A Short History of Men Wanking Together: From Circle Jerks to JO Clubs to Your Phone

There is a particular look men get when they first admit they have bated with a mate — half confession, half relief that the sky did not fall in. Here is the thing: you are part of a tradition older than the internet, older than the word “gay”, and arguably older than trousers.

It has always happened

Anthropologists have documented communal male masturbation in cultures on every continent, usually as part of growing up, bonding or ritual. Closer to home, the “circle jerk” was a fixture of boarding schools, scout camps and army barracks for as long as anyone was writing memoirs about them — the Victorians were simultaneously terrified of it and completely unable to stop it.

The reason is not complicated. Put young men together with time, privacy and no women, and some of them will do what young men do. The company makes it a laugh, the taboo makes it a bond, and the shared secret makes it a friendship. Nothing about that has changed.

The clubs that saved lives

The modern bator scene has a specific and genuinely heroic origin. In 1980 a group in New York started what became New York Jacks — a members-only club where men got together to masturbate, with firm rules: hands only, no penetration, no exceptions. San Francisco Jacks followed, then clubs across America and Europe.

Within a couple of years AIDS arrived, and those house rules turned out to be the safest sex going. The JO clubs became places where men could be sexual, social and completely safe at the same time, and they are credited with keeping a lot of men alive through the worst of the epidemic. Several are still running forty years on. Every time someone sets “hands only” as a house rule for a session today, they are quoting those men.

Bator culture goes online

The internet did for bating what it did for everything: gave it a name, a community and an argument about terminology. “Bator” emerged as an identity — a man for whom masturbation is a thing in itself rather than a consolation prize — along with a whole vocabulary: bate mates, edging, gooning, bate sessions, bate buddies. Forums and later dedicated sites let men find each other outside the big cities, and the scene went from a few clubs to a global subculture that cheerfully includes gay, bi, curious and straight men.

What it never got was a decent app. Hookup grids treat bating as a footnote; organising a group session on them is a mess of screenshots and crossed wires. That gap is a large part of why B8Mates exists — but it is built the other way round from the grids. Mates come first: Tribes for the different scenes, events with host approval and a private group chat, M8s and Close M8s so the men you bate with become men you actually know, and a culture where saying you are into bating is about as shocking as saying you are into cycling.

Why it was never weird

Men bate together for the same reasons they do anything together — company, a laugh, a bit of competition, the odd confession. It is sexual without being complicated, intimate without being a relationship, and for a lot of men it is the first place they ever felt completely unembarrassed about their own body. The blokes who get the most out of it are the ones who treat it as one more thing mates do — alongside the surf, the gym or the pub — rather than the reason for the friendship. Add forty years of safe-sex pedigree and you have an activity with a better record than most contact sports.

So the next time you feel that half-confession look coming on, skip it. You are in good, long and well-documented company.