(All I need to tell you is that this posting takes off from a line of Cumdump jockstraps offered by the Breedwell company in deliberately provocative ads, and you should see that it’s totally not for kids or the sexually modest.)
A Daily Jocks ad from 11/4/19 shows us the jock in red, with a model presented faux-naturalistically as a tough working-class guy in a blue-collar setting (a railyard, shipyard, or truckyard). Ad copy for the jock:
The new Breedwell Cumdump Jock [available in white, black, red, yellow, and blue] is a take on the classic, old-school woven jock.
Features a black centre patch with the Breedwell logo and signature “Dirty By Choice” motto. The back of the jock features ‘Breedwell’ across the entire back.
(#1) The Breedwell Cumdump jockstrap, leading to notes on:
underwear ads as porn; this underwear ad as hard(core) porn; the sodomacho (sodomite + macho), or high-butch receptive (like the guy in the ad), as a brand of homomasculinity; plus linguistic reflections, on various scales with hard denoting the high end of the scale and terminology for referring to intermediate values, especially those near the high end (hard, firm).
Underwear ads as porn. Extended background from my 11/20/19 posting “A regular festival of ambiguity”:
The Regular Guy is a stock character of advertising, where he is especially devoted to selling things directed to men, like tools, sports equipment, shaving accessories, and men’s clothing, in particular swim suits and underwear (both highly gendered). This last category is of special interest to me, because such apparel can be invested with not only gender content but also carnally sexual content: the display of the nearly naked male body is available as a source of pleasurable response from suitably minded viewers (of either gender), no matter how innocently it might be intended.
In brief: underwear ads are always available for service as soft porn (for straight women and gay men) — this is not even slightly a novel observation — and models presented as regular guys have figured in such advertising for a long time …
(#2) Daily Jocks ad for Supawear from 10/27/17: Note the seductive facial expression and inviting open mouth… Despite all this effort to present the figure of a guy in his underpants as an object of commercial but not carnal desire — you were supposed to want to buy the underwear, not do the model — these ads had a long history of functioning as soft porn for gay boys and men; after all, they showed attractive men in their underpants, their desirable genitals just a thin layer of fabric away.
… Then came the time of the Underwear Gods, as Don DeLillo labeled the giant public-display figures advertising sex-drenched underwear, especially men’s premium briefs (a label easily extended to the models and to the genre of advertising)
… the world shifted, as you can see by looking at my Page of links to underwear postings on this blog; in certain districts of the underwear universe, all the constraints on RG depictions have been thrown out the window, and we now have things like [#2], and crotch-tease shots like [#1, I dreamed I cruised for blue-collar tricks in my hot-red Breedwell Cumdump jock]
Yes, Breedwell is the brand name, “Dirty by Choice” (on the waistband) its motto, and Cumdump the model name; the intention behind the model name is that the wearer is advertising himself as an indiscriminate bottom [a mere cumdump] — for barebacking, if the brand name [with breed ‘fuck bareback’] is to be taken at face value. [more on Breedwell etc. in an appendix below]
#1 is pretty much as close to hard(core) porn as you can get. So I’ll move in a little while to the hardcore/softcore distinction.
Brands of homomasculinity. The model in #1 is presented as a high-butch anal receptive, a macho pussy-ass.
He’s located in a blue-collar environment, a conventionally macho locus, and he’s strongly macho in appearance. But his jockstrap cries out: I want, need, to be fucked, bareback, by a lot of guys, as many as possible; I want, need, my pussy filled with cum.
(This is of course a fantasy, but it pleases me to see it represented and celebrated so openly in advertising. It is, of course, something of a trope in gay porn: Real Men Want to Get Fucked. In particular, muscular body-building types beg for cocks up their asses.)
The combination of conventional masculinity with men enthusiastically taking what is conventionally viewed as the “feminine” role in fucking, and hence as acting “faggy”, is one form of what I’ve called butch fagginess. As in my 10/16/19 posting “Adventures in homomasculinity: the pink jock”, with a wider view (intersections of styles of masculinity with styles of homosexuality). The special case here is what I think of as sodomachismo — a macho presentation of self combined with a preference for the pleasures of being sodomized.
Play on hard/soft. From my 11/18/19 posting “Hard/Soft”, about a:
highly sexualized soft porn DJ ad (for CellBlock 13 Covert jockstrap), but stressing the contrast between the hard polyurethane shell of the jock pouch and the softness of its “extra-soft fleece” lining:
(#3)
On to the hard-core lexical stuff. Wow, a really big grab-bag, illustrating sense developments of many different types. From NOAD (AHD5 has much longer list of senses):
adj. hard: 1 [a] solid, firm, and resistant to pressure; not easily broken, bent, or pierced: a hard mattress | ground frozen hard as a rock. [b] (of a person) not showing any signs of weakness; tough: the hard, tough, honest cop. [c] (of prices of stock, commodities, etc.) stable or firm in value. 2 done with a great deal of force or strength: a hard blow to the head. 3 [a] requiring a great deal of endurance or effort: stooping over all day was hard work. [b] putting a lot of energy into an activity: he’d been a hard worker all his life. [c] difficult to bear; causing suffering: times were hard at the end of the war | he’d had a hard life. [d] difficult to understand or solve: this is a really hard question | [with infinitive]: she found it hard to believe that he could be involved. [e] not showing sympathy or affection; strict: my father is no longer the hard man he once was. [f] (of a season or the weather) severe: it’s been a long, hard winter. [g] harsh or unpleasant to the senses: the hard light of morning. [h] (of wine) harsh or sharp to the taste, especially because of tannin. 4 [a] (of information) reliable, especially because based on something true or substantiated: hard facts about the underclass are maddeningly elusive.[b] (of a subject of study) dealing with precise and verifiable facts: efforts to turn psychology into hard science. [c] denoting an extreme or dogmatic faction within a political party: the hard left. [d] (of science fiction) dealing with technological advances which do not contravene currently accepted scientific laws or principles: a hard SF novel. 5 [a] (of liquor) strongly alcoholic; denoting distilled spirits rather than beer or wine. [b] US (of apple cider) having alcoholic content from fermentation. [c] (of a drug) potent and addictive. [d] (of radiation) highly penetrating. [e] (of pornography) highly obscene and explicit. 6 (of water) containing mineral salts that make lathering difficult. 7 Phonetics (of a consonant [letter]) pronounced as c in cat or g in go.
5e is the sense in hardcore (vs. softcore).
(In passing, I note that NOAD is missing the sense ‘(of a penis) erect, tumid’ (in AHD, sense 14 of 21).)
More specifically, there is, from NOAD, the:
noun hard core: [a] the most active, committed, or doctrinaire members of a group or movement: there is always a hard core of trusty stalwarts | [as modifier]: a hard core following. [b] popular music that is experimental in nature and typically characterized by high volume and aggressive presentation. [c] pornography of an explicit kind: (as modifier hard-core [or hardcore]): hard-core porn.
The world of hard vs. soft core is a graded one: there are clear examples of hard core material (in my postings, the visual stuff has to go to AZBlogX, though, at least for the moment, I can say pretty much anything on WordPress; Facebook, in contrast, is erratically, and often extremely punitively, censorious) vs. soft core stuff (like the 1970s newspaper underwear ads), but of course the lines won’t be clear. Sociocultural categories are virtually never sharply discriminated, though for legal or administrative purposes their names might be rigidly defined.
The hard/soft scale. The list of senses of hard provides a rich source for specializations in a great many contexts, all of them conceived in scalar terms. Four examples.
Example 1. Being the person I am, I’ll start with dicks.
From my 8/14/15 posting “Annals of phallicity: the hardness score”, about the:
5-point Erection Hardness Score (developed by specialists in sexual medicine), from 0 (soft, not enlarged) through 4 (“completely hard and fully rigid”); 3 is “hard enough for penetration, but not completely hard”
With some discussion of the British tv show Cucumber, Banana, and Tofu and its 4-point scale: tofu, peeled banana, banana, cucumber.
Example 2. Memories of a scientific childhood. The 10-point Mohs hardness scale for minerals, an absolute hardness scale based on the hardness of diamonds (as #10), with talc on the soft end as #1:
(#4) Discussion in my 10/24/18 posting “Three exercises in cartoon understanding”Example 3. Sleep comfort. In a jokey Bizarro cartoon about ascetic monasticsm, also from the “Three exercises” posting:
(#5)
In the same posting, mattress ratings and the like, with firm as the top end of the scale, mattress companies not actually offering boards or board-like beds.
Example 4. Cake textures. Yes, even there. From a food column in the 11/3/19 NYT Magazine (in print), “The Welcome Distraction of Chocolate Cake: Inspired by the one at Landeau Chocolate, in Lisbon, this cake is as simple as it is bold” by Dorie Greenspan; on-line, 10/30/19 as “The Chocolate Cake That Saved My Vacation”:
(#6) (photo: Sarah Anne Ward for The New York Times)
The crucial quote is about cake texture:
Each forkful is a complete composition: The textures go from firm to feathery, the flavors building in intensity.
The cake scale of hardness: from firm to feathery.
The Breedwell cumdump appendix. Some background postings .
— on 1/11/18 in “Electric underwear”:
(#7) Red glow shoulder harness, plain black pouchThe name of the firm (like so many of its garments) can be read as insertive or receptive: with agentive active breed (as in He breeds his boyfriend’s ass / his boyfriend well / with gusto); or with midde-voice breed (as in Joey breeds well ‘Joey is satisfying / easy to breed, Joey is a great fuck’).
— on 5/20/18 in “Blue light special”, with more on Breedwell homowear, including:
(#8) Glowing blue fetish fuckwear
— on 6/2/18 in “Annals of gangbanging: anonymous in Brooklyn”, about a Brooklyn gay sex club with reduced entry price for tops:
(#9)
The ad is intended to attract tops — all the cumdumps you can breed, for one low price — for the benefit, the pleasure, of a corps of bottoms. It’s a scheme to make the (man)sexual marketplace work for everybody.
with cumdump ‘person regarded as no more than a repository for cum (orally, vaginally, or anally)’
In recent gay usage, a cumdump appears to be a man regarded as nothing more than a bareback bottom, used as the object of a gangbang. Hence the verb breed (used for bareback anal sex) in the poster. And the blindfold, worn by gangbanged men who enthusiastically give up control to the tops who use them for sex.