MARK SIMPSON .com

If you’ve been watching the noble Olympics in a slightly pervey way, treating all that lycra and fit young firm flesh on your HD screens as a form of illicit spornography then you deserve to be spanked soundly with a spiked running shoe.

But you’re not alone.

America’s prestigious NBC no less are doing it too.

With an online splurge of swim-boy nakedness called ‘Ab-Fab’ it asks you to ‘Guess the Swimmer’ - by identifying the headless topless torsos of selected Olympic totty.

In other words, it presents photos of top-flight swimmers as if they were headless naked profile pics on Manhunt or Gaydar. At the very least, it takes it for granted that you’ve been studying their bodies rather closely. They should really go the whole hog and provide a ‘MESSAGE ME!’ button to send those naughty athletes our phone numbers.

Someone with more morals than me might be inclined to huff and puff a little at this non-consensual spornographic exploitation of the golden swim-boys. But then, they are encouraging it, those devilish rascals, with their low-slung pants showing off their storm-proof ‘cum-gutters’ and saucy ‘come-hither’ pelvic tatts. They know exactly what kind of world we’re living in - and they seem determined to give it a semi.

And when you see NBC’s full-length pic of multi-Gold-medal-winner Phelps - the slim-hipped superstar whose seismic popularity might just overcome America’s deep-seated Speedophobia - you realise that, like so many young men today, he’s already practically stripping for Fratmen TV , even when he’s wearing jeans and underpants. (And why he deserves yet another Gold - for tarting.)

Meanwhile, two US National wrestlers have permanently lost their place on the team and their scholarships for actually doing just that.

Tip: D.A. Krolak

I’ve just happened across a new football blog ‘The Spoiler’ that has a self-described ‘Sporno’ section: ‘Where sport meets porn’.

They have some rather good pics (such as this one of Becks mounting an opponent who seems much more pleased than he is surprised). Pages and pages of them. And you can earn yourself £10 if you have any particularly hot examples. Go on, make those straight footie fans smile. You know they can’t get enough of it.

Sport tries its best to be clean, porno is always dirty. Sport is noble and healthy. Porno is always bad and wrong. Yet for all their efforts to keep a distance, they just can’t help running into each from time to time and making sporno, without meaning to at all.

Most of the people involved in ‘The Spoiler’ appear to be former lad mags staff (FHM, Nuts, Zoo). I’m sure their sporno snaps aren’t designed to turn on their male visitors, just make them giggle - or go ‘Ewwwwwwww!’ - and they probably haven’t read any of my articles on sporno.

All the same, they seem to have an even filthier imagination than I do. And they certainly have a bigger pervey pic collection.

by Mark Simpson, The Times, 28 July, 2008

Next week the V&A opens an exhibition called Fashion v Sport, profiling the relationship between the sports and fashion industries - a relationship that seems to be flourishing despite the habit of many of today’s sportsmen and women of wearing less and less.

Recently the New York Daily News ran a spread of photos showing rugby players from the New Zealand and South African national sides playing a match, starkers, on a windswept New Zealand beach. Disappointingly, it turned out that the players showing us their tackle were not in fact Boks and All Blacks, but local amateurs taking part in a beery annual “Naked Rugby” event.

But who can blame the media for getting over-excited? After all, last year the Rugby World Cup was advertised with posters on the Tube of snogging, scrumming rugby players. And then there are footballers such as Freddie Ljungberg and David Beckham spreadeagled across the side of buses.

Almost everywhere you look, sports, advertising and fashion seem to have jumped into bed to produce a spornographic money shot. Sports stars have become sporno stars. How did this happen? What does it mean? And where can I get hold of a pair of those pants?

Ironically, the only unconvincing aspect of the snogging scrum campaign was the relative unattractiveness of the faux rugby players compared to the pumped, shaved perfection of the real thing. The Parisian team produce an arty soft-porn calendar, called Dieux du Stade, featuring lovingly photographed nude players soaping each other up in the showers - or playing naked rugby on the beach. A great success. It sells like, well, hot rugby players.

In the run-up to the last football World Cup the fashion label Dolce & Gabbana commissioned the photographer Mariano Vivanco to snap members of the Italian team all oiled up and ready for us in the changing rooms, wearing very skimpy - and stretchy - D&G briefs. The results were splashed across prime advertising sites. In hindsight, the world was grovelling at the Italians’ feet from that moment on. The Spanish winners of Euro 2008 have yet to pose glistening in thongs, but with studs such as Fernando Torres and Iker Casillas in their stable it can only be a matter of time.

To get our attention in an age of broadband jadedeness, men’s fashion advertising has to promise us nothing less than an immaculately groomed, waxed and pumped group session in the showers.

And if this sporno looks a bit gay, that’s probably because it’s meant to. Partly because it made you look, partly because gay men are a loyal niche market and also taste-formers - especially when it comes to consuming the male body (Mr Dolce and Mr Gabbana are themselves famously gay).

It’s also partly because it seems to turn on the ladies in the same way that girl-on-girl action does their boyfriends. For an athlete nowadays, having a big gay following no longer necessarily means looking over his shoulder worriedly, but instead turning round and winking playfully.

Both Beckham and Ljungberg have posed in gay magazines, the beefy former England rugby ace and married father of two Ben Cohen has brought out a nude calendar marketed at gay men and talks about “embracing my gay fans”. Some, such as Becks and Welsh rugby glamour-boy Gavin Henson, have even argued over them. “I think I have lost a lot of my gay fans to Gavin,” Beckham once said. “It is a shame, as I really love them.”

Being equal-opportunity flirts, today’s sporno stars want to turn everyone on. Sportsmen, like porn stars, are by definition show-offs. Besides, it also means more money, more power, more endorsements, more kudos.

Fashion is more than happy to indulge them. Athletes represent everything that is desirable today: youth, vigour, success, health, fitness, looks, fame - and also the sweaty shorthand for all these things: sex. What’s more, as highly paid “pros”, their bodies are already what all men’s bodies are supposed to be these days: hot commodities. If athletes with hundreds of thousands of fans - gay and straight - are willing to tart themselves up this way, why bother with silly, skinny male models?

Naturally, all the sporno stars flirting with gayness are officially heterosexual. Team sports are still not the best place to openly bat for the other side, not least because it might cost you one of those lucrative gay-looking sporno endorsement deals. Virility is still considered to be officially hetero. (This holds true even in gay porn - where many stars are, like sporno stars, only “gay for pay”.)

But there’s no denying how dramatically attitudes towards the sporting male body have changed as a result of sport’s collision with the world of fashion and celebrity. Sporting male heroes now adopt sex-object poses on the side of buses that were once seen as girly, slutty or homosexual. Or, what was once much the same taboo in the male mind: passive.

As one outraged, middle-aged - and rather plain looking - BBC sports presenter thundered recently in The Sun about Beckham’s Armani-clad giant package: “You’ve got money, status, respect and fame - and then someone says: ‘Armani want you to do a picture wearing tight white pants with your legs as wide open as England’s defence.’ Why would you say yes?” Actually, in a spornographic age, the question should really be: why on earth would you say no?

The Fashion v Sport exhibition runs from Aug 5 to Jan 4. The catalogue, edited by Ligaya Salazar, and featuring an essay on Sporno by Simpson, on is published by V&A Books at £19.99.

The New Zeeland and South African Rugby team made the news this week with their nude rugby match on St Kilda beach. (UPDATE: In fact, the NY Daily News appears to have got a little overexcited: the players were not from the All Blacks and the Boks but local amateur players taking part in a mid-winter naked rugby tradition that has gone on for years - see Uroskin’s post below and on his blog.)

Held before their official match, and sponsored by ‘Bottom Bus’ (a local tour agency, allegedly), it looks at first glance like a realisation of the spornographic fantasy of those Dieux Du Stade calendars and those ‘Paris: City of Love posters’ with snogging rugby players advertising the Rugby World Cup last year. And perhaps in a way it is.

But the naughty slogans scrawled on their bodies and the general mayhem seems to have more of the trademark, old-style rugger bugger hazing humour. Porn and DDS (and UFC) by contrast, are a very serious business.

This seems more like a genuine, beery, blokey laugh.

Nice arses, though.

The ‘accidental’ removal of one beefy male contestant’s pants by another beefy male contestant in the new UK Gladiators series has caused some excitement. 

Now, as you know, I’m all for fit men pulling each other’s pants off, but this leaves me rather cold.  Partly because the shorts on Sky One’s new porno Gladiators are so skimpy in the first place that it’s not so easy to spot the difference between ‘on’ and ‘off’ - save when they’re off they look even more like be-thonged Chippendales.  But mostly because this accident was so carefully choreographed.

Note the handy close-up of some out of work actress in the audience screaming at the sight of a male buttock as if she’d just discovered her G-spot. 

Give it a few weeks and they’ll have these guys wrestling naked in a pool of KY ‘accidentally’ left on the arena floor.

(When that happens I’ll pretend to be jaded then as well - but inside I’ll be screaming louder than the actress.)

Tip: Donald K

Even more snogging rugby players, this time in an American online ad for a noise-cancelling bluetooth headset.

I don’t wish to appear ungrateful, but it’s clear that American ad men, even groovy online ones, really don’t get rugby. Or 21st Century sexuality.

As the lovely lads of Sandbach have shown us so graphically, two rugger buggers snogging is:

a) Nothing unusual

b) Guaranteed to make your teamates even more excitable

And the phenomenon of Manlove for Ladies would suggest that this chick is probably kicking herself she missed the action while gossiping on the phone with her gal pal.

How much bigger can the cotton-clad packages in men’s underwear ads get, I wonder, before they are literally shoved down our throats? And if they are, will any of us be so impolite as to gag? Even though good quality cotton is so absorbent?

Above is Beck’s latest sporno for Emporio Armani underwear, due to air in early 2008. Below is fellow-footballer Freddie Ljunberg’s 2006 Calvin Klein campaign.

Do these chaps live together? I mean, they seem to share the same type of fancy underwear, the same kind of bed-linen, the same barber - and the same dodgy shaver. They also seem to favour the same saucy bedtime positions - and apparently use the same b/w digital camera. They even look like one another, in that slightly disturbing twin-ish way that some boyfriends have.

In fact, the shots are almost a mirror image of one another: are they looking into our eyes, their own or each others? Even if they don’t actually share the same bed, it’s clear that Becks is doing Ljunberg doing Becks: which is impressive. Auto-fellatio and 69-ing at the same time. Just as well these guys are supple athletes.

Becks seems to sport an even larger Ljunbox - though seems to be less well-endowed when it comes to lighting. (Becks is two whole years older than Freddie.)

Is Beck’s bigger basket a case of post-production spornographic one-up-manship? Or is it just that Beck’s Brit meatballs are bigger than the Swedish variety? (Which at Ikea at least seem to be a little on the mean side.) I think we need to be told.

In the meantime, I must commend Mr Armani’s decision to draw a veil - or a white linen shirt - over Beck’s seriously daggy arm and shoulder tatts.

Tip: Towelroad

Today’s Sun carries an interview with England’s tasty pocket-rocket Ricky Hatton about his upcoming fight in Vegas this Saturday with World welterweight title holder Floyd Mayweather.

‘Pretty Boy’ Mayweather was in the news last week for saying to Ricky: ‘I wish I was in prison with you. I’d make you my bitch.’

‘Having another boxer threatening to do that to me is a first,’ Ricky admitted to the Sun. ‘But’ he said (I’m guessing with a twinkle in his eye), ‘I’d like to think I have got a fantastic bum.’

From where I’m standing, Ricky, it looks like you have. And you can trust me - I’m an expert.

But, given the infuriating bagginess of the boxing shorts you like to wear (which appear to have been made with some of your nan’s spare tasselled curtains), just to confirm how fantastic it is I think a closer inspection - and a road-test - is required.

And there’s no need to worry: we don’t have to go to prison. You could just come back to mine.

—-

PS  To those writing in to tell me that Ricky’s ‘no David Beckham’, or that he’s ‘really fat’ most of the time, or that he’s ‘ugly’, please note: I’m not claiming Ricky is of major socio-cultural importance or a ’sex god’. I just fancy him.  Here’s one, sorry, two reasons why.

Hollywood has apparently taken note of the global publicity surrounding uber-metrosexual English footballer David Beckham’s arrival in Tinseltown and decided to dust off America’s own, discarded metrosexual sportsman prototype, 1960s flamboyant, fur-coat wearing NFL quarterback Joe Namath and give it the big-screen treatment.

Jake Gyllenhaal is to play Namath - popularly dubbed ‘Broadway Joe’ - in a Hollywood biopic of the Hall of Fame sportsman who was the first American footballer to become a multi-media phenemonon and Madison Avenue model.

In other words, the actor who played a metrosexual cowboy will be playing the first metrosexual athlete. It sounds perfect casting - in a postmodern way. Gyllenhaal’s inability to convince as a cowboy, or a Marine, or a blue-collar NFL quarterback is just more grist to the mill of the inauthenticity of modern masculinity.

Jake’s pretty, bottom-boy looks also underscore something else: how Namath really wouldn’t cut it today as an object of desire. He just isn’t attractive or seductive or tarty enough. He looks like what he was: a reasonably nice-looking 1960s quarterback in a fur coat - or pantyhose.

Joe Namath’s most famous ad was this eyebrow-raiser from 1974 for Beautymist pantyhose:

Apparently Namath regretted the ad for nylons which brought out many of his male fans in rash, despite its rather heavy-handed ‘I’M NOT A FAG AND THIS IS A JOKE’ message. It may have been one of the reasons why America, with the possible exception of Dennis Rodham, failed to produce another ‘Broadway Joe’. That and the fact that America is sometimes a more conformist country than Switzerland.

If this ad were to be reprised by David Beckham today you would notice the following differences:

• He would look much better in pantyhose
• He wouldn’t say ‘I don’t wear pantyhose’. And if he did, no one would believe him.
• He wouldn’t be wearing anything else
• He wouldn’t laugh. Fashion, as his titanium-cheekboned wife has taught him, is a very serious business.
• He wouldn’t be selling them to women.

Boxing’s trash talk just got trashier - and highly spornographic. According to huge headlines in Britain’s most popular newspaper the Sun, big black American Welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather has announced that he wants to make England’s white scally Manc boxer Ricky Hatton his ‘Prison Bitch’.

‘He said he wanted to buttf**k me’ complained little Ricky, looking even paler than usual.

Ricky, mate, I have to say I really don’t blame him. And I mean that in a very loving way. (Though I’d have to insist you remove those mickey-mouse earphones first.)

But why wait until they’re sharing a prison cell? Why not do it ‘in the ring’ - like they do in Ultimate Fighting?

Actually, I’ve heard that there is a (semi) secret tradition in boxing of the loser giving it up after a match - apparently, it’s called ‘the perk’. (A term I rather like and plan to use: ‘I’m gonna perk your brains out, bitch’ and ‘I’m gonna give you such a hard perking’.) I’m told it’s not exactly obligatory, but not so rare either. It is, after all, what that film Fight Club was really all about.

So if Ricky loses, we’ll know why.