Tag: Calvin Klein ads

Puppy Love

Thursday and my last day in the office for the week. Huzzah! I am fatigued this morning. I went to the gym on my way home last night, and while these “workouts” seem hardly worthy of the name, the way my muscles feel this morning shows me that oh yes indeed, even as light as the weights are and as few sets I am doing, it definitely still is counting. This is why I have to be patient with the progress and not get ahead of myself. Last night, I was definitely tempted to add more weight and even had to talk myself out of it, feeling like I was wimping out–but how much more fatigue would I be feeling this morning? And yes, I slept like the dead last night, too–another sign. I may take an extra rest day and not go again until Saturday. I was also tired when I got home last night, so I didn’t do much of anything, including chores….so will definitely have to do those tonight when I get home. I picked up the mail yesterday, too, so I can come straight home tonight.

And of course, tomorrow is a work-at-home day. Huzzah!

I had another surprise at the post office yesterday, too–my Nancy Drew The Secret of the Old Clock action figure! It’s pretty cool, and I may save pictures of it for here until after Pride month, because I cannot think of a way to do a Pride post about–you know what? I just thought of a way to do it, so I guess I manifested itself into being. I also managed to get a Pride post done yesterday–Calvin Klein ads–and I have some more on deck, too; I’ll give you some hints about them–Dynasty, party culture, gym culture, etc.–and who knows when I’ll get them finished and posted, but they are definitely in progress.

I also got my copy of a book I read and reread over and over again as a kid: Stranger than Science by Frank Edwards. I am slowly remembering some other things about my childhood–my interests in the occult and the unexplained. There was a lot of this sort of thing when I was growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, and I am not sure why there was so much of this in the late 1960’s/early 1970s, but there was. The Bermuda Triangle was a big thing, and so were pseudo-sciences like Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods and so on; Thor Heyerdahl was having his adventures proving that Pacific Islanders traveled much further than most believed, and he also was proving Egyptians could have made it to America on papyrus boats, which was insane but interesting at the same time. I also loved things like Ripley’s Believe It or Not, which used to be a bigger deal than it is now; weird theories about space alien astronauts and forgotten history–I was really into this sort of thing–lost knowledge has always interested me, and books about recovering lost knowledge (or treasure) were catnip for Gregalicious. I don’t know if this was a natural progression of the 1960s movements, in which we became suspicious of government and less trusting, but the 1970s were a very strange decade, and immersing myself in my memories has been interesting. Anyway, Stranger Than Science is a book telling short tales of real events with no logical or rational explanation (this was where I first learned of spontaneous combustion, for one). Edwards used to have a long-running radio show with the same name and subject matter, and my interest in his book and other unexplained phenomenon (whether true, legend, or a combination of both) had more of an influence on me as a writer than I actually remembered. I’m looking forward to revisiting this book.

I also got Paul Tremblay’s Horror Movie yesterday, and I may be moving it up on the TBR pile. He’s become one of my favorite writers lately–since I read A Head Full of Ghosts a few years back, and I’ve not read anything of his that wasn’t compelling and unputdownable since. (I’m also enjoying Grady Hendrix and Riley Sager these days as well.)

And on that note, I am bringing this to a close so I can head into the spice mines. Have a marvelous Thursday, and look for a Pride post later!

Down Under

Remember him?

I’ll never forget him.

The marketing for Calvin Klein fashions and products has always been provocative, proving once again the old adage that sex sells. But on the men’s side, the company’s push to remove men’s underwear from the old, badly fitted, and horribly uncomfortable/unattractive underwear that always looked terrible after a few washes. If you see pictures of men in underwear in the 60s and 70s, it’s always high-waisted and baggy and not flattering in any way. Marooned in Kansas for the latter part of the 70s, I was very unaware of changing trends in men’s underwear, other than ads in magazines. Jim Palmer was one of the first celebrities to do an underwear ad; he was hairy and slim, pretty good shape but not exactly something to write home about. But it was a start, and when Calvin Klein decided to enter the market of men’s underwear, I’m sure people thought the company was crazy: why would anyone spend that much money for a single pair of underwear, when you could get several packs of three for that same price? But CK was onto something–sexy underwear that fit well, lasted a long time, and looked good was an untapped market, and of course the gays were all about fashion underwear.

And they used beautiful men with lean, ripped physiques to make their point for them. Surprise! It worked.

And Calvin kept selling us sex, and we couldn’t get enough of it. Obsession for Men became a must-have cologne, and they continued producing new scents that were popular and had enormously sexy ads. Other fashion companies began emulating the CK model (imitation is flattery and all that); designer underwear for men, colognes, after shaves, and on and on. And what was also happening were two things: the gay aesthetic for what is attractive in a man began to dominate the culture, and straight men began, oddly enough, to start dressing better, caring about their hair and shaving more, and their bodies…the rise of the ‘metrosexual.’ So say goodbye once and for all to those beefy, bulky, barrel-chested men with their high-waisted pants…

And then came the Marky Mark ad.

The great irony of homophobe and racial hate criminal Mark Wahlberg becoming a sex symbol for gay men will never stop making me laugh.

I mean, he was cute, the body was to die for, and the killer smile? And he’d already become known for dropping his pants and “performing” his music in his underwear. The Calvin Klein gig was probably a mistake for him, but he wound up with a successful film career and even was nominated for an Oscar. Goes to show, Hollywood doesn’t really care about a problematic history if you can sell tickets for them. I always had a soft spot for him, despite everything though–that first crush from seeing the video for “Good Vibrations” has never really gone away, despite knowing full well about the problematic past.

My first pair of Calvin Klein underwear changed my opinion about underwear forever. My mother always told me that the things you never skimp on–even if you have to save up money for it–are underwear, socks, and sheets. Everything else, you can buy discounted, on sale, or from bargain bins, but as long as you bought quality for those three things, they made up for everything else. Once I opened that gorgeous black and white box, and slipped them on…I was sold. I was never buying cheap underwear ever again, even if it meant having to save up money for a while to invest in the good pairs. To this day, I still wear Calvin Klein as my preference; I discovered Under Armor around 2004, but eventually went back to Calvins. I bought cheap underwear at Wal-mart after Katrina to get by until I got back to New Orleans…and regretted it. I hated the cheap socks and underwear, how they felt, how the elastic in the waistband loosened with every wear, how the material began to wear within a few weeks.

Calvin Klein introduced us to the term “underwear model” as a body type, too. Underwear model didn’t used to even be a thing; you’d only see underwear models in catalogues. Calvin Klein’s artistic spreads, with incredibly bodied models shot by the best photographers, certainly had a huge impact on culture–and certainly played a part in what I call the “gaying” of culture; in which men became sex objects in the way women always had been before.

And Mark Wahlberg’s natural progression from ‘rap’ musician who dropped his pants all the time to underwear model also changed the perception of celebrity models; if Calvin Klein wanted you for a photo spread, that meant you were fucking gorgeous–and they started including actors, dancers, and athletes to their rosters.

Number One tennis player in the world Carlos Alcaraz

I can think of several celebrities I’d like to see model for Calvin Klein–figure skater Guillaume Cizeron, several rugby players, Joe Burrow, Malik Nabers–but they also do a pretty good job of finding models.

My favorite cologne from Calvin Klein was Eternity, but it wasn’t my favorite–I liked Fahrenheit and Cool Water the best, but I stopped wearing cologne after we moved to New Orleans. In this climate, for most of the year there’s really no point in wearing it anyway.

Goodbye Baby

Tuesday morning and all is quiet at this ungodly hour.

I’m up earlier than usual because I made the decision, whilst I was out of town, that the smart thing to do was get up when I actually wake up, rather than just continuing to lie in the bed awake. It’s comfortable, to be sure, and getting out from under my pile of blankets is never an easy thing to do….but it’s also wasteful of time and staying in bed doesn’t make getting up with the alarm any easier, nor does it make me less tired later in the day. All in all, it’s not going to kill me to get up earlier, so today is my first day trying it (not really, I woke up an hour earlier than necessary yesterday and just went ahead and got up then, so this is my second day of trying this to see how it all works for me). I had errands to run after work last night and I had to write a promotional piece for another blog for A Streetcar Named Murder–there really is no worse timing than having a book coming out as you are trying to meet the deadline on another.

It’s also weird because at the same time I have to try to remember things from Streetcar, which was finished months ago, and of course I’ve moved on to something new that I need to focus on. Heavy sigh. But I think the post I wrote last night is fun and interesting, and hopefully will spark some interest in the book. I’ve also been asked to sign at an event here in New Orleans in January–I want to say ALA, but I could be wrong–and I’ve also agreed to return to the dual Murder event weekend in Alabama yet again. I think this is the fourth time I’ve been invited? I love Margaret and Tammy, and I always have a lovely time at the event.

WE started watching that Hulu series about Chippendales last night, Welcome to Chippendales, starring Kumail Nanjiani as Steve Batterjee. I’ve watched a couple of documentaries about Chippendales and the resultant murder of one of the partners, but I’d forgotten about Dorothy Stratten’s connection to the club before she was murdered (someone really needs to do another series or movie about her life and death; Star 80 was good but…). It’s entertaining enough, and Chippendales also has something to do with the societal change in the sexualization and objectification of the male body that began in the 1970’s (along with the explosion of gay porn and Playgirl, followed by Calvin Klein ads in the 1980s), as well as the beauty standard for men. I recently (it may have been longer ago than what counts as recent, but time has lost all meaning to me now) commented to one of my younger gay male co-workers that “you used to be able to tell if someone was gay or not by how well built they were; if they clearly spent time on their bodies at the gym and ate right to improve the way they looked, they were gay because straight men didn’t give a shit.” Tribal tattoos also used to be a tell that a hot guy was gay. NOT ANYMORE. And the guys today–whatever their sexual orientation–have even more amazing bodies than we used to have back in the day; the definition and the focus on ab development and the absence of any body fat is far more pronounced amongst hot young men these days than it used to be. And they are everywhere. My Instagram and Twitter feeds are often filled with beautiful shots of incredibly handsome young men with unbelievable bodies; some of which I’ve sometimes shared here on the blog. I’ve also been seriously considering going to something else with the blog images, to be honest–I know some people would miss the sexy men images, but it also might be keeping other people away at the same time. I don’t know. But I started using pictures of hot men years ago because when the blog cross-posted to social media it would always show up as with a pale blue square box with a pencil in it, which I hated. When I talked about books, the book cover would come over, so I decided to use images of very hot men that essentially pop up somewhere on the Internet throughout the course of the day and it kind of became an ingrained habit, a default if you will, perhaps even a brand–I hate thinking of myself or anything I do as a writer as a ‘brand,’ and yes, I do recognize that my writing is a product for sale, but it’s not a pack of T-shirts or underwear or a pair of pants hanging on a sales rack. So, do I really want my ‘brand’ for my blog to be sexy shirtless men?

Probably a little late to worry about that now.

The Chippendales calendar–how many years did I buy that? I can remember being deathly afraid to take it to the cash register at the bookstore…but now that I am thinking about it, I don’t remember which bookstores I used to patronize in Fresno. Perhaps a Barnes and Noble at the mall? A Waldenbooks, maybe? But yes, I used to feel my face burning with embarrassment as I tried to nonchalantly buy a Chippendales calendar, all the while thinking the cashier knows I am gay because why else would I be buying this calendar? Now I laugh at the memory of the shame I used to feel. The cashier couldn’t have given two shits about what I was buying, and even if they did, who cares? I had always been attracted more to athletes than any other type of male; I always had a thing for muscles and worked out bodies. Why, I don’t know; whether I was simply wired that way for physical attraction, or if it’s because the first naked bodies of men that I saw were those of athletes in school. Junior high was the first time I ever had to change into gym clothes, shower and be around other naked boys, and I was never comfortable doing so. The locker room before and after gym in junior high was a nightmare, but once I was in high school and on sports teams…the boys I was attracted to were usually athletes. That never really changed over the years as I got older and grew more comfortable with my sexuality–what changed were the bodies. Whereas only athletes and dancers, gay men, and narcissistic straight men used to regularly go to the gym and work out their bodies to build muscle, gradually it became a thing for all men across the board, regardless of orientation. On the rare occasions when I go to the gym now, I see incredibly well-built and well-muscled young men all the time–and while thirty years ago I would have assumed they were gay or bisexual, now I can’t assume anything. I just marvel at the shift in societal attitudes towards men no longer in school who continue to exercise and work out–whether to be healthier or for something to show off and attract women, who knows?

But aesthetically, I appreciate them.

So, the quandary remains. Do I try to rebrand the blog by using other types of pictures, and if so, what kind should I start using? Would people miss the hot guys? Would more people be drawn to the blog rather than closing the browser window as soon as the hot guy loads?

Or do I just not worry about it–as I have never worried about people coming here to read the entries–and keep on as I have been? Decisions, decisions.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader, and I will talk to you again tomorrow.