When Did You Discover You Were A Bator?

We here at The Bator Blog posted a poll on BateWorld asking “When did you discover you were a bator?” The responses poured in and we were amazed at how many of you wrote contemplatively about your self-discovery, experiences, and your own definitions of what it means to be a “bator.”

Below are some truncated quotes we pulled from the comments. If you would like to read the rest, or share your own journey to finding out you’re a bator, then go here or drop it in the comments below this article. 🙂 

Sharing Our Bate With Each Other 

“Besides my own enjoyment of masturbation, I am interested in the bating habits of others, which is why this site (bateworld.com) is so amazing[!]” – DRAADTREKKER 

“At first, I found the word bator silly, as I did goon and [use] makeup remover as lubricant. For me, being a bator is a celebration of penis, body, masculinity, and sexuality. The edges of my bator identity are organic and ever changing. Sometimes, I cam with others, and other times I watch porn or fantasize.

Still other times I want to bate with another man or group of men. I want to be naked and show off my penis, muscle, body hair, facial hair, balls, hole, pits, etc. I love the primal and feral nature of male sexuality and the way it peaks and falls and rises again.” – JAXATL

“Heterosexual guy here who has been bating since I was 14, and I’ve always preferred masturbation and porn to sex with a partner. Found BW a few years ago and saw guys identifying as solosexual, and it suddenly dawned on me that’s what I was. It’s been invaluable to find other like-minded people, and I’ve fallen even more in love with pleasuring myself.” – MACREADYKING

“I started to wank when I was 12. Never stopped (am 45 now). One day, I read on the internet about guys meeting to jerk off together. I am not gay, but was excited about the idea of camaraderie: discussing pornstar pussy and/or our wives/girlfriends, discussing what we like, while watching porn together and rubbing one out. Never understood why other guys were coy about wanking (when I was young, wanker was an insult). So I was very happy to find this place some years ago. Never bated with another guy yet, but perhaps that will happen one day.” – TAURIS78

What Is A “Bator”?

“To me, being a bator means a release of shame around masturbating often, masturbating deeply, and masturbating mindfully. There is still so much stigma around masturbation, and to be a bator is to fight that stigma and own your masturbation as an act of self-love, and as the primary sexual outlet in your life.

I think BateWorld also provides a key component for many bators, which is a sense of belonging to a brotherhood of other masturbators. As a man who hasn’t always felt a deep camaraderie or sense of brotherhood with other men, being a bator has allowed me that experience.” – MASTURBAT0R

“Being a bator is flexing, baseball caps, jockstraps, harnesses, hairy, trimmed, shaved, poppers, tongues out, etc. It’s embracing what appeals to me in ways I’m unable to articulate and yet having the freedom to choose how I want to express that solo sexual energy in the moment. Bating is definitely about sharing and being seen. After coming, I always feel a sense of having reconnected with my essential self and having healed myself.” – JAXATL

“Being a bator means that my only sexual stimulation (i.e. that which causes orgasm), is from hand on penis, either from myself or another male.” – DICKOUTFORBED

The Stigma: Masturbating Is “Beneath” and “Less Desirable” Than Penetrative Sex With a Partner

“Still, for many years [I] viewed it as a pastime to enjoy until I could get “real sex (involving other people)”. When I found myself single again and the child out of the house, I settled on exploring the bating side more, but as both a “solo” thing and a “social” thing. The social side, especially bate parties, made me normalize that men, regardless of what society taught, should be comfortable with producing pleasure from their bodies–they need not rely on someone else.” – JIZZYBONER

“In my younger years, pre puberty, I always imagined that when I found a boyfriend, sex would be rubbing each [other’s] hairy dicks every night. I [had] just assumed it was what men did together for sex, since it was so logical to me, concentrating the rubbing around the glans ridge and upper shaft, just where stimulation is most intense, and comfortably lying back in bed.” – DICKOUTFORBED

“I moved into the dating world but remember always having a preference for masturbation, but having to keep that truth from my boyfriends. Masturbation and porn consumption was actually a cause of much friction in a few LTRs. I always felt ashamed of my masturbation and thought something was wrong with me for preferring solosex to penetrative sex, not always, but often. This went on for the next nearly twenty years.

Around 36 years old I discovered BateWorld, men who identified as solosexual, and men who were proud to be masturbators. This blew my mind and changed my life. I developed a sense of pride in my masturbation practice. I started identifying as a bator, but still haven’t quite owned that I’m most likely solosexual. I’ve communicated openly with partners and lovers that masturbation will always be my primary sexual outlet, and I’m happy to share that with them, and also need to share that with other men who identify as bators.” – MASTURBAT0R 

“During puberty, when I started masturbating, I simply assumed that men who had sex with other men were simply doing the same – I didn’t realize that men were having oral and anal sex. Of course, I realized later that some men engaged in oral and anal sex together, but I didn’t find the thought of those things arousing – in fact, I found anal sex particularly repulsive.

When I started having sex with men in my mid-20s, I FAR preferred masturbation and mutual masturbation to anything else, but realized that I was an outlier – most men I encountered preferred oral and anal sex. In fact, most men seemed to view mutual masturbation as foreplay. I began to think that I was alone – that there just weren’t other men who primarily enjoyed masturbation and mutual masturbation.

With the advent of the internet in the early 1990s, I finally found other men in the ether who also preferred masturbation to other forms of sex and considered them my “tribe.” Eventually, I masturbated with some of these guys in [person] and it felt so right – it was exactly what I always wanted.” – NAKEDBUDDY

Frotologist’s Final Thoughts

Wow! Originally I wrote out several paragraphs about my own experiences, but after reading through all of your comments on this poll, I was amazed at how many shared similar experiences to mine. 

Here’s what I think the “discovery” process is for bators:

It comes down to finding out for yourself first, then finding partners, then finding a community. For BateWorld members who live in situations that prohibit them access to bate buddies nearby, steps 2 and 3 are reversed. They discover the online brotherhood of Bateworld, find partners to discuss it with and perhaps webcam with, but it may be a while before they find real-life bate buddies (and if you are straight, then you may never do anything beyond chatting about it).

The journey one goes on to discover that he is a bator is very similar to the journey of a person who discovers they are into bondage and other kinks. The individual begins by being curious about a sexual practice. They may be exposed to it for the first time through pornography or a life experience that lit the spark of interest. Then the individual goes through a period of attempting to conform to conventional sexual lifestyle. If you are straight/bi, then you date women, get married, have kids.

If you are gay/bi/queer, then you date men, you engage in anal sex, because that’s how we are told that two men are supposed to have sex. Wherever you may fall on the sexuality spectrum, if you are a bator, you find out by process of elimination that you get off harder from masturbation than any other form of sexual activity. The same as someone who is into kink, the next step for the bator is to seek out a safe place to do it with other people. For someone into bondage, that is finding a dungeon and/or a dominatrix.

For a bator, it is finding a bate buddy, a bate club, and/or BateWorld. Only then will he grow out of his bator youth and into full batorhood. 

I personally do not consider bating a kink, but that’s a conversation for another article. I am using it for comparison because kink and bating have very similar arcs of discovery, and they both lie on the fringes of sexual behaviors. Another similarity between kink and bating is how gender preference doesn’t matter as much as with traditional sex.

For example, men and women who enjoy being tied up and spanked care less about the gender of the person dominating them, and more about the experience of being dominated; as long as the person using the whips and paddles does it the way they like it, then they will get off. Likewise, I have talked with numerous bators who identify as straight who make exceptions for the practice of bating the same way someone who is into BDSM may. 

My path toward discovery started in my teens when I started masturbating with a friend, and continued through the rest of my teens as I guessed (luckily) that more of my friends would be into mutual masturbation. Had those initial mutual masturbation sessions never occurred, would I still have discovered that I was a bator? Well, I think so.

I think it was in my nature to begin with. I am sure it was in my friends’ nature to begin with, too, and that was how we gravitated toward doing it with each other at such an early age. Like so many of you, in my 20s I dated men and engaged in anal sex. I very quickly figured out that I did not enjoy bottoming and when I topped, the bottoms always seemed to derive more pleasure from it than I ever did.

When I was 26 I made a friend on Manhunt.net who would come over to watch porn and jack off with me. He was my first bate bud in my adult years, and after bating with him for two years, that cemented it for me that I was a bator.

I then joined BateWorld in my 30s, and that was when I learned all about edging, monkeybating, bro-bating, gooning, poppers. I even now feel comfortable asking my bate buds to roleplay pretending we are straight college dudes watching porn together and decide to push our sexual boundaries. All I know is that, after finding Bateworld, if I ever get into a long term relationship again, it’s not going to be a “top and bottom” situation.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had mind-blowing blowjobs and buttfucks, but if I’m coming home to someone every night, I don’t want to have to anally penetrate him to make sure he is satisfied. Giving someone’s penis pleasure, that’s what does it for me. 

In closing, I want to thank all of our commenters. I also want to say that I love that each of us has his own definition of what a bator is, and we should keep it that way. BateWorld is a community for bators to come together (and “cum” together ;), to bond, and to find their own unique definitions of what being a bator means to them, to own it, and to unlock pleasures within themselves that they didn’t know existed before.

Happy bating!