You’ve probably heard that Finland has celebrated the work of the gay porn artist Tuoko Laaksonen, better known as Tom of Finland, by putting his images on a series of stamps.

Tom of Finland drawing. Indian chief, cop, cowboy and sailor not shown.

As Tom of Finland he drew pictures of improbably fit men wearing clothes that were just a bit tighter than their skin. The look was modelled on Marlon Brando in The Wild One, if that had been a porn film. So the guys in his pictures had erections as big as police truncheons, and as hard, inside their denim jeans, and they had arses that were, well, the sort of thing you’d really like if you liked male arses. 

It’s nice that Finland is cool enough to give him his own series of commemorative stamps. And there’s a joke available about licking the rear of a Tom of Finland character that I’m not going to touch.

They get sticky when wet, too. 

Anyway, this reminded me that years ago there was a cartoon series on the tellie, He-Man. Like He-Man’s powers, the show was terrible beyond belief.

But it was interesting that while nearly all cartoon superheroes have a slightly obsessive urge to name themselves after their gender – Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Catwoman, and so on – He-Man took it to the extreme. Both components of He-Man’s name insist that he’s male, and they don’t say anything else. 

Fisto. Apparently there was another character in He-Man cartoons who was called Ram-Man. Maybe he was an Aries.

The other interesting thing about the He-Man universe is the most obvious and extreme of its homoerotic figures, someone whose special super-characteristic, and preferred practice, is way more perverse than anything Tom of Finland came up with. 

I refer, of course, to Fisto.

That’s one amazing brachio-proctic fist of luurve he’s got there. And, arguably, fist of justice, so long as he only uses its special powers for good. With great fist comes great responsibility. 

Oh, “brachio-proctic”? “Brachio” means the arm, and “proctic” means the general area up the bum. The term “brachio-proctic eroticism” was invented as a way of talking about fisting without bringing a blush to the cheeks of the innocent and naive. It was coined by Professor Basil Donovan, at the University of New South Wales. He was actually joking, but it seems to have taken on a straight-faced life of its own.