Dating Locked: A note on Gay Chastity

Oh. My. God. Can this be true?

“Chastity devices at Dore Alley Fair 2011” (Erica Liss, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Imagine if you could hook up or date while locked in chastity, and that was OK...

Imagine if you could identify as “permanently locked”, hook up and date that way, and even start a long term relationship pre-locked…

Even if you’re middle-aged and happily paired off, there’s something wonderful about imagining that your sex life could have been like that back when.

My romantic history pre-Xena was confused and confusing for the women involved. I kept dating ice maidens, but then trying to thaw them. All the relationships of my youth would have made more sense had I gone in locked, would have been less messy, and maybe would have ended on better terms… but only if “locked” was unremarkable.

And that’s pretty much what seems to be going on in some corners of the gay community.

It’s a cool sexy thing in its own right, but it also bodes well for the Future of Chastity…

Normalised Locked Dating and Relationships in the Gay Community

The gay dating community has always been more broad-minded about kink than the heterosexual one.

(Article unlocks at the weekend)

Some of this has to be to do with a history of being “outsiders together against the world”. However, the gay community remains kink friendly even in areas where with established large gay communities embedded in reasonably gay-friendly cultures. (That’s not to say that there aren’t dangerous instances of homophobia, but in these places homophobia isn’t the default expectation, so the community is much less embattled than, say, fifty years ago.)

It’s more likely that gay men tend to be kink friendly because men in general are more compulsively kinky than women, so kink isn’t a red flag the way it would be in vanilla dating.

It’s no surprise, then, that over the years I’ve seen some intriguing reports of unchaste chaste goings on in the gay community.

When I was prepping for this series, I caught Locked Guy’s X post, showing a locked meetup at the Kink 3D chastity device store during the Up Your Alley Fair (AKA “Dore Alley Fair”), a massive outdoor kink fest for queer folk. (You can see the picture here, but it’s not remotely safe for work!)

It was time to do the virtual legwork and find out what was going on. I asked some questions on the original thread, and on Reddit (here and here). I also searched keywords on chastity sites and again on Reddit.

What follows is my general impression of how male chastity works in the gay dating community. (I’d love to hear more specifics and corrections in the comments.)

Dating Locked

In general, gay chastity seems to be “WEIRD” phenomena found in culturally liberal developed countries, where kink is just another dimension of erotic preferences, and toppy men tend to cheerfully approach low-overhead kink instrumentally: e.g. even in the absence of specific fetish, a "slave" might be fun to hook up with because you get things you want and a “chaste” because no functioning penis. The boundaries between kink and vanilla are porous.

Conditions, of course, vary. There are some otherwise wildly kinky gay communities where male chastity is an oddity, and some subcultures where there's a firm boundary between vanilla and kinky and a cock cage could get you thrown out of a gym or bathhouse.

However, where male chastity is on the edge of the gay mainstream, it thrives. In chastity friendly dating pools, the populations of locked bottoms roughly matches that of interested tops, and can be between 5% and 10% of the pool. For perspective, locked gay men are more common than ones with red hair (1-2%), and just about as common as those with specific Myers Briggs personality types (6% for each type).

In such environments, it seems chastity cages are generally OK in nude gay spaces from locker rooms through saunas to what sound awfully like semi-public orgies. Bottoms can present as chaste in hookups without that being a red flag (though it can still be unwanted, and it’s usually polite to inform upfront). You can be open about chastity on dating apps - Grindr even has a "chastity" tag. You can "permanently" self lock and have a reasonable hope of not only dating that way, but also finding a long term partner.

"Mainstream" gay chastity, however, differs from straight chastity in that it is very instrumental. Chastity is a (mostly) reversible body modification, literally locking you into being a bottom and maybe enhancing your chance of a prostate orgasm; you still tend to get off. You could frame a chastity cage as a “costly signal” broadcasting your willingness to bottom, and maybe give oral without receiving it.

All this is similar to the type of straight chastity focussed on anal, but very different from the kinky denial-focussed chastity that's probably more common amongst straights. Truly kinky gay chastity also exists, but is probably rarer than the straight version, perhaps because toppy gay and bi men like giving anal sex, and it's hard to reliably deny a bottom who you are also penetrating for your own pleasure.

Crunching the numbers: the chaste future is gay

That figure of 5%-10% visible gay chastes is between twice and four times all the plausible estimates for adult men merely owning a cock cage! It seems that — in a permissive environment — just about every gay man interested in being locked is locked and there’s no meaningful distinction between “cage owner” and “locked”.

We can use that statistic the same way lesbian dildo use indicates actual percentage of women in PIV (20%) and predict that…

In the future, at least 5% of all men will be locked, but this will never exceed 10%.

In the shorter term, these numbers tell us about the market for male chastity devices, and who’s driving it (numbers based on US population of 166M males and 4.5% of US men being gay or bi):

There are about ten times more straight cage owners than locked M4M.

However, we can expect only a small number — say 5% — of straight cage owners to be actively locked. So, there are probably twice as many locked gay and bi men than locked straight men.

It follows that men who like having sex with men will drive the development of male chastity devices for the next generation or so.

• Chastity technology will be about what I called muzzling and sealing, but not neutering; future device design will make them hard to remove in the heat of the moment, or at all, but actual orgasm prevention will be a minority interest.

• We can expect an emphasis on aesthetics, partly because gay culture likes aesthetics, but also because people want to look their best for new lovers.

There are other likely impacts on straight chastity, but I’ll get to those when I talk about near future chastity next week…

See all Future of Chastity Articles.

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While you’re waiting for the next episode, find out what it would be like to date in a world where male chastity was mainstream…