Enforced Male Chastity’s popularity doesn’t seem to be growing. Maybe it’s the name. Chastity” after all, conjures images of virginal young women. Over time, it acquired a decidedly female connotation. The actual definition is to refrain from extramarital sex, or have no sex at all. It’s clearly the wrong word for what we practice. Male chastity got it’s name from people who wanted to build chastity belts for guys. They thought it was a cool, new form of BDSM play. As far as I can tell, it began after World War 2.
There is no historical record of medieval female chastity belts. Actually, the first documented, widespread use was in Victorian times. It was believed that male masturbation led to insanity. Devices, most of them very cruel and painful, were invented to prevent young men from masturbating. There are thousands of U.S. patents for these devices.
Fast forward to the 1990’s. A small group of men built and wore chastity belts of all designs. Once they locked themselves in, their job was to escape. More and more complex devices were created to prevent escape.. In the late 90’s an inexpensive ball-capture device was offered for sale: the CB2000. It wasn’t very secure, but it was inexpensive and did the job if you didn’t try hard to escape. It was designed as a sex toy for a couple (or a single guy). It prevented erection and ejaculation, mostly.
The thing is that none of these devices going back all the way to Victorian days wereln’t really for chastity. They were and remain as devices to control a male’s ability to experience sexual arousal and orgasm. The term “male chastity” and later, “enforced male chastity” gained popularity among people who practice it. The problem that I see is the name itself doesn’t clearly communicate exactly what practitioners do. In fact, I think it may be offputting to people when they first hear it.
What if we called it “male sexual control”. It’s not very catchy, but it is self-explanatory. You buy a male sexual control device. That’s really what we wear. The reason this makes a lot of sense to me is that it’s really what we do. Mrs. Lion isn’t preventing me from having sex with other women so much as preventing e from having sex; period.
BDSM is now mainstream. Fifty Shades of Grey turned bondage, safe words, and all sorts of BDSM fun into topics discussed and maybe tried by millions. Our vanilla friends might be surprised to learn that Mrs. Lion spanks me, but chances are they won’t run away in horror. BDSM information is disseminated by mainstream magazines.
For a while, interest in enforced male chastity seemed to be growing alongside other BDSM practices. At least many of us who do it thought so. Blogs like ours appeared regularly. Even amazon.com offered male chastity devices (via 3rd party sellers. Our readership grew steadily as well. Yes, male chastity looked like it would also join the kinky mainstream. But it didn’t.
From what I see, growth of this kink is essentially flat. Enough new people come in to offset those who drop out. Five years ago you could count the serious, custom chastity cage makers on one hand. That number hasn’t changed. Asian off-the-shelf cage makers are plentiful. But I can’t see any way to track North American consumption. My experience with Chinese retailing is that a large number of one-person “shops” offer the same merchandise. Volume is not indexed by number of sellers.
Chastity forums and discussion groups seem less active to me than they were five years ago. Topics are less newbie focused than they were in the past. Our readership is growing more slowly than in earlier years. By these informal measures, enforced male chastity is remaining a small corner of the kink world.
On the other hand, interest in female domination is strong. Of course, it’s always been a top interest of many men. Thanks, I think, to the Internet, more and more women are appearing in blogs and conversations who either practice or want to practice female domination. Conversations about this topic are everywhere. As you probably know, Mrs. Lion dominates me. We practice our own version of a female led relationship.
If our kink had a better name, I think it would be much more popular. Maybe it’s time we give changing our name a try. How does Male Sexual Control Journal sound to you? I like it!
I’m going to disagree about the participation on forums; there are only a handful of fairly active forums, each with it’s particular spin, ranging from solidly BDSM to vanilla-ish; all of them have member numbers that continue to grow, although at a slower pace than a few years ago. However, a lot of discussion that once would have been on forums is now taking place on Reddit and a few other social groups. The groups that I follow on Reddit are full of newb posts, almost daily.
A few other points: Blogging has fallen off in general, so blogs like yours, Thumper’s, Drew’s, and others will remain as good resources, but people who are writing are tending to limit their posts to Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, and maybe a few other venues.
Stuff that was kinky 10 years ago is becoming more mainstream, thanks to 50 Shades, but also the drip-drip of mentions, news articles, FB posts, etc.
And the fact that some Chinese manufacturers actually invested money in the molds, dies, etc., for making a lot of these different devices (and not just copying the well known ones) tells me that they have at least anticipated a market, one that probably hasn’t flattened out quite yet. I suspect it’s only going to take a mainstream actor making a few jokes about it on TV, and the interest will be up again. If a manufacturer were more interested in cornering the market, they would probably offer a B list actor (a woman might be a better choice) some money to drop mentions of it in public.
And because of those Victorians, we tend to associate pretty much anything on our genitals as chastity related. But instead of calling it “male chastity,” which might carry a connotation of “lack of sex,” how about a more assertive name, like “cock bondage” or “cock locking”? I mean, let’s capitalize on the 50 Shades thing while we still can.
You make good points. Mainstream writing may have moved from blogs to other outlets. I’m glad to hear that forums are still doing good business. When I visit the one you moderate, I see less newbie questions than five years ago. Perhaps they have moved to reddit, etc. I am not sure the plethora of Chinese products is very significant. In China, one manufacturer tends to dominate a product category and then thousands of mom and pop sellers buy them and resell them. Molds and metal fabrication remain very cheap by U.S. standards, so inexpensive chastity devices are easy to produce.
We agree that the name “male chastity” may be off putting. You and I view what we do a bit differently, I think. I think of it as sexual control more than bondage. Of course, it is penis bondage. I hope interest is growing and that some mainstream media will pick up on it.
I find cock bondage a better term. Less clinical to me.
But I thought I would tell you your posts are no longer appearing in my WordPress feed. And commenting is a real pain now.
We switched hosting companies. Try deleting and resubscribing. Mrs Lion had the same problem. After a lot of fiddling we finally got it to work. I use a browser, even on my phone. Our theme has a great mobile presentation.