Male Chastity Fetish and Evolutionary Psychology
Why on earth would I want to lock up my penis? #NSFW
I discovered male chastity devices pre-internet in an old book on Victorian medical obsessions. Here’s the kind of thing:
My reaction was instant and paradoxical. I got very, very hard. I instantly wanted… needed a device like this, and somebody to lock me in one.
OK, I am a submissive, so just about any bondage device interests me. However, this one pushed my buttons so hard it was an instant fetish.
Why?
Most fetishes make some kind of sense. They are either a refinement of some early sexual experience, boots, for example, or else they are an exaggerated adaptive urge (i.e. one that will help you breed and pass on your genes), for example liking women with big breasts.
But I had no early sexual experience of chastity.
True, the (call it) Chastity Instinct need not be adaptive. Perhaps it’s an expression of some random variation around gender. Maybe some of us have mild dysphoria or dysmorphia, which only now finds expression through chastity devices. Or perhaps it allays some common combination of personality traits and psychological ticks. Maybe we’re all fastidious, or don’t like the way our penis is outside our control.
However, instant and strong attraction to chastity is sufficiently common as to feel as derives from some instinct. But what?
(Before I continue, a quick disclaimer. Natural Selection doesn’t care what you think you are doing or why. When I talk about “strategy”, I don’t mean something anybody consciously chooses or is even aware of.)
If the Chastity Instinct is adaptive, then the chastity device fetish looks like an Evolutionary Trap, like sugar for humans, street lights for turtles, beer bottles for a certain Australian beetle that confuses them with females...
In other words, in ancestral times, the Chastity Instinct was useful and made you more likely to reproduce, but has the opposite effect now chastity devices exist.
I can see three possible origins for the Chastity Instinct, that are not mutually exclusive.
Firstly - so I have read - that standing upright displays our genitals, and in primates displayed genitals are a challenge, especial erect penises. Modesty is a way of avoiding giving out accidental challenges that might get you killed (thus preventing reproduction, because you are dead). The chastity fetish could be the Evolutionary Trap version of modesty.
Next, it might relate to the Sneaky Fucker Strategy (not joking about the name). Basically the beta male breeds by infiltrating the alpha male's harem. He does this by framing himself as “not a sexual threat (no sirree)”. This is one (potentially problematic) explanation of how homosexuality might be adaptive, or at least how homosexual traits might be passed down. So, the chastity fetish could be the evolutionary trap version of the Sneaky F***er Strategy. This is certainly consistent with the cluster of kinks adjacent to chastity: sissyfication, cuckolding, and above all, submission.
Finally - and we’re just starting to see research on this - perhaps it’s to do with male submission as a breeding strategy. If you step away from the “Big Dick Alpha Male and His Harem” model of our ancestral past and think about loose monogamy, male submissive behaviour (as long as it’s coupled with visible competence) could be a way of breeding with a much higher status female. If you can show you’re prepared to meet her needs, let her call the shots, and relinquish control over sexual activity (so she can control fertility), then sometimes you can be more attractive than Big Dick Alpha Male. Perhaps the chastity fetish is merely the Evolutionary Trap version of whatever instinct makes cunnilingus adaptive? That fits at least some of the chastity-adjacent kinks.
And of course it could be all or some of the above, depending on the fetishist. We could be dysphoric/dysmorphic, with interesting neuroses, in the grip of Evolutionary Trap that “wants” us to avoid confrontation with alpha males, to get us close to the attractive women and win them over with our submission.
As I sit here halfway through my fifth month happily sealed into a permanent chastity device, I am fairly convinced that this is more than just a kink.