Another installment of material on the (gay) porn register, following up on this posting, where I looked at some lexical features, saying about
man pussy, boy pussy, man cunt, boy cunt, man hole, [and] boy hole. These are terms strongly associated with gay porn (fiction, scripts of videos, and descriptions of videos) but not much used by gay men in everyday life; they are part of a specialized porn register, akin to the specialized registers in some other domains
Today there’s some more lexical stuff, but mostly it’s about the prosody of some writing about porn; like some other advertising copy, there’s some tendency for it to fall into metrically regular patterns.
The text is the copy on the front cover of the Dream World (1994) DVD:
(This image is cropped so as to eliminate naughty bits; the full image can be viewed on AZBlogX, here, along with some write-up about the flick.)
Lexical notes: the N – N compounds dick-pig and man-meat. The first I have heard in real life (though not often), to refer to a man who is an avid fellator (aka cock junkie). The second I have never encountered except in porn writing, where it’s one of a number of variants of cock or dick that writers use to avoid repeating these vernacular-standard terms; the strategy is a kind of “elegant variation”. In any case, thick man-meat is a frequent collocation, particularly satisfying because of the echo of dick in thick (as well as the actual semantic contribution of thick, thickness being, a desirable property of dicks), though
The text above comes in two parts — the maker’s copy and a quote from a TLA Video review, which is not metrical, though it has the half-rhyme dudes / chew and the rhyme shit / spit. The maker’s coipy, however, is three lines of trochaic tetrameter (with some short feet and some extra unaccented syllables.
Cock suckin’ dick pig Ethan Wright: SWW SW SW S
Offers up his hot mouth: SW SW S S
Slobbering and swallowing thick man-meat: SWWW SWW S SW
I’m not claiming that the writers of this copy were aiming at trochaic tetrameter, only that in English this metrical pattern comes naturally to writers essaying short forms.
The back cover copy (visible on AZBlogX) continues the pattern (and is heavy with porn lexical items):
Hot sweaty man loads: S SW S S
Sucking and riding huge, stiff cocks: SWW SW SW S
But the ad copy isn’t metrical:
Some people spend all their time dreaming about sex; the feel, the taste, the smell, the fantasy. Welcome to the world of David Bradley, a frustrated stud who spends his days dreaming about men.
Only stud suggests that this comes from the porn register.
To come: more Ethan Wright movies and overheated ad copy.
