Dear readers, you have made the gangbang poll our biggest yet, and for that we thank you. As of April 21, we recorded a total of 626 responses. You’ve kept the train rollin’ all night long.
Gangbangs are, by their very nature, restrictive because only one individual is on the receiving end of sex acts from multiple partners. Other partners are often standing to the side, not engaged, just watching. This voyeuristic aspect of the gangbang could explain its popularity, and why the most popular gangbang is one woman fucking many male partners. Speaking of numbers, let’s take a look at the responses to this, one of our most popular polls to date.
Diving into the Data
Regarding which gangbang scenario you prefer, one woman and multiple men was the clear majority at 44% of the total responses. DGs were about 10% behind at 33.3%. However, DGs were the winner among females at 23 responses, with one woman and many men coming close behind with 20. Only 14% of the total audience prefers one man and many women, with all other choices mere fractions.
Lesbian gangbangs were as popular with women as the “harem” scenario of one man fucking many women; each received five responses. Only one woman stated that she didn’t enjoy gangbangs. Comparatively, 15 men preferred the lesbian gangbang, less than the 23 men whom don’t enjoy gangbangs. We can’t claim any relation between the two genders though, as only 55 of the respondents were women, while 551 were men.
Our audience doesn’t like gay male gangbangs. Only two people, both male (one hetero, one bi) chose this option. This could be because gangbangs are about heterosexual power dynamics, or their inversion. As the majority of lesbian scenes target a straight male audience, this could explain the higher interest in lesbian gangbang scenes as well. Or, it could just be due to the fact that our primary audience isn’t gay.
Desire and Dominance
When it came to why people enjoyed gangbangs, desire to take on multiple partners, personally or vicariously, was the most frequent reason chosen at 36.9%. The desire for dominance came in at 23.8% and interest in the specific person being gangbanged came in at 20%. Meanwhile, desire to be dominated only counted for 9.9% of responses. Nearly 8% of respondents don’t enjoy gangbangs.
Comparing dominance vs. being dominated, men and women chose opposing responses. Twice as many women indicated a preference to be dominated (14) than a preference to be the dominator (7). More than 75% of men who answered this question preferred to dominate (131 in favor of dominance vs. 42 in favor of being dominated). These data affirm the dominance and submission norms of Western culture. Just remember that norms are not absolutes: They are only generalizations of what one is likely to encounter.
Forget Evolutionary Biology
The data gets very interesting when it comes to the gender makeup of gangbang scenarios. Across all genders, we saw people prefer the one-woman, multiple-men arrangement over the many-women, one-man harem, usually by a significant margin. This does not follow the practices of controlling access to females or harem-keeping seen in both humans and nonhuman primates. However, those practices originated as reproductive strategies, whereas a gangbang doesn’t typically revolve around insemination as a fetish element, except in the instance of confusing paternity. One man fucking many women in a single session would run out of semen before getting very far. He’d have much more luck sleeping with one or more women in many successive sessions.
The gangbang appears to have much more to do with pleasure than biology, specifically with regard to voyeurism. If we combine the desire to take on or watch someone take on multiple partners, and the interest in the individual being gangbangs, as well as some of the write-in responses, over 50% of the responses involve voyeurism or a physical challenge. Most gangbang scenes also involve anal sex and double penetration, to the point where pornstars who regularly perform such scenes develop stronger sphincter muscles to better handle the physical work. So much of the interest comes from watching the act, and appreciating the effort required from performers. In this regard, it appears Garrett’s hypothesis about gangbangs being an artifice of pornography is on the money. While this probably wasn’t the case going back through history, it does appear to be so in our modern, sexually liberal age.
When Excess Becomes Dangerous
Domination is the next biggest area of desire for gangbangs. The power dynamics of desire and conquest, whether following the norm or through role reversal, can amplify sexual pleasure. However, there are also negative implications, as we have mentioned. Some may see gangbangs with a single woman as a simulacrum of gang rape, which is not about the pleasure of the woman.
Gang rape is not about the victim at all, it is about the male participants. It is a perversion of the more orderly unit coherency development strategies you see in military institutions. Such practices are an initiation which bonds individual men to a group through an act of atrocity.
This ties in to Marie’s comment about an issue of trust with finding enough men willing to fuck you in a safe a pleasurable way for all participants. Possessiveness and jealousy are complicating factors, but there is also the issue of the woman’s enjoyment being disregarded unless she is the one in control of the situation.
Is the end a new beginning?
This difficulty in arranging the encounter also likely feeds into its role as a porn staple. It allows us to enjoy a fantasy that is otherwise difficult to realize. What do you think? The What’s Your Fetish column has now run three issues on various permutations of group sex. We’ve discussed group sex overall, as well as double penetration and now gangbangs. Which is your favorite? Is there some other iteration of group sex you would like to see covered in the future? Let us know, and be sure to check back soon for more sexy shenanigans.
Sources:
- Biological Anthropology, 3rd Edition by Craig Stanford and John S. Allen.
- On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman
max
May 2, 2017I like watching/ fantasizing about gangbangs because it frees the individual man from the responsibility of satisfying the nymph and guarantees her fulfillment regardless of his own size and performance ( something that all males are subconsciously worried about).
In a gangbang you can participate in penetration with only your own satisfaction in mind and no single individual is preferred over you because only through cooperative team effort can ‘we’ fully satisfy her needs.
Not only does a gangbang free you from performance anxiety, it allows for male bonding too, kind of like the way our male ancestors bonded when they cooperated to hunt for food, now that we don’t hunt for food we have to bond with other men in achieving another goal, i.e. getting her orgasm.
If the thought of another guys dick rubbing against yours is a little too gay for your desire to see double penetration, gangbangs with dickgirls become a logical buffer, allowing multiple penetrations without the homophobia.
Elayn Wilde
May 2, 2017I didn’t even think of performance anxiety as a possible factor in the enjoyment of gangbangs. Thank you for the comment; I will have to look into this.