From Steven Levine on Facebook yesterday, some J. Crew joke boxer shorts:
(#1) Steven on Facebook: I was looking to pick up some new boxer shorts and came across this print of wiener dogs in wiener buns, with mustard. I guess this is a standard old-school cartoon joke image, but it still seems an odd thing to put on your underwear.
Joke boxers are a very old thing; women buy them for their guys, especially on Valentine’s Day and Fathers Day. I’m pretty sure the hotdogs-in-buns pattern (with frankfurters rather than dachshunds, of course, and not always with mustard) was available back when I was a teenager, 65 years ago. Once the frankfurter version was out there, a wiener-dog version was, I suppose, almost inevitable.
In the underwear zone. Meanwhile, the original frankfurter pattern appears on all types of men’s underpants — boxer shorts, boxer briefs, briefs — with a wide variety of background colors, and both with and without mustard. (As the hotdog stands in for a penis, so the mustard stands in for semen, so the avec-moutarde variant is marginally more jokily raunchy than the sans-moutarde variant.) Four examples…
— Billy Flex (an AussieBum line) briefs, low-cut: white background, with (rather startlingly red) mustard:
(#2) Visually, that’s a very awkward seam down the pouch
— American Eagle boxers: purple background, without mustard:
(#3)
— Jerecy (advertised on Amazon) boxer briefs, low-cut, light green background, with mustard:
(#4) Seems to be a drawing, rather than a photograph of the actual goods
— SLF / Sleefs (sports accessories from South Florida: “arm sleeves, headbands, socks, and more for every sport and mood”) boxer briefs, high-cut bright blue, with mustard:
(#5)
In the outerwear zone. Covering the male crotch with images of phallic hotdogs is by no means confined to underwear; it is, in fact, available for blatant display on outerwear as well — on swimwear (swim briefs and trunks); and on shorts of all kinds: casualwear, beach shorts, gym shorts, running shorts, boxing trunks. Three examples…
— Made-in-China swim briefs: light blue background, fast-food print pattern (hotdogs, hamburgers, fries), no mustard:
(#6) Speedo-style A (wearer not included)
— Shinesty swim briefs: bright blue background, hotdogs in rows, lots of mustard:
(#7) Speedo-style B
— Ladkingq beach shorts: low-cut, bright yellow background, with mustard:
(#7)
Plenty more hotdog shorts, in other colors and styles, are available from other sources.
Blue Boy’s Mustard Tragedy. Facebook discussion of #1 led quickly to recollections of an old soc.motss story, about (as I recall it) a gay guy having mustard smeared on his beautiful new blue Speedos: Bad Day at the Beach. You might think of #6 as a reworking of Blue Boy’s Speedo tragedy, resolving it by putting the mustard mess back in its rightful place.
And now with regret we leave the crotchfuls of hotdogs in buns, some spritzed with mustard, and return to the celebrations of Lincoln Darwin Day (today), Superb Owl Day (tomorrow), and Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky’s Birthday (aka Valentine’s Day, Monday).