Today's popup post features some early 20th C. wresters/strongmen in trunks that look like they might have been designed to show off bulges. I'll trust our resident vintage men's clothing expert, Calorman, to confirm that last bit and hopefully provide a few more details. We start with a fellow named John Antiochos who signed his photo in Chicago, 1926l
Thank you for asking me to comment.
ReplyDeleteI have written very often about the effects on Western societies of the Victorian Classical Revival. It affected fashion, morality as well as language.
We have all heard of the supposed existence of a "Platonic relationship", which ostensibly means an absence of romance within a friendship but anyone who has ever read any Plato will know this to be not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help us William Booth, because the Greek language reflected the Greek mind which has three clear, distinct and discrete words for the single concept of the all-encompassing word in English "love": ἀγάπη (agape - pronounced agapay) representing brotherly love or charity; ἔρως (eros) being sexual love (including lust), from which we derive the word "erotic"; and φιλία (philía) meaning affection, regard, and, according to Aristotle, a dispassionate love but was a word used to describe the love between a husband and wife.
The Classical Revival was also responsible for the Victorian emphasis on what we today would call a "patriarchal" society, where the masculine predominated over the feminine, with the stern Victorian paterfamilias presiding over his clan like an oriental potentate.
The Classical Revival also informed male relationships, both private and in the public arena. We would be flabbergasted today to learn just how segregated society was between the sexes and just what mores were acceptable between men. In all-male spaces, nudity was commonplace if not mandatory. Men, however, walked arm-in-arm in the street, as homosexuality had not gained a widely-accepted medical definition and societal understanding of it was as a sin and called "sodomy" after the Biblical city, and as all men were deemed to be heterosexual, ἀγάπη (agape) might be being expressed in such a gesture but never ἔρως (eros).
The tension, therefore lay in how much ἀγάπη (agape) and how much ἔρως (eros) there was in any male friendship. If we read our Plato, we understand that in the gymnasia, there was a lot of ἔρως (eros), which, in Victorian societies, was overtly discouraged by societal pressure as well as the law. As with everything that is censured and/or censored becomes the forbidden fruit, so in Victorian societies what we would understand today to be the purely erotic was fuelled. I have also written before about how the Victorians themselves were in fact far less prudish than the generations they spawned and the latter half of the 19th century was a far cry from the conservatism of the first half of the 20th.
From the very start of the Victorian introduction of municipal, public gymnasia and private spas, the erotic in clothing is apparent. The Victorians in fact invented the micro-bikini (to play indoor five-aside football) and the Victorian strongman wore what was effectively a dance belt, exposing the buttocks, even in the Victorian music hall and circus and squash, badminton and volley ball were very often played in just jockstraps. What is less is sometimes more and, as we see later with the clever use of the posing strap, the erotic was ever present. It was subconscious, it was never talked about, it was ignored. But it was very much there. We today are as obsessed with sex and sexuality as the Victorians were with death. The Victorians - and later generations - were not "sexualized" and it was quite possible to be homosexual without even realizing it or, alternatively, doing anything about it.
I wholeheartedly agree with Jerry that the costumes we see today are deliberately exaggerating the male genitalia - coyly referred to in Savile Row as the "male contour". It was erotic not sexual. It was not intended to titillate but to emphasize masculinity all under the excuse of "mens sana in corpore sano" - healthy mind in a healthy body.
Thanks, Julian!
DeleteNot to mention men still swam nude. Women had these ghastly devices: Wool bathing suits, bathing machines, when swimming wasn't seen as mannish. Many males would (in all-male company) stay nude as they dried, and often engage in other physical activity.
DeleteThe interesting thing is, even at the height of things like "reflex neurosis theory", most guys still did masturbate together (In US parlance, "a chaw for a chaw", "chaw" referring to the shape of the overhang of the foreskin.), though oral and anal were highly taboo, at least in the receptive end. One could go down to the docks and find a queer, in the city, but never suck or be fucked.