IF YOU ASK any open-minded, educated person about masturbation, they will most likely smile and say it’s wonderful, healthy, and normal. However, if you told them that masturbation was your favorite sexual outlet or even your only sexual outlet, that smiling face might turn into one of concern or confusion. Surely masturbation can’t be a valid and purposely chosen substitute for sex, right?
At this point, masturbation can elicit anxiety, as it has done for centuries. In the early 18th century, in London, a physician of dubious repute wrote a tract for the Grub Street press that identified a rarely discussed social problem, masturbation, that needed to be addressed as never before, and with haste. This doctor felt a moral imperative to shed light on this “self abuse” before it led people to physiological and/or psychological harm (epilepsy! insanity! death!). Less than fifty years later, this newly discovered disorder and its attendant ills were being included in the top encyclopedia of the day.
A Growing Subculture of Masturbation
Three hundred years later, there is a growing subculture of men who are finding that masturbation is the best sex they’ve ever had. These men may or may not also engage in traditional forms of sex, but the tie that binds them is an unabashed love of “bating,” as it is called by its aficionados. Generally speaking, these men are going way beyond the quick wank in the shower before work; they are making an art of it. They’re masturbating until they enter what they describe as the “batehole.” This is a place where the outside world melts away and sexual ecstasy takes over. They’re meeting each other on-line on sites such as BateWorld.com or Chaturbate.com, where the focus is masturbating on camera with the general public looking on.
These sites are the nuclei of a world of men who speak their own lingo. They call themselves “bators,” and their version of a man cave is the “masturbatorium.” Weekends spent “bating” are called “batecations.” They may bemoan moments of “Batus Interruptus” when the damn phone rings just as you’re riding the “edge” of the “bate.” Edging is getting close to orgasm and then pulling back right before it happens, calming things down, and gradually building up to the edge again, doing this multiple times, and finally reaching a climax while “gooning.” The latter is understood as a state of consciousness far removed from ordinary reality.
On any site geared to masturbation, check out the videos of men “cockbabbling,” which refers to the verbal emanations that accompany extreme arousal and eventual ejaculation. Gooning is considered to be that moment during a bate when porn is no longer necessary, when the connection to the penis is all that’s required to reach an almost frightening height of sexual ecstasy. At that point one enters the batehole, a sort of sexual abyss. Type the word “goon” in your favorite porn search engine and see the collections of the typical looks on a gooner’s face: tongue hanging out, face contorted—man becoming satyr.
One remarkable, and perhaps unexpected, thing about this community is that its members have taken to referring to each other as “brothers.” They feel bonded in a shared yet private experience. Unlike on other hook-up sites, these men are not trying to get into each others’ pants. Rather, they’re encouraging each other to get into their own pants. The Bate Brotherhood is made up of such a variety of men. I’ve met bators who like to do drugs while they bate, just as there are those that use no stimulants or depressants at all. There are groups on BateWorld.com for men who love big penises, small penises, hairy men, smooth men, and so on. There are married bators on the down low, others who are exhibitionists, and still others who have a fetish for used condoms. There are bators who like to philosophize about the phallus, who are fans of the Grateful Dead, and who are narcissists. You can find Christian bators, Jewish bators, and Mormon bators. There are bators looking for a bate partner, and there are events listed for group bates. There are bators who like to perform fellatio on themselves. And the list goes on.
The Solosexual
Many men have begun to refer to themselves as “solosexual,” which is defined as a preference for masturbation over other sorts of sexual activity. However, the experience of masturbation can be paradoxically social. One bator described it to me in this way:
Gooning is achieved through hours of porn and masturbation. It is an act that is almost, by definition, solitary. It is the domain of the solosexual. To share that experience with another seems almost a contradiction in terms; almost a contradiction in terms, but not quite. The heightened masturba-
tory experiences that men have achieved as solosexuals are largely possible because of the strange combination of privacy and sociality that the Internet permits. … Solosexuals rely on online sociality to enrich their self-pleasure, which is to say that in some way the solosexual’s act of solitary self-pleasure is always already sociable. Since solosexuality is sociable even as it is solitary, it is possible to achieve and to share something like mutual gooning: a fully self-absorbed uninhibited bate state in the presence of another in the same state.
This defense of solosexuality flies in the face of common wisdom. We live in a world in which masturbation is seen as a poor substitute for partnered sex once we reach adulthood. In the centuries since the alarm bell about the purported dangers of masturbation was sounded, disapproval from the past still informs our discussion about masturbation, if we discuss it at all. As recently as the 2006 print edition of the Encyclopedia Americana, we read: “Masturbation may be a sign of an underlying psychological problem if an adult prefers it to sexual intercourse when a partner is available, or if it is abnormally frequent.”
Needless to say, bators would totally reject such a statement. Bators are not shy about discussing issues such as addiction to masturbation, but they refuse to be considered abnormal. Just as some people will watch TV for hours at a time, some bators will bate for hours in one session. They will tell you that no episode of Modern Family ever got them to the heights of ecstasy that bating does!
As an avid reader, I did a search for any books on the subject of solosexuality and turned up nothing. Toni Morrison is credited with saying: “If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” And so I did. I released Solosexual: Portrait of a Masturbator in January 2016, and it has sold consistently well ever since. Reading my own book at the tender age of twenty would have made clear to me that which has taken me another twenty years to figure out. For one thing, it could have spared me some sexual relationships that would have best been avoided altogether.
When Solosexual was published, I was interviewed by Salon.com. The social media trolls had a field day in the comments section: “Get a hobby!” they blared. “Jason Armstrong, ha! Now we know how he got such a strong arm!” But when readers wrote me fan mail in large numbers, telling me how the book touched them and reflected their story, I wept with joy. BateWorld.com members told me that Solosexual wasn’t just my book anymore, “it’s our book.” I became a poster boy for solosexuals. On Vocabulary.com, my name and book were referenced with the word “masturbate,” making me the dictionary definition of the act.
But the story doesn’t end there. Masturbation is the gateway to further self-discoveries, and one doesn’t necessarily need to be a solosexual to be consumed by it. Let’s go a step further and really talk about self-love.
The Autosexual
The first time we see Barbra Streisand’s face in a motion picture is in 1968’s Funny Girl, when Barbra as Fanny Brice stops in front of a mirror, turns to her reflection, and says “Hello, gorgeous!” Who among us hasn’t done that—admired ourselves in a mirror, thinking that we’re hot stuff—at least at that moment? But for some, the image seen in the mirror does more than arouse vanity. For them, it really arouses.
The autosexual is someone who is sexually stimulated by his or her own image. For some, who might be defined as exclusive autosexuals, this may mean that being their own sex object obviates the need to watch porn during self-stimulation. A mirror will do nicely, thank you.
Speaking for myself, even though I don’t define myself as an autosexual—I’m attracted to other men and enjoy watching gay porn—when I “bate” in front of my reflection, I can be as turned on as a radio. Indeed I struggled with the notion of autosexuality for a long time, as it invoked in me an element of incest panic: was I looking for an identical twin with whom to make love? Self-love is considered vital to our mental health, but when it takes a sexual turn, there’s an aura of taboo about it.
For some, self-love includes not just a sexual attraction but also a romantic attraction to oneself. These “autoromantics” will take themselves on a date, light candles, cuddle with themselves, and buy romantic gifts for themselves. In a few cases (though it is not technically legal anywhere), autosexuals and autoromantics may even marry themselves, a practice known a sologamy. As might be expected, the Japanese are at the forefront, with a company there offering self-marriage services that cater largely to women. As with much about sex, women have spoken out more forcefully than men. I’m the first male writer I know of to discuss autosexuality, but I hope to stand corrected on that.
Men on amateur sex sites such as Xtube.com and the masturbation site BateWorld.com have told me that they masturbate to their own posted videos. With respect to autosexuality, why is it that so many couples that one encounters seem to look so much alike? I can’t help but wonder if many of us don’t long for the familiar, a return to self, even while pairing off with another person.
On BateWorld.com, which is the world’s foremost social media site for men who love to masturbate, I posted an informal poll, posing the question: “Autosexuality is being sexually attracted to one’s self. When masturbating, do you get sexually aroused by yourself (perhaps by looking in the mirror or watching your own masturbation videos)?” Of the 373 responses that I received—a respectable number for a survey sample—about seventy-five percent agreed that they get aroused by watching themselves masturbate.
One man left this comment: “I love looking at myself naked and hard in the mirror. The more lewd the pose, the better. I find that seeing myself as a sexual being is highly arousing.” Another commented that he has “three two-meter high, big mirrors in my masturbatorium. I placed one as a central mirror and the other two mirrors at each side of the central one, at an angle of about 130-140 degrees so that I can watch myself bating in deep, crazy bate bliss … from three different positions.”
Narcissism plays a role, to be sure. One commenter revealed that in high school and college, “my narcissistic love affair with myself was my deepest secret.” Another proudly proclaimed: “Look at me. Wouldn’t you be turned on if you were 280 lbs of muscle/fur/cock like me? I get rock hard watching myself go through my bodybuilding poses in the big mirrors and great lighting in the gym locker room.” But sometimes the self-desire wanes, as one fellow humorously put it: “I started a relationship with myself in the mirror in my late 20’s, and broke up with myself in my early 40’s. I just wasn’t attracted anymore. I took it well and am still good friends with myself.”
Remember the days when homosexuality was considered abnormal here in the West? Now it’s solosexuality that’s challenging what is normal sexuality for an adult. It takes courage to embrace one’s sexuality in a world that remains judgmental and hypocritical about it. I believe heartily in writing about sexuality in order to shed light on things that, in my opinion, are unnecessarily hidden.
There is something in masturbation, in the notion that we can do ourselves better than anybody else, that appears to threaten some people. For others, embracing masturbation means that a new conduit has been found to the deepest recesses of self. The power of our sexuality, whether partnered or solo, is that it can lead us all on a journey into self, as frightening and exhilarating as that might be.
