Who needs to know

After technique, the thing guys write about most in this subject isn't their body. It's who knows.

Men describe doing this for years and telling nobody. Hiding toys. Clearing history. Waiting for an empty house.

Nobody has to know

You don't owe anyone this. Not a partner, not a friend, not your doctor.

That's not a starter position on the way to being open about it. For a lot of guys it's just the setup, permanently.

The one exception is medical. If you're bleeding, if something's stuck, if pain won't go away, a doctor needs the real story to help you. They won't be shocked. You're not the first guy this month.

Hiding it costs something

This one catches men off guard. The sneaking around has its own price tag, separate from anything you're doing.

Where the toys live. What happens if someone borrows your laptop. Whether tonight is safe. Planning around other people's schedules for months. Several guys said straight out that the hiding wore them down harder than the slow progress did.

Worth knowing before it builds up. Some guys tell one person and the pressure drops. Some guys tell nobody and it never bothers them. Both work fine.

Does liking this make you gay?

No.

Your prostate is standard issue on every male body. It sits where it sits and it responds to pressure no matter who you want to sleep with. What gets you off and who you're attracted to are two different questions, and one doesn't decide the other.

Straight guys do this. Gay guys do this. Guys who've never thought about it do this. Same anatomy in all of them.

The line men use on each other, when it comes up, is that saying this is gay has about as much truth in it as saying blowjobs are gay. Nobody has ever come back from that one.

Worth knowing the assumption runs the other way too. Plenty of gay men have never done any of this and have no interest in it. The stereotype is doing no useful work for anybody.

There's a longer version in the reference section if you want it.

If you do want to tell someone

Guys report it going better than they expected. The dread is usually worse than the conversation.

How you open it matters. Men who framed it as something they were curious about and wanted to try report an easier time than men who delivered it like a confession.

The most common outcome, told by men who spent months dreading it, is some version of: she didn't care. Not "she was delighted", not "she joined in" — she just wasn't bothered, and the thing he'd been carrying around turned out to weigh nothing to anybody else.

Supportive and not interested is a real answer

The version nobody prepares you for lands in the middle, and it's common enough to expect.

She's fine with it, she's not doing it with you, and she doesn't especially want to hear about it or find the kit on the worktop. Men describe that arrangement working perfectly well for years, and describe being caught out by how much it stung at first — because "fine with it" sounded like it should mean "part of it".

It doesn't, and that isn't a rejection of you. Plenty of people are simply not interested in arses, including people who are entirely relaxed about yours.

The other thing worth naming: telling a partner and telling other men are different problems. Men who are completely open at home still describe not being able to raise it with a single mate. If that's you, you're not being a coward, you're reading the room accurately — and it's the loneliness, not the act, that most of them say wore them down.

There's a whole track in here about partners. Bringing it up, doing it together, what to say after. It opens whenever you want it, at any level, and you never have to touch it.

What this app does about it

Your journal gets encrypted in your browser before it's sent anywhere. We can't read your notes and neither can anyone who gets hold of the database. That's how it's built, not a promise about our intentions.

The community runs on made-up handles, so your email and account ID never show up on any page this site serves.

Nothing gets shared with anyone. No leaderboards, no followers, no comparing yourself to other guys. We left all of that out on purpose.

Journaling and the community are both completely optional. Use them, don't use them, use one and not the other. None of it changes what you get out of the practice.

The one thing we can't protect you from is what you type about yourself in a public post. That part stays your job.