The event is organized by New York Jacks, a group that hosts regular meetings for men to gather in relative public to do something nearly every man does in relative private. They take over Paddles on Tuesdays, and on Sundays host a meeting on the third floor of a building on West 38th Street.
Before arriving, we’d discussed our apprehensions. What if it’s empty? What if we see someone we know? Based on stories from friends, this is a not-uncommon occurrence at some other gay sex events in the city, and the fear amounts to one of being exposed somehow — not just physically, but, in the case of New York Jacks, as a “bator”: someone who seeks out mutual masturbation as a discrete sexual experience. But as with being seen on Grindr, or in the backyard of a gay bar in Brooklyn, the “exposure” would be mutual.
As in every fetish community, the fear of being outed as a participant in something deemed weird or pervy keeps many people, including bators, in the closet about their interests. All things considered, mutual masturbation is pretty tame — masturbation is something most people already do, albeit alone — but the popular notion of masturbation as somehow being failed sex, the purview of lonely internet trolls, leads many would-be avid mutual masturbators to keep their sexual cards close to their chests.
Among men who have sex with men, mutual masturbation is often seen as sex-adjacent, rather than a sex act in its own right. In some cases, this is a heterosexual fig leaf (“It’s not sex, we’re just being dudes”); in others, it’s treated as an hors d’oeuvre. More than one friend has told me about engaging in mutual masturbation as a sort of compromise in a disappointing hookup situation, as in, “I went home with him but I was tired, so we just jerked off.” But for many men, myself included, mutual masturbation is not merely the “I’m not really hungry; I’ll just have a salad” of sex; rather, it’s an experience to be sought for its own sake. (...)
In an effort to better understand the appeal of mutual masturbation and the community that seeks it, I went looking for other men for whom jerking off together is not merely sex-adjacent, but an important part of a balanced sex life. I found these men among my friends, on social media, as well as in pockets of the internet I hadn’t yet reached into: notably Kik, a text-messaging app, and BateWorld, a global social network for masturbators that functions as a kind of Grindr–Facebook hybrid, with all the HTML sparkle of classic MySpace. I talked to men who associated their attraction to mutual masturbation with some of their earliest memories of queer desire; men who started seeking j/o buds in an effort to hook up with “straight” guys; men who simply consider it a safer, simpler alternative to other kinds of sex. Entering these spaces opened them up for me personally in a way I hadn’t thought I needed.
by John Sherman, BuzzFeed News | Read more:
Image:John Taggart for BuzzFeed News[ed. Seems like a good safe sex alternative. See also: Why Straight Men Are Joining Masturbation Clubs (GQ).]
