One night not long ago, Jaxon Roman sat naked in front of his laptop wearing only a pup hood as he masturbated with single-minded zeal to the attention of eight other men watching onscreen.
It was a typical weekday for the 33-year-old Arlington, Virginia, program analyst. “When bros praise me and say they’re enjoying [me], I get to that edge point so fast,” Roman says. His favorite instances are “when they all come to what I’m doing.” Sometimes, when he’s feeling especially kinky, Roman, who is bisexual, likes to ask for permission before climaxing. When granted, he releases and his body, he says, shakes for 10 seconds. “Pure bliss,” he calls it.
At least a few times a month on Batemates, a social app for men who like to masturbate with other men, Roman will spend an hour online with his bros. Masturbating—or “bating” as it’s known online—has always helped him relieve stress and find his center.
He’s not the only one. Pitched as an “all-in-one platform designed to embrace bating as a lifestyle, together,” Batemates is the newest haven of queer pleasure. “It’s a community of like-minded people who are just trying to be porn for others, virtually, while watching others pleasure themselves,” Roman says. “Group play with hotties around the world. What’s not to like?”
Though Batemates technically launched in October 2024, it wasn’t until last year that it really started to catch on as a viable—and safe—alternative to other online bator platforms.
Nearly all of the bators WIRED spoke to said they were introduced to the lifestyle in 2020, during Covid, because, as one of them put it, “there was nothing else to do.” Gone were the days of the discreet sauna circle jerk. Instead, men flocked to private video channels on Skype and Zoom for digital jam sessions where they communally bated with other men from around the world via the portal of their laptop screens. During this period, virtual sessions got so popular that they would occasionally max out with more than 100 people in a single room.
Everything changed last year. Skype was shut down in May. Zoom sessions started getting reported more often. (“Sensitive content,” including porn, nudity, and “other content intended to cause sexual arousal” is prohibited according to the company’s acceptable use guidelines; Zoom did not respond to a request for comment.) Some queer bators have since decamped to Teams, Microsoft’s chat and video-conferencing app; others rely on chat forums like BateWorld—a Reddit-style platform for all things male masturbation that is arguably the most popular destination for bators—as well as Discord, Telegram, and Reddit to find bros to bond with.
Batemates emerged as an exciting replacement. “All the corporate tools were just banning us,” says Batemates founder Johan Guams. “As members of the LGBTQ+ community, we had no space. I was really upset about the hypocrisy of the situation, especially when this is something everybody does.”
Batemates wants to put an end to the corporate sanctimony around adult content. It’s an ethos the company has even woven into its branding. A recent ad posted on X makes clear: “Your friends. Your boss. Your coach. Your colleague. Everyone bates.”
Microsoft declined to comment, but according to both its digital safety policy and its terms of use, “any images, videos, audio, text, or links that depict or imply nudity, sexual acts, sexual arousal, or sexual violence” are prohibited on Teams.
Though Guams, who is 31 and from Paris, was also a regular in various Zoom bating sessions during the pandemic, he often left them wanting more. “I was like, OK, I masturbate on Zoom, but I don’t know who these people are. There’s no control. I can’t keep in touch with them. Sometimes you find crazy people. The experience just felt complicated.”
Guams has worked as a freelance product designer for major brands and hotel chains for 10 years, so the instinct to “fix the flow” of the experience came naturally, he says. “My job was always to solve other people’s issues.”
Batemates runs on a subscription model—$17.99 per month or $155 for the annual plan—and requires users to create a profile when signing up. Rooms, or bate groups, can host up to 32 people at one time. “But 32 is never used, because we found out that people prefer smaller rooms,” Guams says. Users can create their own rooms or join established ones, which can be tailored to appeal to people with likeminded kinks and fetishes. That includes everything from leather and verbal to piss play, toys, and fisting. There’s also a feed where all the real-time rooms are listed and users can post their thoughts, upload photos, and comment. A filtered search function can find bators based on location, kinks, age, race, and more.
The platform is on track to hit its next milestone very soon: 10,000 members, the majority between 30 and 50 years old. For a niche product, Guams considers it a win.
Puppaluffagus, who asked to be identified by his online persona citing professional concerns, joined Batemates a few months after it launched. Initially, the 47-year-old Missouri-based software developer had concerns, because the onboarding process required US citizens to upload their passport, but the company has since allowed for driver’s licenses instead; ID verification for potential new members is processed by third-party vendor Shufti Pro. The company also uses Besedo, a content moderation service, to monitor communication and make sure members are following the rules, including not spreading hate speech or posting about minors. Puppaluffagus now considers himself a regular, using Batemates “a couple times a week.”
Among the most important rules on Batemates? No lurking allowed. “It’s kind of like when straight women go to a leather bar, and they’re gawking at people—like we’re animals in a zoo,” Puppaluffagus says.
When joining a virtual session, all users are required to turn on their camera and are automatically removed when they turn it off. To maintain privacy, many bators will often wear a mask or position their camera from the neck down. Others happily let their freak flag fly and show their face during sessions. Room moderators have the option to host “face-mandatory” rooms. In those scenarios, everyone is required to show their face for the entire bate session.
The platform’s mandatory-face feature was one of the reasons Puppaluffagus was eager to join. (BateWorld does not have the same rule.) Puppaluffagus likes to know who he’s bonding with, because it makes for a heightened experience. “Everyone is participating. At this point, I use Batemates more than I use BateWorld.”
Batemates is available for download only on Windows and MacOS computers. The company plans to release a web version—available on mobile—by the end of the year. “We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel; we’re just trying to create a space that is dedicated. It’s tailored for our use,” Guams says.
Being biracial—his father is from Guadeloupe and his mother is white French—he was adamant about including an ethnicity filter. “I often found myself being the only person of color on Zoom. Culturally, in these online bator spaces, it is dominated by white people. So it was important to me that people—Black, Asian, Latino, whatever—can find their community within the community.” In 2020, Grindr discontinued its race filter in support of the Black Lives Matter movement; critics have said that such filters promote discrimination. “It’s only a problem if you are using it for fetishization. It has allowed Black men to bate more comfortably,” Guams says. He tells WIRED that people of color account for roughly 50 percent of the rooms on a daily basis.
The most active rooms on Batemates are for gooners, where men indulge in what is known as popper bating. Poppers are a recreational inhalant and party drug used as a stimulus to enhance one’s sexual experience. (Batemates published a “bator-friendly guide” on poppers in November.) For the uninitiated, gooning is a state of extreme sexual arousal achieved through prolonged masturbation and porn consumption. Like edging, gooning is about reaching a state of total ecstasy without climaxing; some men edge for hours at a time, fueled by a sustained euphoria. Unlike edging, gooning can be about losing control of your senses in the process.
The growing popularity of gooning—jumping from internet forums to TikTok to the pages of Harper’s magazine—has also contributed to the rise of Batemates. Largely fueled by Gen Z, gooners officially broke into the zeitgeist last year. Though its exact origins are up for debate—some speculate it started on 4chan—all gooners seemingly want the same thing in the end: to reach the “gooning state, where [a man] and his dick become one,” as one Redditor explained on r/askgaybros in 2022, just as trend was gaining momentum. “When the gooning state is achieved, the man’s body becomes for all intents and purposes an appendage to his erection.”
An important distinction to note: All gooners are bators but not every bator is a gooner. “If you want to ejaculate really quickly, that’s just masturbating,” Puppaluffagus says. Gooning, on the other hand, is “a communal experience that isn’t necessarily rushed. It’s kind of like a meditation that can let your mind take you where you want to be.”
Guams hates how gooning has become co-opted in the larger culture. He says the practice “is much more than making faces and flashing your tongue. In the bator community, when you goon, it’s because you’ve reached the pinnacle of pleasure. You are being vulnerable, you’re exposing yourself in ways that you would not expose yourself normally—moaning, grunting, screaming. Maybe you make faces, but you’re going to let go of all of your inhibitions. There’s a communion of pleasure because we’re all feeling the same thing at the same time. This is not something that’s supposed to be performative.”
He thinks platforms like the Gooniversity podcast have totally misappropriated gooning for profit. “It’s just putting on a show about gooning. And of course it works, because it’s sex and it’s cool. But if you really are gooning, you know that this is not what this is about. It’s not about putting on a show. It’s about bonding with yourself deeply.” (Gooniversity host Big Dick Clark denies the claims. He tells WIRED: “Of course gooning on camera is performative. Anyone who says gooning is not performative doesn’t know what gooning is. It requires specific facial expressions and jargon. But nothing Gooniversity does is inauthentic.”)
Even so, Guams wants Batemates to be a safe and welcoming place for not only LGBTQ+ bators but for all people who crave that deeper sense of connection.
The platform recently celebrated its first anniversary, and though Guams has all sorts of ideas for new features, he says there is one thing about Batemates that won’t change. Unlike Grindr or Jack’d, queer apps also geared toward pleasure-seeking, Batemates has no outside investors and doesn’t feature a single ad.
“No, no, no—we’ll never sell your data. And we’ll never have ads on the product. It’s only being supported by premium members. And it will stay like that. This is what makes the difference,” he says. “This is by bators, for bators.”
The post Inside the App Where Queer Gooners Run Free appeared first on Wired.
