(Another follow-up to today’s “Manual labor” posting, and like it, thoroughy unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.)
These are extracts from previous masturbation postings, focusing especially on my sexual and affectional life with my guy Jacques.
— from 3/24/13 in “Cyanide & Happiness roundup”:
most people have a preferred hand for masturbation. The JackinWorld website (“The ultimate male masturbation resource”) assumes that the masturbation hand is the dominant hand, as in this discussion:
What is your favorite position to masturbate in?
Notes: Between 80% and 90% of those responding favor lying in bed on one’s back or sitting in a chair in front of a computer or TV. The availability of Internet pornography has driven many right-handed people to shift to using their left hand for masturbation to leave the right one free to maneuver the mouse. Other positions for masturbating included lying on one’s stomach while humping a pillow or mattress, hanging upside-down, masturbating in front of a mirror, standing (usually in a shower), and with legs over the head to maneuver the genitals closer to the person’s face.
But many right-handers use the left hand for masturbation — left-handed jacking off is way more common in gay porn than the incidence of left-handedness in the population — and in some cultures the left hand is prescribed for masturbation as well as wiping the anus, since the right hand is prescribed for eating. (The left hand is then the “dirty hand”.)
J used his right hand, for himself and for me, while I use my left hand for myself (and have since 1950, I have no idea why) but used my right hand for J.
— from 12/29/14 in “Santa jack”, two things. First, about the social context of jacking off:
jacking off can be private or public (public in the sense of having an audience — jacking off for someone — or in the sense of acting in concert — in what’s sometimes called a circle jerk, though group jerk would be a better term); it can be directed at someone (jacking off on someone, as in bukkake, but not only there); it can be celebratory, flagrant, or matter-of-fact. The jack-off in
A goofy guy in a Santa cap, in an immediately post-masturbatory momentis without an audience or co-actors, directed back at the guy jacking off, and celebratory. All these distinctions are important to men who engage in jacking off (which is virtually all men), but none of the activities have customary names.
J and I jacked off with one another (often, while sharing the pleasures of gay porn flicks that suited both our tastes) and for one another (to provoke hard-ons or to show off) and, sometimes on one another (a complex act with many possible meanings, of which one is claiming the other man’s body as your territory by coming on it).
Also in the “Santa jack” posting, a discussion of jack-off clubs:
A jack off club is a sexy situation, but jerking off together is not technically a sex act. There’s no penetration or feelings of love between the participants, so it is not particularly gay or straight in itself. It’s just sexuality, plain and simple, which is one of the attractions. If you desire to jack off with gay or bi men only, there are certainly some jack off clubs with strictly gay or bi memberships, but unless you want to suck and fuck other men in addition to jerking off, it doesn’t really matter what their sexual orientation is.
The view here of these clubs as primarily for a celebration of masculinity, a kind of male bonding, echoes accounts by MSMs (“men who have sex with men” but explicitly do not identify as gay or bi) of what they get out of their sort of down-low sex.
J and I both had networks of male friends, some straight, many gay, with whom we enjoyed the pleasures of affiliation; meanwhile, when we were hunting for sex, we weren’t interested in male bonding. We were both wary of classic MSMs (sensing that many of these guys were in fact homophobic to some degree). And jack-off clubs offered nothing of interest to us; what we were after was in fact sexual connection, indeed connection with a specific person (maybe just a quick trick, but a specific person).
— from 3/24/17, in an AZBlogX posting “Hand jobs”:
Hand jobs and frottage (aka rubbing) are the non-penetrative forms of mansex and, as such, are often discounted — treated as mere accompaniments to other sexual acts (it’s common to jack off a guy you’re fucking, for example, but the fucking is the main event; and in group sex in gay porn, a cocksucker will often work a cock in one or both hands, but the blow job is the main event) or foreplay to penetrative sex (rubbing is a common lead-in to fucking, hand jobs to blow jobs and possibly on from there to fucking). There’s an attitude that if nobody takes a dick into his body, it’s not really sex — an attitude that, on the plus side, makes hand jobs and rubbing more acceptable as buddy play (or bro-play), something straight guys could easily get into — just helpin’ my horny buddy out, helpin’ him to get of — without veering into fag territory.
Whether you identify as straight or gay, you can give or get a hand job for its own sake; it’s friendly sex, literally non-invasive, and safe sex (but it is sex, since shooting your load or his is the goal), and it’s easily combined with other kinds of body play, especially kissing. If you’re frankly gay, it can be the vehicle for affection, love, and romance. It can be configured as one guy serving another guy’s cock (for pleasure on both sides) or as a mutual exchange (easier to manage than 69ing, because there’s less sense of divided attention: mutual hand jobs are just like jacking yourself off — you use your hand to stroke, you get the pleasurable sensations of being stroked — with the bonus that you get another guy’s body to appreciate).
It’s usually said that to give a really satisying hand job, you should watch how your guy jacks himself off; if you can reproduce his style, then you’re pretty much guaranteed to be doing a good hand job. But his style is whatever he chanced on because it once worked for him as boy, so it’s familiar, but that was years ago, and he might now appreciate novelty instead of familiarity. Guys differ in these things: some need the familiar routine, but others can be pleasantly surprised. [I see that when I wrote this, I was somewhat under the sway of sex advisers bent on getting guys to try out new stuff.] Stimulating the glans and frenulum provides the most intense sensations; but fisting the shaft can give a man the feeling of raw power; playing with his balls or asshole can magnify the experience; and there are several satisfying options for moving hand on dick (with two fingers vs. whole fist; up and down vs. rotary; etc.).
One of the lessons of the gay porn that J and I used to watch together was that the range of styles for jacking yourself off is truly enormous. “Wow!, J once marveled, “Hard-driving two fisted jacking! Who knew?” The orgy scenes that are such a common feature of gay porn provide tons of opportunity for studying these things. A further lesson is that though the orgiasts will try out an assortment of techniques on one another, they seem very firmly fixed in what they do for themselves.
At this point, there’s a small terminological issue: how to refer to the participants in a hand job, a guy who jacks another guy off and a guy who gets jacked off by another guy…. The crucial fact here is that in a mansex hand job, one guy supplies (metonymically, is) the hand, and one guy supplies (metonymically, is) the dick — so that when the context is guys and handjobs, the compounds handman and dickman will do just fine.
[On my X blog] I’ve selected five scenes from gay porn that show hand jobs pursued for their own sake (at least at the point in mansex shown in the photos). From professional rather than amateur gay porn, because the pros — directors, cameramen, and actors — really are better at what they do, and they tend to produce much more satisfying images.
— from 1/28/20 in “Humongous tops Adonis”:
recreational gay porn can be enjoyed with a like-minded partner. You can comment on the action and on one another’s responses to it, and maybe move on to man-on-man sex. You get a lot of sensory input: your own hard-on, what you’re doing and saying, his hard-on, what he’s doing and saying, and everything that’s happening on-screen. You’re floating together in this hot fog of sexual feelings. (In the long-distant past, this worked nicely for Jacques and me.)
Interestingly, gay porn is, or at least used to be, a major thing at gay sex clubs. Its function there is to help as many guys as possible maintain their hard-ons while they’re advertising themselves for whatever kind of sex they want. If you start to slide towards coming, you can just take your hand off your dick and look away from the screen, to recover your composure.
I have seen guys maintain hard-ons this way for an hour or longer, until the very specific thing they were looking for came along. (If he didn’t, they finished themselves off in private.) J had no interest in sex clubs or the gay baths — they struck him as jangly sensory overload; he was amazed that I could cut through the waves of demands on my attention to make satisfying one-on-one connections. (I don’t think I ever told him about the occasions on which I was gangbanged; gangbang porn was very much not to his taste, so he surely would have found my experiences distasteful.)
In fact, J was aware that I was vastly kinkier than he was sexually (I’m not sure he could be said to have been kinky at all — just really really queer, into your basic sucking and fucking and kissing and so on), and warned me away from talk about, and gay porn featuring, sexual acts he found distasteful. (For a long time, a lot of gay porn has very prominently featured watersports, that is, piss play, which I used to enjoy on occasion. J was at some level aware of this, so told me that if that was something I liked, he didn’t want to hear about it — and didn’t want to see it in the porn we shared.)
Reflecting on this now, I’m guessing he didn’t want his rather idealized view of me damaged by knowledge of my down and dirty side (even when he could guess at what that side might be like). That would have been loving (though rather unrealistic). In any case, I of course fully respected his wishes.
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