Fun with Dick and Dick: Homosociality on r/MassiveCock

Massive complications

Homosociality is a concept that captures non-sexual attractions between persons of the same sex and the structuring force of masculine relations among men (see Bird, 1996; Flood, 2008; Kiesling, 2005; Lipman-Blumen, 1976). The bedrock of such relations in Anglo-American cultures is hegemonic masculinity, which “embodies the currently most honoured ways of being a man” (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005: 832). Thus hegemonic masculinity functions as a yardstick against which both femininity and all other masculinities are measured, and found to be lacking. At the core of hegemonic masculinity is male dominance: “To be a man is to be strong, authoritative, and in control, when compared to women, and also when compared to other men” (Kiesling, 2005:696). As Kiesling also observes, hegemonic masculinity is tied to heterosexuality: “To be a man is to be powerful, and to be powerful in the current gender order is, in part, to be heterosexual”(696). Hegemonic masculinity is also linked to homosociality because “men are understood normatively to want (and need) to do things with groups of other men, excluding women” (Kiesling, 2005: 696) and because these relationships between men structure masculinity. A range of studies have examined homosociality in socially-sanctioned, sex-segregated spaces such as fraternities (see Kiesling, 2005; Kimmel, 2008); sex-segregated sports (Messner, 2002); and the military (see Flood, 2008; Wadham, 2013). In these settings, homosocial bonds are created and maintained through the lens of hegemonic masculinity.

Creating and maintaining homosocial bonds among heterosexual men can be a fraught exercise: “If men are to form close friendship groups, how are they do to this without expressing desire for one another?” (Kiesling, 2005: 696). The answer, in part, lies in the boundary that hegemonic masculinity maintains between approved homosocial relations and forbidden homosexual ones. This hetero-homo binary must be constantly policed or mitigated, particularly in contexts where male nudity and genitalia may be openly displayed, and a man’s endowment can be observed/assessed: physical spaces such as bathrooms, locker rooms, frathouses, and barracks, as well as in mediated spaces of pornography. In these particular contexts, penis size becomes consequential because first, the ideal male body possesses a large penis (Lorber and Moore, 2011) and secondly because there exists an important connection between a desirable masculinity and penis size (see Brennan, 2018)—it is a crucial measure of a man (as it were), particularly in the pornographic context. By destabilizing the binary, the homoerotic desire that has been created as a result must be carefully monitored. Looking too long—dick gazing—could be taken as a sign of dangerous homosexual desire, raising threats not just to one’s heterosexual identity but to one’s person. Assessments, therefore, are better to be performed quickly and covertly—dick glancing, so to speak. Only when the homoerotic charge is recoded though various rituals found in fraternities or military or mitigated in other ways can either the gaze or the glance be safely permitted.

The female body in homosocial contexts serves a mitigating function. Sedgwick’s (1985) influential study of literary texts, Between Men, shows how romantic heterosexual triangles between two men and a woman maintain the appearance of heterosexual masculinity by masking the underlying homosocial desires at play between the two men. Similarly, Flood’s (2008) study of homosociality in the Australian military illustrates how desire is mediated through sex acts where straight men either have sex together with the same woman or together with other women. Other studies have examined how straight men engage in sex with other men in a variety of contexts. Anderson (2008), for example, found that straight identified men will engage in homosexual sex for “the good cause” of pleasing a female partner” (109). In contexts such as these, sexual interactions between men are heterosexualized through women’s presence and participation. Similarly the darkened rooms of the now largely-defunct porn theatre or the all-male “stag party” both function similarly. As Thomas Waugh (2004) notes, straight men watching heterosexual porn together at stag parties appear to have an unspoken agreement among them to ignore that they “are getting hard pretending not to watch men getting hard watching images of men getting hard watching or fucking women”(132). Such disavowals deflect suggestions that homosexual desires are at play and thus maintain the fiction of the viewers’ exclusive heterosexuality.

In the past 15 years, however, homohysteric cultures have been challenged and displaced to some degree as a result of LGBTQ+ demands for recognition and inclusion in broader society. In studies of American young adults, Anderson (2008) found that a number of younger heterosexual men no longer position themselves in opposition to women and gay men, ostensibly decoupling hegemonic masculinity from homophobia. In response to this reduction in homohysteria, Anderson (2008) posits a theory of inclusive masculinities, which accounts for not only tolerance and acceptance of gay men but also permits more fluid sexual practices among those men who identify as heterosexual. Studies of Str8 (Ward 2008), mostly straight (Savin-Williams and Vrangalova, 2013) and straight-identified men who have sex with other men (MSM) (Persson et al., 2019) are tied to a notion of heteroflexibility. Such practices also point to what Brooks (2015) calls heterodoxy—“unorthodox, transgressive, or subversive ways of doing heterosexuality and being heterosexual” (250). In other words, being straight no longer means being narrow in desire.

While heteroflexible and heterodoxical practices appear to signal a breakdown of the hetero-homo binary, this is not the case. According to Carrillo and Hoffman (2018), “individuals who are not exclusively sexually interested in members of ‘the opposite sex’ can continue thinking of themselves as straight” (92). Ward (2015) makes a similar point: homosexual practice when engaged in by straight-identified men is often framed as “straight-dude bonding” that presents an alternative to sex the “gay way” (136). Ward also underscores the link between heteromasculine sexual fluidity and racial identity: “White homosociality”, she contends, is about the bolstering of a “brotherhood of white men” (193). Heteroflexibility embeds white privilege such that homosex activities among white men are not stigmatized as they are for racialized men who must do so on “the down-low” (Ward, 2008). White heterosexual men are therefore freer to disarticulate heterosexual identity from sexual practice than are men of color.

To provide a more nuanced understanding of these emergent heteromasculinities, Savin-Williams (2017) uses the spatial metaphor of the sexual neverlands, which he locates on a modified Kinsey scale between 0 (exclusively heterosexual) and 3 (bisexual): the primarily straight male (0.5), the mostly straight male (1.0), and the bisexual leaning heterosexual male (2.0). Evoking the Kinsey Scale is problematic for us since it links sexual desire to a particular orientation placed on a continuum from heterosexual to homosexual. Moreover, it suggests that identities and sexualities can be understood as innate orientations that drive a set of sexual behaviors and acts. On the contrary, however, we understand these as performative and shaped by the heterosexual matrix (Butler, 1990). The repetition of these performances produces a regulatory fiction that is legible but inherently unstable. Such instability, however, does not rule out the emergence of new categories of identification around which performances coalesce. Savin-Williams’ additional categories can thus be mobilized by researchers who draw on a poststructuralist framework to critically examine gradations of heteromasculinity and heteroflexibility.

Accompanying the larger cultural shift to a more inclusive, sexually flexible heteromasculinity have been new developments in internet and mobile technologies. Easy access to a wide range of pornographic content via websites and more recently content-sharing platforms and apps have loosened the homophobic constraints associated with the homoerotic practice of dick gazing. In particular they have played a central role “in exposing the forbidden fruit of homosexual sex, commodifying and normalizing it in the process” (Anderson, 2008: 6). As per Rob Cover (2018), straight-identified men can now “include sexual practices and spectatorial pleasures that are more usually associated with non-heterosexuality, gay male or queer subjectivities” (114). In the context of Tumblr, where pornography and PSR circulated freely until the end of 2018, Passonen et al. (2019) contend that the blogging and re-blogging of dick pics created a visual economy in which the meanings were framed “as desired, appreciated, and as open to entering a range of social exchanges” (5). More to the point, these “displays were not necessarily coded as either straight or gay, or fixed as catering to people of any specific gender identification” (5). In such digital environments, dick gazing is no longer solely the purview of gay- and bisexual-identifying men.

Reddit offers straight-identified men ample opportunities to indulge in the homoerotics of dick gazing. According to Brady Robards (2018), the subreddit Totally Straight “represents a digital trace of the lived reality and practice of men who identify as straight but consume gay porn” (53). The subreddits dedicated to male PSR, however, are not just about consumption but social engagement. To quote Massanari (2015), “most of what makes Reddit. Here is where the best (or worst) of Reddit is on display” (4). Redditors can choose to reply privately or publicly to the original poster (OP as per Reddit parlance) as well as to others who post public replies (the total number of comments is also tallied up and appears below the post as another indicator of popularity). This functionality enables exchanges to take place not only between commenters and OP but between/among commenters.

While both Tumblr and Reddit skew young in terms of demographics, the same is not the case with gender. The first platform has had gender parity since its early days (Desilver, 2013) and is conceptualized as a queer space (Anselmo, 2018). Reddit, on the other hand, continues to skew heavily male. As such, the subreddits dedicated to male PSR may cater to both men and women, cis or trans, but they are more likely to be structured by homosocial relations. Similar to other homoerotic practices, posting dick pics for the spectorial pleasure of other men and commenting on other men’s dick pics threaten to disrupt the hetero-homo binary. On Reddit, this disruption is somewhat assuaged by the affordances of pseudonymity (van der Nagel and Frith, 2015) where accounts do not require verification even with a valid email address, and any number of accounts can be set up by the same individual. Some Redditors set up a specific account for NSFW activity for this very reason (Massanari, 2015). These options allow for anyone, including straight-identified men to freely engage in the pleasures of dick gazing.

Breaches to the binary are further heightened on r/MassiveCock. It is, after all, is a space in which gay men are openly invited to participate, and a space in which bisexual men, whose omission in the subreddit’s description recapitulates a long history eliding bisexuality, ¹ can be expected to show up nonetheless. For those straight-identified men who have dipped a toe into the sexual neverlands or are willing to do so, Massive provides a safe space in which to tentatively explore same-sex desire and engage in same-sex play with others like themselves as well as with bisexual and gay men. As such, Massive affords the possibilities for “masculine heterosexuality [to be] disjunct from heteronormativity” (Cover, 2018: 144). At the same time, Massive still holds out the promise to those men whose identity is anchored in an exclusive heterosexuality the ostensible presence of straight cisgendered women and their covetous gaze. In sum, Massive appears to offer something for all big dick lovers, even those not directly included in the call, but with an important caveat. The racial makeup of Reddit suggests that this love is framed by an unmarked Whiteness. So, although performances of racialized masculinities and desire are not the focus of this paper, we acknowledge, following Ward, that whiteness plays an important role in structuring Massive.

Researching Reddit and r/MassiveCock

Taking a case study approach (Stake, 2008) our project was broadly designed to shed light on the ways in which masculinities are performed and homosociality is operationalized on Massive. We draw on Bury’s (2005) ethnographic approach to the study of gender in an online context. Any cyberspace in which interaction takes place is understood as a virtual field in which to observe the production of identities and sexualities. Language is the linchpin that tethers but does not fix online performances to those of the corporal body in front of a screen (Bury, 2005). As Steve Jones (1996) observed some years ago, online forums afford the production of “artefactual traces of interaction” (13). These traces can then be captured by researchers as raw data to be critically analyzed.

Given our interests in capturing some of the ways in which gay/straight relations are negotiated on a site structured by the homoerotics of dick gazing, it was important for us to attempt the fraught task of categorizing performances of masculinities. For ease of labeling, we decided to directly reference the Kinsey scale as modified by Savin-Williams (2017). We are aware of the “will to truth” that is mobilized by such regimes of power/knowledge pertaining to sexuality (Foucault, 1972; 1990). In our data analysis and in the presentation of the samples in the sections that follow, we do use the categories of Kinsey Zero and Kinsey Six but as a form of shorthand for a coalescence of unambiguously straight and gay performances respectively. Given our focus on the nuances of white heteromasculinities, we similarly mobilize Savin-Williams’ (2017) categories of Kinsey One and Two. For Savin-Williams (2017), the first category broadly offers a collection of mostly straight performances marked by “attunement to other men’s physical attributes”(77), including appearance, athleticism and, salient to our research, a large penis . The second is marked by a willingness to enact certain homosex fantasies such as MMF threesomes (see also Scoats et al., 2018). We also consider this category to include bi-curious men, who, as described by Savin-Williams (2017) often move from fantasy to enacting their desires without renouncing their primary heterosexual desire. These provisional categories offer a heuristic through which to discuss differences in the sexual neverlands but we know these are prone to misrecognition.

In December 2017, we began our initial observation period by taking turns browsing Massive to take note of posting, commenting and interactional rules and practices. Like all Reddit forums, Massive has a set of rules posted on its main page. The first is that all posts must have a title. Titles very quickly became central to our study in light of their role in anchoring the meaning of the images (see Barthes, 1977) and tying them to performances of masculinity and desire. The second rule is that posters are only allowed to share an image of their own penis, thus defining Massive as a site of PSR sharing as opposed to porn distribution and consumption. Third, photoshopping, presumably to enhance size, is not permitted. Finally, commenters were instructed to be “kind and civil” and to follow the “golden rule” of not saying anything at all if they have nothing positive to contribute. Moreover, the moderators specifically state that “hateful, racist, homophobic, or negative comments are not permitted” (r/MassiveCock, 2019). Such guidelines buttress the call to inclusivity. And, in fact, we encountered only two homophobic post titles, both of which were subsequently removed. Consequently, the guidelines and their enforcement help constitute Massive as a safer virtual space for gay and bisexual men to dick gaze outside of designated queer and other non-normative spaces.

Our initial data collection period took place in January 2018. First, we reviewed all posts made over a 10-day period (n = 1517), saving the titles in an Excel sheet. The majority fell into several broad categories indicating OP’s large size (“My roman candle”; “Blocking out the sun,”) or lack thereof (“Do I belong”? ² ); OP’s state of arousal (“Morning wood’; Throbbing”);OP’s location (“In the shower”); or that some kind of action from the spectator is desired/required (“My fat cock needs attention”; “Need to get this thing sucked all day long”). We found that a small set of posts (13%) worked to covet a particular gaze. For example, some post titles qualify that their dick pic is “for the ladies”. Others address their posts to other men through self-identifying as gay or calling on “twinks” to private message them. Between February and June 2018, we collected and saved a selection of posts titles that suggested a particular identity or desire until we reached saturation (n = 70). With this set, we also paid close attention to the comments. A similar problem arose with accurate classification of performance: the bulk of the comments were generic exclamations of admiration (“nice cock”, “hot stud”, “well that is huge!” “God, I need a cock like this in my life”; “simply beautiful”); expressions of desire (“that’s a fat dick I would like to suck!!”; “wish I was there to pleasure you”; “I want that big dick in me”; “the things that I would do to that thick long cock”); or questions as to size (“How big is that anaconda?”). It was difficult to discern whether the commenter was performing cis-femininity, trans-femininity, or some variant of masculinity, although some account names were suggestive of gender. It was only when turn taking or an exchange ensued between OP and a commenter or between commenters that a clearer picture of gender performance and sexual desire became evident and revealed some interesting glimpses into the workings of homosociality.

In July 2018, we collected a third data set through systematic random sampling with the goal of generalizing our preliminary findings. This consisted of selecting every tenth post over two separate 24-hour periods. We ended up with a total of 42 posts and 118 comments. We also counted up the total number of comments for each of the 416 posts made during these periods. Although comments ranged from 0 to 116 per post, 71% received no more than three comments and only four received more than 21 comments. ³ The analysis of this third data set revealed a similar lack of legible performance of gender and sexuality. Of the 42 posts, 35 did not allow for accurate classification. Of the 118 comments, only 21 could be classified as being made by men and 3 by women. To get a better sense of how these posters and commenters performed identity beyond the single ambiguous contribution, we decided to conduct what we are calling a digital trace of their Reddit account activity. According to Hepp et al. (2018), “digital traces grant direct access to ongoing processes of social construction” (442). Citing Venturini and Latour, they argue that such traces enable researchers “to witness processes of assembling in the moment” (448). Massanari (2015) ascertains that by reading the post/comment history, “a clever Redditor could determine much about the tastes, opinions, and habits of another member” (51). Indeed, looking at the post histories of other members is a common practice that is sometimes rendered visible in discussions where commenters are interested in OP’s content (something to the effect of “Wow, love the other photos you have posted”) or question the veracity of OP’s claims (something to the effect of “Judging by his previous posts, OP is full of shit”). We made notes on any expression of self-identification or sexual desire in the profile description and/or in other posts and comments made not only to Massive but also on other identity-themed subreddits such as r/askgaybros or r/gaygamers. We were able to classify a few commenters as trans women, for example, through their posts made to r/trans.

We paid particular attention to the posting of or commenting on PSR. A male posting on Massive but only commenting on PSR posted by women on other subreddits, for example, helped us narrow down to either Kinsey Zero or One pending closer analysis. Those who commented on both male and female PSR were provisionally considered Twos if they did not self-identify as bisexual. Conversely, if all the comments were related to male PSR only but no PSR was posted, gender was not legible, meaning that the commenter could be performing cis- or trans-femininity or, alternatively, a gay male masculinity. We were only able to verify that commenters were cis women if they also posted PSR. Taken together the data sets provide a snapshot of performances of masculinity and its imbrication with homoerotic desire for the big dick, one which enabled us to analyze the production of homosociality on Massive.

Collecting data from Reddit raises similar ethical questions to those raised about other social media research. To be sure, many Institutional Research Boards (US) consider material on social media sites to be public data that do not require researchers to obtain informed consent to research (Fiesler and Proferes, 2018), a stance that aligns with the policies at our respective Canadian universities. Moreover, Reddit’s privacy policy makes clear that contributions should be considered public: “Any visitors to and users of [the] Services will be able to see that content, the username associated with the content, and the date and time you originally submitted the content” (Reddit.com/policies, 2020). Moreover, users are warned that posted content may remain available even after the account has been deleted. Finally, as we noted above, unlike social media sites such as Facebook or dating apps such as Tinder or Grindr, Reddit is not founded on a notion of authentic identity where real names and other identifying information are on display or easily discovered; pseudonymity offers “privacy through obscurity” (Hartzong and Stutzman cited in Fiesler and Proferes, 2018). About half the accounts we reviewed as part of our digital trace were clearly “throwaway” accounts created for posting and commenting on PSR.

And yet, scholars such as Charles Ess (2015) make the case that the distinction between public and private in the minds of users and researchers is not clear cut. In the guidelines for internet research ethics (IRE 3.0) produced by the Association of Internet Researchers, Franzke (2020) states, “User-generated content is generally published in informal spaces that users often perceive as private but may strictly speaking be publicly accessible. In any case, researchers are rarely the intended audience of user-generated content”. Research becomes more problematic when dealing with sensitive or pornographic content (Warfield et al., 2019). Therefore, an ethics of care (Franzke, 2020) to reduce any potential harm still needs to be adopted when analyzing interactional traces that were made in a public context. We have adhered to several suggestions offered by Fiesler and Preferes (2018) that are of direct relevance to our project. Given that we are studying identity performance and the construction of homosociality as produced through online interaction, we consider the use of direct quotations as data samples as reasonable and necessary. Heteromasculinity, Cover (2018) notes, rests on “a prohibition of speech [italics in original] about actual practices, slippages or instances of heterosexuality’s failures” (114); the instances we cite show how these failures are evident on Massive. To protect pseudonymous identity, particularly in the case of those Massive participants who might not have created a NSFW throwaway, we used only an abbreviated form of the username for comments or exchanges with OP. The Reddit search engine does not find comments without a username and it is hit and miss on post titles without a username. For those titles that did come up, we provided a description instead.

Establishing heterocentric homosociality on Massive

Of the 36 poster performances that we were able to categorize in the third data set, we were struck by the fact that 21 were legible as Kinsey Zeros, meaning that this group of men held a prominent role in establishing and maintaining Massive’s norms. Moreover, of the small percentage of post titles that coveted a particular gaze, 60% coveted a female gaze. A few of these went further and blocked other gazes:

P(M)s open. Ladies only please!

The next set of comments reveal the linguistic strategies that some Kinsey Zeros deployed to deflect the homoerotic charge that the dick pic mobilizes. The comment by X10, “Not gay but you get an upvote”, illustrates how heterosexual men can normalize their same-sex interaction by positioning themselves “as experts…able to document and verify their normal sexuality … and to expand or contract the circle of normal (not gay) homosexual activity” (Ward, 2015: 197). Other Kinsey Zeros were willing to go beyond upvoting to express their admiration in comments.

HHM: Packing some really big meat there buddy … Lucky guy

RXS: Damn, dude. Fuck you (out of jealousy haha!)

A variation of bro cock talk involves men talking about heterosexual sex involving women. Such activity, notes Flood (2008), is a “key path to masculine status, and other men are the audience, always imagined and sometimes real, for one’s sexual activities” (342). In the following example, the commenters engage with OP, imagining themselves in a triad.

I23: I pray you come fuck my gf

FH: I’d like to see my gf deepthroating you

MCA: Damn dude. You’re huge. I’d love to let you borrow my girl for a little while as long as I get to watch you give her that huge cock…

Although we have discussed Kinsey Zero performance on Massive in detail above, we must not lose sight of the paucity of comments made by this group. According to Kimmel (2008), silence is an important element in the performance of masculinity and creating and maintaining the fraternal bonds that structure homosociality. In other words, the lack of Kinsey Zero comments is itself a performance of a masculinity that finds intimacy and connection through silence. Yet, according to Frank Kariosis (2014), this silence is ironically “a distancing from intimacy” (107), which in the context of Massive takes on another role: Silence precludes the possibility of a heterosexual male being (mis)taken as open to homosex. There’s also another dynamic at work, one that is reminiscent of Waugh’s (2004) crucial observation, cited earlier, that stag parties relied on a kind of willful ignorance that the sexual arousal may also be arising (as it were!) from watching the hard cocks on screen. Indeed, as Cover (2018) observes, “the hegemony of masculine straightness has been constructed on a foundation of disapproval and disavowal of intimate same-sex coded erotics, thoughts and practices” (114). Consequently, the male who performs a Kinsey Zero identity may be getting aroused from his homoerotic dick pic viewings, but to break his silence would be to wander into the sexual neverlands or more troublingly (from his perspective), verge onto the territory of bisexual and gay men whose sexual relationship to the homoerotic is overt. Such desires must therefore be disavowed.

Heteromasculinity interrupted

Analysis of the third data set revealed a reversal of the posting/commenting pattern described above. While 58% of the posts were made by those whose performances were classified as Kinsey Zero, those we provisionally classified as Kinsey Six made only four posts (9%). Moreover, only 2% of posts explicitly coveted a gay gaze. The Kinsey Sixes, however, comprised the majority of commenters (n =  61). If we remove the comments that were still not classifiable after digital trace (n = 10) and those made by women (n = 22), the percentage is even higher: 72%. Their expressions of gay desire were overwhelmingly made in relation to posts by men who performed a straight identity, as per the samples below:

PM: Mm yummy would love to wrap my lips around it

SYJ: Hot cock stud I want a taste.

XKH: My ass would fit it like a glove.

Another homosocial bond between the Kinsey Zeros and Sixes developed around a frustration around a lack of women’s appreciation of the big dick:

I'm tired of dating hot women that don’t like to please!

OP did indeed receive quick praise and ego stroking but not from the intended audience.

ECB: I’m not a woman and I like to please. Come over:)

Beyond zero: Exploring the sexual neverlands

Participation in Massive by those inhabiting the sexual neverlands was limited but significant. We classified seven posters as Kinsey Ones based on two interactional practices. The first was their use inclusive post titles:

The upside of calling in sick is that I can stay at home to post for all of you [emphasis added]

Do you guys and gals like my hard cock?

The before (I’m straight but all PM's welcome)

The nine participants whose performances we classified as Kinsey Two were much more open about their same-sex desires than the ones:

G13: Awesome … Your [sic] making all us Bi-curious guys hungry, that cock gets a 10 for hardness, length, girth and most of all how nice you keep it groomed.

In sum, the contributions of the Kinsey Twos underscore that they are “bi-curious,” but not “bisexual-leaning,” as per Savin-Williams (2017).

The fraternity of the (massive) cock

We began this project with a curiosity about how homosociality might operate in a PSR-sharing site in which both straight- and gay-identified men heed the call to participate. In the past, this kind of bonding across sexual orientations could not easily happen, given the cultural injunctions against homosexuality in homohysterical Anglo-American culture. The internet and social media have re-written individual and collective engagement with pornography generally and with PSR, specifically. Massive explicitly facilitates the bringing together of gay and straight men into a single “fraternity of the cock” (Waugh, 2002: 50). ⁴ The centrality of the big dick engenders Massive as a masculine space. After all, one requires a dick to post, and, although having one is not required to be a big-dick lover, our findings suggest that most of the Redditors who choose to comment have one as well. Then there is the silent admiration/fascination from a potential male spectatorship that surrounds this fraternity—not just almost 300,000 subscribers, but all Reddit users, the majority of whom are likely to perform a Kinsey Zero identity “in real life”. After all, to paraphrase the famous 1993 New Yorker cartoon, on the internet, nobody has to know you’re hard. ⁵ The objectification of women also has a role to play in facilitating homosocial bonding regardless of sexual orientation, as illustrated by the data in which straight-identified men, Kinsey Zeros in particular, and some Kinsey Sixes bond over women’s lack of appreciation of the big dick. At times, this bonding takes the shape of an alliance against women, positioning them as objects for male dominance.

At the same time, those performing a Kinsey Zero identity on Massive appear to show no interest in exploring the sexual neverlands, despite their precarious position on the edge. Collectively, they produce a homosociality imbricated with heteronormativity. The dominance of this group is established by the volume of posts and the paucity of comments, a performative silence that is a form of disavowal at the heart of heteromasculinity: it is the gay man who talks about his love of big dicks; heterosexual men don’t mention it because– that’s “so gay”. When these men do comment, their bro cock talk and related linguistic strategies work to contain homoeroticism as an acceptable expression of heteromasculinity. Indeed, the pressure these norms of heteromasculinity exert over others is exemplified by the gay men who also take part in these containment strategies.

That said, the heterocentric homosociality of Massive is subject to subversion. As Butler (1990) argues, “to operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination. It offers the possibility of a repetition of the law, which is not its consolidation, but its displacement” (30). By frequently admiring, teasing, and reassuring the heterosexual male posters, gay commenters assert homosexual desires as a meaningful alternative to heterosexual ones. Furthermore, the constant and persistent presence of gay men creates a gap for straight-identified men to dip into the sexual neverlands and engage with the homoerotics of the dick pic. The data sign posts heterodoxical moments in which dick gazing and the dick play it affords could in fact be meaningful and open the door to a future shift in identification. CHC was one example of a Kinsey One whose experiences on Massive might well place him one PM away from a same-sex hook up. At the same time, heterosexual privilege allows straight-identified white men the option to engage in same-sex dalliances without any penalty or imputations of being gay or queer.

Taken together our findings demonstrate that Massive potentiates an expansion of the terrain of what constitutes acceptable forms of heteromasculinity. Such territorial expansion is not novel or exceptional. Ward (2008, 2015) suggests that rather than viewed as meaningless sexual acts partaken when drunk, “dude sex” has become part of a white straight-identified male’s sexual repertoire. Certainly dick gazing or engaging in homoerotic play on Massive is not the same as placing a Craigslist ad for a same-sex hook-up or opening an account on Grindr, both of which entail a higher level of investment and exposure. Such are the affordances of pseudonymous performance.

As for future directions, empirical data collected through surveys or interviews are needed to provide a better understanding of the motivations and investments of the posters and commenters as well as to more fully understand the homoerotics of dick gazing, homoerotic desire, and performances of masculinity. We are interested in exploring why straight-identified men share PSR and how despite the lack of encouragement from the straight-identified men, gay and bisexual men persevere on Massive. We also want to understand how personal shifts in desire or identification, if any, have come about as a result of participating on Massive. Likewise, the presence of trans women needs further analysis. Even though their numbers are low, our datasets included six women who identified as such. Their presence has the potential to create queer moments of disruption, as when they are misread by Kinsey Zeros as cis—the issues of illegibility that limited our research will similarly affect the participants of Massive. Finally, the whiteness of homosociality needs to be addressed. Out of the eight dick pics that we took to be those of non-white posters, we only found one poster and two commenters who made direct reference to their racialized identities. How race and masculinities operate in tandem on Massive are questions we are currently investigating.

We end with the observation that since our project started, Massive has grown from 82,000 subscribers in early 2018, to 208,000 in late 2019, and almost 280,000 by mid-2020. Massive’s burgeoning popularity is echoed in the rate of posting: an average day in 2018 would see 250 posts in a 24-hour period; by 2019, there were more than 450 posts. Indeed, a review of the subscription totals of other subreddits dedicated to male PSR indicates a similar rate of growth. This growth suggests that the sharing of male PSR can no longer be considered novel and for niche research study. In this sense, the patterns we have outlined on Massive are perhaps just signs of bigger things yet to come.