Shower rooms.
Locker rooms.
Jockstraps.

The words alone cast a drowsy, aphrodisiacal spell on us. And it’s no wonder. They take us back to the days when the jumble of adolescent male bodies in a high school locker room was the first place, as far as our secret desires were concerned, where the rubber met the road.

Our first sight of a jockstrap might have been in the mirror but it didn’t take on real force until it was glimpsed making its grooved, scooping way around a buoyant pouch, just slightly above eye-level as we sat tying our sneaker amid the slam of locker doors.

The trio of shower room, locker room and jockstrap has been plot enough for many a porn film, and as soon as we see the familiar bench in a deserted room with a row of lockers looking on like somber tin soldiers, we pretty much know what’s up ahead. Blowjob City: Population 2. With casual walk-ins dropping their towels and swelling our small town to, at times, an orgiastic metropolis. (Bukkake Nation, anyone?) Then everyone ends up in the shower for a bangup reprise, but with different partners. Wash, rinse, repeat. (read the full article)

Christmas is almost here, with its perennial promise of expanding our wardrobes, often with gifts so unnecessary and trendy we’d feel too guilty to buy them for ourselves. Magazine ads are all about retail, where waxy models put away the swim trunks and don the most up-to-date name brand clothing.

That’s good news for the oglers, because there’s something about a well-dressed man that never disappoints, even as we grow so accustomed to exposed 6-packs that they get boring.

Fashion is something I forgot through college, where everyone conspicuously dresses like shit. But in high school, attire was a person’s primary identity statement, and conversations about attraction used to go like this: (read the full article)

“Husky” is good, right? We would want three hours of continuous, hardcore action from some of Brazil’s “huskiest” men, wouldn’t we? Is it like rugged, only thicker, with grunting and stubble?

A loosely-held secret of porn promotional blurb-writing is that no matter what material the writer is handed, he must find some way to speak well of it.  That said, though he can’t blatantly insult it, he doesn’t want to be entirely dishonest so there are quite a few occasions on which a writer is stuck saying something most easily likened to “that sweater-vest is so different!”

That’s because even though porn is a multi-billion-dollar industry, the quality of the product is wildly unstable. Writers must forge forward and say the best thing they can say to promote the video they may or may not have actually watched.

To that end I’ve compiled this short guide, after years of weary and dedicated porn promo-reading, to help you through the hurdles and hoops of discerning what should be the least traumatic path to your healthy erection.

Physique

Sexy: (Tommy’s sexy body) The model’s body is of appropriate weight and built. Unfortunately, models who are described as “sexy” also tend to have egregiously overwrought hairstyles and a propensity to tilt their heads to the side.

Despite looking like the lost member of the Pussycat Dolls, this model illustrates what porn promo copy writers are talking about when they say someone is “sexy.”

Chiseled: (Baker’s chiseled good looks) The model has protruding muscles and lower-than-average body fat. This is often accompanied by bad skin and a sunken face. (read the full article)

It was a scorching summer night and we were making out on the couch in his father’s fancy business condo, away from where his parents lived and where he went to school on the East Coast. After two bottles of wine and a few repeats of the same Coldplay CD, he now had his lips against my neck, one arm wrapped behind me, one leg thrown up over my lap. He paused for a moment to mutter, “so you really don’t mind this even though I’m probably voting for McCain?”

OK, stop.

What compelled him to bring it up then is, to this day, beyond me but at this moment it was his first time mentioning who he’d vote for. I’d been talking about the election earlier, and he apparently assumed I was already aware of his politics — and surely it didn’t matter at that point; it’s not as though I was going to hike my pants and drunkenly trot off to my car in the parking lot to sleep it off in the back seat. (read the full article)

Most of us know the frustration of finding that every guy who piques our interest already has another draped over his shoulder, in what looks like romantic bliss, leaving us high and dry. The question, “why are the good guys taken?” seems to be a conspiracy of fate.

Granted, a universally-desirable man (if there is such a thing) should have an easier time finding a mate quickly. But shouldn’t there be a constant supply of new men arriving on the scene when they reach 21? And it begs the question — does the fact that we’re still single mean that we’re not one of the “good” ones?

There’s a more familiar form of the adage, though; one that lets us know the phenomenon is mainly a matter of perception. It states, “why are all the good guys taken — or gay.”

To straight women, dating is tough, but that elusive otherworld of clean-cut, sensitive, articulate homosexuals – to them tauntingly out of reach – is full of opportunities they would be lucky to pursue, or so insists the joke. Gay men know it doesn’t work quite that way; we aren’t partnering up with ideal mates at the snap of a finger. We aren’t seeing perfection pop out ripe between the cantaloupes in the supermarket. And we don’t quite fit that description ourselves. Some sort of “the grass is always greener” scenario is at play. (read the full article)

“I have seen the future and it does not work…”

The ’70s were the decade when America officially lost faith in the myths of the Eisenhower Era. They had it all: an energy crisis, contentious battles over civil rights, religion encroaching upon government, a futile and ill-conceived war, a rancidly corrupt president, and The Gong Show.

In the Double ’00s, everything old is new again.

The way forward is the way back and all the answers to our current plights are a NetFlix click away: the failed aversion therapy of A Clockwork Orange, genocidal race wars of The Planet of The Apes series, King Kong enslaved as Big Oil’s unwilling corporate spokesmodel, and Charlton Heston (of all people) playing a corporate whistle-blower in Soylent Green and the emancipator of an Earth-inheriting group of… the brown people… in The Omega Man.

And then came Zardoz.

Thousands of years after global wars have nearly eradicated humanity, Earth’s vestiges are divided into two factions: the Brutals – lowly, debased agrarians whose numbers are held in check by Uncle Tom members of their own ranks dubbed the Exterminators – and the Immortals, a ruling class of intellectuals dwelling in decaying opulence within a green zone called the Vortex. God has (finally!) made himself physically manifest in the avatar of an immense levitating head called Zardoz.

The Ten Commandments can suck it now that the world’s flimsy pretense of social order has crumbled. All the Bible-thumping fire and brimstone bullshit has lashed-back on itself. Murder really is the answer to dealing with our conflicts. Zardoz may be divine, but he sure has some earthly vested interests, mainly in having in the Brutals’ crops shoved into his maw as tribute. Best of all, the meeting of peen and snatch is now the ultimate sin, each new birth an abomination in the eyes of Zardoz. (read the full article)

Richard Grieco put his disease in me.

It’s his fault that I have a thing for Guidos. It was fate that I just happened to be entering the initial materialization of sexual identity at the very time he was sauntering into his 21 Jump Street/Booker brief glimmer of stardom.

During that era, the teen crush objects of Saved By The Bell and Beverly Hills 90210 were Clearasil-skinned Mickey Mousers; Le Grieco was the antithesis of pre-fab Wonder Bread idols — a trashy, spike-haired, downtown slut with the class of an alley cat and a porn star smirk. My Yasmine Bleeth Reflex — the design flaw that leads the well-adjusted inexplicably drawn to ruinous headboard pounders — triggered and my formative Grieco obsession has left me forever susceptible to the wiles of the Guido.

The sexual fantasies that we always turn to are the ones that make us feel the most ashamed, the ones that make us question who we really are and what we really want. It’s when we feel the most dirty that we’re the most gratified. Our polar opposites – those we would never conceivably cross paths with and who personify everything we’re not – can sometimes attract as much as they should repel. (read the full article)

In a college sociology class on deviance I took in 2004, the professor, who was known for her sense of humor and explicit knowledge of what she studies, explained to 400 undergraduates what a “tea room” is. We were reading an academic essay detailing the ritual of gay male public cruising, and discussing how it is so strikingly consistent from one hot spot to another, as if driven by something more innate than cultural.

The essay was about a particular public park in London, but the professor’s lecture brought us closer to home – she explained to our amusement why the bathroom stalls in the men’s room of the Chemistry building (the building the lecture was in) used to be changed once every few weeks – whenever the maitainence staff found a glory hole carved in one – and why they eventually removed the stall doors altogether. (read the full article)