(Men’s bodies, underwear, snarky captions, and some slang.)
A recent offer from Daily Jocks, SUP BRO t-shirts from the Australian company Supawear:
(#1)
That’s my shirt bro
It comes from A U
I’m Buster Brown
Look for me down there too
The Supawear firm likes to play on its name — as here, with the play on AmE slang ‘sup, bro?, short for whassup, bro?, a casual-speech variant (probably originally from black street speech) of what’s up, bro?, combining the informal idiomatic query what’s up? with the address term bro, which (like ‘sup?) has diffused from black street speech into much wider use among young men.
From GDoS:
what’s up? (also ‘sup? wassup? whassup? wha’s up? what up? whazzap? wuzzup? ‘zup?) 1 a general enquiry or greeting [first cite 1855] 2 what’s the matter? esp. in what’s up with you/her? etc. [first cite 1837] 3 what is happening? what’s going on? [first cite 1912]
what’s up, G? (also what up G?) (orig. US black) a greeting [1991 cite as campus slang; other cites from black sources] with [generic address term] G (derived from ‘Gangster’) ‘Whasup G?’
The main entry lists syntactic variants (what up?, with omitted auxiliary, alongside what’s up?) and phonological variants (what’s up?, wassup?, ‘sup?; variation between /a/ and /ʌ/ in the variants of what; variation between /s/ and /z/ in the reduced auxiliary) and possibly mere orthographic variation. The full range of facts about the variants and their contexts of use is extremely complex; a dictionary can’t be expected to go much beyond cataloguing the variants that occur in texts and mentioning a few of the social parameters that seem to be relevant.
Bro is complex as well. From a 4/28/16 posting:
The story of the address term bro in relatively recent years begins with its use by black men to black men, roughly (but not exactly) like the widely used American buddy — a term of male affiliation. It then spread into the wider culture, serving as a mark of male solidarity. This is what I called in a 4/12/16 posting “good”, positive, bro. But male solidarity tends to come with a dark side: rejection of anything perceived as feminine, played out as sturdy misogyny and homo-hatred in general; and the elevation of boys’ clubs (formed for whatever reasons) to boys-only clubs, aggressively hostile to women and to men perceived as inferior. When these guys use bro to address (or refer to) one another, then we’ve got what I called “bad”, negative, bro.
Regular use of bad bro between men in groups, for instance by fraternity boys and so-called brogrammers, has led to a steady pejoration of the term for people outside those male groups; bro is now a tainted term for many people, calling up unpleasant images of aggressive masculinity.
Bro has made its way to Australia, where it seems to fit in well with the macho strain in the culture. The Supaware ads play on it as a marker of male solidarity and combine that edgily with the homoerotic currents of premium men’s underwear advertising in general, and Supaware in particular: the advertising is offering underwear, swimwear, and gymwear, but it’s also offering the model’s bodies as objects of desire.
Here’s the model in #1 displaying his body in Supawear Rainforest briefs:
(#2)
In the Cairns
Rainforest,
Buster became a
Fruit bat.
A frontal offer, of a smoothly masculine body. Another frontal offer, from the European firm Code 22, this time a scruffily masculine body:
(#3)
El Caimán
Lays in wait for
Spanish boys in
La laguna azul.
On to the often outrageous Canadian firm PUMP! From a 9/2/15 posting about
[PUMP!’s] larger catalogue, which tends to feature underwear models “projecting steamy desirability” (as I put it in my Rafael Nadal posting) — in fact projecting a male-hustler persona while teasingly flaunting the pleasures of their bodies.
And on 11/9/15:
PUMP! specializes in gym-oriented images (pumping iron and all that), though they also have a few pretty-boy models and a lot of models doing the slutty rentboy look
Their models do front displays in bodywear that sets off their pouches strikingly, and several models specialize in rear displays — for example:
(#4)
(#5)
L’Ami en Rose, from his
Tattoo and the song, sometimes
Le Miracle de la Rose, from the
Rosebud of his body, à la Genet.
