Buddies

The Leveret’s series celebrating mutual masturbation between two or more men continues.

As noted in the first installment of this series, those who participate in this activity sometimes refer to themselves as “jack-off buddies” or “j/o buddies.”

The Leveret’s “Buddies” series features images found online of jack-off buddies accompanied by various writings about the sexual practice of mutual masturbation.

In this third installment I share Joe Morgan’s fascinating December 2018 Gay Star News article, “Four Out of Five Men Don't Think Mutual Masturbation Is a ‘Gay’ Act.” As Morgan notes, his piece is a response to Kyle Mustain’s Slate article, “Helping a Brother Out,” which examines the website BateWorld and the “vibrant community” it hosts of “straight men who enjoy masturbating together.” Both articles highlight that how these straight men make sense of this “says a lot about the nature of male sexuality.”

Enjoy!

Four out of five men don’t think mutual masturbation is a “gay” act, according to male masturbation fans.

Kyle Mustain, a writer for Slate, has conducted an informal study of nearly 87,000 Bateworld users.

Using the website known as the “Facebook for masturbators,” he wanted to understand the site’s self-proclaimed straight men who enjoy masturbating with other guys.

He used the website’s user-created polling questionnaires to ask, “Is mutual masturbation gay?”

And to his surprise, he found 82% of 565 respondents said mutual masturbation isn’t gay.

For the second question, he also asked about various actions which “makes” a man gay.

Most men then responded with “kissing another guy” and “becoming emotionally involved with a male sex partner.”

“According to these responders,” Mustain wrote, “touching a cock isn’t gay; lips touching lips is gay; and for that matter, heart touching heart is really gay.”

He added: “It can be frustrating, seeing straight men debate the infinitesimal difference between touching your own cock and someone else’s, hearing each one hand-wring about ‘how far he’ll go,’ and whether double penetration or using a Fleshlight on a friend is gay.”

Mustain references the sociologist Jane Ward’s book Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men in his article. Ward says straight white men have sexual encounters with other men often employ “props, costumes and dialogue” to have sex with men while upholding their heterosexuality.

“They get drunk and stoned, watch heterosexual porn, and they talk about ‘pussy,’” Ward writes. “The [personal] ads draw heavily upon the model of adolescent friendship, or the presumably meaningless and proto-sexual circle jerk. [They also mention] nostalgic commentary about being buddies or ‘bros’ and sharing ‘legit’ male bonding experiences. . . .”

Mustain concludes: “What I have also found on BateWorld is that these lines between ‘just fucking around’ and ‘kinda gay’ and ‘OK, that’s really gay’ are indeed superficial and imaginary.’

NEXT: Part IV

See also the previous posts:
• Buddies, 11/2/18
• Buddies, 2/27/19
• Reaching Out
• A Means of Making Contact
• Not a Weapon or a Mere Tool
• Phallus
• Penis
• Hard
• Soft
• Rethinking the “Normal” Penis (Part I)
• Rethinking the “Normal” Penis (Part II)

Images: Subjects and photographers unknown.