(It’s about slang, but there are going to be buttocks, mostly men’s, some startlingly bare, so this posting will not to be everyone’s taste.)
Following up on yesterday’s posting “Buttocks III: (mainstream) art, male art, porn”, Timothy Riddle offered some recently fashionable slang for ‘buttocks’: the M(ass) noun cake, as used by (straight) pornstar Johnny Stone (who has a famously fine ass, and is proud of it, even though it’s not an especially relevant feature in his porn work); and by DC Comics on its Twitter site, showing a photo of the superhero Nightwing (the former Robin / Dick Grayson), played by Brenton Thwaites, who’s also famous for his fine ass, which is much featured on the series.
So: into still more buttocks slang, both M cake and (more commonly) PL C(ount) cakes.
The recent quotes, of M cake:
Johnny Stone. Riddle reports him as having posted on Instagram:
I’d like to date a woman with more cake than me.
in combination with an image of Stone’s ample cake, perhaps this one:
(#1)
Then from a johnnystonecb tweet on Twaku (a Twitter online web viewer), full-body nudity, cake in the air:
(#2)
From the Pornhub profile for Stone: born 10/31/97 in Manhattan KS; his statement there:
here to show you why I consider this art and bring positivity to sex-workers all over!!! here for a good time not a long time but that doesn’t mean I can’t be kind
Nightwing. Riddle reported that DC Comics used M cake on Twitter in the sentence
Can you see the cake here?
while showing a photo of the superhero Nightwing. From my 9/28/19 posting “Gender notes: the pinup push”:
From The Mary Sue site, “We’re All Kinds Of Obsessed With Nicola Scott’s Nightwing Drawing Highlighting His Assets: Gotham’s ass indeed”, by Kate Gardner on 9/20/19:
(#3) [#1 caption:] Dick Grayson evolves into pinup-push Nightwing[from Mary Sue] The title says it all. In her latest art depicting DC characters like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman throughout the years, comics artist Nicola Scott drew the evolution of Nightwing, a.k.a. Dick Grayson, ending with art of him in a pose usually reserved for male artists drawing female characters, and we’re totally obsessed with it. It’s about damn time that men had to push their tush out alongside their female counterparts.
A pose signifying (women’s) sexual availability, with a long history, but especially as made famous by movie star Betty Grable in 1943 (#2 in the earlier posting):
(#4)
Slang notes. I’m not able to judge the extent to which M cake ‘buttocks’ is actually now fashionable, but both PL C cakes and M cake are slang of long standing, having been attested for at least 50 years.
PL C cakes — serving as a parallel to the more common buns (both of them metaphorical, turning on the resemblance of buttocks to foostuffs). In GDoS, first reported in U.S. gay usage (first cite in 1972), but then in wider usage. On the other hand, GDoS also has more recent slang (cite from 1997), from U.S. campus usage, of M cake for the female posterior specifically — with examples “Check out her cake” and “I’d like a piece of her cake”.
Meanwhile, from HDAS for the noun cake, sense 2c:
pl. Black E. the buttocks; BUNS (with Black English cites from 1971 on, all about women’s buttocks: “spreads her cakes like the whore she is”; “Sweetie, lose three inches off those cakes, pump coupla jolts in the tits, and I’ll make you the cover girl of Nigeria” “I’ve been hot on her cakes for years”).
As always, the questions are: who has used the form, when, to whom, in what contexts, for what purposes? Obviously, there’s a multiplicity of uses here, with a lot to be mapped.
The title of this posting. A playful allusion (incorporating two highjacked slang buttocks references, cake(s) and tail) to the title of a novel. From Wikipedia:
Cakes and Ale, or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard (1930) is a novel by the British author W. Somerset Maugham. Maugham exposes the misguided social snobbery levelled at the character Rosie Driffield, whose frankness, honesty, and sexual freedom make her a target of conservative propriety. Her character is treated favourably by the book’s narrator, Ashenden, who understands that she was a muse to the many artists who surrounded her, and who himself enjoyed her sexual favours.
Maugham drew his title from the remark of Sir Toby Belch to Malvolio in William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” Cakes and ale are also the emblems of the good life in the moral of the fable attributed to Aesop, “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse”: “Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear.”
(I read the book in grade school, third or fourth grade — I was an intellectually precocious child — and was deeply impressed by its theme of otherness, which spoke to my condition even then.)
And then there’s Maugham and his homosexuality, an open secret in his social circle. See my 4/22/16 posting “More on open secrecy”.