And now for something completely different. On 10/31 it was densely nerdy marveling at the words calceology, telamon, and hallux — I should probably have issued a technical-linguistics warning on that one — but today it’s underwear models (in a Daily Jocks e-mail ad from 9/26) wearing minimal tighty-whities that display the carnal attractions of their bodies, fore and aft, in intimate detail, hot stuff definitely calling for a male-sex-content warning. And then there are racy bonuses: the male couple in the ad is interracial, and the one presenting as a receptive / bottom is celebrated as an equal partner to the one presenting as an insertive / top.
Just to remind you: these are photos of male models playing characters in a sexual story (loosely playing with the image of a wolf pack) for a receptive audience, a story that’s intended to be at least sexually pleasing — or, better, actually arousing — to this audience and thereby to sell more of the company’s wares (DJ is an Australian company, here selling items from The Pack underwear company, distributed by Dragon Label Limited in Hong Kong). I’ve given these characters Italian names: Nero ‘black’ (note: in Italian, Nero is pronounced roughly like English neigh-roe) for the black receptive partner (who brings his tight muscular buttocks and its anal prize to the encounter, plus a focused and open facial expression) and Lupo ‘wolf’ for the white insertive partner (who brings his crotch and its genital prizes to the encounter, plus a decidedly feral facial expression, at least in the first of three photos).
(#1)
The e-mail ad photo. The first of three telling the story of Nero and Lupo, here presenting the two men as an intimate couple, bound to one another. With Lupo displaying his most wolfish face
(#2) Nero has his right hand on Lupo’s left hip, drawing him closer, with Lupo’s left hand covering Nero’s; with his other hand Lupo is firmly clasping one of Nero’s buttocks, making it and Nero’s anal cleft one of the foci of the photo; meanwhile, Lupo’s penis and one large testicle are lovingly outlined in Lupo’s briefs (an effect that many men find more arousing that a raw display of naughty bits)
If the two men are being framed as a (breeding) pair of wolves in a pack, and Lupo is so profoundly, ferally wolfish, coming on as the (intensely masculine) alpha wolf of folk ethology, the wolf in charge of the pack, then Nero (who looks not at all lupine) must be (at least metaphorically) his female partner: apparently, Nero has been cast as feminine and subordinate, whose function is to serve the dominant male sexually.
But, but … Contrary to what many viewers would take to be the obvious reading of the visible signals given off by the two characters in this sexual story, it’s possible to understand #2 as an image of two men — one a devoted bottom, one a devoted top — in an equal and loving partnership, each man giving the other what he most deeply desires sexually, each man asking for this service from the other. This is in fact the even-handed attitude that The Pack underwear company adopts on its website (and conveys in its ad images):
JOIN THE CLUB …of weirdos, individualists, proactivists, over the top bottoms, muscle mary’s, party kings & queens, daddies, bears, otters and everyone in between.
We’re all here and there’s enough room for all of us to live our most authentic selves.
Join ThePack, lead your Pack, and we’ll cover your ass. Literally!
The company offers trunks, harnesses, thongs, briefs, shorts, armbands, chokers, chest chains, bodices, and handcuffs; and boasts that it has both Bussy (gender-fluid) and Bossy (“be a boss”) lines. Wait! Bodices? These are definitely Bussy garments, and these bodices —
(#3) A lacy garment, one of several bodices for men on offer from The Pack
— are a flight of men’s kinky underwear fashion that appear to involve a recent semantic development of an old underwear-usage term bodice, as in NOAD‘s sense b:
noun bodice: [a] the close-fitting upper part of a dress, covering the chest and back above the waist. [b] mainly historical a sleeveless, close-fitting waist-length garment, typically lacing up in the front, worn over a dress or blouse or as underwear. ORIGIN mid 16th century (originally bodies): plural of body, retaining the original pronunciation. The term probably first denoted an undergarment, then known as a pair of bodice, although this sense is not recorded until the early 17th century.
The coding of racioethnicity and sexual position. In any case, the photos in Daily Jocks are dense with the coding of race (or, more generally, racioethnicity) and (what’s often labeled) sexual position (meaning, crudely, the role a man takes in anal intercourse, either in a particular encounter or by general inclination); both of these constructs are enormously complex, not only in their visible aspects. but also in the psychological values associated with them, and there is enormous variability in how these matters work out for individual people. The complexity of the constructs is a lot more than I can handle in this posting, which will, however, go on at alarming length on the coding of racioethnicity and sexual position via various concrete and perceptible signifiers (intrinsic, like facial characteristics and hair type; and imposed, like the choices of facial hair and hair style).
Digression: the posing of the bodies in #2. Conveying the joining of receptive and insertive, and presenting them as an intimate couple. Drawing on Greek myth, I’ll call this the Ganymede-Zeus pose (GZ for short). With a variety of racioethnicities, GZ is something of a staple in gay porn p.r. stills and in homo-oriented men’s underwear ads. As it happens, my 11/3 e-mail brought me a GZ ad for a sale on Lucas Entertainment’s gay porn:
(#4) [e-mail header:] NEW SCENE: Roque Rems & Austin Ponce | Gay Underwear Fetish
On the left: bottom Austin Ponce, Colombian-native twink who’s a devoted and enthusiastic bottom (he’s able to serve as top, but advertises his ass), with a stunningly white skin tone (but Latino facial features). On the right: top Roque Rems, a lean and muscular Latino who’s exclusively a top, with a warm brown skin tone.
But the poses in #2 and #4 differ in only minor details. Two variants of GZ.
On to the main events, about signifiers.
Signifiers in general. A bit earlier in this posting I distinguished two kinds of signifiers:
intrinsic, like facial characteristics and hair type; and imposed, like the choices of facial hair and hair style
With a certain amount of allowance for deliberate alterations, intrinsic signifiers are the ones nature gave you, and imposed signifiers are the ones you create for yourself. Nero has a number of intrinsic characteristics that mark him as of (sub-Saharan) African extraction (hence, “black” for short) — his lips and his hair type, in particular; while Lupo has thinner “white” lips and similarly “white” springy-curly hair. In addition, Nero has chosen to style his hair in a cut that’s current in some African-diaspora communities, in a “black” cut (which has, of course, been adopted by some white men who like the look on themselves and find it fashionable); while Lupo has chosen a characteristically “white”cut.
Digression on Nero’s hair style. Viewed in isolation, cropped from #2:
(#5) Nero’s buzzfade with rows (with a close-up of the pendant on Nero’s ear stud; both the right-ear location of the stud and the pendant — the dangly earring — are signifiers, the first a signifier of sexual position, details to follow; the second, a signifier of some kind of fashionableness, again with some details to follow)
First it looks like a buzz cut. From NOAD:
noun buzz cut: a haircut in which all the hair is cut very close to the scalp.
But it also looks like a very short fade cut. From NOAD:
noun fade: … 3 a haircut in which the hair is left long on top of the head but cropped close to the sides and back with the length of hair gradually decreasing: a fade is extremely versatile and can be adjusted to different hair types and lengths.
So: my invented term buzzfade. Fades are a characteristically “black” cut (buzz cuts are a racioethnically all-purpose style, with a variety of significations), and buzzfades are as well.
Then, Nero’s cut has shaved stripes in it. In a very common, characteristically “black”, hairstyle, the stripes run side-to-side; they’re called waves. In another common, characteristically “black”, hairstyle, the stripes run back-to-front, and the unshaved hair is long enough to be braided into what are called cornrows. What Nero has are the back-to-front stripes, with unshaved hair too short to be braided. What I’ve chosen to call just rows; so a buzzfade with rows.
(Now I confess that I spent hours trying to find an example of a guy with Nero’s hairstyle. Lots of fades, lots of cornrows, lots of waves, but nothing just like Nero’s. This was disappointing, but the search pleased me greatly, because sites about haircut styles use male models for illustrations, not just guys off the street, so I got hundreds of really fine-looking black guys to look at; for complex personal reasons, I’m partial to black men.)
Back to signifiers in general. That concludes what I have to say for the moment about the racioethnic signifiers in #2. Though I’ll issue two general cautions about signifiers.
First caution: signifiers are, as I am fond of saying, just stuff. People imbue them with signification, but they can take on many different (sociocultural) meanings for different people in different contexts at different times. There is no such thing as what they really mean.
Second caution, about point of view (this is a subclause of the first caution): your intention in choosing a signifier — what you are trying to say (with, for example, your choice of hairstyle or your choice of which ear to put a stud in) — can differ substantially from other people’s interpretation of your choices — what (various) people understand you to be saying through your choices. There is plenty of room here for misunderstandings.
Signifiers of sexuality. These will lead to signifiers of sexual position, though a bit of everyday analogical associations in our culture. In compressed form:
(#6) The domains of sex, sexuality (for men), and sexual position (for gay men) analogized; these analogies allow vocabulary and imagery from one domain to be carried over to a parallel domain
The signifiers of female vs. male and the signifiers of gay vs. straight (for men) now become relevant as possible signifiers of bottom vs. top (for gay men), through these analogies. So we see intrinsic characteristics that are culturally associated with females vs. males being taken as markers of gay vs. straight — as when larger, wider-set eyes (vs. narrower, closer eyes), associated with women vs. men, are then taken to be markers of gayness in men because they are “feminine”and “soft”; similarly with “weak” chins (vs. square jaws) and fine hair (vs. thicker hair).
Note that Nero in #2 has relatively large “soft” eyes and a “weak” chin — marking him as “feminine” , and therefore gay. So does his smooth, hairless body. Lupo, in contrast, has “masculine” eyes and chin, and a “masculine” hairy body, so he reads as straight. Those are intrinsic signifiers, but then there are his extensive tattoos (vs. Nero’s inklessness), an imposed, chosen signifier of masculinity. Of course, we know that this character is in fact gay, because he’s in an intimate, loving relationship with another man, a relationship represented in the first of the three images from Daily Jocks. But the signifiers chug on anyway, setting up an intriguing tension and a pleasing reversal of expectation.
It now turns out that there are more intriguing tensions and reversals of expectations in the DJ Pack ad. Some exposed in the second of the three images — with Nero and Lupo facing the world together, in their matching genital-display mini-briefs, while adorably holding hands:
(#7) DJ’s second image of Nero and (a still-feral) Lupo, now presented as equal partners — well, actually, with Nero literally having the upper hand, his left hand clasped atop Lupo’s right (indicating his being in control); and with Nero apparently having the larger penis, so with two signs of male sex, straight sexuality, and top sexual position for the feminine queer bottom
There’s a great deal to unpack here. With no pretense as to completeness and in no particular order: on the handedness of sexual signifiers; on skin tone and racioethnicity; on the factor of control; on the wolf pack analogy; and on the fashionableness of ear pendants.
The handedness of sexual signifiers. There was a time in my country, back in the 60s and 70s, when ear studs for men became fashionable, and for some men, a single stud served as a sexual signifier: a stud in the right ear served as a sexual advertisement by gay men; so a stud in the left ear served as a denial of homosexuality, consequently a signal of straightness.
At roughly the same time, the famous gay hanky code appeared: a bandanna in the right back pocket indicating you were receptive / bottom / seeking / passive; on the left, that you were, correspondingly, insertive / top / offering /active — with the color of the bandanna indicating the sexual act or characteristic of the man flagging that color. Dark blue, for example, was a code for anal sex; mustard a code for a big penis; and so on. (I was a dark-blue on-the-right guy, and yes, the bandanna worked for me as intended.)
At roughly the same time, other choices of accessories — armbands, wristcuffs and bracelets — joined earrings in taking on this range of significations in queer and bdsm contexts, as well as serving as markers for gay / feminine / effeminate (or fem) (vs. straight / masculine / macho (or butch)).
These three cultural phenomena were no doubt closely related, but I lack the resources to examine how the history developed. They are all, however, remarkable in the way they associate a side of the body with sexual matters.
The “natural” association of sides of the body with sexual, gender, and sexuality content takes off from the right hand as the hand of the great majority of people; the right hand is the “normal” hand and also the stronger, dominant, hence more aggressive hand, so the right side would be seen as a sign of “normal” — straight — sexuality and of the stronger, more dominant, more aggressive sex — male — and of the insertive / top / active participant in anal sex. That would make the left side a sign of “abnormal” — gay — sexuality and of the weaker, more subordinate, more agreeable sex — female — and of the receptive / bottom / passive participant in anal sex. This assignment of associations is congruent with the left hand as the “dirty” hand, for use in acts prohibited in public, including sexual ones like masturbation.
But these are not the associations of sides of the body with sexual, gender, and sexuality content that we see in earrings, bandannas, and the rest, all of which are, we might legitimately say, perverse, in that they elevate disfavored desires, practices, and identities by associating them with the naturally favored side of the body — chorusing, in effect, “I am faggot, I am pussy-ass, I am flaming queen, hear me roar!” Once we’ve taken that side of the body as ours, straights, tops, and butches get the other side, so as not to be taken for trash like us.
Skin tone and racioethnicity. We’ve already seen racioethnic signifiers, both intrinsic and imposed, in the first two DJ Pack images; to reduce things to the simplest terminology, Nero has “black hair”, cut in a “black” hair style, as well as “black” facial features; and Lupo has “white hair” cut in a “white” hair style, as well as “white” facial features.
Meanwhile, Nero’s skin tone is, like so many “black” people’s, a warm shade of brown. And like the skin of so many “white” people from around the Mediterranean Sea, so is Lupo’s. Nero’s skin tone, in fact, appears to be a bit lighter than Lupo’s.
These things are enormously complex. It might be that Nero’s skin tone has a yellowish or reddish tinge lacking in Lupo’s. It might be that Nero is racioethnically “black”, tracing back to sub-Saharan Africa, but not from the diaspora of formerly enslaved Africans (to the US; to various parts of the Caribbean and then perhaps on to elsewhere, like England; to Brazil, etc. — and then mixed with other racioethnicities, each location having its own range of characteristically “black” bodily features), instead coming more recently directly from Africa, indeed from South Africa or East Africa rather than the West African territory that provided the bulk of historical enslavement by Europeans. In any case, Nero’s racioethnicity is signaled by many characteristics other than skin tone. As is Lupo’s — Lupo possibly being of, say, Greek, Sicilian, or Occitanian extraction.
The factor of control. Finally, DJ’s third image of Nero and Lupo, in which Nero presents himself as the independent parter, facing the world (us) and holding the waistbands of the two men’s briefs together as a sign of the coupledom; while Lupo inclines his face lovingly against Nero’s and puts an arm around Nero’s shoulder. Very sweet. But if this were an announcement for the weddings section of a newspaper, Nero would be the husband, Lupo the wife. Independent and dominant — in charge, in control — vs. dependent and subordinate.
I now take you to my writing about b/t roles in gay porn, a notion that can be applied to real-life relationships as well as fictional ones. (There’s a Page on this blog of annotated links to my postings on b vs. t.) From my posting on AZBlogX on 12/18/10 on “The Bombardier 4: b/t”:
Back in 2005-6 I came to appreciate just how pervasive a particular kind of relationship is in male-male pairings in gay porn — so pervasive that you can make pretty good predictions about how a sexual encounter will unfold from various pieces of background information about the men. (The whole topic is vast and subtle; I’m doing just a little piece of it here.)
The pieces of background information are those that have to do with relative degrees of gayness and with relative degrees of masculinity (warning: these are sociocultural properties, not characteristics given in nature.) Also important is who’s “in charge” during the encounter. [AZ in 2023: a matter of agency and control]… The roles are what I’ll call b (an extension of “bottom”) for the gayer man and t (an extension of “top”) for the more masculine man.
When you enumerate points for femininity vs. masculinity and points for markers of gayness vs. straightness, together contributing to the role b vs. the role t, it’s Nero with almost all the b points and Lupo with almost all the t points:
— Nero has a stud in his right ear, with a pendant; no visible ink; a smooth body, feminine eyes, elegant small ears; is a bit shorter; has a pleasant, open facial expression; is a bottom
— Lupo has a stud in his left ear, no pendant; notable tats; a hairy body, masculine eyes, big ears; is a bit taller; has a threatening, feral facial expression; is a top
There are a few contrary physical characteristics: Nero has broader shoulders and a bigger dick. But then people come with the bodies nature gave them, so not everything will be aligned in one way.
We get no information about their social lives from these contextless photos; what we see is all we get, though for characters in fiction and for real-life people these characteristics make important contributions to b and t points. There are, for example, high-femininity and high-masculinity occupations as well as high-straight and high-gay occupations; what if it turns out that Nero is a telephone lineman while Lupo is a hairdresser? Similarly for other social indicators: what if Nero is a fanatic sports fan, while Lupo is a devoted opera fan? what if Nero is a meat-and-potatoes guy, no fancy food, while Lupo adores haute cuisine? what if Nero is a country-life guy, who likes to grow his own food and raise some animals, while Lupo is a city-life boy, happiest where there are shops and museums, little bodegas and fancy restaurants? And so on. (I’m deliberately exaggerating, of course, but you should see the point.)
We don’t know anything about any of that, but we do have that pictorial evidence about agency and control within the two men’s relationship, and that points to Nero as the man in charge, which gives him lots of t points, reversing our expectations about the two men’s natures. Producing a nice tension in their presentations of themselves.
The wolf pack analogy. Despite the even-handed attitude that The Pack underwear company adopts (see above), the DJ ads tap into folk-cultural understandings of wolf packs, and Lupo looks alarmingly ! wolfish in the first two of DJ’s images. In my 1/14/22 posting “Folk ethology: wolves”, I looked at
two metaphorical uses of wolf (and wolf-related vocabulary) that get their punch from common lore about wolves and their behavior: one from a particular sociocultural context in which men have sex with other men; one from a different particular sociocultural context in which men relate socially to women and other men. The first context is from working-class Harlem of the 1920s; the second from recent alpha male self-help / self-improvement literature aimed at striving American middle-class, largely professional, men.
… [On the first case, material from] A.B. Crista Schwarz’s Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (2003) on Claude McCay, especially his 1928 novel Home to Harlem (p. 107)
… The role of wolf / man [vs. other men labeled as either punks or fairies] in McKay’s world combines aspects of top (vs. bottom) (more generally insertive (vs. receptive)), dominant (vs. subordinate), butch (vs. fem), regular guy (vs. faggot), and Daddy (vs. Boy) — all of these being various kinds of reinscription, in the world of male-male sexual (MMS) relations, of male-female sexual (MFS) relations in the heterosexual world.
In the MMS world, a man in the wolf-like role — call him a lupinus ‘a wolfish man’ — is the counterpart of the male in the MFS world (who is, by some of his behavior at least, a heterosexual, or straight, guy, though his desires and sources of pleasure might be anywhere in the sexual landscape); consequently, in the popular understanding of sexual roles, a lupinus often picks up the positive valuation of the male in the MFS world and avoids much of the normative opprobrium associated with participation in the MMS world.
So it’s (sort of) ok to engage in MMS relations, so long as you’re a lupinus, taking the “male” role. Certainly if you’re just occasionally using another man — who is “really” homo / gay / queer — to get off, and possibly also to provide you with the emotional pleasure of dominating another man, demonstrating your superiority over him, “winning” a sexual competition with him.
The world of lupini is, of course, as diverse as other social worlds, varying in all sorts of dimensions. There are what you might call “hard-shell” lupini, like the guy I described in the previous paragraph. Many who don’t identify as belonging to the MMS world at all, or who are occasional visitors to this world. But also men like McKay’s lupinus Billy, who fully belong to this world. And then within that group, lupini who are emotionally distant sexual partners and those who are affectionate; lupini who are inclined to forming longer-term partnerships and those who mostly trick; lupini who are sexually selfish partners and those who are attentive; and more.
The lupinus role is scarcely confined to the working class, but it’s stereotypically associated with the working class, and it’s clearly common there.
[On the second case:] So far, the metaphorical wolves in this posting appear as individuals. They are, as the idiom goes, lone wolves.
… This is not the typical state of wolves, which are pack animals.
… About wolf packs there’s a considerable ethological literature, plus an equally considerable fund of [often quite preposterous pop-cultural] folk-ethological story-telling, the key point of which is the structure of the pack, centered on a dominant male … the alpha male
[Then:] From Wikipedia:
A dominance hierarchy, formerly and colloquially called a pecking order, is a type of social hierarchy that arises when members of animal social groups interact, creating a ranking system. In social living groups, members are likely to compete for access to limited resources and mating opportunities. Rather than fighting each time they meet, relative rank is established between members of the same sex. Based on repetitive interactions, a social order is created that is subject to change each time a dominant animal is challenged by a subordinate one. In mammals, a dominant individual is sometimes called an alpha, and the lower rank is sometimes termed a beta.
In addition to realizing the necessity of change, this brief account allows for a considerable amount of looseness in the rankings, for contexts in which competitive behavior is replaced by cooperation, for different rankings for different purposes, for subversions of the hierarchies, and so on. Dominance hierarchies also seem to work differently for different species. But they do seem to constitute a real, though complex, phenomenon in wolf groups.
The leap to human beings, however, is an enormous one. Dominance and submission play a variety of roles in human life, yes, but there’s no reason to think that wolf behavior maps in any detail onto human behavior.
Given all of this literature, when I look at the wolf-pack allusions and the implicit alpha/beta-male allusions in the DJ photos and in the name The Pack for the underwear company, I conclude that these allusions are in fact largely ornamental — entertaining, but providing no fresh insight into Nero and Lupo and their relationship.
The fashionableness of ear pendants. From the New York Times on-line on 11/12/19, “Why Men Are Embracing the Single Dangly Earring: Men with ear jewelry are a thing. Just ask Lil Nas X, Harry Styles and any K-pop star” by Max Berlinger (in print on 11/14, with a different title):
It glistens, it sways, it frames your face. It’s the dangly earring, and it’s hanging from men’s lobes everywhere.
Lil Nas X, the rapper cowboy, often pairs his fringed western jackets with a gold cross swinging from his left ear.
Odell Beckham Jr., the heavily tattooed N.F.L. wide receiver, prefers wearing a gold cross on his right ear, whether he’s in his Cleveland Browns uniform or a Thom Browne tuxedo.
And the K-pop star Kang Daniel, formerly a member of the band Wanna One, is often photographed with dangly earrings that bounce like his floppy bangs.
The trend has made its way to mainstream retailers like Urban Outfitters, which offers single earrings for men shaped like keys or safety pins for $15.
It has also permeated internet culture, with dangly men’s earrings popping up in TikTok videos and various memes. Zach Clayton, a 19-year-old internet celebrity who lives in Los Angeles, recently observed on Twitter: “I just went on TikTok for the first time in so damn long and every dude on there has one dangling earring.”
Fashion designers have been quick to co-opt the trend, perhaps sensing that men’s dangly earrings are well suited for our nonbinary gender moment.
Dangling earrings were sent down the runway at numerous men’s wear shows earlier this year, including at Celine, Balenciaga and Gucci. (Harry Styles wore a single Gucci earring to the Met Gala in May, causing a social media frenzy.)
When paired with traditional men’s garments, the single earring can “give a subversive edge to smarter looks,” said Nick Paget, the senior men’s wear editor at the fashion forecasting firm WSGN, in an email.
Mr. Paget added that it tracks with a broader evolution in men’s fashion. “We’re definitely charting soft masculinity,” he said. “We’ve been talking for a couple of seasons about a different kind of masculinity — soft but not fragile. It’s for men who aren’t afraid of experimenting with their look and will probably have enlightened views on gender roles, or at least be comfortable enough with their own sexuality.”
It’s likely no coincidence, too, that these earrings have proliferated as social media platforms like Instagram have put focus on the face. The dangly earring is a fashion flourish that invites social media sharing.
But the single men’s earring predates social media, of course, with early examples going as far back as 17th-century England.
“There’s a real historical element to this trend,” Mr. Paget said, adding that the pearl drop earrings at the Givenchy men’s wear show last June had “a dandyish appeal that evokes the pioneering spirit of Tudor explorers such as Sir Francis Drake, reminiscent of portraits of the era.”
More contemporary precedents include George Michael’s door knocker of a crucifix, which he wore on his left ear for his 1987 album, “Faith,” and Rob Lowe’s character in “St. Elmo’s Fire,” who wore a silver crucifix on his right ear.
Unlike the 1980s, however, the current trend defies neat labels; the debate on whether there is a so-called gay ear is long over.
As Erin Schwartz wrote in GQ recently, dangly earrings are “the roller skates of ear jewelry” and “totally without practical use and extremely fun.” Likewise Brock Colyar, writing for The Cut, said, “the single dangly truly does not discriminate.”
In other words, everyone can join in the fun.
“What it means to be a man isn’t as black and white anymore as society once made it out to be,” said Christopher Morency, an editor at Highsnobiety. “At the end of the day, an earring is an earring, and with societal lines around masculinity changing, no longer is the accessory limited to one gender.”
So Nero’s dangly earring is a sign of his fashionableness and his “soft masculinity” (vs. Lupo’s harder-edged masculinity) — an aspect of his presentation of self — rather than a sign of his sex, sexuality, or sexual position.