Ay, there’s the rub…
The enigmatic French term for it is Frottage, more colloquially, the dry hump, frotting, bagpiping, scrumping and perrear.
But there’s also: The Safety Dance, grinding, cock2cock, cock knocking, dubbing, sandwich dancing, dogging, the Princeton Rub and cock surfing.
It all comes down to putting your dick anywhere other than the big three orifices.
That’s a continent of erogenous zone to cover.
The Greeks paved the way and all-male college campuses took it and ran with it. It’s a favorite of wrestlers, jockeys, bikers, anyone who’s ever taken an abstinence pledge and straight-identified guys who still like a good man-to-man groin grind. It’s something we’re all into in one style or another. Most likely it’s the first form of sexual stimulation we discovered as children by means of some inanimate object. By the time we’d reach our teens, we’d upgraded to another partner.
The expected dick-on-dick friction standoff is just the tip of the iceberg. Thighs, legs, pecs, biceps, faces, asses and feet are all equally game, the full-on body surf being the pinnacle. It’s probably the most instinctive and intuitive form of sexual intercourse – practiced by the most hesitant beginner and the most seasoned veteran – either as a form of teasing or as the big show stopper.
Plus, it’s got range: clothes on or clothes off, standing up or laying down, face to face or back to front, sober or blitzed. Some men even do it unconsciously while they sleep.
Never center stage in big ticket adult film industry circles because it’s deemed too vanilla (you’re not likely to find Penis Fencing, Oxford-Style! or Pec Fuckers 4: The Grand Canyons on the shelves), cock surfing still turns up even in impromptu or blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos in a medium where explicit penetration is compulsory.
Any brand name slice of muscle porn is bound to feature at least a few seconds of some roided-up slab massaging his dick between another guy’s rigid lats, teasing an upturned ass with an engorged glans or cleavage-fucking a genuflecting muscle slut.
Oddly enough, it’s this spontaneous foreplay that often tends to be the steamiest and most rewind-worthy part of the act. Niche-marketed eroto-grappling features devoted to climax wrestling cater to viewers seeking thrills that veer off from the typical ” Oh yeah, man! Fuck my ass!” exchanges.
Be it the specter of HIV or just an antipathy toward standardized sex play, Frot Culture has taken root and become a distinct– and iconoclastic – stratum of gay life. Known collectively as the Man2Man Alliance, Frot Men have risen up against the so-called “Butt-Fuck Dictatorship” (a term coined in Bill Weintraub’s seminal 2000 Frot manifesto) and champion non-penetrative phallus-to-phallus contact.
Frot Credo stridently deconstructs the Top/Bottom, Active/Passive and Insertion/Reception dichotomies that are viewed as mirrors of heterosexual intercourse; in this ethos, the anus just doesn’t fly as a sexual organ and is not the male equivalent of the vagina. It’s only through mutual and egalitarian dick-dick meeting that the ultimate co-mingling of two partners’ masculinities can be achieved. In Frot World, the buttfuck is merely a parody of straight sex and “gay sex” is not limited to the expected rock ‘em sock ‘em bouts of all anal action your average DVD jacket promises.
The notion’s not without merit and appeal. It’s after all the anus that’s usually the subliminal cynosure of the Religious Right’s condemnation when it comes to same-sex relations. If indeed “a man who lies with a man as with a woman” is truly a transgression, then the cock rub is exempt from the classification – the stimulating of two erect members is an exchange in and of its own right that’s not a simple aping of straight sex.
Frot Rhetoric is not without its troubling aspects either, namely in its tendency to reinforce Fundamentalist preoccupations with our sexual orifices serving only the strictest of biological functions. Just as the vagina must only exist as a birth canal, so to is the back door a No Man’s Land for sexual gratification.
Suspicions that a latent fear of emasculation lurks behind the Frot Coalition aren’t completely unfounded. In one sense, its common themes and allusions to fraternity, innocent horseplay, romance, superheroes and other mythic figures, fidelity, spirituality, male bonding in naturalistic settings, vigor, classical Greek culture and its noble ideas and male primacy (Frot Men will often refer to themselves as “warriors” or “soldiers”) are inviting. In another context, the Alliance’s linkage of anal play with promiscuity, disease and mental illness can be off-putting.
Assertions that there’s an “anal mafia” operating to not only perpetuate a grand-scale lie that anal sex is enjoyable, but also conspiring to discredit Frottage as a sexual disorder come across as deeply paranoid. Hypocritically and condescendingly at times, Man2Man will seek broad-base acceptance and lament its marginalization while hawkishly characterizing anal as nothing more than a vicious means of violating, humiliating and debasing feminized “victims”.
In this Dude Culture, the Power Bottom, the versatile Role Reverser and the new wave of positionally protean Gay Porn Superstars — not to mention good hygiene and the Male G-spot — are apparently fantastical concepts along the lines of the centaur and the cockatrice.
Whether this all amounts to a ruggedly individualistic Homosex Movement or a closed-off state of macho separatism (maybe more than a dash of both?) could ultimately be a draw. Gays have simply heard too much bombast about what constitutes a “real” man to not be a little bit cynical about an alliance that draws the line between the Man’s Man and the Girly Boy.
Splitting the difference and finding the balanced middle ground is probably the best approach. Strangers With Candy’s picaresque little tramp and up-for-anything good time gal Jerri Blank insouciantly said it best: “I like the pole and the hole.” It’s a compromise the Frot Warriorship seems too unwilling to make.
In the vast ocean of sex, sometimes you ride the wave, sometimes you take the plunge.
It’s nice to see frottage getting the props it deserves. My boyfriend and I can spend hours grinding, and then take a break and do it some more. It’s like a tantric practice in a lot of ways. I wish your writer had covered the phenomenon of beard frottage…it’s really sexy and fantastic.
I like rubbing parts as much as the next guy. But the group mentioned are FREAKS. You mention some of their less salient positions. Back when I was looking into them, I choked on the blatant homophobia so badly I got the fuck off their site and if anyone says they subscribe to that crud I give them the kiss off.
Please, warn folks these guys are the Scientologists of the homo-set.
Weird, deepy creepy. And the saddest part is, they have a GREAT idea. But it needs to not be some fucked up Religion, complete with persecution fantasies.
I love the term DEEPY CREEPY. I agree with Sloppy2, it’s too bad there aren’t other options out their for frottage fans…Someone should address this immediately. Maybe the democrats can add it to their burgeoning ‘to do’ list?
The hitch is that they aren’t content with having frot just be an alternative or a part of the spectrum. It’s all or nothing and this big value judgment about morality. They can’t seem to imagine that anyone outside of their circle has the mental state or dignity to actually consent to any other form of sex.
As mentioned above, a good idea marred by very ugly grandstanding.
yeah seems like the fundamentalist mindset is alive and well in frot land - best to let them rub themselves into oblivion
So…do these guys not do fellatio either? If so, that’s mind-bogglingly sad.
It’s normal sexual behavior, and pretty hot at that. But if there’s a dictatorship, it’s on the part of the man2man alliance, who declare that nothing other than frottage is normal or acceptable. The website is weird, more of an angry manifesto than anything else. It’s pretty homophobic, and it also seems that a convenient use for the organization could be to cover for individuals who want to cheat on their wives and yet not feel gay (thus the “bi” and “straight-identified males”). I could be making some assumptions here, but that’s my take on it. Maybe that’s why there’s stern warnings on their site about “fidelity” too.
In my opinion, the straight-identified male who asserts his right to romps in the sack with other males while at the same time enjoying the priviledges of straight public life, seems to be unfairly having his cake and eat it too. To this group, if they are masculine enough, and worship and love only pure masculinity, and avoid the anus, how could they be gay, after all? I think it’s a check they can’t cash.
These guys obviously have never had a good and truly satisfying dick in the ass. What a pity. It takes a real man can enjoy a really good fuck.
One of their main beefs is with the Psychological Community, not the gay one, though they’re intent on directing their resentment our way. Psychology has been notoriously slow on the uptake when it comes to realizing that kinkier sex is not always a mental problem or a sex crime, but now they’ve finally started demarcating between healthy frottage (the consensual kind) and the sort committed against an unwilling partner. It’s like Man2Man is throwing punches in the air when the issue lies inward. Too much manly rhetoric can be an indicator of problems behind the scenes.
Come on! Saying things like that they (Man 2 Man) just need a “dick in their ass” are the truly homophobic comments here. Comments like that denigrate the fantastic complexity of male/male sexuality, reducing it to a neatly defined and controlled thing with no room for personal preference or choice. That’s the type of attitude that fuels and justifies the paranoia of the Man 2 Man frot community.
I think that while M2M has a good idea, their methods are screwed up. They maintain that there is a Cultural “dictatorship,” but then too often direct their attacks at other gays (who, maybe not having as much insight, are more accepting of the cultural importance placed on anal).
Finally, how can you call them homophobic?? They aren’t against gays/gay sex…their website promotes and praises it! Are you saying that being gay equals being promiscuous, effeminate, and a butfucker, and nothing else??
This Man2Man site is way too bombastic/political/paranoid. Some of their ideas are great: gay men do need to get into fidelity more, have more variety and real creativity in our sexual practices and not be so insistent in anal sex as the be all and end all. It is a shame that the creativity and power of Man2Man’s message is so weakened by the presentation, rigidity and downright paranoia of some of their ideas.
Their idea of butt-fucking as automatically classifiable as feminine behavior is too old-fashioned, rigid, and medieval in attitude. A man that takes a dick up his ass can be just as masculine as anyone else. Also, you just cannot take the instinct out of a man to stick his dick in something cave-like and ejaculate into it. How can you possibly give up the desire to stick your dick into something that covers every square inch of it completely, giving maximum pleasure to maximum area and the proceeding to dump a nice cum-load into it? Who doesn’t want that? Well … obviously them … but whatever … Men don’t have a vagina, so if you don’t like women, you’ve gotta resort to the rectum/anus.
Also, shit may be dirty and carry pretty bad diseases that are hard to cure, but shit is part of life. As the title of the children’s book says “Everybody Poops.” (In all seriousness, just in case you didn’t know, there is a book by that title.) As far as STD’s go, anal may be the easiest way to transmit in general, but, herpes and gonorrhea are pretty easily transmitted orally. Taking away anal is not going to eliminate those other risks.
I agree totally with Shaun’s comment that frequently the best part of scenes in porn are the frottage parts. Personally, I love to rub my dick in my well-muscled man’s “pec cleavage”. I also love, love, LOVE to rub my lips over beard stubble that’s grown in at the end of the day or if he hasn’t shaved in a day. It really turns me on. I love the light burn, the feeling of touching with such a sensitive and intimate part of me something that’s really part of the essence of a man’s masculinity. So even with my defense of anal sex above, I too love frottage. And I really do not want to be excluded just because I like butt-fucking, too.
Not all us frot guys are bashers of anal sex.
Some of us can bend a little with understanding and reasoning.
I love to feel a man against me with his cock against mine or against my butt crack.
I discovered frottage at an early age, and yes I too went onto different things,ie women and marriage.ButI soon came to the realization that I love men and that I am Gay.It took me several years but I did find out what I was doing as a kid,it was called ( FROTTAGE ).I have never done anal ,but I will not condem it.I enjoy everything else that is associated with love making.And I have met several men that is associated with other Frot groups,that enjoy the same things that I do and they don,t condem or bad mouth those that prefer anal.I have had a friend that is into anal,who tried frot with me and thoroughly enjoyed it, but he wanted both anal and frot.
Thanks for the story.