“If all the men of the world just admitted they bate and started doing it together, we’d probably have peace on earth!” Even so, they are lines that allow for a thriving sexual subculture with a logic all its own. It can definitely all seem a little absurd, these intellectual contortions around what’s gay and what’s not. But when you think about it, it’s not really the guys’ fault. We know so little about male sexuality, and because of that, carving out space in it for anything other than totally straight or totally gay behavior is bound to be confusing. Ward demonstrates this in her book, showing all the wild ways guys rationalize having sexual encounters with other men, whether it be just jerking off together or eating potato chips out of each other’s butt cracks.
Compared with women’s sexuality, Ward theorizes, male sexuality is perceived as rigid, and because men aren’t perceived as being able to have fluidity, their behaviors have to be defined as either gay or not gay. This explains the difficulty the Str8 bators of BateWorld have with coming to a consensus on what jacking off together means. There’s no allowance for fluidity, and if the world were to find out that you jack it with dudes, everyone would think you were gay, and that means you lose your heteromasculine capital. The upside to all of this is that there has never been a better time in history for a man to explore his sexuality. Binaries like gay/straight are being challenged, and we are creating conceptual and physical spaces in which it’s possible to imagine ways of being that are more fluid. One thing that’s kept me going back is that unlike Grindr, Scruff, and Tinder, BateWorld has constructed a real sense of community where men can go to share their ideas and feelings about the place in time we live in and help each other figure out their diverse sexualities in ways we weren’t allowed to while growing up. I think the site helps a lot of them find acceptance and come to terms with whatever complexity they contain.
When you see guys post things like “Hail penis!” yeah, it’s a little cheesy. But these men lift each other up and empower each other. If we can do that, enrich understandings of identity, and have fun getting off, it seems to me that buddy bating is definitely not harmful. In fact, it’s something all guys should consider exploring, rock stars and regular dudes alike.You are about to enter a website that contains explicit material (pornography).