MARK SIMPSON.com

Ooo-la-la! The 2007 Dieux du Stade calendar is upon us and it seems to be even naughtier, even saucier - and somehow even more graphic - than last year’s. How do they do that? Without actually using those rugby balls as sex toys instead of just holding them that way?

Even I - even I - hesitate to reproduce some of the more explicit locker-room snaps - so you’ll have to visit the link for the full sauce. How long before sporno becomes just porno? (Oh, give it about a fortnight at this rate.)

And when it does, what on earth are gay men going to do with all their gay porn? When (mostly) hetero athletes photographed in blatantly, provocatively, deliriously homoerotic poses for mainstream consumption is hotter than anything Falcon can come up with, isn’t it going to be like when VHS was replaced by DVD? Sporno is in danger of making gay porn - and maybe even ‘gay sex’ - hideously obsolete, at least from where I’m staring.

After all ‘gays’ so obviously don’t own ‘gay sex’ any more - if they ever did. Sporno makes it eye-poppingly, horse-frighteningly apparent it’s no longer their private-members club (’have-you-been-to-a gay-bar-before?’) property. Now professional athletes pose for photos that should really be printed on their porn-movie box-cover - or saved for their ‘private pics’ on their Gaydar profile.

Soon all that will be left of ‘gay sex’ will be fisting in Continental leather bars. Sorry, my mistake, that’s not ‘gay’ either any more. That’s just the latest Bond movie.

And, truth be told, the ‘making of’ Dieux du Stade DVD has pretty much already found the boundary between sporno and gay porno and crashed through it. Scottish rugger bugger Sean Lamont reveals himself a ‘well rounded’, talented and very versatile sporno star - whichever way you look at him.

Not to be outdone in the sporting/spurting male stakes, Australia has muscled in on the sporno industry as well with the Naked Rugby League Calendar.

Perhaps the only surprising thing about this venture into out-of-the-closet sporno by Aussies is that it took them so long. After all, Australia is the country that brought us the Speedo and the Lifesaver, as well as Aussie Rules Football (I know it gets hot in Oz but really, is there any excuse for those skimpy, skimpy shorts and sleeveless tight vests other than showing off and generally being a tart?). Australia is also the country remember, with it’s extremely powerful, innovative sports media, that practically invented the drooling, extremely profitable commodification of the sporting male body and perhaps for that very reason is a global leader in metrosexuality.

So they must be extremely hacked off that they were outdone in the sporno stakes by the bleedin’ French. And also that Sean Lamont’s arse is even rounder and more inviting than the best barbied buttocks they can come up with (compare and contrast Scotland’s divinely geodesmic bum-cheeks with Australia’s March).

Lovely and eager to please as they are, the Oz sporno stars are though going to have to be a little less coy and show a little more in the way of vital assets if they want to keep up with Dieux du Stade. This shouldn’t be a problem: in my experience Australian men are anything but shy in real life - or reality TV. But then, perhaps Jamie Brooksby’s famous ‘metrosexual knob’ is the reason the Australian Rugby League pin-ups are hiding their tackle. Thanks to Jamie, Australian males are now held to very stretching standards indeed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sean Lamont however clearly isn’t worried. And who can blame him?

While beefy British rugby players may be lining up to tart themselves out to the public in French calendars, our home-grown sporno lags behind that of both France and Australia.

However, Nike’s use/exploitation of the England Rugby Squad in it’s advertising campaign for its tres gay stretchy top ‘Nike Pro’ is very encouraging indeed. Note how the muscled, glowering hunks have been photographed from a kneeling position - i.e. packet-level - lit from above, the better to show off their shoulders and pecs, as any gay porn director will tell you. The rugger gods themselves look down masterfully at the supplicant rugby fan, like Jeff Stryker at the greedy bottom servicing him. Perhaps the ‘Pro’ part of ‘Nike Pro’ stands for something other than ‘Professional’.

‘England’s secret weapon’, despite those baggy shorts, is not so secret after all. It’s spornographically obvious.

Now, if you think that, once again, my perverted, overheated brain is polluting with a filthy imputation to something as pure and unstained as England’s rugby shorts well, you’d probably be right.

But this doesn’t actually mean I’m wrong. Not just because advertising is, of course, never pure or unstained, but because of these eye-popping, shorts-straining pictures of what appears to be of a giant orange blow-up doll of Josh Lewsey (second from the right in the ‘Secret Weapon’ ad above - or one with the least secret packet and best six-pack) outside Twickenham Rugby Ground. And no, I didn’t take them myself: they appeared on the England Rugby Union official website.

Now we seem to be not just kneeling but grovelling on the floor gazing straight up at Josh’s powerful naked thighs and straight at his impressive (less baggy) packet. Plus he seems to have, very kindly, taken off his skin-tight Nike lycra top and is instead just wearing his skin-tight skin.

Naturally, it wasn’t officially a blow-up doll. As part of their campaign in the UK Nike commissioned a giant ‘bronze’ (plastic) statue of Josh Lewsey.

Much as I’d be happy to grovel for Josh, my favourite image however is this slightly less submissive perspectived one, snapped half-way through Josh’s bronze ‘erection’. Not only does he look more Greek, more Apollonian, it also looks as if he’s engaging in one of those charming post-match locker-room rugby games.