totality of masculinity. When Marcus Iron worships cock at the gloryhole, it’s downright primal.

For KW, sucking cock and getting fucked seem to be similarly primal experiences.

Now to track back to MX, the real person yoked to KW. It would be hard to accept that KW’s being an ubercocksucker and an uberbottom did not derive from something similar in MX’s psyche. That is, it would be hard to believe that KW’s amazing performances as cocksucker and bottom are just triumphs of acting skill, from a porn persona carefully crafted to appeal to a particular gay male audience, even though that audience is huge: an enormous number of gay men fantasize about serving as an ubercocksucker and/or uberbottom and so find KW’s intense performances enormously arousing. As for the others, they can fantasize about being served by a total faggot like KW.

Note about language in gay porn. The characters that KW’s characters service often use a lot of insulting, degrading, and demeaning talk to his characters. But it’s often hard to tell whether this talk is meant to be taken seriously (as it does, it seems to me, in Spring Break), in which case it’s an invitation to KW’s character to experience the pleasures of submission to Real Men and of humiliation at their hands (this works for a lot of guys); or whether it’s just playful dirty talk that will end in affection once the participants have gotten off. In real life it is as in gay porn, so men often have to negotiate about their limits. For example, if you’re a man with a cock that other men perceive to be small, can partners use your little dick against you in dirty talk, or would that be irredeemably painful? (I am such a man, and I can say from experience that It All Depends. You have to judge your partner’s feelings about other men’s dick sizes, try to gauge easy acceptance — from a gay friend of mine, as advice to a young man: “all dicks are the same size”– vs. contempt. Some years ago I did phone sex with a male-hustler acquaintance who was damn good at domination and who I eventually came to trust enough for him to get me off by elaborately humiliating me over the size of my dick; of course he himself didn’t give a shit about dick size.)

This topic will let me segue into the final section of this posting, about MX’s (and hence KW’s) satisfyingly big dick, which makes him (as an ubercocksucker and uberbottom) a very attractive sex partner.

One crucial point here is that in male sexual lore penis size correlates with masculinity: a big-dicked guy is more of a man than an average-dicked guy, who is, in turn, more of a man than a little-dicked guy. One consequence of this in gay porn is that an actor with a cock that is perceived to be on the small side is expected to act as a bottom, to submit to the superiority of actors with large dicks.

Another crucial point is that in male sexual lore sex between men is regularly configured as a contest, in which the loser submits sexually to the winner (by servicing the winner’s cock). Gay porn is full of scenes in which two relatively evenly matched men face each other in a jack-off contest in which eventually one man becomes the loser by apparently recognizing the other man’s superiority (or, more likely, by recognizing the strength of his own desire for cock) by going down on his knees and sucking cock or by turning around, bending over, and offering his ass to be fucked (or by these acts in sequence). I’ve witnessed such contests in real life and tend to feel that they are just wastes of time (they can go on for some time).

One consequence of this in real life is that some men will not easily accept as a sexual partner a man who frankly and openly admits his desire for cock; these men want their partners to play the game and then (reluctantly, perhaps) submit to them; they want to be winners. The obvious strategy for a man on the hunt for dick is to play the game just long enough to get status as a contestant and then happily concede defeat.

Putting the two points together: first, in real life some men (actually, quite a few, in my experience) will not easily accept a relatively small-dicked man as a receptive partner (cocksucker or bottom): they want a contest, in which they take a man comparable in size to them (or, even better, a man with a bigger dick) as a trophy of their conquest. Much the same for men they see as too old, too ugly, too fat, or whatever: they want to be serviced by a man who might, in principle, win a contest over them.

And second, both in gay porn and in real life, big-dicked ubercocksuckers and uberbottoms — like KW, who’s both — are a prize: they have the dick to compete with you, but like the faggots they are, they admit your superiority, concede defeat, at the outset.

Two things that came to my attention over this holiday (Valentine’s and Presidents Day) weekend, both involving same-sex couples: a piece on two men who are a couple (an engaged couple, in fact), Tom Daley and Dustin Lance Black, in the February issue (the “love” issue) of OUT magazine; and a review (in the NYT Book Review on the 14th) of a children’s picture book about two hermaphroditic worms in love.

In both cases, the question is how these couples will present themselves and how they will be portrayed in images (photographs or illustrations) — in particular, how they will treat the conventions of coupledom for other-sex pairs, in which the sexes are often sharply distinguished. There are three possibilities: (a) to embrace these conventions; (b) to abandon them, by appearing as equals; and (c) to fragment them, by assigning each partner a mixture of them. Daley & Black present themselves / are presented sometimes via (b), sometimes (c), and the worms go for (c). I’ll get to (a) — which is well represented in male-male couples in gay porn, and sometimes in real life — after some discussion of Daley & Black.

Daley & Black, photographically equal on the cover of OUT:

(#1)

Here they are coded as equals in dress (both playfully in pajamas) and in the positioning of their bodies (neither is above the other or behind the other, but instead they are side-by-side and face-to-face). Black’s hand on Daley’s shoulder might be seen as indicating what I’ve called,  in a recent posting on gay pornstar Kevin Wiles, hands-on ownership (by a more dominant partner of a more subordinate one), but could just follow from the fact that Black is a bit taller than Daley.

In real life, partners are never entirely equal. Daley and Black have equally substantial careers, but Black is significantly older (by 20 years), so that Black has more authority (seen as masculine) while Daley has more sexual desirability (often seen as feminine). From the OUT article, “Dustin Lance Black and Tom Daley fell in love at first smiley” by Aaron Hicklin (photography by Harry Borden):

One was an Olympic diver who loved Nerf guns; the other was an Oscar-winning screenwriter who made great burgers. A chance encounter at a dinner in Los Angeles — and a smiley face — set the scene for a procession of foiled wedding proposals.

Wikipedia on Daley and on Black, very briefly:

Thomas Robert “Tom” Daley (born 21 May 1994) is an English diver and television personality. Daley specialises in the 10 metre platform event and was the 2009 FINA World Champion in the individual event at the age of 15. He started diving at the age of seven and is a member of Plymouth Diving Club.

Dustin Lance Black (born June 10, 1974) is an American screenwriter, director, film and television producer and LGBT rights activist.

Now, one of the photos inside the magazine, another couple shot:

(#2)

A remarkable shot (thanks to Juan Gomez for calling my attention to it).. On the one hand, Black is positioned above Daley (man above woman, as Erving Goffman noted in his remarkable 1979 book Gender Advertisements); Black is wearing a business suit (a sign of a masculine status in society), while Daley is mostly or entirely naked (he’s appearing here in his occupational status as a diver, so he’s probably in a Speedo, but the effect here is to foreground the sexual desirability of his body, as women are presented in advertisements and sometimes in couple photos as well); and Daley is made to look smaller than Black (as women are generally smaller than their male partners). On the other hand, Black is positioned in front of Daley (as women typically are in couple photos; they are displaying themselves for the viewer, while their male partners are displaying social status or authority), and Daley is clasping Black with both hands, indicating serious hands-on ownership. So each of the men is projecting some m characteristics together with some f ones.

Couple photos are made for several purposes — for simple display (in living rooms and the like) and to accompany the rites of coupledom in our society, all with a sexual tinge to them: prom photos (in the U.S.), engagement photos, and wedding photos. Traditional engagement and wedding photos have the woman seated in front of a standing man, with one or both of his hands on her shoulders (he has hands-on ownership and is displaying her as a trophy); and they are differently attired. In a traditional engagement photo, the man is in a business suit, indicating formality and often occupational status, while the woman is in a “good dress”, indicating femininity (and sometimes sexual desirability as well). In a traditional wedding photo, the man is in a tuxedo, indicating formality, while the woman is in a wedding gown, indicating her role in the wedding ceremony (tuxedos are worn for a number of formal occasions, while wedding gowns are worn almost entirely in wedding ceremonies).

This description holds pretty well for the state of things when Goffman wrote his 1979 book (which looks at more things than advertisements), but the world has changed. Engagement photos, in particular, are almost always informal in dress, though they fairly often preserve the positioning and hands-on characteristics of the tradition, as in this example:

(#3)

Wedding photos, on the other hand, generally preserve some version of the traditional attire, with the woman in a wedding gown and the man in some sort of formal or “good business” attire (not necessarily a tuxedo), as here:

(#4)

What’s changed here (at least in the New York Times) is that the wedding couple is usually shown  in some sort of egalitarian positioning, side-by-side or face-to-face.

On to same-sex couples. What I said on this blog in an 8/4/10 posting on “Marriage equality”:

As my grand-daughter put it recently, Jacques and I weren’t allowed to get married — so we racked up a series of domestic partnerships, the last of which (contracted while his mind was still up to it) granted by the city of Palo Alto. On February 14, 1996. Valentine’s Day, and a beautiful day it was (not always a sure thing in these parts in the middle of February). There was a ceremony inside City Hall, then a party, put on by the city, on the plaza outside.

Elizabeth, bearing small wedding-equivalent gifts, came to see her fathers get domestically partnered. A surprising number of the couples were there with their children, so it was very much a family occasion, and most of them had been certified as domestic partners — an almost entirely symbolic status, but a powerful symbol for us nonetheless — several times before, though not in such style.

Later, our friend Robert Emery Smith (aka ModBob), who’s a professional photographer (among other things) came by to take pictures of Jacques and me. His wedding-equivalent present to us. There was some discussion about where J and I would pose (answer: on our front patio, among the cymbidium orchids that were my annual birthday presents to him) and how we would be arranged.

The classic wedding photo has the couple standing or (very often) the bride sitting and the groom standing — in either case, ensuring that the man will be shown standing above the woman. Also, quite often with the groom behind the bride, looking proprietary while she is shown off to the world, sometimes with his hand on her shoulder (to emphasize the gender inequality even further). In any case, the couple are facing the camera, and the world, presenting themselves to an audience.

All three of us just hated the whole business and the gender-relationships baggage that comes with it (we’d read our Goffman, after all).

In the end we took a couple of chairs out there, and sat facing each other [well, sitting side by side, but with our heads turned to face one another]. We’re symbolically equals, and we’re in this for each other, not an audience (though J’s kids, and the rest of his family, were just as pleased by the occasion as my daughter was). (We also decided not to go for formal wear.)

(#5)

In shots from gay porn, couples are represented not in terms of f/m roles, but in terms of the corresponding roles I’ve called b/t. From a 12/19/10 posting on AZBlogX:

An obvious point about the b and t roles: they’re a re-inscription in Gayland [the fantasy word of gay porn] of gender stereotypes (feminine vs. masculine) in the straight world.  All sorts of things then tend to align with each other, among them: differences in physical characteristics like size, muscularity, and strength; differences in dress, hair style, posture and gesture, and speech; asymmetries in social roles, in particular those involving power, authority, assertiveness, and (in)dependence; and of course differences in sexual encounters as to who does what to/for whom, when, and how much.

The b in an encounter is subordinate to a dominant t, who’s in a sense in charge of the encounter; more details in that AZBlogX posting and a 12/19/10 posting on this blog. Although things are more complicated than this, there’s a tendency for b/t to play out as bottom/top in anal intercourse . As I wrote in a posting on Kevin Wiles:

Top and bottom roles [in anal intercourse] are often conveyed in publicity [for gay porn] not only by hands-on ownership but also by the positioning of the men’s bodies, with the top standing above the bottom (and behind the bottom, putting the bottom on display for the viewer) — reproducing the placement of other-sex couples in, for instance, wedding photos: husband over (and behind) wife. A typical portrayal, involving [bottom Kevin Wiles] in the flick Foreplay (Midnight Men, 1986): top over bottom, bottom on display as the trophy of the top’s conquest:

(#6)

Somewhat more subtly, here’s a photo from a 12/13/15 posting on “Boyfriends”, showing pornstar boyfriends Sean Duran (t, left) and Nick Cross (b, right), their difference coded in a variety of ways (note bearded Duran and smooth-faced Cross, for example) and playing out in the positioning of their bodies and hands-on ownership (and sexually Duran is mostly top to Cross as bottom):

(#7)

Worm Loves Worm. Now to Dan Vaccarino’s review in the NYT, in the print version “Will You Be Mine: Four picture books follow the many courses of love, from first meetings to the pain of separation”, where we can see a fragmented presentation of gender roles, as in #2:

Adults lug around a five-piece Samsonite luggage set of love and intimacy issues, but most small children have none, or at the most, a carry-on. They are unencumbered by personal history, commitment issues or self-doubt.

They just love.

Four new valentines disguised as picture books examine age-appropriate love affairs of every stripe: from high-rise-dwelling kids to urban polar bears, from worms to an ink drop and a snowflake.

… Gender roles are imposed on us all. As adults, we mostly accept, rail against, or at least acknowledge them, but as far as the youngest of lovers are concerned, the point is moot. J. J. Austrian and Mike Curato’s “Worm Loves Worm,” [for children 3 to 8] in which two worms of the hermaphroditic variety fall in love, brilliantly explores the idea of love between two beings, regardless of gender (or species) and despite societal pressures.

Curato’s spare but sure silhouetted images and Austrian’s straightforward text are a perfect match to deliver the simple story of two characters who just want to declare their love and commit to each other. With patience and good cheer they accept the various matrimonial trappings offered to them by their well-meaning insect friends, like a wedding party, a cake and rings — even though they have no fingers. The all-embracing spirit of the story is best represented by the worm couple’s lack of regard for traditional wedding garb: Each wears bits and pieces of a tuxedo and a wedding dress during the ceremony.

(#8)

Note that they are both wearing their gold wedding bands.

The story of the address term bro in relatively recent years begins with its use by black men to black men, roughly (but not exactly) like the widely used American buddy — a term of male affiliation. It then spread into the wider culture, serving as a mark of male solidarity. This is what I called in a 4/12/16 posting “good”, positive, bro. But male solidarity tends to come with a dark side: rejection of anything perceived as feminine, played out as sturdy misogyny and homo-hatred in general; and the elevation of boys’ clubs (formed for whatever reasons) to boys-only clubs, aggressively hostile to women and to men perceived as inferior. When these guys use bro to address (or refer to) one another, then we’ve got what I called “bad”, negative, bro.

Regular use of bad bro between men in groups, for instance by fraternity boys and so-called brogrammers, has led to a steady pejoration of the term for people outside those male groups; bro is now a tainted term for many people, calling up unpleasant images of aggressive masculinity.

A brief review of these matters on this blog, then two recent entries in the conversation. And a cartoon too!

from 3/25/12, “On the bro- watch”: reference to bro as a “frat-house moniker”; brogrammers as asserting aggressive masculinity (with aggressive misogyny as a concomitant; boys’ clubs become boys-only clubs, even when physical displays of masculinity are not at issue [as in the case of programming])

from 3/27/12, “more bro”: broga – yoga for men: “Another chapter in the great book of protecting men from the taint of femininity”

from 4/12/16, “On the brocabulary watch: brocialist”: “bad”, negative bro, with misogynist connotations, as opposed to “good”, positive bro, connoting male bonding.

And now a recent Facebook comment from Aric Olnes, on the last of these postings:

In skiing, bad bros are called BroBrahs, but Michael [Thomas, Aric’s husband] likes to turn it around to BraBro for more impact. The most common utterance from BroBrahs on the slopes is a casual “Sorry, dude” shortly after they cut you off causing you to fall down.

The alternative – BraBro – plays on the emasculating nature of visualizing a guy in a bra.

And then from Brian Kane on Facebook, a reference to a douchbro (a transparently derisive portmanteau of douchebag and bro), which led me to the character Douche Bag in an ALT. cartoon by Dennis Caron, the “Gay Taste” strip of 4/17/13 with  (recurring) characters Cadence and Douche Bro:

From Caron’s website:

Denis Caron is the creator of Corvink, an art centered brand revolving around his art, comics, and designs. He was born on April 10th 1985, in Van Nuys, California and graduated with a degree in Psychology in 2007 at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

… L.A.W.L.S. (sometimes written LAWLS) is an acronym for “Large Air Whales Like Silence,” the title of the webcomic created by Denis Caron in 2010. L.A.W.L.S. started as a single comic, intending to be a Gag-a-Day, with a very loose story. Eventually, however, it became a rather complex and more investing story which no longer allowed Denis to write random jokes about other things that interested him. As a result, L.A.W.L.S. was split … into 3 individual parts: L.A.W.L.S. [Story Mode], the original storyline; ALT., a spin off about the main characters in regular day scenarios: dating, playing video games, getting coffee, etc; and Words of Interest, a comic about leaning fancy words.

The anti-spam architect would be Elizabeth Zwicky in a “Yahoo Women in Technology Profile” by Michael McGovern (Talent Community Manager at Yahoo!) on the 18th. The piece is in the form of an interview, but with questions submitted in writing by McGovern and answers written out by EDZ, so you get the full flavor of her writing — lucid, pointed, often wry. There are photos: one of EDZ with her team, one an unposed head shot of her which catches her nicely. It’s a bit too light, a consequence of the fact that the photographer (Opal Eleanor Armstrong Zwicky, then age 6) was a novice at the camera, though she already had a good eye):

(#1)

On LinkedIn, EDZ says of this piece:

I talk about high school, breakfast, and DMARC. Also there is some mention of diversity. I am for it.

The high school part is mostly about a spectacularly bad math teacher she had and how she was written off as a failure in math. People who know her find the story falling-on-the-floor laughable, since her tech work has for some time relied on serious mathematical tools. And since she eventually became a sort of appreciator of many types of math as art forms, a fact I didn’t fully appreciate until at some point (in talk about logic puzzles) I observed that I took math courses from Ray Smullyan at Princeton, that he wrote letters for me to get into grad school in linguistics (in particular at MIT), and that I considered him to be a friend — and Elizabeth was truly, deeply impressed.

(#2)

Read the interview. Now I’m going to shift to Ray Smullyan, a great scholar and one of the most entertaining people I have ever met. He plays a small part in my c.v., in this item on mathematical logic:

Stephen Isard & Arnold Zwicky, “Three open questions in the theory of one-symbol Smullyan systems” (SIGACT News, 1970).

The Wikipedia article on him begins with a masterpiece of compression:

Raymond Merrill Smullyan (… born May 25, 1919) is an American mathematician, concert pianist, logician, Taoist philosopher, and magician [“recreational mathematician” should be in there as a separate category].

and goes on with some basic bits of life history:

Born in Far Rockaway, New York [he has proudly maintained his Noo Yawker accent almost untouched through his various careers], his first career was stage magic. He then earned a BSc from the University of Chicago in 1955 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1959. He is one of many logicians to have studied under Alonzo Church [as did I, but I defected to linguistics].

The article lists his publications under three headings: “Logic puzzles”, “Philosophy/memoir”, and “Academic” [on mathematical logic]. There are YouTube videos of his piano performances.

(Well, dildos and vibrators, so not for everybody.)

Passed on by Jeff Shaumeyer on Facebook, a startling sex toy, from the BlogRebellen website yesterday:

(#1)

Fühl den Nationalstolz tief in dir mit dem Deutschland-Dildo ‘Feel national pride deep within you with the Deutschland Dildo’

Black, red, and gold (the colors of the German national flag, in order, here from the black Eichel, or dickhead,  to the gold Hoden, or balls), in silicone, with natural-looking veining and a suction-cup base. Be a penis patriot: fuck yourself the bold Teutonic way!

On the flag:

(#2)

The flag of Germany is a tricolour consisting of three equal horizontal bands displaying the national colours of Germany: black, red, and gold. The flag was first adopted as the national flag of modern Germany in 1919, during the Weimar Republic.

If Germany, why not other countries? How about patriotic dildos — or the dildo cousins, vibrators — in the blue, white, and red of France; the red, white, and blue of the U.S.; and the complex red on white on blue of the Union Jack (and its spinoffs in, for example, Australia and New Zealand)? Here’s a bold attempt to embrace them all. in a blue, red, and white dildo from the Bad Dragon site:

(#3)

And then a trip down vibrator lane with the Union Jack:

(#4)

Keep one in your handbag, or manpurse, in case of sexual emergency. And remember: it’s not just clits that can use a stim.

And then there are designs for Avenger vibrators, including a spiffy one for Captain America:

(#5)

From the somecards site on 8/13/13:

Artist designs 6 different Avengers-themed dildos, one for each superhero.

“Some assembly required” takes on new meaning with artist Balazs Sarmai’s titillating depictions of Avengers-themed vibrators. He posted these, saying “geek girls, today I made something special for you.” So, geek girls and non-geek girls (and boys), rejoice! Now you can imagine you’re imagining being sexually stimulated by a superhero. Every team needs a captain, and every vagina [let’s not forget anuses] needs one of these.

Oh, Captain America! Shake that thing in me! (I note that the Captain goes in blue end first, à la française, rather than red end first, à l’américaine.)

And now, since this is Pride Month, I turn to the rainbow flag and its dildonic manifestations. Here there’s an enthusiast, whose Sex Ed 102 w/ Kara Sutra site surveyed, for 2014 Pride in Toronto, a collection of rainbow sex toys, mostly dildos. Here are four, in thumbnail shots:

(#6)

[1] If there were ever a set of dildos that reminded me of Pink Floyds ‘Dark Side Of The Moon‘, the Pride Rainbow versionsf rom BS Atelier would be first on the list.

Crafted by hand in Madrid, Spain, each of the dildos in the Pride Collection is unique, sporting sleek black shafts, curved bodies for g-spot stimulation, and rounded bases perfect for strap-on or anal play.

(#7)

[2] rainbow unicorn horn dildos from Split Peaches.

(#8)

[3] Color Pleasures rainbow dildo by NS Novelties

(#9)

[4] Rainbow Amor Dildo [no longer available]: From start to finish this dildo is everything I could ask for; there’s no bleeding of shades from one to the next, it’s crafted from body safe silicone (Fun Factory, thank you for making this!), it’s neither too big nor too small, AND it has every color perfectly distributed just like a real rainbow should.

She’s got more rainbow sexual paraphernalia linked to as well.

And then from an offering on etsy, some cute knit(ted) dildo covers — surely you have a collection of dildo covers — in rainbow patterns:

(#10)

Keep those dildos snug and dry!

Yesterday‘s xkcd, “Time Travel Thesis”:

A man’s gotta explain what a man’s gotta explain.

(Hat tip to Chris Waigl.)

Earlier on this blog:

from 9/20/14, “Two from Out”, on straightsplaining and mansplaining

from 4/17/15, “Mansplaining in the comics”, a Dilbert

from 4/9/15, “More mansplaining”, another Dilbert

… was a banner day for cartoons in the New Yorker. Waiting a few minutes to get called in for routine blood tests at the Palo Alo Medical Foundation this morning, I chanced upon this particular issue of the magazine and found five cartoons of interest for this blog (plus some others I enjoyed but had no special interest here); all five were from artists already familiar on this blog.

First I noticed a Bob Eckstein cartoon parodying Hopper’s Nighthawks — which, it turns out, I posted on this blog on 5/30/15. Later, when I checked out the issue on-line, I found the other four. In no particular order:

Zach Kanin on cross-dialect intelligibility.

(#1)

Especially relevant to me since I’ve been watching a lot of British detective tv shows, many with characters speaking distinctly regional (and working-class) varieties of English. (More on this to come.)

Haefeli on same-sex couples.

(#2)

William Haefeli has been posting wryly funny cartoons about gay men for years. Here we see two guys and their daughter, the guys all smiles, either awkwardly at The Question or (I’d prefer to think) delightedly at the kid’s happy request for a retelling of the story as a bedtime ritual.

Kanin’s anachronistic quotative. Yes, another Kanin, this time with the builders of Stonehenge (or something similar) reflecting on the reception of their creation:

(#3)

These prehistoric men are not only speaking modern English — this is set in Cartoonland, after all — but a distinctively recent variety, with quotative (be) like, now the vernacular quotative of choice (compact discussion in a 6/16/13 posting).

Mick Stevens on the pace of evolution. Evolution is a common cartoon topic, usually in some version of the Ascent of Man meme, but sometimes more generally, in an Evolution of Life theme (the Ascent from the Primordial Slime), as here:

(#4)

Here the Evolution of Life meme has been combined with the Traffic Stop meme.

Yesterday’s Zits:

Some other orange schools: Florida, Princeton, Univ. of Miami, Oregon State, Idaho State, Oklahoma State. There’s also a bunch of schools with gold — but that’s yellow-orange, not straightforwardly orange. As for teal: Eckerd College, UNC-Wilmington, Coastal Carolina. Scripps has sea-foam green, which is very close to teal. (In any case, teal isn’t a basic color word in English, while orange is, so there’s a big imbalance here.)

There’s a suggestion in the strip that choosing a college on the basis of the school colors is silly, frivolous, inconsequential — the sort of thing an air-headed girl would do. I don’t see that it’s any more frivolous than choosing a college on the basis of the current fortunes of the football and basketball teams. (Please don’t just baldly assert that sports are important, serious, and fashion isn’t.)

Four in my comics feed Sunday morning: a One Big Happy with the derived adjective quotatious; a Zippy on pangrams; a Mother Goose and Grimm with an ambiguity in marine biologist; and a Doonesbury nominally about pronoun choices, but about much more.

One Big Happy. An exchange between Ruthie and her Aunt Dolly, in which Dolly throws out hackneyed proverbial expressions and Ruthie lobs them back with her own twists on them:

(#1)

And in the last panel, Ruthie uses the word quotatious, meaning something like ‘given to, fond of, using quotations’. For Ruthie, this was surely a fresh invention, built on the quotat– of the N quotation and the Adj-forming derivational suffix –ious. As it happens, Ruthie wasn’t the first: the Collins English Dictionary has it, glossed ‘using or involving many quotations’, and the Oxford Dictionaries site has a longer entry:

Especially of a person: fond of using quotations; characterized by frequent quotation. Origin; Mid 19th century; earliest use found in The Southern Literary Messenger.

Zippy. The strip explains what a pangram is and gives five examples, one per panel: four goofily nonsensical ones, plus one that reads like ordinary, but odd, English:

(#2)

Mother Goose and Grimm. With a play on an ambiguity that is sufficiently outré that I missed it on first reading:

(#3)

The expression marine biologist ‘scientist specializing in marine biology’ is, semantically, marine biology + the derivational suffix –ist, though formally it is clearly marine + biologist. (In the trade, this is known as a bracketing paradox: one bracketing into parts for one purpose, another for another.) But let me focus on marine biology.

The conventionalized sense of marine biology (‘the scientific study of organisms in the ocean or other marine bodies of water’) involves an Adj marine + a head N biology. The Adj in this sense of the compound is non-predicating: marine biology is not biology that is marine, though there are other, predicating, senses of the compound (‘biology in or on the ocean; watery biology’), though these aren’t particularly useful. (The conventionalized sense of marine biology involves a particular type of non-predicating Adj sometimes called pseudo-adjectives: an Adj that is interpreted by evoking a N. This marine biology is understood much like ocean biology, a N + N compound with the first N ocean.)

None of this gets us to the marine biology that concerns Ralph the Boston terrier in #3, which is a N + N compound meaning — wait for it — ‘the biology of marines’, involving as first N (from NOAD2):

marine: a member of a body of troops trained to serve on land or at sea, in particular a member of the US Marine Corps

Add to this the stereotype of marines, and especially U.S. Marines, as being inclined to getting tattoos, and you get the joke in #3.

Doonesbury. This one is really complex.

(#4)

It begins with Sam, knowing that Jan presents themself as non-binary, asking Jan what their preference in pronouns is: gendered he or she; non-gendered they; or some invented pronoun like xie. Jan declines, unhelpfully, to suggest a choice, leaving other people with the options of either projecting their opinion about Jan’s identity in their choice of pronouns or else skipping from pronoun to pronoun: He said xie expressed herself badly. Or maybe, proper names throughout: Jan said Jan expressed Janself badly.

Any choice but the first forces people to violate, left and right,  the conventions for expressing and comprehending coreference and non-coreference. And if Jan insists their identity is profoundly non-binary, totally outside of gender, then the only polite solution for other people is to refer to Jan with an non-gendered pronoun, which is what I’ve done above (using forms of they).

But pronouns are the least of the problems. Jan at first talks as if they were totally out of the gender identity universe and expected people to relate to them socially without any assumptions connected to gender — even, presumably, assumptions by people who recognize a number of gender identities, not just two. This is an enormously big ask.

Even bigger when intimate relations enter the picture, as they do towards the end of #4. I have certainly had people tell me that their attraction to people is entirely on the basis of their personalites, and that matters of sex and gender don’t enter into it at all. That sounds to me like a remarkable achievement, one that I can’t imagine managing myself. Certainly not one that anyone should expect other people to manage easily: intimate relations are relations between persons, yes, but they’re also relations between bodies, relations in which the appearance, feel, and scent of bodies are significant.

And despite their assertions earlier in the strip, at the end Jan re-configures themself as on a journey in gender space (not as being outside of gender space), in which case Sam’s location in that space now becomes important. Will they be able to hook up?

So now the soap opera of attraction is back in some kind of gender space — maybe a very complicated one, but still a gender space.

Another item from my blog backlog, this time a 2/17 piece by Claire Cain Miller in the NYT,  (in print) “Job Disconnect: Male Applicants, Feminine Language”, (on-line) “Job Listings That Are Too ‘Feminine’ for Men”. On the one hand, we have jobs that are widely considered to be the province of one sex rather than the other (and so are dominated by that sex). On the other hand, we have lexical items that have associations with one gender rather than the other. Meanwhile, there’s a need to attract more men into what have traditionally been “women’s jobs” — because that’s where the action is.

The article reports on research about how things might be jiggled in a positive direction via the way job ads are phrased. This can be only a small piece of a solution, but it’s a possible piece.

The text:

Job postings for home health aides say applicants need to be “sympathetic” and “caring,” “empathetic” and focused on “families.” It turns out that doesn’t lead very many men to apply.

One of the biggest economic riddles today is why out-of-work men aren’t pursuing the jobs that are growing the most, which are mainly in health care. A big reason is that these so-called pink-collar jobs are mostly done by women, and that turns off some men.

Employers have something to do with that: An analysis of listings for the 14 fastest-growing jobs from 2014 to 2024 found that they used feminine language, which has been statistically shown to attract women and deter men. The study was done by Textio, which has analyzed 50 million job listings for language that provokes disproportionate responses from men or women.

The qualities sought for male-dominated jobs also apply to female-dominated ones, much more than traditionally male jobs require traditionally female qualities.

The most “feminine” job postings were those for home health aides, a job that is 89 percent female and projected to grow 38 percent by 2024. Common key words in the job descriptions were sympathetic, care, fosters, empathy and families — all of which Textio has found appeal more to female candidates — and are more likely to result in a female hire. Job listings for other fast-growing and female-dominated jobs like nurse practitioner, genetic counselor and physician assistant used similarly feminine language.

Compare that with job listings for cartographers, one of the few fast-growing jobs that is male-dominated. It is 62 percent male and expected to grow 29 percent by 2024. Common key words were manage, forces, exceptional, proven and superior. These words tend to appeal to men and generally result in a male hire, Textio found. Job descriptions for the two fastest-growing jobs that men mostly do — wind turbine technicians and commercial divers — also used masculine language.

But just as cartographers need to be “exceptional” and “proven,” so do health aides. The reverse is not necessarily true — cartographers don’t necessarily need to be “sympathetic” or focused on “families” to excel. That might be one reason that women have historically entered male-dominated professions, like law or management, more than men have entered female-dominated ones, like teaching or nursing.

Societal expectations and stigmas concerning masculinity deter men from feminine jobs, social scientists say, so some health care employers have tried to use more masculine language to appeal to men, like talking about the “adrenaline rush” of being an operating room nurse. A better solution, according to Textio’s data, is to use gender-neutral language in job postings.

For example, Textio said it improved the results for a job posting for a software development manager by changing a few words from masculine to gender neutral: “premier” instead of “world-class,” “extraordinary” instead of “rock star” and “handle a fast-paced schedule” instead of “manage” it.

There is a benefit to the employer in changing the wording. Gender-neutral language fills jobs 14 days faster than posts with a masculine or feminine bias, Textio said, and attracts a more diverse mix of people.

Ah, but then you have to smooth things once these people turn up for work. Looking at things from the other side of the lens: you can bring women into technical jobs, but if the workplace is hostile, things might not go well. You can bring men into health care jobs, but if they find their masculinity threatened by the culture of the workplace, things might not go well.

Some well-known phenomena: ceteris paribus, in conversations between men and women, (a) men speak significantly more than women, and (b) men interrupt women significantly more than vice versa. The effects carry over (not surprisingly) to argument between justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, and there they are augmented by another effect, that conservatives interrupt liberals significantly more often than vice versa. (These results from a study now in press for the Virginia Law Review.)

These effects can be seen as instances of a larger phenomenon: a tendency of those who are, or believe themselves to be, more dominant in an interaction to feel free to impose themselves on their partners and a corresponding tendency of those who are, or believe themselves to be, less dominant in an interaction to avoid imposing themselves on their partners.

The story came to me in the NYT on the 18th, in a piece by Adam Liptak. Well, in print in the national edition on the 18th, under the title “Let Me Finish, Please: Conservative Men Dominate the Debate’ — and on-line on the 17th, under the title “Why Gorsuch May Not Be So Genteel on the Bench”:

Justice Neil M. Gorsuch is by all accounts the soul of courtesy, and he may have a hard time elbowing his way into the judicial crossfire that is the modern Supreme Court argument.

Justices interrupt one another all the time, and it may not be easy for the new justice to find his place and to raise his voice this week, when he hears his first arguments.

But a new study suggests that Justice Gorsuch has two things going for him: He is conservative, and he is male.

“Conservatives interrupt liberals at significantly higher rates than liberals interrupt conservatives,” the study, to be published in The Virginia Law Review, found.

And male justices, perhaps not surprisingly, interrupt female justices far more often than the other way around. “Even though female justices speak less often and use fewer words than male justices,” the study found, “they are nonetheless interrupted during oral argument at a significantly higher rate.”

Tonja Jacobi, a law professor at Northwestern University who conducted the study with Dylan Schweers, a law student there, said the ideological disparity reflected the balance of power on the court.

“Conservatives have dominated the court for the last 50 years, and, knowing that, they feel they are more in power than liberals feel,” Professor Jacobi said in an interview. “Interruptions are generally considered an aspect of dominance, and the conservatives feel dominant over the liberals. With Gorsuch entering the court, that’s going to reinforce that tendency.”

Gender, the study concluded, plays an even larger role

The study considered 7,239 interruptions in arguments from 2004 to 2015. Of those, 32 percent were of women, and just 4 percent were by women.

Studies in other settings have shown that men tend to assert their power by interrupting women. Still, it is telling that the phenomenon persists at the Supreme Court.

“If female justices are consistently interrupted more than their male counterparts in this context,” the study said, “it would show that gender dynamics are so powerful to persist even in the face of high levels of power achieved by women.”

Male lawyers also interrupt female justices more often than male ones. (Female lawyers, it seems, never interrupt anyone.)

This is particularly surprising in light of the stern instructions the Supreme Court provides in a guide for lawyers preparing to argue before it.

“Never interrupt a justice who is addressing you,” the guide says. “If you are speaking and a justice interrupts you, cease talking immediately and listen.”

But such interruptions are not particularly unusual when male lawyers face questioning from female justices.

In a 2015 argument in a big affirmative action case, a lawyer for a student challenging the University of Texas’ admissions program repeatedly interrupted Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

“Let me finish my point,” Justice Sotomayor finally told the lawyer.

The study had to grapple with one particularly contentious relationship. Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who is both liberal and loquacious, seemed to have a special knack for getting under the skin of Justice Antonin Scalia, who died last year. “Scalia interrupted Breyer at such an extraordinary rate as to dwarf all other interruptions,” the study found.

By comparison, Justice Scalia interrupted Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, another liberal, at just 15 percent of the rate at which he interrupted Justice Breyer.

“If we subtract Scalia’s interruptions of Breyer, and vice versa,” the study said, “then the only three justices who are interrupted more than 100 times are Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan — the three female justices.” This is particularly telling, as Justice Elena Kagan did not join the court until 2010, and Justice Sotomayor joined it the year before.

The two general trends — conservatives interrupting liberals, and men interrupting women — are hard to disentangle these days, as all three women on the court are liberals.

The study addressed this overlap by looking at some older terms. In 1990, for instance, it found that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a moderate conservative who was then the only woman on the court, was interrupted 2.8 times as often as the average male justice.

That suggests that ideology and gender are independent factors. Between the two, Professor Jacobi said, gender seems to play the larger role. “And that’s pretty remarkable,” she said, “because ideology has been shown to influence everything in judicial behavior.”

Seniority also figures in almost everything at the Supreme Court, and it may be that more senior justices feel entitled to interrupt more junior ones. Until Justice Gorsuch joined the court, the two most junior members were Justices Sotomayor and Kagan. But Professor Jacobi said the explanatory power of seniority was relatively minor. “Both gender and ideology are much more significant,” she said.

I fear I interrupted Professor Jacobi to ask whether these trends tell us anything about how Justice Gorsuch is likely to act, given his mild and courteous manner.

“If we know going in that he’s a conservative male,” she replied, “then we would think there’s a good chance that he would be an interrupter.”

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s behavior on the bench, she said, may provide a valuable comparison.

“Chief Justice Roberts is a very polite man,” she said. “He seems to care about decorum. He cares about the reputation of the court. And he’s one of the biggest interrupters, interestingly. I see Gorsuch as somewhat similar in style to Roberts.”

“I don’t think that a lot of men notice that they’re doing this,” Professor Jacobi said.

Meanwhile, I have heard some observers — most of them male — maintain that Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan have particularly sharp conversational elbows, out-talking and overriding the other (male) justices. This I interpret as a reflection of the observers’ belief that the women should be silent and compliant, so that any assertion of themselves in conversation is seen as transgressive. Put in its most offensive terms: when the women assert themselves conversationally, they’re uppity cunts.

But this, of course, goes well beyond Jacobi and Schweers’s findings.

Today’s Rhymes With Orange.on love and conjunct order:

So: in coordinated pairs of names, which comes first, and why?

In the case at hand, whoever creates the coordination (here, carving it into a tree) will almost always put their own name first; people are strongly inclined to take themselves to be the measure of all things. Similarly, if you’re referring to a couple of people and one of them is a friend of yours while the other is someone you know mostly through your friend, you’ll probably put your friend’s name first. But beyond that, there’s a complex set of factors that tend to favor one order of names over the other. It seems that these factors conspire in (now well-studied) ways to favor — wait for it… — Guys First.

Background. There’s long been an interest in what have come to be known as irreversible binomials (the term is due to Yakov Malkiel, “Studies in irreversible binomials”, Lingua 8.113-60 (1959)). From NOAD2:

noun irreversible binomial: Grammar a noun phrase consisting of two nouns joined by a conjunction, in which the conventional order is fixed. Examples include bread and butter and kith and kin. [+ salt and vinegar, fish and chips, meat and potatoes, gin and tonic, time and tide, cloak and dagger, ladies and gentlemen, knife and fork,…]

A number of tendencies emerge, some having to do with phonology (shorter before longer), some with meaning or cultural role (positive before negative, main thing before accessory, male before female).

More recent studies — pursued especially by Jen Hay, of the University of Canterbury in Auckland NZ, with various collaborators — have looked at fresh, rather than frozen, combinations, and focused specifically on personal names (where the factors can be systematically controlled). A small taste of this work, from a 12/27/09 Language Log posting “Sexual orders” by Mark Liberman, on “the preferred orders of English binomial expressions for gendered categories of humans” as treated in Saundra Wright, Jennifer Hay and Tessa Bent in their paper “Ladies first? Phonology, frequency, and the naming conspiracy”, Linguistics 43.531–561 (2005). The abstract for this paper:

In pairs of names, male names often precede female names (e.g. Romeo and Juliet). We investigate this bias and argue that preferences for name ordering are constrained by a combination of gender, phonology, and frequency. First, various phonological constraints condition the optimal ordering of binomial pairs, and findings from our corpus investigations show that male names contain those features which lend them to be preferred in first position, while female names contain features which lend them to be preferred in second position. Thus, phonology predicts that male names are more likely to precede female names than follow them. Results from our name-ordering experiments provide further evidence that this “gendered phonology” plays a role in determining ordering preferences but also that an independent gender bias exists: when phonology is controlled (i.e. when two names are “phonologically equal”), subjects prefer male names first. Finally, frequency leads to another tendency to place male names first. Further investigation shows that frequent names are ordered before less frequent names and that male names are overall more “frequent” than female names. Together, all of these factors conspire toward an overwhelming tendency to place male names before female names.

So: Guys First.

A Dilbert from 9/7/91 (passed on by Tom Limoncelli):

Betty balks at the title fellow — because she thinks of only one of the three lexical items fellow, informal ‘man, boy’. But there are two others, and the one she’s thinking of is the most recent.

From NOAD2:

1 informal a man or boy: he was an extremely obliging fellow; a boyfriend or lover: has she got a fellow? 2 (usually fellows) a person in the same position, involved in the same activity, or otherwise associated with another: he was learning with a rapidity unique among his fellows; a thing of the same kind as or otherwise associated with another: the page has been torn away from its fellows. 3 [various subsenses referring to a member of some group distinguished by achievement or excellence] a member of a learned society: he was elected a fellow of the Geological Society;  (also research fellow) a student or graduate receiving a fellowship for a period of research;  British an incorporated senior member of a college: a tutorial fellow; a member of the governing body in some universities.

From my 5/4/15 posting “fellow sisters” on fellow:

[original sense ‘companion’, then the (mostly) academic sense, and then:] eventually [according to the OED] “in some dialects, and in unceremonious colloquial speech (esp. among young men), used without adj. as the ordinary equivalent for ‘man’” (from 1861 on).

The ‘sharing’ uses and the college/university uses continue throughout these developments. It would now not be unreasonable to posit at least three lexical items here [which is, in effect, what NOAD2 does]. We can now say things like all my fellow Fellows are fellows ‘all those who are Fellows with me are men’.

Sense 2 in things like my fellow Americans, sense 3 (the one in the strip) in academic (and sometimes professional) usage, as when New Yorker staff writer Sarah Stillman was named a 2016 MacArthur Fellow (in a “genius grant”). I am a Fellow of various academic societies, all of which have plenty of female Fellows (though some could use more).

You might (justifiably) wonder whether the company Dilbert works for has simply invented a society of fellows just to look good on the gender front. Betty might well balk.

Meanwhile, she’s going with the weight of usage as she’s experienced it — most of the occurrences of fellow she’s encountered are of NOAD‘s sense 1 — while disregarding the other two senses, which are still very much alive, but contextually restricted and much less frequent in speech.

(I note in passing that no one seems to have objected to fellow used to mean ‘guy, man, boy’, despite the fact that it’s a great divergence from the etymological original. But then enthusiasts for etymological absolutism have never been consistent in their peeves.)

[revised version]

From David Preston, yesterday’s Brewster Rockit comic strip, in a male character attempts to mansplain mansplaining to Pamela Mae Snap (aka Irritable Belle):

(#1) (Note strategic use of speech bubbles in the third panel.)

Today’s follow-up:

(#2)

[Notes from David Preston on Facebook:

[Rockit’s alias is] Short Attention Span Avenger. He’s blond. I’m not sure if Mansplainer is a previously introduced character, or if he’s just a random member of the crew. Usually it’s Ensign Kenny who gets injured. He’s the equivalent of Ricky Redshirt in Star Trek.

Brewster Rockit appears in #4 below.]

On the comic, from Wikipedia:

Brewster Rockit: Space Guy! is a satirical retro-futuristic comic strip created by Tim Rickard. It chronicles the misadventures of the dim-witted Brewster Rockit, captain of the space station R.U. Sirius, and his crew. Many of the comic’s characters and elements are derived from the Star Trek franchise, American science fiction films of the 1950s, and science fiction comics of the 1940s and 1950s. It debuted on July 5, 2004, and is nationally syndicated by Gracenote.

The weekday strips usually feature extended serial storylines, often running several weeks at a time. The Sunday strips are stand-alone, self-contained gags which are often more elaborately illustrated and action-oriented than the dailies, and are sometimes presented in medias res style. The comic’s humor includes satire, metahumor, slapstick, dark humor, running gags, word play, and puns.

Two central characters:

Captain Brewster Rockit: The lantern-jawed and squinty-eyed captain of the R.U. Sirius. He is brave, optimistic… and dumb as a rock. His strong leadership skills are complemented by a boyish sense of humor (and childlike mindset). He graduated from the Air Force Academy and then served in NASA as a space shuttle pilot. However, he failed his intelligence exam because he kept eating the pencils. He originally had the intelligence of an average person, but excessive memory wipes from alien abductions caused him to lose it. According to Pam, he has an obsession with ham.

Lieutenant Pamela Mae Snap [aka Irritable Belle]: The tough and pragmatic second-in-command aboard the R.U. Sirius, Pam is usually the one responsible for keeping things running, despite the collective idiocy of her shipmates. She sometimes has a hot temper and an attitude that gets her into trouble. She is also the mother of two young kids from a bad marriage that she doesn’t talk about. She has shown to have a “thing” for bad boys, having dated Dirk Raider, Brewster’s nemesis, as well as Karnor [a visiting alien given to eating people; he’s tall, green, and has a crush on Pam].  She enjoys killing things.

On mansplaining (and straightsplaining) on this blog, see this 9/20/14 posting. On the condescension in such explanations, see this Minnesota Public Radio site, with this illustration:

(#3)

Men mansplaining mainsplaining has become something of a trope on its own.

Back in the Brewster Rockit world, Capt. Rockit and his guys are also given to manfixing — “I’ll fix that for you, ma’am” — as in this 8/4/14 strip:

   (#4)

The two other characters in this strip:

Cliff Clewless: The station’s engineer – a position for which he is completely unqualified. He got his position through his computer-hacking abilities by hacking into NASA’s computer and upgrading himself from “programmer” to “engineer”. He believes himself to be popular with the ladies. He is fat and is invariably shown sporting a cap and sunglasses.

Dr. Mel Practice: The station’s conniving science officer (and mad scientist, though he prefers the term, “sanity-challenged scientist”). He often creates monsters and machines (killbots), but inevitably fails in his plans to conquer the universe. One of his craziest inventions was a “Procrastination Ray”, which sent troublesome objects into the future, so one would have no choice but to deal with them later. He is bald and wears a white lab coat, black gloves, and spectacles.

Irritable Belle. Out of the great pile of jokey names in the strip, I’ll comment on just this one, a play on irritable bowel, as in irritable bowel syndrome. On IBS (and the pun irritable vowel syndrome) on this blog, see this 4/11/17 posting.

The play in Irritable Belle can be taken one step further, to give the portmanteau name Irritabelle. And it has been. From an Adweek article of 4/14/16, “Ad of the Day: Meet Irritabelle, Your Irritable Bowel Sidekick, in Campy Ads for Viberzi: Actress Ilana Becker tells us why she loves the character” by David Gianatasio:

   (#5)

Take a bowel, Ilana Becker! [The puns just keep coming.]

The actress and comedian tells Adweek that portraying “Irritabelle,” the personification of a stomach ache with diarrhea, in campy ads for IBS-D (Irritable Bowel Syndrome With Diarrhea) medication Viberzi, has been a dream come true.

“I wanted this job from the moment I laid eyes on the copy,” she says. Originally hired to provide voiceovers when the work was in its animatic/storyboard phase, “I remember thinking how much fun it would be to be able to bring Irritabelle to life.”

Fashioned by Arnold Worldwide for pharma giant Allergan, the campaign broke nationwide last week, starring Becker as a kooky colon who makes life difficult for her owner. Clad in a jumpsuit decorated with a goofy digestive-tract illustration, her hair and lips painted atomic red, Becker makes a distinct impression in “Home,” the 60-second launch spot.

The site has several ads featuring Irritabelle.

Cartoons by Will McPhail, last seen here in three cartoons on 4/15/17, in particular a wordless cartoon (in which God slam-dunks in an angel’s halo). Now from the August 28th New Yorker, this complex exercise in cartoon understanding, drawing on several pieces of very specific cultural knowledge:

(#1)

Comments on #1, then on another entertaining McPhail not covered in my previous posting:

(#2)

Steamroom heat. Understanding #1 requires, first, that you recognize the locale of the cartoon as the mean streets of a big city: note tall buildings; car in background; the central characters, which are rats, those urban scourges; and the manhole cover.

Then there’s the steam rising from the manhole. A bit of cinematic atmosphere you’re unlikely to see in any city other than New York, and even there only in parts of the city. Details to follow.

Finally, you need to recognize that the rats are in a steamroom, on benches, with towels around their waists. Well, actually, a sauna. Details to follow.

In any case, the cartoon superimposes a sauna scene onto an urban street scene. The result isn’t ambiguous, but is simultaneously, surrealistically, both things at once.

From a Slate article of 11/23/12, “What’s That Thing? City Steam Edition” by Mark Vanhoenacker:

Con Edison, New York City’s venerable power company, pipes steam to customers in Manhattan just like any other utility product (such as gas, water, or electricity). The steam — some purposely created, some a ‘waste’ byproduct of electricity generation —comes from power plants.

Commercial, urban steam systems of this size are rare, and New York’s is the world’s largest. (Lockport, N.Y., had the world’s first urban steam system, in 1877, and Denver’s is the world’s oldest in continuous operation.) NYC’s system has 105 miles of main pipes, 3,000 manholes, and reaches around 1,800 buildings — everything from the Empire State Building to United Nations Headquarters. Steam connections run from the southern tip of Manhattan to 96th Street on the West Side and 89th Street on the East Side.

As for steam rooms, they come up in this blog often, in connection with the website Steam Room Stories and the gay baths. What’s portrayed in #1 seems not to be a wet-heat steam room, but a dry-heat sauna: note rat #3 dipping water, presumably onto hot stones. From Wikipedia on the sauna:

The [traditional Finnish] sauna featured a fireplace where stones were heated to a high temperature. Water was thrown on the hot stones to produce steam and to give a sensation of increased heat.

Evolution. #2 is yet another version of the Ascent of Man cartoon meme (see the Page on evolution postings) — so labeled in McPhail’s drawing. Which, however, plays on the ambiguity of man ‘human being’ (the sense intended in the literature on evolution) vs. man ‘adult human male’ — the sense shown in #2, where (presumably male) apes are seen evolving into men, while women make all the crucial cultural breakthroughs: tools, fire, the wheel, artistic precursors of writing. A wry viewpoint on the role of gender in the evolution of culture.

The Zits from August 31st:

(#1)

About color naming, and its association with sex/gender. The stereotype is that males use only a small number of color names, but that females draw on a much more diverse collection of names, and that this difference follows from differences — perhaps learned, but perhaps inborn — in the interests and inclinations of the sexes, with females engaged in fashion and interior decoration (where a rich color vocabulary is useful) in a way that males are not.

First, brief notes on seafoam, the hue. It starts with sea foam, the foam of the sea, specifically (as from Wikipedia):

Sea foam, ocean foam, beach foam, or spume is a type of foam created by the agitation of seawater, particularly when it contains higher concentrations of dissolved organic matter (including proteins, lignins, and lipids) derived from sources such as the offshore breakdown of algal blooms. These compounds can act as surfactants or foaming agents. As the seawater is churned by breaking waves in the surf zone adjacent to the shore, the presence of these surfactants under these turbulent conditions traps air, forming persistent bubbles that stick to each other through surface tension. Due to its low density and persistence, foam can be blown by strong on-shore winds from the beachface inland.

From this, a seawater-related color name. From Merriam-Webster online:

seafoam: a brilliant to light green that is very slightly lighter than chrysoprase

The color term is not in OED2, NOAD2, or AHD5, possibly because the compilers thought it was a straightforward figurative transfer: sea foam, sea-foam, or sea foam ‘the color of sea foam’. But in fact the color term refers to a type of sea green, the color of the sea beneath the bubbles of sea foam, which are themselves frothy white and light greyish-brown , not unlike the color of Jeremy’s shirt in #1:

(#2) Sea foam off Ocean Beach in San Francisco

Compare these varieties of the color seafoam, from the color-hex site:

(#3) The second bar is close to the most common referent for seafoam

Now, as to sex/gender and color vocabulary, see the discussion by Mark Liberman in Language Log on 5/5/10. When asked to name colors (in English), men and women both supply basic color terms (with, possibly, some gender differences in the extension of a few of these term). But the color vocabulary alluded to in #1 isn’t the basic color vocabulary, but the much larger inventory of specific color terms (including seafoam and chrysoprase) used to name paints (artists’ paints, housepaints, indoor paints (for walls and furnishings), nail polish, model airplane and car paints, etc.), the colors of fabrics, automobile colors, the colors of crayons and colored pencils, and so on.

As far as I can tell, there is no evidence at all that males and females differ in their innate abilities to disinguish shades or hues of things, but in certain contexts, it does appear that the sexes differ in the discriminations they are inclined to make, and in their knowledge of terms to use for these discriminations, and all this is surely a matter of sociocultural learning.

Two of these contexts are fashion and interior decoration, domains that are stereotypically associated with females (in contrast to oil painting and model building, domains stereotypically associated with males). In a further step, domains associated with females are taken to be marked — male concerns are the norm — leading to the widespread belief that in general females are especially sensitive to color distinctions and especially knowledgeable about color vocabulary.

True, for fashion and interior decoration, on the whole, females show more interest in the domains than males (though I’d be interested in seeing some empirical studies of the means and the differences between them), leading to pages like this one, from the Chaviano Couture blog (the work of a woman)

(#4) 6 is mint chocolate chip ice cream, 7 is a men’s bowtie

While looking through sites this past week I came across images of mint and seafoam green which I loved. It’s a fresh color which looks gorgeous with white and cream accents. So for this week it’s my color of choice.

(Ah, memories: my high school class colors were mint green and black. Delicious.)

Hurricane Irma works its way through the Caribbean, now aiming at Florida. There’s nothing useful I can do at this distance, so I’ve been frittering away my time recalling the famous Irmas of my world — your list might well be different — namely Irma S. Rombauer, the Irma of Irma la Douce, and, top of the list, the Irma of My Friend Irma, the apotheosis, oh alas, of the Dumb Blonde stereotype in American popular culture.

In the kitchen. Irma S. Rombauer is the Irma of The Joy of Cooking.  From Wikipedia:

(#1) ISR with The Book

Irma Starkloff Rombauer (October 30, 1877 – October 14, 1962) was an American cookbook author, best known for The Joy of Cooking (1931), one of the world’s most widely read cookbooks. Following Irma Rombauer’s death, periodic revisions of the book were carried out by her daughter, Marion Rombauer Becker, and subsequently by Marion’s son Ethan Becker. The Joy of Cooking remains in print, edited by members of the Rombauer–Becker family, and more than 18 million copies have been sold.

(My own copy is a well-worn and falling-apart 1946 edition, originally Libby Walcutt Daingerfield’s, passed on to her daughter Ann Walcutt Daingerfield (later Ann Daingerfield Zwicky).)

In the bedroom. From Wikipedia:

(#2)

Irma la Douce is a 1963 romantic comedy starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, directed by Billy Wilder. It is based on the 1956 French stage musical Irma La Douce by Marguerite Monnot and Alexandre Breffort.

Irma la Douce [“Irma the Sweet”] tells the story of Nestor Patou (Jack Lemmon), an honest cop, who after being transferred from the park Bois de Boulogne to a more urban neighborhood in Paris, finds a street full of prostitutes working at the Hotel Casanova and proceeds to raid the place. The police inspector, who is Nestor’s superior, and the other policemen, have been aware of the prostitution, but tolerate it in exchange for bribes. The inspector, a client of the prostitutes himself, fires Nestor, who is accidentally framed for bribery.

Kicked off the force and humiliated, Nestor finds himself drawn to the very neighborhood that ended his career with the Paris police – returning to Chez Moustache, a popular hangout tavern for prostitutes and their pimps. Down on his luck, Nestor befriends Irma La Douce (Shirley MacLaine), a popular prostitute. He also reluctantly accepts, as a confidant, the proprietor of Chez Moustache, a man known only as “Moustache.” In a running joke, Moustache (Lou Jacobi), a seemingly ordinary barkeeper, tells of a storied prior life – claiming to have been, among other things, an attorney, a colonel, and a doctor, ending with the repeated line, “But that’s another story.” After Nestor defends Irma against her abusive pimp boyfriend, Hippolyte, Nestor moves in with her, and he soon finds himself as Irma’s new pimp.

And then things get complicated.

My Friend Irma I’ll take up in a while. First, some stereotype-talk.

Female stereotypes. From Wednesday’s birthday posting, signaling the content of this posting:

the catastrophic hurricane, Irma S. Rombauer, Irma la Douce, My Friend Irma. Stereotype time [respectively]: the Femme Fatale, the Good Wife, the Prostitute With a Heart of Gold, the Dumb Blonde (and the Dumb Blonde’s best female friend the Smart Dame)

Several of these have already been mentioned on this blog, in a 10/2/14 posting “Female archetypes in the movies”, about Sunwoo Jeong’s Stanford qualifying paper on “Iconicity in Suprasegmental Variables:
The Case of Archetypal Hollywood Characters of the 1940s-50s”, covering:

several distinctive film genres, featuring highly stylized female characters, emerged as important cultural phenomena: femme fatales in film noir, independent brunettes in screwball comedies, and dumb blondes in musical comedies.

The Femme Fatale, the Smart Dame, and the Dumb Blonde.

From NOAD2:

noun femme fatale: an attractive and seductive woman, especially one who will ultimately bring disaster to a man who becomes involved with her. ORIGIN early 20th century: French, literally ‘disastrous woman.’

Hurricane Irma is the Femme Fatale in this posting. My Friend Irma is the Dumb Blonde, and her best female friend Jane Stacy is the Smart Dame. The Smart Dame is on the whole a positive stereotype, though she is typically in competition with a man (think Katharine Hepburn vcontending with Spencer Tracy).

Irma la Douce is the Prostitute With a Heart of Gold, and Irma S. Rombauer is The Good Wife, a complex stereotype with some positive content, though it confines women to the spheres of domestic life and moral enforcement (Kinder, Küche, Kirche) and to obedient submission to male authority (St. Paul, in Ephesians 5:22 (KJV): “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord”). As the moral enforcer (monitoring her children’s behavior, speech, and hygiene), the Good Wife also represents the mother figure that American boys are supposed to rebel against to achieve true masculinity.

At the office. Then there’s the Dumb Blonde, a scatterbrained female ditz in a stereotypically female social role (housewife, mistress, secretary, waitress), not necessarily blonde, sometimes given to physical as well as verbal comedy: Gracie Allen as foil to George Burns, Lucille Ball in her various Lucy incarnations, the Joan Davis of I Married Joan, Judy Holiday as Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday, Jean Stapleton as Edith Bunker in All in the Family, Beth Howland as Vera in Alice. But the great manifestation of the stereotype was by Marie Wilson as stenographer Irma Peterson in My Friend Irma. From Wikipedia:

(#3) Dumb Blonde and Smart Dame: Marie Wilson and Cathy Lewis in the radio studio

My Friend Irma, created by writer-director-producer Cy Howard, is a top-rated, long-run radio situation comedy that spawned a media franchise. It was so popular in the late 1940s that its success escalated to films, television, a comic strip, and a comic book. Marie Wilson portrayed the title character, Irma Peterson, on radio, in two films and the television series. The radio series was broadcast on the Columbia network from April 11, 1947 to August 23, 1954.

Dependable, level-headed Jane Stacy (Cathy Lewis — and Joan Banks during Lewis’ illness in early 1949) began each weekly radio program by narrating a misadventure of her innocent, bewildered roommate, Irma, a scatterbrained stenographer from Minnesota. The two central characters were in their mid-twenties. Irma had her 25th birthday in one episode; she was born on May 5. After the two met in the first episode, they lived together in an apartment rented from their Irish landlady, Mrs. O’Reilly (Jane Morgan, Gloria Gordon).

Irma’s boyfriend Al (John Brown) was a deadbeat, barely on the right side of the law, who had not held a job in years. Only someone like Irma could love Al, whose nickname for Irma was “Chicken”. Al had many crazy get-rich-quick schemes, which never worked. Al planned to marry Irma at some future date so she could support him. Professor Kropotkin (Hans Conried), the Russian violinist at the Princess Burlesque theater, lived upstairs. He greeted Jane and Irma with remarks like, “My two little bunnies with one being an Easter bunny and the other being Bugs Bunny.” The Professor insulted Mrs. O’Reilly, complained about his room, and reluctantly became O’Reilly’s love interest in an effort to make her forget his back rent. In 1953, Conried dropped from the cast and was replaced by Kenny Delmar as his cousin, Maestro Wanderkin.

Irma worked for the lawyer, Mr. Clyde (Alan Reed). She had such an odd filing system that once when Clyde fired her, he had to hire her back again because he couldn’t find anything. Useless at dictation, Irma mangled whatever Clyde dictated. Asked how long she had been with Clyde, Irma said, “When I first went to work with him he had curly black hair, then it got grey, and now it’s snow white. I guess I’ve been with him about six months.”

Irma became less bright and more scatterbrained as the program evolved. She also developed a tendency to whine or cry whenever something went wrong, which was at least once every show. Jane had a romantic inclination for her boss, millionaire Richard Rhinelander III (Leif Erickson). Another actor in the show was Bea Benaderet [who later achieved fame in a series of tv situation comedies].

Irma in a comic book:

(#4)

And in the first of her two movies, in which a pair of comics — Martin and Lewis — were introduced on screen:

(#5) The 1949 movie

Today’s Dilbert, in which the pointy-haired boss goes portmanteauing:

(#1)

boss + exercise (in a spelling variant with –ize) = bossercize, formed on the model of the name of the dance fitness company Jazzercise.

In my 8/5/16 posting “Ziplinguists”, #5 is a Zippy strip entitled “Jazzercize”. The inchoative / causative derivational suffix is (very roughly) spelled –ise in the UK, –ize in the US, but for the verb and noun exercise, only the –ise spelling is standard, even in the US.

(I personally enjoy the jazzercize spelling. You can never have too many Zs.)

As for Jazzercise, from Wikipedia:

(#2)

Jazzercise is a dance fitness franchise company founded by Judi Sheppard Missett in 1969 and headquartered in Carlsbad, California [in northern San Diego County].

Jazzercise combines dance, strength, and resistance training with popular music for a full-body workout. The company currently has over 8,300 franchisees worldwide in 32 countries.

Dance fitness classes are mostly taken by women (as in #2), though some men do take them — and many classes are led by men. If they were billed as callisthenics classes (seen as aiming primarily at strength rather than fitness or grace), they’d probably attract a lot of men and very few women. This despite NOAD‘s definition, which does not, in my opinion, capture current usage accurately:

noun callisthenics: [treated as singular or plural] gymnastic exercises to achieve bodily fitness and grace of movement. ORIGIN early 19th century: from Greek kallos ‘beauty’ + sthenos ‘strength’ + –ics.

Callisthenics in ancient Greece were a strictly male activity (aimed at developing strength and agility, to prepare men for warfare), and the association of the word with men — in gymnasiums and military training — continues to this day.

That’s the portmanteau in yesterday’s Luann strip:

voluminous + voluptuous, probably with a bit of sumptuous mixed in — but certainly ample heft combined with sensuousness. Not a waif, and not any typical fashion model.

(Hat tip to Benita Bendon Campbell.)

The three lexical contributors, from NOAD:

adj. voluptuous: 1 (of a woman) curvaceous and sexually attractive. 2 relating to or characterized by luxury or sensual pleasure: long curtains in voluptuous crimson velvet. ORIGIN late Middle English: from Old French voluptueux or Latin voluptuosus, from voluptas ‘pleasure’.

adj. voluminous: (of clothing or drapery) loose and ample.

adj. sumptuous: splendid and expensive-looking: the banquet was a sumptuous, luxurious meal.

voluptuous alone carries most of the import of volumptuous: voluptuousness requires a body with enough substance, enough padding, to be curvaceous, and also a body that is sensual to the eye and to the touch, like velvet.

(Discussion of men’s bodies and mansex in very plain terms, photos of naked, though not quite X-rated, men, so not at all for kids or the sexually modest.)

Liam Riley, actually an ubertwink we’ve seen before, but now — to celebrate the completion of a “Twinks” Page on this blog (with links to postings on twink as a body type, a persona, and a sexual identity) — viewed in conjunction with his CockyBoys stable-mate Levi Karter.

Levi and Liam, Levis and lace, (more) butch and (more) femme, twink and near-twink (more muscles, swimmer body type). Both playful, affectionate, and (professionally) adorable. And competitors in the Ace Ass department.

For comparison: Levi left and Liam right:

(#1)

(Note that although Liam is the more femme of the pair, he has the unquestionably male butt — a tight  bubble butt of the sort rarely seen on women — while Levi has a longer, fuller butt (and somewhat wider hips), which though identifiably male (hey, it’s mine!) comes closer to the female norm.)

Front views, so you can more easily compare their body types:

(#2) Liam, effete twink, inclined towards lace (note shaved armpits)

(#3) Levi, muscle twink (or swimmer-type near-twink), inclined towards Levis (and with unshaved armpits, displayed in #4)

(#4) Levi in video action with Arad WinWin

Background on CockyBoys from Wikipedia:

CockyBoys is a New York City-based producer of gay internet pornography. Managed by CEO Jake Jaxson and his two partners, RJ Sebastian and Benny Morecock, the site has drawn attention from both inside and outside the adult industry for blending arthouse erotica and experimental film with mainstream-style genre films.

… Though CockyBoys primarily releases content through its website, the studio also manufactures a popular DVD line through EuroMedia Distribution. In addition to digital media, CockyBoys partnered with [book publisher] Bruno Gmünder in 2014. [See my 2/14/16 posting “Two books of male photography”.]

On Liam, from my 2/12/16 XBlog posting “Liam Riley, power bottom twink”:

He’s very much a twink: cute, very young-looking, completely smooth body, slender and slight of build (5’7″, 120 lbs., 28-inch waist), with a feminine rather than rugged face.

On Levi, from the p.r. copy on the CockyBoys site:

Levi is from Paraguay but moved to small-town Ohio when he was very young. He still has a lot of pride for his home country, though, which you can tell by the big tattoo on his back. Levi’s known he’s wanted to be an adult model for a long time, and started out as a gogo boy shortly after he turned eighteen. He’s also very athletic thanks to working out at the gym all throughout high school — he even did some back flips for us when we met him. Sexually, Levi’s versatile and had his first boyfriend when he was a freshman in high school.

And on the two CockyBoys together, in an XBlog posting yesteday, “Levi and Liam”, with five images:

Both young, smooth-bodied, and sexually enthusiastic (cocky in several senses), but nicely contrasting. Liam — who’s been featured before on this blog — is definitely a twink, almost invariably a bottom, and flirts with effeminacy, while Levi has a more muscular, swimmer-type body, bills himself as versatile (he’s been fucked by almost everybody in the business, but then he’s fucked a lot too), and presents as entirely masculine, but frankly gay and sweetly amiable. They’re both playful and affectionate, and make a cute couple.

The photos:

#1 The video “Meeting Liam”, with a shot of Liam kissed and fucked (Reverse Cowboy) by Levi

#2 Levi displaying his body (cropped above)

#3 Liam displaying his body (cropped from an earlier XBlog posting)

#4 Levi, smiling happily, fucked (Reverse Cowboy) by Arad WinWin (cropped above)

#5 Liam, ecstatic, fucked (Reverse Cowboy) by Dillon Rossi

In addition to exploring twinkishness, the XBlog posting focuses on facial expressions in mansex (in particular, the Ecstatic face of pleasure and the smiling Good Buddy face) and on sex positions (Reverse Cowboy requiring a certain amount of agility, strength, and balance).

Bonus, from the Paper website on 2/13/15, “Get In Bed with Cockyboys Porn Stars Levi Karter and Liam Riley” by Mickey Boardman:

(#5)

Liam Riley and Levi Karter, two of gay adult film company Cockyboys most adorable stars, spend a lot of their work hours in bed. And now they’re about to show us just how versatile they are in the sack with their new talk show. In Bed With Levi and Liam premieres on Valentine’s Day and the boys guest will be porn star James Deen (no relation to Paula). Who knows what can happen when these two raunchy rascals get rolling.

Oh yes, Levis and lace. An allusion to the many square dance clubs of this name in the US. Levis for the gentlemen, lace for the ladies.