82 Pct Of ‘Straight’ Men Say Masturbating Each Other Is ‘Not Gay’

According to more than four out of five self-identified “straight” men who are registered users of the male-masturbation-oriented online platform BateWorld, masturbating another man is “not gay,” a response which according to the author of the study, published by Slate.com, “says a lot about the nature of male sexuality.” BateWorld advertises itself as “a unique social networking community for men who love to masturbate.” Writer Kyle Mustain obtained data from the site on how its users describe their own sexual identities, and found that while a full 50 percent of the site’s 86,840 users identified as gay, and another 30 percent as bisexual, one out of 10 men registered on the male masturbation site said they were “straight.” That was the segment on which Mustain focused his research for his Slate article, using BateWorld's own online polling tool. While the method cannot be called scientific, Mustain found the results nonetheless intriguing, the answers to one question in particular. Namely, “Is mutual masturbation gay?” Mustain—who identifies himelf as gay—gave respondents only two choices: • “No. Being homosexual is an attraction. You can bond and bate with a bro and not want a homosexual relationship.” • “Yes. Any interaction with same sex genitals is a homosexual act.” Of the 565 men who responded to the question, 465—about 82 percent—chose the “No” answer. But if jacking off another man is not considered a “gay act” by these self-described non-gay men, what is? “The top two answers for what makes a person gay were ‘kissing another guy’ and ‘becoming emotionally involved with a male sex partner,’” Mustain wrote. “So according to these responders, touching a cock isn’t gay; lips touching lips is gay; and for that matter, heart touching heart is really gay.” Referencing the 2015 book Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men by Jane Ward, a women’s studies scholar at the University of California—Riverside, Mustain notes Ward’s finding that “straight” men who engage in sexual contact with other men go to great lengths to reinforce their own masculinity leading up to and during the act, refashioning homosexual experiences as a type of heterosexual male bonding. For example, Ward found (according to Mustain) that “when straight men masturbate together, they use straight pornography as a substitute for a woman.” In other words, they convince themselves that the experience is “not gay” because, they believe, the source of their turn-on is porn—not the other dude in the room. “These men are looking for encounters in which they can bare themselves to other men and have male-to-male nudity and often physical contact while maintaining their heteromasculine capital,” wrote Mustain. “What I have 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.” But Mustain also concludes that the “logic” that allows self-identified “straight” men to engage in homosexual acts without questioning their own sexual identity would not be possible without “heteronormativity,” the dominant societal view that “straight” sex is “normal.” “No one, not a single person in the history of time has, in the middle of hetero sex, stopped, assessed the situation of a penis coming into contact with a vagina and thought to utter the words, ‘Wow, this is really straight!’ We don’t speak that way about straightness,” Mustain wrote. "That’s because of heteronormativity: Our society considers straight to be the norm." Photo By Andrew McIntyre / Wikimedia Commons Public Domain