genital nudity

While gathering examples of Michael Reh’s male photography, I came across several sites that referred to genital nudity as present or absent in various photographer’s work (so far as I can tell, there’s none in Reh’s, though he cuts the line very close). In genital nudity, the Adj genital is nonpredicating (His nudity was genital is anomalous): genital nudity isn’t nudity that has the property of being genital, but instead it’s nudity of the genitals, that is, exposure of the genitals. The Adj genital is interpreted via the N genitals — interpretation by evoking a noun is one mark of the type of nonpredicating adjectives known as pseudo-adjectives. (Resistance to modification by degree elements — note the oddity of very genital nudity — is another.)

Putting this aside, there’s the question of how to refer to the images that are banned in certain contexts (U.S. postcards, WordPress postings, etc.). Here’s I’ll restrict myself to the male body in these contexts.

Flowering pears and secretions

The local landscape has been brightened for some time by flowering pear trees, which are planted all over the place; there’s even a Flowering Pear Drive in Cupertino. These are mostly Callery pears. Whole trees in bloom, and some flowers close up:

The Wikipedia page on the plant leads us to bodily secretions:

soft/hard

(Only a bit about language. High sexuality content.)

I’ve posted earlier, on AZBlogX, about pairings of photos of men clothed vs. unclothed: contrasts that provoke thought about clothing and the body (and about the way people hold themselves when they are clothed vs. when they are naked). I’ve also posted, several times, on penis size, most recently here (with a follow-up here); the first of these includes factual material about penis size, along with comments on the size obsession of gay male porn (and the second has comments about the vocabulary of penis size).

Now, thanks to a link by Jodie Lane on Facebook, another set of contrasts, on the site Flaccid – Erect Gallery, which pairs photos of soft and hard dicks:

Dude Wipes

A few days ago on Facebook, Leith Chu wondered, about Dude Wipes from the Dude Products people:

Why hasn’t anybody mentioned these before? (link)

The Dude Products Dude Wipes Box of 30 [$9.99] on Amazon:

The description on this site:

There is nothing like the feeling of being clean!! After a long training session wipe down with a Dudewipe for a Fresh Scent not a Baby wipe scent. DudeWipes are wallet-sized and perfect for any person who wants to keep up their hygiene no matter where they are or what they’re doing. These wipes are a great complement to toilet paper, pre or post gym clean up, or to simply keep hands, face, and other areas Fresh and Clean. FINALLY!!!!!! A hygiene product that doesn’t smell like a baby.

Is this (to some degree) a serious product, designed to appeal to men who feel the need to assert their masculinity against babies (not to mention the elderly and the infirm, giving three groups who lack manliness and probably also the smell of a man, and of course women, who are totally out of it on both fronts)? There is plenty of male paranoia out there, but the closer you look at the site, the less likely it seems to be serious.

Little popliteal moments

More adventures of the Woolly Mammoth and his Platinum Wonder Hip, with some anatomical technicality.

Affliction

(From my life, with some technical language from anatomy.)

These have been hard days. It started maybe five weeks ago, with occasional twinges in my right hip. As time went on, the twinges turned into pain, mirrored eventually by pain on the inside of my right thigh, in the groin area, and then the pain began to radiate down my leg. Walking gradually became an ordeal, and a week ago, sleeping became difficult. What was happening to me?

to oxter

A very small thing, but entertaining (to me at any rate): the verb to oxter, in this passage from Bernie McGill’s The Butterfly Cabinet (2011), p. 201:

Then you came back, the pair of you, dripping with seawater, and lay down on the grass to dry.  And you said, ‘When was the last time you felt the sea on you, Nanny Madd?’ and your gray eyes twinkled, and I smiled back, and you jumped up and shouted to Conor, and the two of you took me by the hands, laughing, down to the shore. You slipped off my shoes, peeled down my stockings. At the water’s edge you took me by one elbow, Conor took me by the other, and between the two of you, you oxtered me in over the rippled sand until the water licked my ankles…

(Hat tip to Eve Clark, who noticed the passage because I mentioned the noun oxter in my SemFest talk last Friday.)

Parts: vulva and vagina

After I posted my first piece on the (human) body and its parts, with four diagrams illustrating vocabulary for the external parts, Ellen Seebacher complained on Google+:

Okay, can I register my irritation at illustrations of exterior body parts which substitute “vagina” for “vulva”?

Turns out that there are several things going on here: the difference between ordinary and technical (in this case, anatomical) vocabulary; narrow vs. broad interpretation of terms; variation in ordinary language; change in ordinary language; and the problems of ostensive definition.

SemFest 13

Judgments have been made, and my abstract for the Stanford Semantics Festival 13 (March 16th) has been accepted (along with those from Jason Grafmiller, Ingrid Falkum, Elizabeth Traugott, Cleo Condoravdi and Sven Lauer, Marta Recasens,  Lauri Karttunen, and Eric Acton; this is a small, local, and companionable conference). Here’s my abstract, on themes some readers will recall from earlier postings of mine; remember that this is just an abstract, confined to a single page: