By David Futrelle
Last year, weirdo online pastor “Coach” Dave Daubenmire caused a bit of a stir after he warned men not to give in to the devilish temptation of masturbation, because when a man jerks himself off he’s, well, jerking off a man, and even though that man is himself, it’s still totally gay.
Turns out he’s not the only one who feels this way. One NoFap Redditor — one who has posted in detail on his own efforts to cure what he considers a fierce masturbation addiction — made a similar declaration last summer in the UnpopularOpinions subreddit, where his views did indeed turn out to be quite unpopular.
“Masturbation is gay,” announced asdasdasdasdfff44. “You’re jerking off a penis and a man is jerking you off.”
This particular Redditor — let’s just call him Asdas for short — wasn’t the first Redditor to have this thought, but while most of those who’ve posted on the subject seem to have be joking. Asdas clearly wasn’t.
He set out his arguments one by one, starting with the most anatomically difficult — but also, he thinks, the most obviously gay — example he could imagine. (His examples only apply to cis men, though presumably he thinks cis women who masturbate are gay too.)
Autofellatio. That’s sucking your own dick. Yes, it can be done and you can likely do it too with determination and flexibility training. Ask just about anyone and you will be told it’s gay as fuck, you’re literally sucking dick. They’d be correct. You probably know it’s gay as fuck too, no need to ask others.
Actually, judging from some other Reddit discussions of this particular form of self-pleasure, there doesn’t seem to be a consensus on this issue. While some Redditors think it’s “hella gay,” a larger number seem to be envious of any guy who can pull off this particular stunt, and don’t consider it gay at all. “As long as you tell yourself ‘no homo’ in the mirror beforehand you’re good to go,” joked one Redditor in a SettleThisForMe subreddit discussion. It’s only gay “if you make eye contac,” joked another.
But Asdas didn’t consider any possible objections, and quickly moved on.
“I’m thinking about a woman so it’s not gay”. You may be thinking about a woman when you’re fucking a goat too, that doesn’t mean you’re not fucking a goat. Ultimately a man is jerking you during masturbation and you’re stroking a cock.. that happens to be yours. Notice how that’s gay as fuck.
This raises so many questions. What if you’re thinking about a goat when you’re fucking a woman? What if a goat is thinking about you?
Asdas continued:
“It’s not someone else’s cock”. Ok then, grab a realistic dildo and stroke it rigorously and sensually or whatever you do when you masturbate. Yes, stroking a dick. Notice how that’s gay as fuck.
I don’t know how many guys stroke dildos when they masturbate. But guys certainly fuck a lot of inanimate objects, and I feel I could use more guidance from Asdas on this subject. What if you fuck an apple pie? Not gay, right? How about if you fuck a GAY WEDDING CAKE!?
Alas, Asdas offered no answers on any other inanimate objects beyond dildoes, and instead moved on to his final argument:
When masturbating, you get 10% the sensation of penetrating a real vagina and 100% the sensation of stroking a real penis.
Huh. I have heard rumors that there are numerous heterosexual sex acts that do not involve a penis penetrating a vagina at all. Are they all gay too?
Once again, no answers from Asdas, who wrapped up his post with a bold challenge:
If you think masturbation is not gay, you have an obligation to suck your own dick too in order to be consistent.
Asdas was stunned when a large number of the commenters informed him that they, and most other men, would be happy to do this if only they “could bend that far.”
“No,” Asdas declared, in evident horror, “most would be horribly disturbed by such an idea.”
“Are you new to the internet?” his interlocutor replied. “Or just to like, people in general?”
Good questions, both. Had Asdas done any research on the internet at all, he would learned, among other things, that many if not most men have tried to suck their own dicks, a feat only a few men are capable of pulling off, and that there’s a big subculture of dudes who not only think jerking themselves off isn’t gay, but also that jerking off next to other dudes jerking off isn’t gay either. Because sexuality is weird and complicated and people draw lines between gay and straight in all sorts of places, or don’t draw clear lines at all.
Because in the end, whether a sexual act is gay or straight, or neither, or something else entirely, is less about what goes on with the body than it is about what’s going on in the mind.
And one thing that seems abundantly clear is that what’s going on in Asdas’ mind when it comes to sex isn’t really doing him or anyone else much good. Homophobia and toxic masculinity are two terrible tates that taste worse together.
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So what is your non-sarcastic point? Non-sarcastically, what do you feel about makeup in the workplace?
Do you have a substantive point to make?
Well it looks like I sure missed a thing here.
I’m actually having thinky thoughts about this exchange. Hmm.
Late, but if I am not real, can I go back to bed? Would be so nice.
@Crip Dyke: Okay, I’ll admit the needling thing was more me in the open thread.
Admittedly, it came from a place of morbid curiosity: I had already used up my finite supply of patience on someone who seemed exponentially more genuine, and my internal judge for “Is this a necessary post” was out to an extended lunchbreak.
And it was too tempting.
It was very effective though! I mean, it was one comment and BOOM: “You and your coven”
I didn’t make popcorn. I should have. Such a missed opportunity. I even have some of the really good kettle stuff I could have made!
Good luck with getting straight answers to your questions from DA!
@Scild: Please do have thinky thoughts! Please! The well of my thinky-thoughts is almost run dry, and I could use an excuse to make popcorn for breakfast tomorrow.
@DA: Sorry for the misrepresentation of your second position. All the sealions tend blend together in a big brown blur — I will admit to being too lazy to go back and cite your word-for-word positions relative to every other similar sealion in this blog’s history.
I will likely continue to be unmotivated to debate with you until I see some solid evidence that you aren’t a troll.
As I said to Crip Dyke, I’ve got a limited supply of patience; I prefer to save it for my critters, folks who genuinely need advice, and for wrestling with SOLIDWORKS.
If you want a discussion? Maybe try paying attention to the advice other folks tried to give you. Particularly the advice about where you choose to focus your energy and what that choice tells everyone else. Then, follow it.
I kind of doubt you will, because have I mentioned how similar your behavior is to past trolls? Or maybe everyone else speculating on whose sock you are might be a solid indicator of how trollish your posts have been in this thread and previous.
You could always follow the links to old trolls and maybe compare and contrast your style to theirs. It might be enlightening for you.
On the slim chance you aren’t a troll, it might even give you some ideas for how to dig yourself out of the pit you’ve excavated instead of continuing your current trajectory towards your antipode.
Fudge, I got drowned.
Still, it was nice to come visit this comment section again.
This place only got lovelier.
@Desperate Ambrose
You had ample time to do just that, but you preferred to whine and complain about people who had some jabs at you instead of engaging with the folks who tried to discuss.
You’re more interested in protecting your own ego and talking about discussion than you are in discussion itself. Sorry, but until you sort out your priorities, nobody is gonna bother.
@kupo
The desperate
“Really I’m going to bed”please give me air so I can suck it all out of the room” vibe kinda reminded me of mrex, but maybe that’s because I missed Steele (I think), but was regurly lurking again when mrex was active. They really do all blend together.@L-O-troll
Calmly explaining the logical (and scientific!) fallicies of your joke is “being touchy”? The joke that makes no logical sense, and therefore isn’t funny? If you want to come in here and use tired old homophobic tropes as fodder for humor, then at least be clever about it.
But my guess is that’s too much to ask, and all you’ll manage in reply is a brainless ‘lol’ because you don’t have the smarts, or the trolling expertise, to manage anything other than the basics.
Also, have you been here before? Because you seem to have ridden DA’s coattails into here.
Every article and discussion about a homophobic statement or action gets at least one person (usually more) going, “Ha! He’s totally in the closet!” Every. Single. Timee. If the joke was ever funny, it has has been run into the ground by this point.
I would love to know what percentage of these ‘let’s blame the gays for their own oppression for the lulz’ jokes are made by straight people. Probably not a perfect 100%, but damn close.
@fgetc
I LOVE the ahnk on your kitty gravitar. Please come back and comment again soon!
@red lion
Pretty pink punani princess has been here before. Not a troll. However, the snotty, unapologetic homophobic response is not typical and wasnt cool.
@troll hunters
Def not steele. But damn this dude is just like a troll weve had, right down to the weakass insults and sealioning willful ignorance about all things but yet knows EVERYTHING. Def a sock. Prolly got banned bc every thread ends up being the troll show. The bon bon comments he joked about last night is clearly indicative that hes been here before. He sure likes the attention, no matter how negative, as long as its from women. Pathetic.
As a longtime lurker, first time poster, I have to ask:
What is the point of engaging with an obvious bad faith actor such as Desperate Ambrose?
I remember the early days of chat rooms and online fora in which the most common refrain was “don’t feed the trolls.” Starve them of the attention they crave and they will eventually tucker themselves out and toddle off looking for greener pastures where they can get a rise out of others with their antics.
It’s not even like Desperate Ambrose is being clandestine in their intentions. They clearly aren’t here to participate in reasoned discussion. They simply want to throw sand into the gears of social interaction while reaping the benefits of the attention that their antics elicit. Why give them that attention?
I’d understand if it was a matter of subtle trollery that flew under the radar, but in this case, there’s nothing subtle about it. Heck, they’ve made it clear even with their choice of nom de guerre. Has anyone been more desperate for attention and validation than the aptly self-identified Desperate Ambrose?
I hope this post won’t be seen as concern trolling. I sincerely value the discussions, humour, and light-hearted antics of the community here, which is why I keep coming back. I just rarely feel like I have anything to add, so I prefer to listen while others speak. However, in this case, I can’t help but speak up out of concern for seeing great discussion derailed by a bad-faith troll.
I have a little secret: I save a lot of time in these loooooong threads with trolls by scrolling past every one of their posts. I’ve found that anything worth seeing will either be blockquoted by the regulars that interact with the trolls, or I can pick it up most of the time by inference if the “salient” troll part is omitted. If I can’t, I don’t worry about it and find that I don’t miss much at all.
In any case, reading troll sealion screeds is very seldom necessary past the part where I dismiss the commenter as a troll.
In other news, the trial is over and I’m excused from jury duty for three years. I’ve found that being on a jury is kind of cool because everyone treated us very respectfully; from the judge to the security people.
@Hambeast You’re freeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!! 😀
And re: scrolling past trolls: you and me both. <3 I can usually stomach maaaaaybe three or four posts before I give up. Besides, everyone here is faster on the draw with the replies than I am. 😀
@David wehuntedthemammoth.com got another shout out on Daily Kos. 🙂 (I think it was on the post about the foiled Women's March shooter.)
Seems like folks have had enough of DA, so I’ve banned him.
I’m sure he’s off now in whatever troll-hole that spawned him boasting about how he totally owned the libs here… ?
The idea that if you “don’t feed the trolls” they’ll just go away just isn’t true. What typically happens is that they stick around, and people who would have participated leave.
Pushing back against a troll is important, because then voices that might not be heard can feel secure that here, we call trolls out on their shit.
Engaging with them is also typically not for them. I mean, maybe, you’ll be the person to talk to that one troll, and it will be at the exact right spot in the universe and their mind will be changed. It happened to someone from Westboro, after all.
But what usually happens is that people are talking for the lurkers. If you let a troll’s points stand, then people reading might think “the regulars here think that this troll has a point. No one has said otherwise.” And silence is so often taken as agreement.
Points need to be pushed back against, because who knows who you are helping? Who knows who is reading?
Also, where do the trolls go, when they leave? If they’re ignored, do they just decide to stop trolling and become not-devil’s advocates? I don’t think that any of the trolls who are used as chew toys here stop being trolls… But maybe some see how small it is we see them, and they will reconsider their choices. Instead of feeling big and in control, ‘triggering the libs’, they can see that they are neither of those things. Perhaps they’ll stop, but at least I know that they won’t leave here to go and troll in another space, without remembering that they had their asses handed to them here.
TL;DR: “Don’t feed the trolls” is bad advice that lets one shitty voice dominate a conversation, instead of having a bunch of people calling the troll out.
If this saying actually worked, would we be having these problems now? I mean, that’s been the advice for pretty much the entire time of the internet, right?
@Crip Dyke:
Hmm, first my brain started going ‘hey, shouldn’t that be “wast thou”‘, then I realized this probably qualifies as the subjunctive mood because it’s a hypothetical…
It’s almost too bad that English doesn’t really have the second person familiar like ‘thou’ anymore (and worse that because ‘thou’ is mostly only heard by people in church these days, many seem to think ‘thou’ is the formal version) because deliberate misuse of the T-V distinction is one of those tells in terms of respect. Granted the bar for the distinction can be different in different dialects; Quebecois vs. Parisian French can be different.
(And then you have German, where the second person formal is actually the third person plural rather than the second person plural as is true in most of the Romance languages.)
Yeah, I find the details of linguistics far more interesting than Desperate Ambrose here, despite the bouts of pedantry there.
@Jenora Feuer
Yorkshire folk still use thou – modified to tha (or ta if preceeded by is), but it’s still in daily use. Also thee, thy, and thine aren’t uncommon at all. The rabble across the border in Lancashire do too.
We’re a little resistant to change. To say the least. 😛
@Jenora Feuer:
Well **I** had to pretend DA’s anilingus comment was a deliberate reference to the Katherine/Patruchio banter in Taming of the Shrew in order to make the whole thing worth the trouble of a response, so I don’t see why you shouldn’t geek out on the foibles of the english 2nd person singular pronoun for a bit.
I mean, although DA’s comments were, in the main, inane, they did provide an excuse to let people know that Shakespeare wasn’t a snooty, upper-class stick-in-the-mud. Very few folks actually remember off hand that Shakespeare loved his sex jokes (or at least appreciated that the audience of his day loved them enough that he included them as a pander).
So take DA’s lemons and make pronoun-ade is what I’m saying.
@Hambeast @Fishy Goat
Me three. I’d rather not waste any time on trolls, personally.
@Wandering Jewterus
I believe the main reason is to show lurkers that the troll’s trolling is not acceptable here.
“If I were thou” is perfectly fine, because “were” is the subjunctive for “I”. The other way round would be “If thou wert I”, because “wert” is the subjunctive for “thou”. “Wast” is the indicative preterite for “thou”. Verbs conjugated for “thou” always get at least a “t” at the end, at most “est”. For example, Thou wert, thou shalt, thou canst, thou eatest, thou hadst, thou typedst. (Don’t bother trying to pronounce that last one as a single syllable. Type-edst.)
I think the way trolls are dealt with here is pretty outstanding, tbh, for the benefit of people (that would be me) who get to read the excellent dissections and rebuttals many regulars are so good at. I reckon a lot of us benefit from those dissections and rebuttals.
Plus it’s good medicine to see trolls get their arses handed to them so thoroughly and with such panache and aplomb.
Thank you for explaining this to me, Rhuu. Despite being a lurker for so long, I didn’t consider the lurker angle. What you said made a lot of sense. I guess the efficacy of the “don’t feed the trolls” mantra hasn’t really been borne out by evidence.
This is why I don’t normally post. I achieve so much more understanding just by listening to the rest of you.
There’s a saying in advocacy: “You’re not trying to persuade the witness; you’re trying to persuade the jury”
And I think that’s applicable to trolls. It’s for the benefit of the viewers, not them. Partly to rebut the arguments, but also to show that their views and arguments are not accepted.
@Shadowplay:
The Amish dialect still uses ‘thou’ as well, as I recall.
@Crip Dyke, regarding Shakespeare:
Oh, no kidding. Just see the reference to being ‘Fortune’s Privates’ in Hamlet. Deliberately playing on the multiple senses of the word ‘Privates’.
Or Iago’s commentary in Othello about the ‘black ram tupping your white ewe’, which wouldn’t seem too out of place in a modern MRA forum. Iago was a nasty piece of work.
Or, from what I’ve heard, just the title of ‘Much Ado About Nothing’…
@Wandering Jewterus:
It’s also worth noting that ‘don’t feed the trolls’ really depends on the type of troll in question, and the immediacy of the communication.
Back in the Usenet or BBS days, when the majority of the people on the net were University students or staff, turnaround response times were measured in hours or days, and trolls didn’t have their own specific hidey-holes to plot, it made a lot more sense. A lot of the trolls were more the ‘prankster’ type: do something out of line and watch the reactions. If they didn’t get the reaction they wanted, a lot of the time they’d give up. Also, anything too egregiously out of line could get punished by revoking the account privileges. Not to say that things were perfect (anybody who’s seen student newspapers from the 70s could tell you that), and unfortunately a lot of the time the problem got ‘solved’ by the victim leaving, but there tended to be limits, at least as long as the percentage of trolls in the population was low enough that they couldn’t reinforce each other.
Nowadays, the trolls have their own places where they run things and can’t be kicked off, they can egg each other on to worse and worse things, and they often have lots of time so they can just sit around throwing shit to see how much of it sticks, causing everybody else to spend more work cleaning it up. ‘Not feeding the trolls’ in this case is like ignoring a toddler’s tantrum: they’re just as likely to keep ramping it up until they can’t be ignored anymore.
Also, in many cases the potential victims can’t just leave without damaging their own livelihood. The only real solution is places with at least semi-active moderation like this one. No moderation, and you end up with Youtube comments.
To the extent that ‘don’t feed the trolls’ was ever true (and it was never entirely true), it hasn’t been for a long time now.
You are welcome, Wandering Jewterus. I hope you continue to post when you would like to, because more voices make the conversation richer.
No pressure, though!