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Morning names: wiles, Wiles

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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.

 

 



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