(Utterly unsuitable for kids or the sexually modest)
My title: yes, a groaner pun bate (a clipping of masturbate) on bait ‘food used to entice fish as prey’; I am shameless.
Clearing things from my desktop (with great sadness, abandoning postings in preparation that I’d spent hours on but were clearly, in the face of new material constantly streaming in, never going to get written up) I found this site advertising a directory of jack-off clubs (/ jackoff clubs / jack off clubs / jerk-off clubs / wank clubs / masturbation clubs / etc.) — which you can think of as bate shops:
(#1) Bait shops sell live bait and fishing lures; often, they are bait and tackle shops, selling fishing tackle as well — but you can’t go all the way and actually cast bait for fish there; bating, on the other hand, requires very little in the way of gear, but does need a suitable location
Both fishing and bating are often engaged in as (satisfying) solitary pursuits. But they’re also occasions for male companionship. Guys have their fishing buddies; some of them have their bate bros or bate buddies; but here the analogies between bait shops and jack-off clubs breaks down (analogies aren’t identities), on the fact that bating is a sexual act while fishing is not.
(Though in the world of the movie of Brokeback Mountain, fishing and sex — sex considerably more advanced than masturbation — are combined; there were Ennis’s “fishing trips” with Jack, in which no fish were caught and Ennis never opened the new tackle box his wife bought for him, though Ennis was always invigorated by the trip.).
In any case, the jack-off club is a sociocultural institution whose practices are scarcely predictable from its name (but then, as I relentlessly point out on this blog, labels are not definitions).
Previously on this blog.
— from my 12/29/14 posting “Santa jack”:
sucking cock and jacking off: the world of safer sex now provides institutions for each of these activities, but they are configured very differently. One set of clubs, like Blow Buddies in San Francisco (which I wrote briefly about here), serves gay and bisexual men and focusses on cocksucking, though it affords an opportunity for all sorts of safer sex between men, including jacking other guys off. Jack-off clubs primarily offer circle jerks and accommodate many straight guys. An explanation from a website:
I am male and straight. What happens at jack off clubs? Are all the men gay or bi? —Michael
Dear Michael, When you get a group of horny men together, there’s no predicting exactly what will happen — aside from frequent orgasms, of course. However, you can expect most jack off clubs to involve men of all different ages, shapes, sizes, and sexual orientations, gathered together in a circle, stroking their cocks. Most men will probably only handle their own meat, but some guys will lend a helpful hand if that is mutually desired. Most men will be naked, except for their shoes (so as not to slip on jizz that has been spilled on the floor.) Jack off clubs are by no means strictly gay or bi. The majority of men will actually be predominantly straight. Why do straight men get off on getting off with their buddies? The fact of the matter is that nothing could be more natural. Jacking off with another man or several other men involves sharing one’s masculinity, participating in a common feeling, acknowledging a simple and frequent activity shared by all men, and celebrating manly passions. All men experience horniness, and all men masturbate (okay, perhaps there is a handful of men on earth who do not jerk off regularly, but the vast majority of other men more than make up for this lack of masturbation by shooting off more than once a day). 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; brief discussion here, with links to Language Log treatments.
— from my 6/13/16 posting “Rainbows and b8r bait”, about
photos and video clips on the Tumblr site “hairyb8r’s bate fuel”, devoted to hairy men masturbating.
[A linguistic note: the site regularly uses the clippings bate (or b8) for masturbate and bator (or b8r) for masturbator. I don’t think I’ve noted these on this site before (and they’re very hard to search for). On-line slang sites, including Urban Dictionary, generally have both, but the big slang dictionaries (Lighter’s HDAS and Green’s Dictionary) seem to have neither — suggesting that the clippings are either relatively recent or not very widespread (or both). (There are also some on-line uses of bation for masturbation.)
The full versions are formal or clinical in style / register, while the clipped versions are slang, so of course speakers see a connotative distinction between them — usually expressed by saying that the clipped versions refer to acts performed for pleasure, or very frequently or compulsively (even “obsessively” or “addictively”). The first way of talking shows a generally positive evaluation of masturbation, the second betrays the widespread devaluing of the act.]
hairyb8r says of himself, “Being a compulsive bator with a fetish for hairy guys, I post the types of things that get me off.” So he collects phallophili(a)c photos and videos showing hairy men jacking off, or getting ready to do so: what part of this indicates a compulsion and a fetish? (compulsion in NOAD2: ‘an irresistible urge to behave in a certain way, especially against one’s conscious wishes’; fetish in NOAD2: ‘a form of sexual desire in which gratification is linked to an abnormal degree to a particular object, item of clothing, part of the body, etc.’). Why are all of these things — delight in cocks, especially hard ones; a preference for hairy men; pleasure in watching men jacking off; jacking off oneself — not simply enthusiasms (requiring no apology, and in the case of jacking off, deserving of encouragement and celebration)? Why should b8rs be treated differently from foodies, avid sports fans, or opera queens?
In any case, some of b8r’s material is artful …, but a lot of it is routine means to an end … But then some religious music is great art, though a lot of it is routine, and some of it is downright embarrassing (soppy-sentimental and awkward), but it gets the job — praising God, inspiring devotion — done, at least for people who are inclined that way. So with porn (hairyb8r’s stuff is certainly a species of gay porn).
I’ve written on this blog, in some detail, and with considerable feeling, about masturbation as one component of lovemaking with my man Jacques; see two postings of mine from 12/30/20: “Manual labor” and “Masturbatory side notes”. A form of sexual activity that is worlds away from the masturbation in jack-off clubs.
June 13, 2024 at 3:18 pm |
SF Jacks was a long standing jack off club (no oral or anal) here in San Francisco. Naked (or fetish wear) and shoes only, in one big open room. Men of all types and ages. Was only once or twice a month, short hours (3-4?) so they always had issues finding suitable locations. Died out pre-pandemic. Typically a crowd of around 50 guys when I’d go.
Miss that, as well as Blow Buddies, which also closed just before the pandemic.