For those of you who could make the self love mens circle run by Stroking the Soul (Twitter or Instagram) on Sunday, I hope you enjoyed it. I would like to do more of these kinds of events so if you're interested let me know. If you attended the event please give me any feedback you have.

I am also continuing the Bate Support Program and now is the time to join! Come and talk your bate practice with me and we can work on developing new habits and practices to make your bates even better. I guarantee you will find something new about yourself that you didn't know previously. 

This week we have a Q&A with Paul who runs Rain City Jacks. He tells us a little bit about what a jack off club is and how he got his started. He also runs the bate specific Mastodon server mastobate.social which I would love for all the Man Tools members to join! Also if you run or are involved in a jack off club in your area I would be keen to know about it. So send me a message. 

You run a jack off club, can you tell people what that is.

Generally speaking, JO clubs are organized group masturbation gatherings. Most of these begin informally, just one or more men inviting some guys over from time to time to watch porn and jerk off together. If it happens more than once or twice, it's a club. More formalized clubs adopt names like "Rain City Jacks" and meet on a repeating basis, usually in some private venue like a hotel suite, yoga studio, art gallery or sex club rather than in private homes.

The unifying elements of all jack-off clubs include nudity or near-nudity, men only and absolute prohibition of any penetrative sex. So, no oral or anal sex of any kind is permitted. The most common slogans are "No lips below the hips" and "Nothing goes inside anybody's anything." By limiting play to solo and mutual masturbation only, the stakes are far lower than most other forms of group sex play. The need for condoms is eliminated and the risk of contracting any STI is vanishingly low. Also, the fundamental activity of penis stroking is very familiar to all men, so the learning curve isn't steep or challenging. 

How did you get started in this field?

In the early 1980s, I was living and working in Aspen, Colorado. I was there all through my twenties and somewhat isolated from “mainstream” gay culture. In one porn magazine, Honcho, a fictionalized account of going to a jack-off club stuck with me. It presented the story of a guy who meets a new sex partner (I don't remember the setup scenario) who invites him to come along with him to a jack-off club, which is then described in achingly hot detail. The picture painted in my mind by that story became a primary fantasy of my masturbation life.

In 1990, I moved from Colorado to Chicago, Illinois and before I'd found my first apartment, I'd found Chicago Jacks via a small personal ad in The Reader. Following the directions, I mailed them a photocopy of my license and the next week, received instructions—again, by mail—on where to go and when to experience my first jack-off club party. I arrived at the Wicker Park brownstone, walked up the steps and a tall man peered out a cracked door, asking my name and why I was there. Once we established my identity and objective I was admitted and directed down a flight of stairs to where lockers awaited and then onto the playroom. My experience there far exceeded my expectations and I immediately felt like I had “found my tribe.”

In the fall of 1991, I fell in love. I was 33 and had been avowedly single since I was 18, so this was no small thing. The man I fell in love with was 31 and had nothing to do with the Jacks. My 16 months of going to the Jacks ended and a relationship that has now lasted over 31 years began. 10 years into being half of a couple, my husband and I had a hard conversation about wanting to have sex outside the relationship. This led to us opening our relationship and of course I knew exactly what I wanted: Masturbation buddies and, if possible, a jack-off club I could attend regularly.

Now living in Seattle, there was no JO club to be found. One had existed until the year before we'd moved there. After exploring some online groups, I decided to try doing it myself. I leveraged what I knew about hosting parties, attending Chicago Jacks more than 10 years before and more than 20 years working in the hospitality sector to organize a jack-off party at a local hotel, inviting guys from a Yahoo group of Seattle-area “jackers” I'd found. I booked a big room at the Silver Cloud Hotel, and on the day of the party, emailed the address and room number to those who'd RSVP’d. That party drew 9 men. I took donations to offset the cost of the room but it left me paying out of pocket for most of the experience. Still, it was well worth it for a first foray. Learning from that first party, I set up a second and a third, tweaking the model a bit with each iteration and, by that third party, crowded the room with 19 men and donations now covered costs.

Eventually I sourced my first venue, a place I could regularly host jack-off parties and on June 7, 2005, I officially launched Rain City Jacks as a private club, meeting at an out-of-the-way artist's studio and private event space. I initially ran RCJ as a sole proprietorship until January 2010 when the club transitioned to a nonprofit. This meant I gave up administrative and business duties but still ran club operations while the board of directors looked after the official stuff.

Rain City Jacks now stands as the only (to my knowledge) incorporated nonprofit jack-off club in the world and the most active JO club on the West Coast for over a decade. Rain City Jacks has welcomed thousands of members over the years and currently has over 1,300 active members. Hosting roughly 45 events per year, our current average attendance is 85 men at every event. We welcome trans men as well, removing the requirement of being “biologically male” in 2015 and amending the “men only” requirement to “may not identify as female,” in order to accommodate all men.

What can people expect when they come to a jack off club?

The first time a guy comes to a JO club, he should expect to feel a degree of nervousness. Whatever the situation, venue or locality, he's probably getting naked and aroused in front of men he doesn't know and will have some sort of expectations around masturbating in front of them, touching penises other than his own and feeling his penis being touched by other men, possibly for the first time in his life.

“Grazing” is a common behavior at jack-off clubs, but it’s by no means universal. By “grazing,” I mean playing with multiple men over a given time, masturbating with one partner before pausing to move on to a new partner, continuing over the course of an hour or two and enjoying the variety and novelty of multiple partners one at a time. Others may hold off and wait until they feel specifically compelled to masturbate with someone they click with and stick with that one playmate for the entire event. Others will play in groups of three or more while still others may only masturbate themselves openly and remain the only persons touching their penises while getting off on seeing and being seen. Because all males of legal age are welcome, the crowds are typically diverse with respect to age, race, ethnicity, body type, class and even sexual orientation, religion, and political disposition. It is very common to see men of advanced age masturbating alongside and with men in their twenties and thirties. Surprising combinations of men show up all the time and there are surprises in discovering how what we may be attracted to in a photo or video may differ from what we are actively turned on by in real life.

Another surprise comes in adjusting to reality after walking in with certain assumptions. One assumption is that what happens in JO clubs is masturbation. While there’s always masturbation (solosex) happening, men quickly learn that the sensation of being stroked by another man’s hand is always different from and never the same as solosex. Solosex comes with a high degree of familiarity and sureness of how to achieve orgasm or prolong sex. When another person performs the same actions on us, that familiarity is gone and all the dynamics of sex with other people come into play: communication ascendent among them. We have to guide and teach partners how to get us where we want to go or keep us where we want to be.

Thank you for being a subscriber. I value this community a lot as I have made some wonderful friends and connections through it. If you interested in talking to me or other members of the community the best place is the Man Tools Member chat on Telegram. We share penis and bate with each other all day every day. 

Also if you want to support the work I do then the best way is to join the VIP club. Not only will you get every issue before everyone else, but you also get to here more personal stories from me in the members only issues. 

Till next time Bators!

Benno