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The reasons are WAY more complicated than you think!
By Trey Lyon — Written on Nov 30, 2016
The fantasy of having sex with multiple women at one time is a universal one of just about any straight male walking the planet right now. You won’t have much trouble getting a guy to admit to this fantasy in mixed company, either.
One would think that if there were any type of group sex in porn that would be most popular, it would the kind featuring way more women than men. Would you believe me if I said this wasn’t the case?
Curiously, when it comes to group sex, straight men prefer gangbangs featuring a whole gaggle o’ penises focused on one woman.
So it’s high time us guys confess what the porn studios and tube sites already know to be true: we really enjoy our gangbang porn.
In fact, at the time of this writing, a quick search on Pornhub for “reverse gangbang” (i.e., one man having sex with many women at once) produces just barely more than 880 results. Eight hundred and eighty. Compare that with the over 20,000 results for “gangbang.” It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see which category of porn — overwhelmingly created for men, no less — is preferred by most guys.
So why do straight men prefer gangbang pornography featuring multiple men on one woman?
In my opinion, a lot of it has to do with the taboo of group sex in general. We’ve long been a species that has promoted monogamy, yet when we look at the number of divorces, our true experience may be painting a different picture. Since most guys will never actually participate in a group sex or gangbang scenario, it can become a strongly-held fantasy, leading many men to seek this type of content out when browsing for porn.
Not to mention there’s also that never-to-be-spoken-of male-bonding-component in there as well. And according to biologists, the theory of sperm competition may hold an even deeper evolutionary answer.
Researchers discovered that when a man watches porn with multiple men versus any other kind of combination, he ejaculates harder, his ejaculate contains more sperm and he gets erect again sooner.
When participating in gangbangs in my own personal life, I’ve often noticed the men seemingly showing off — “peacocking” by thrusting harder and faster during sex in an environment where we’re essentially competing for the attention of the female.
Sperm competition may also explain why men’s penises have fluted heads. As science journalist Melinda Wenner Moyer explains:
“Researchers speculated that when a man has sex with a woman who has recently slept with another man, the first man’s semen is pulled out with the second man’s penis (because it gets caught behind the second man’s coronal ridge, which separates the head of the penis from the shaft). This lends meaning to the term 'sloppy seconds': Sex the second time around is sloppy, because the semen that is removed ends up, well, making a mess.”
That’s hot — and could indicate that at least biologically speaking, we may not have been designed exactly for monogamy by default after all.
By the way, it isn’t only men who enjoy gangbangs. They are a common fantasy among women as well.
Dr. David J. Ley, author of Ethical Porn for D*cks: A Man’s Guide to Responsible Viewing Pleasure, explains how participating in gangbangs actually gave one of his female clients a feeling of empowerment:
“There used to be an antiquated psychological theory that women who participated in gangbangs were mentally disturbed, pre-psychotic, and that the act was an expression of their disintegrating identity. There’s no evidence of this, and this theory was merely the result of sex negative stigma. For several years I treated a woman who’d grown up in a highly conservative family and community. She was shamed for expressing her femininity or female sexuality. As an adult, she got into swinging, and found gangbangs to be incredibly exciting. There she was celebrated and idolized for her beauty, and sexual responsiveness. Gangbangs taught her to love and accept herself and to embrace her sexuality ...
Distributors of Internet pornography hit on this phenomenon by accident, through the free market economy. Because more men gravitated toward such FMM+ type porn, came back to it more frequently, and watched it for longer, porn producers started making more of it. In the process, they helped us discover a hidden part of male sexuality.”
Dr. Christopher Ryan, co-author of Sex At Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What it Means for Modern Relationships, reiterates the sperm competition theory by suggesting that we evolved from ancestors who frequently participated in group sex. He says the fact that women are so vocal during sex (female copulatory vocalization) has its roots in sperm competition as well.
I personally happen to also think that sperm competition explains why the "money-shot" tends to be such a big deal in porn.
Many guys report preferring to see the money-shot, and witnessing this in porn tends to inspire them to cum as well. Most guys will even skip through a porn video to get to the money-shot when they’re ready to ejaculate during a session of masturbation.
Could this be a natural response to witnessing other men spreading their seed, thus triggering the same biological response in us to spread our own seed right after them?
Whether men are consciously aware of it or not, it's not only natural for us to desire porn that features one woman pleasured by multiple men, but it’s common.
So let’s start being honest about it.
We evolved from ancestors who developed sexual behaviors in a non-monogamous environment where the men and women competed sexually for the control of conception.
Whether we’re participating in gangbangs at real life swinger parties or simply masturbating to them while we watch porn, it’s likely these scenarios turn us on because we’re unconsciously responding to the very natural cues of sperm competition.
And it’s also just really damn hot! Amiright?
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