FUCKING

There are two types of men in this world. Those who are fucking. And those who aren’t. By fucking I mean those men who are enjoying regular, fluid sex. This isn’t the sex people have in marriage or long relationships, half-hearted fucking when they get their minds out of bills or tensions, but abandoned, raw and ceaseless fucking. For hours at a time. 

For this fucking you are constantly available to each other. If we are talking heterosexual sex, then he will take her anywhere – in the kitchen, his head up her skirt, mouth and hands reaching for her vagina and clitoris, he could slide inside her at any moment. That is the energy and the dynamic of the time they spend together. At any moment they could be inside each other.

Men who are fucking are in a state or condition where sex keeps on happening to them. Men who are fucking will spill out of their clothes – or their clothes can be “got at” to reveal or access the body underneath – the lover must be able to get at the cock, the buttocks, the chest, the lower back. 

I don’t think sex is always easy for humans. It takes some time to get started. You may be nervous or awkward the first times you sleep with someone. And then a threshold is crossed and sex is easy and constant and wild. And her smell (if it is a she) is on your body and whatever marks she makes, or you have asked her to make, scar your back and skin. 

So this impacts on fashion and dress. Men who are fucking will fall in and out of their clothes. And you can even fuck someone for two or three hours and have time to dress for work. This is the song of low-slung jeans, the narrative of a crumpled T-shirt and battered leather jacket. Suiting gives nothing away. If the man actually can, after all that fucking, dress in perfect suit, tie, gleaming shoes and neat hair, then who knows, nobody can know, how he spent that night or how he fucked her in the kitchen, that morning, his tongue up her ass. 

Of all the rock stars Iggy Pop is the closest to the man who fucks. The way he looks makes no distinction between the worlds of being, fucking and performing. He is always nearly naked, dressed in something tight, dressed in sweat, living in that zone where fucking is constant and fluid and important. Iggy was always too busy fucking (it looks that way) to have been as fussy or particular with his image as Bowie or even Mick Jagger, who in their sensual heydays were more dressed and consciously styled than the stripped and sheet-hot Iggy Pop. 

All this fucking surfaces in the fashion image. Or doesn’t. A Dolce & Gabbana campaign from 2010: a group of men, possibly Italian, share a meal at a simple, rustic taverna. It must be hot, because clothes fall off the men. One of them, the only one looking at the camera, looking out at us then, wears just tiny, tight, white shorts. They are more underpants than outerwear and you can see the outline of his cock and balls. There is a plate of seafood on the table and a cold slimy tentacle from a wet black squid is falling from the plate onto the shiny, hairy, naked, masculine thigh of our friend in the tight, white, cock-suggesting shorts. 

That’s pretty hot, right? The suggestion of salty, stinking activities, the curl of dark hair on his naked, sweat-shining thighs. What does the ad say? This Dolce man fucks. 

So some fashion images are about fucking. But not all. The models may be immaculate and remote, de-gendered almost, still and lifeless. Perfect like the suited man, everything concealed behind the note-perfect hair (Dior) and architecture of seam and fabric and cut that masks the hairy, slurping intimacy of the wet octopus. 

I also love that Tom Ford campaign with the skinny, blue-eyed boy who comes on like Gatsby or someone from the 1920s. He is nearly always pictured with a blonde who could be his sister. In one image she is naked, combing his hair, which is too fey a gesture to pass for a sexual metaphor. If anything it says the opposite: they haven’t been fucking. With his neat, oiled hair and dainty bow tie and velvet smoking jacket – he wears the signs of 1920s American wealth – he is idle, decadent, rich, in the Hamptons, playing dress-up with his sister and someone else will fuck him later, some burly man or rough sailor. 

So if you hair is too neat you haven’t been fucking. If your clothes are too dainty, your tie bowed (too prissy). But the men in Paul Marciano’s Guess campaign are unshaven, the hair is lank, shirts are unbuttoned, jeans are falling, their skin is flushed. And they are shot with women; there is a suggestion of possession. Or ownership. 

There are men in fashion images who possess women. And they have a certain look in their eyes. The word arrogance is derived from “arrogate” meaning to lay claim to. The original Latin arrogare means to ask of and to adopt. The root of arrogance is ownership of another, your claim to another. You possess him or her and they do whatever you want. This is what flashes in the eyes of the arrogant. 

There will also be fashion images of boys and boy-ish men who will not possess but will be possessed and owned. They are pretty boys with bashful eyes and dressed in girlish, sparkling things: long, silver scarves, pretty jackets, soft vests. The sex they promise will come later, if and when you get them home. 

But fucking. Constantly fucking. Nothing beats that. Nothing beats falling in and out of your clothes, in and out of someone else’s body, for hours at a time, day after day after day. And this affects the way you dress – because maybe you don’t have time now, time to co-ordinate, to iron, to shave, to clean. And it affects the way you move, the way you stand, the way others see you. Because they can sense the fucking that goes on around you, they can tell that you are constantly sliding in and out of another body, taking him or her, again and again and again. And this can make you desirable to others, especially if they also want to be taken. 

Men who fuck don’t linger. There isn’t the time. They are filled with purpose and power. And other people, as much as they acknowledge them, could easily, so easily, be taken with the same ease and immediacy that they take their lover.

And some fashion images suggest this, some don’t. Because some men are fucking and many aren’t. Hours and hours of hot fluid sex reverse the polarities in life; the sex eats up the hours, work and travel are just things you do when you are not fucking, when she isn’t bent over the bed or running her nails in so deeply that you cry, you actually,physically cry. And thank her for it. And fashion, or the entire way you look, not only reflects this but betrays this. Just as you can tell, by looking, the men who are fucking, you can also tell, by looking, the men who aren’t.

by Tony Marcus