(Manual sex acts as the theme, discussed in both clinical and street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
This is very much a Mary, Queen of Scots, Not Dead Yet posting. I failed to get a Hot Hunks of Christmas posting out yesterday, though I was close to finishing it, when at 2:20 in the afternoon, my net access (also my phone and my cable tv) went down for 6 hours, derailing my life (and marooning me from contact with the outside world). Now I offer you this small, unambitious posting, just to show that I have not indeed died. (My medical state is a strange mixture of, on the one hand, terrible incapacitation and constant pain, and, on the other, absolutely splendid recovery on some fronts. But I have gotten this day as a gift to use. To write for you.)
I bring you this Irish radio report on the recent Golden Globes awards (quoted yesterday on Facebook):
The Cork actor [Cillian Murphy, in Oppenheimer] beat off fellow Irishmen Barry Keoghan and Andrew Scott [in the competition for Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Motion Picture], as well as Leonardo Di Caprio and Bradley Cooper.
Commenters picked up the inadvertent double entendre in beat off, one quipping and boy were his arms tired! (suggesting a malady of wankarm, the manual counterpart of the well-known oral-sex affliction cockjaw). Gay male readers might have read the Irish radio report as the fulfillment of an extraordinary fantasy, of getting off all four of these hot actors in single encounter.
From NOAD on the phrasal verb beat off:
1 [a] succeed in resisting an attacker or attack: we beat off the raiders with sticks and broom handles. [b] win against a challenge or rival: the firm had beaten off competition from 260 other submissions. 2 vulgar slang (of a man) masturbate. [AZ: this is intransitive beat off; but as with jack / jerk / wank off, there is a transitive verb as well: vulgar slang masturbate a man; that is, bring someone else, especially a male, to orgasm with one’s hand or hands]
The sexual verb beat (off) differs from the sexual verbs jack, jerk, and wank (off) in that it has a very common non-sexual counterpart (NOAD‘s first subentry), a fact that makes it prone to unintended interpretation.
An interpretation I’ve reported on this blog before: from my 8/8/12 posting “More vintage comics”, this Archie comics cover with an inadvertent double entendre involving the two transitive verbs beat off:
