One of the most fascinating pieces of Jacks culture regards the many assumptions surrounding why we jack off together. The most common assumption is that it’s all about “safe sex” and HIV. In other words, fear. There’s an idea that we’re afraid of getting HIV or transmitting HIV so we are essentially settling for this “fake sex.”

In my experience, and this is just my perception so you get to disagree all you like, those of us who are sexually active are often unsuccessful at suppressing what we really want. Our strongest sexual instinct is to push further, not to retreat. We want genuine pleasure, satisfaction and authenticity in our sexual experiences, and we rarely are willing to “settle” for more than a short period of time, although for a tragic number of people, it’s easier to just give up on sex altogether than to settle for what they don’t want…

It’s like dieting (and there are loads of parallels between our desire for sex and our desire for food). A few people will be able to curb their desire to eat, chew and enjoy the foods they crave, but this almost always results in cycles of control and release. We can control the cravings and limit ourselves to a point, and then we release that control. For serial dieters (those familiar with riding the “diet rollercoaster”) it is painfully clear that diets are often a “two steps forward, three steps back” proposition where they lose weight and then gain it all back plus a little more. For many successful at weight loss, a deliberate release (a “free day”) built into a diet means they can keep their progress on track.

Accepting and embracing what we really want works better than trying to suppress it altogether.

In sex, like in dieting, we are trying to suppress strong, primal forces that are active in us all the time. Those forces only go away when we can no longer sustain them biologically and when we are successful at suppression, it almost never leads to happiness. Eventually, we go for what we want, binge and deal with the regret later… often by consoling ourselves with more binging.

I know I’ve been tapping the well of this factoid a lot lately, but its significance is important: Jacks clubs formed in earnest before HIV. A number of men (and their numbers were in the process of expansion well-before AIDS appeared) organized to jack off together out of desire. There was no such thing as “safe sex

There is a primal hit we get from every specific sex act, and there doesn’t seem to be any end to the specifics. We want and we explore and when we find what gets us off, we want to go back and get off again and again. We’ll keep going back and digging deeper until we don’t get off anymore, and then we look elsewhere. At some level, men will always desire novelty as a way to get off, but some things click for extended periods of time for us, and when those things are missing, we feel unsatisfied.

Barebacking is part of that dynamic. So is fucking in general, or sucking, or water sports or glory holes or public sex or BDSM… Any "Kink” or conventional sex practice can easily be seen as just another way of expressing the general category of sex that satisfies to an individual.

Jacks like jacking off together. Jacks get off on the specific energy of group and/or buddy masturbation. It is a desire that drives them (us) repeatedly back to that activity, not fear. Fear motivates a lot of behavior, but when it comes to sex, desire is the onus that makes things happen and keeps them rolling.

It may be obvious to you but it is not to others. Many will always see mutual masturbation as a poor substitute for real sex but for Jacks, it is real sex. Period.