We know so little about male sexuality, and because of that, carving out space in it for anything other than totally straight or totally gay behavior is bound to be confusing. Ward demonstrates this in her book, showing all the wild ways guys rationalize having sexual encounters with other men, whether it be just jerking off together or eating potato chips out of each other’s butt cracks. Compared with women’s sexuality, Ward theorizes, male sexuality is perceived as rigid, and because men aren’t perceived as being able to have fluidity, their behaviors have to be defined as either gay or not gay. This explains the difficulty the Str8 bators of BateWorld have with coming to a consensus on what jacking off together means. There’s no allowance for fluidity, and if the world were to find out that you jack it with dudes, everyone would think you were gay, and that means you lose your heteromasculine capital. The upside to all of this is that there has never been a better time in history for a man to explore his sexuality. Binaries like gay/straight are being challenged, and we are creating conceptual and physical spaces in which it’s possible to imagine ways of being that are more fluid.
