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Queries: Cult of the Wolf / Muscleguys

Query: Cult of the Wolf

The wolf / Is shaved / So neat and trim / Red Riding Hood / Is chasing him / Burma-Shave

WolfBurmaShaveThis 1952 Burma-Shave slogan, one of hundreds of roadside advertising signs posted by a shaving cream company, seems to refer to the very popular fairy tale of a young girl by the name of Little Red Riding Hood, and an adult male wolf.

The “Wolf” the advertising refers to is a two-legged man, not a four-legged mammal, lupus. In trying to sell shaving cream to their primary market, the ad sign writers were making a cultural reference to an ostensibly heterosexual erotic male type known as the wolf.

“Wolf” was not just parlance but likely an adult code for men as a sexual type, regardless of sexual orientation. This might have been a primarily heterosexist term that included heteros, bis, and gay men, possibly even a term of self-identification.

G. Legman’s epic book on humor, Rationale of the Dirty Joke (New York: Grove Press, 1968) refers to a “male wolf” type several times heterosexually (boldface added):

One of the strictest items of sexual folklore, of the type that adolescent boys confide to each other, is that “Talking dirty heats girls up.”  This is made crucial to the plot in Norman Krasna’s sex-comedy, Sunday in New York (movie version, 1963), in which:
The seducer tries to warm up the virginal heroine by telling her dirty jokes, but her brother has warned her to be on the lookout for wolves like this. She pretends she has to go to the toilet (!) and slips away. But this wolf is fangless, and later refuses to lay her when he learns, in bed, that she is authentically a ‘beginner.’ (p. 696)

Legman identifies similarly hetero-oriented wolves in the companion volume, No Laughing Matter (New York: Grove Press, 1975, p. 35)  discusses a anti-patriarchical reversal in which playboys are told an offensive necrophiliac sex joke by a woman:

Aside from the obvious advantage in turning off a would-be ‘wolf’ or seducer, it seems clear that a woman’s telling a man repulsive sex-jokes of this kind, whether privately or publicly, is intended further as a sort of turnabout rape, in which it is she who outrages and humiliates the man — her own secret assessment of what sexual intercourse amounts to, from the woman’s position. She is also effectively also denying her own sex as a woman.

Yet Legman names a distinct wolf type, which he typifies here as deeply repressed homosexuals with flat-tops who wear aviator jackets. Also from Rationale, p. 526:

… The hair problem is, in fact, very old: at least as old as the Nazarite sect of Samson and Jesus. It the Levant it particularly centers around the beard, and the respect due it, naturally involving also insults to the beard. (Motif P672.) The breaking of the spirit of the Russian boyars by Peter the Great by forcing them to cut their beards in insulting fashion is a most significant and historic instance. This is sometimes entirely reversed, especially among unconscious or unavowed homosexuals of the aggressive and athletic ‘wolf’ type, who cut their hair as short as possible (‘hairbrush’ or German aviator style) and reject all outward softness of clothing and body-stance, or femininity of manner: the ‘James Bond’ or body-as-phallus type.

I’m querying modern literary, cultural, or folkloric references to wolves as human male sexual type, especially before Legman early 20th Century. This would include folks now in their 50s and older. Did you encounter a male sexual type “Wolf,” when and where, and in what context? Wolf Blitzer and other correspondents are welcome to confidentially send a message here. Permalink here.

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Query: Muscle Men

Canadian Überbear Richard Labonté is circulating another CLS for a Cleis anthology, forwarded by Lawrence Schimel, and which I encourage all my writerly friends to consider.

Call for submissions:
MUSCLE MEN, edited by Richard Labonte for Cleis Press
Were you the kind of scrawny queer kid who ogled Steve Reeves and never missed a TV wrestling match, or the buff young man who
fantasized about entering strongman contests and cherished his first weight bench?  I’m looking for original, erotic stories or web-only
reprints of up to 7,500 words for an anthology of fiction and memoir based on muscle and desire. Consider: built Daddies, burly bears, body
worship, bodybuilding, wrestling from backyard and collegiate to motel and TV pro, mixed martial arts, weightlifting, arm wrestling, colt
model porn fantasies, muscle voyeurism, big guys attracted to the twinklike … “muscle” in all its forms, big and beefy or lean and wiry,
as a starting point for *authentic*, well-crafted stories by, for or about men and muscle – writing with a solid narrative arc in which
characters connect emotionally as much as physically. Deadline is Oct. 1, 2009; publication date is Spring, 2010; payment is $50-$75,
depending on length, plus two copies; submissions in .doc or .rtf format to <cleismuscles@gmail.com>.

Published by Ron Suresha

Ron Jackson Suresha is an editor, anthologist, and writer. He is considered an authority on emergent queer masculinities, in particular the subcultures of gay and bi male Bears and of male bisexuality. For Ron's service to the bear community, he was named "Bear of the Year" 2008. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Suresha attended the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, 1976-8), where he studied creative writing, and Vista College (Berkeley, Cal., 1989-92), where he studied American Sign Language. For more than two decades, he has worked as a freelance proofreader for trade book publishers such as Shambhala Publications. He was married in October 2004 to Rocco Russo. He is also a licensed Justice of the Peace in Connecticut, an ordained minister, ULC, and a member of the New London Green Party. Nonfiction works include Bears on Bears: Interviews & Discussions; Bi Men: Coming Out (coeditor, with Pete Chvany); Bisexual Perspectives on the Life and Work of Alfred C. Kinsey (editor). His latest book is The Uncommon Sense of the Immortal Mullah Nasruddin: Stories, jests, and donkey tales of the beloved Persian folk hero, published by Lethe Press.