Pic by the awesome Stuart F Taylor

Usually when someone emails me and says ‘you absolutely HAVE’ to see this it falls into one of two categories:

It’s something I’ve already seen It’s their cock

Occasionally, though, I get a message containing something so sexually unusual and perfectly tailored for me that I have to go for a bit of a lie-down. For about two to three clit-rubbing minutes. Today’s blog is about one of those things, and if – like me – you’re a fan of unusual nerdery and frantic cock-flogging masturbation, then you might want to start taking notes.

Today we’re going to talk about Cock Hero.

Cock Hero is like guitar hero, in that it’s a rythmn game you play, while focusing heavily on beats scrolling across the screen. It’s unlike guitar hero in that you probably don’t want to play it at parties. Here’s the deal, at a very basic level: people create compilations of porn scenes and splice them together with some music – usually cheesy beat-heavy dance. You grab your cock, turn on the video, and beat it one stroke every time the scroll bar tells you to.

Oh, who am I kidding? I can’t tell this any hotter than my friend does…

“It’s like a cheesy, bad-’90s-videogame story. The production is a bit better than most of the Cock Hero videos I’ve seen. And the porn which it’s made up of isn’t all crap, either. Even the music isn’t quite as terrible as some. I mean, it’s still pretty bad, but … a little sub-industrial boom-boom-boom is actually quite bearable. And some of the girls are pretty cute. And, despite the ridiculous intro about conquering five kingdoms of amazon women (or whatever), now that the video is getting into its stride, I’m actually getting hard. I’m absent-mindedly holding on to my cock with one hand and giving myself a slight squeeze from time to time. “When the end of ‘round one’ comes around I make myself comfortable and play along. I’m laid on my bed, and I’m not wearing anything anyway, so it’s an easy transition. I’ve a laptop in front of me, and I’m sort of laid on my left side, with my now-stiff cock in my right hand. I turn the volume up a notch (I can still just reach with my left hand, despite being propped up on that elbow) and as the second round begins, I start to stroke myself to the pulsed beat scrolling from right to left across the video. It’s not fast, not slow, just a comfortable relaxed pace and I’m watching a girl having her tits massaged before it cuts to her masseuse fucking her across the bench. The rhythm switches to three quick strokes and a pause, three strokes and a pause, again and again, and I follow it. Long strokes up and down my whole shaft, yet somehow the awkwardness of this three-pause-three-pause-etc isn’t sexy. It suddenly feels mechanical, not natural. Nobody would come doing this. I wonder if that’s the point … if this is meant to be a break of some sort … but then the rhythm switches back to a steady up and down wanking just as the video cuts to a slow, sensual blow job. That’s more like it. “The video continues like this, switching between natural rhythms and awkward ones. I’m wanking slower than I would if it were just me and my own mental images, or me and a regular porn video. I can’t always concentrate on the imagery because my eyes are flicking down to the pulsing rhythm markers at the bottom of the screen, but I’m watching (and enjoying) more of it than I expected to. As the round ends, on a couple of come shots that I really did find pretty hot, I’m extremely hard and I keep right on stroking myself, slowly, while I wait for the ‘plot’ to pass by and the next round to start. I’m hooked now. I want to see this through. “The whole next section is clips of anal sex, which isn’t a massive turn on for me. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy watching it … but I find myself concentrating more on getting the rhythm just right – on playing the game – than I do on the visuals. I’m still rock hard, I still feel great, and I’m enjoying every stroke I make… but the rhythms are a lot more complex and I guess I’m geeking out here as much as anything else. The fourth chapter is much more my kind of thing. Rock chicks, PVC and tattoos. Hi-hats and synths for the beat. I sort of hit my stride and stop thinking so hard. This just feels like a good, long, slow wank now. I’m shifting on the bed so that I can stroke my balls with my left hand. By the time the fifth and final section of the video arrives, I’m a half-hour in and pre-come is lubricating my hand around my cock, helping me slide right the way over the head and tip, before all the way down my shaft, with every stroke. Eventually, there’s a countdown onscreen at the end; ten, nine, eight … overlaid on a slow motion come shot with a girl’s hand pumping spunk from a porn-star cock, and as soon as it hits zero I let myself come too. And I come a lot. You know how, when you’ve built it up slowly, over a really long wank or fuck, you sometimes amaze yourself with how much come there is? How it almost shoots out in slow motion and lands halfway up your chest in lazy arcs, leaving thick, white strings all the way down over your stomach? Yeah. That.”

Cock Hero – what is it about video game wanking?

I found the description above a massive turn-on. What’s more, I thoroughly enjoyed watching the videos that guys had uploaded to free clip sites, scenes which consisted of a cropped webcam showing them playing the game. Naturally I find it sexy when guys do things with their hands, and I also love the kind of private masturbation that I’d never be able to watch up close (the Schroedinger’s wank conundrum). Above all, though, it’s the combination of motivations that makes me intensely wet and horny. Part-competition, part-performance: lacking a dick of my own I ended up playing along with them, trying to time my strokes to match theirs and my own orgasm to match the one they had at the end of the scene. I asked my friend what the fascination was for the guys who played it.

“Part of my own fascination here is that I can see bits of my younger self in the communities making and playing with these videos. It’s a self-contained porn subculture. I can see that if I were that age right now, I would probably give it a try. I would probably be one of the guys editing videos and trying to be a part of the scene.”

What about copyright? We chatted about this a fair bit – both of us are firm believers that if you want good porn, you should pay for it, and I admitted to him that I felt uncomfortable linking directly to too many videos, because I can see a fair few artists probably wouldn’t be happy with clips of their work being taken and repurposed. He says:

“A thousand times yes on the ‘pay for your porn’ thing. These videos feel more lika a collage art form to me, not simple rip-offs. There is a transformative act going on. It’s creative, in its own way. Maybe ‘repurposing’ is the right word? Feels a bit like mashup culture, or a Mystery Science Theater 3000 or Rifftrax style thing (where the art form is commentary dubbed over existing movies).”

Does the type of porn make a difference in Cock Hero? Some of the scenes he sent me were very mild – sexy ladies slowly taking off their t-shirts, and that kind of thing. Others were much more hardcore. Typically a long Cock Hero ‘challenge’ video will involve climbing steadily through what the creator interprets as levels: you begin with soap in the shower and end with gangbangs at dawn. I’d struggle to keep an eye on the porn but also on the beat, just as in Guitar Hero I find it impossible to move my fingers to the right buttons while also looking at the screen. How hard is this in Cock Hero?

“There is something very specifically ‘teen male’ about how geeky this whole Cock Hero thing is. Taking something as organic and ineffable as sex and codifying it. Building rules around desire and satisfaction. It’s obsessive – and that’s what I find interesting about it. The almost otaku-like level of devotion to a specified set of societal rules. It screams out that ‘this is our private club and it has rules. Fuck to our rules. Wank to our rules.’ Even more interesting, it gets competitive. It becomes about being the best. About lasting longest. But thats the best part … the ‘win condition’ is lasting the longest before you come. It becomes, at some level, about getting ‘better at sex’. Which is a lot less selfish than most teen contests. (Even if the whole concept of ‘lasting longer being somehow better’ is essentially flawed. It’s the best guess of a virgin.) “I checked out a few of these videos. Who am I kidding, I watched/played a lot of them, in the name of research. And my first impression was that they’re all crap. The music is overpowering and awful repetitive Europop. The visuals are hyper-fast jump cuts from one porn scene to the next. There’s no anchor. Nothing to concentrate on and nothing to be turned on by. “But then I started to zone out. Precisely because the visuals and music didn’t do anything for me, I started to pay attention to the scrolling line of beats at the bottom of the screen. I started following the instructions and stroking my cock to the rhythm. I played the game. I started to realise that this was the point. It was hypnotic. Anything could have been on the screen, but since it was flashes of skin, moments of tits, arse, cunt and cock, it easily faded into the background with my own cock in the foreground. I concentrated on the act of wanking. It actually felt quite zen. “So… to answer your question, it felt EXACTLY like Guitar Hero. I stopped paying attention to the media and focused on the activity.”

I have a couple more questions for this guy. Tell a lie, I have LOADS more questions for him, it’s just that 90% of those questions are ‘please please please can I watch?’ I’ll try and stick to the more professional ones for now, though, such as: is it as nerdy-hot as I think it is?

There’s something geekily delicious about Cock Hero – the challenge element of wanking to a beat, and coming either on, or after, a particular cue. Including screens and games in sex reminds me of giving blow jobs while dudes play video games, and challenging myself to make them come before they finish the level. What’s more, it seems like there are loads of interesting ways to level this up: some of my favourite videos included guys giving themselves a kind of Cock Hero golf-handicap, by using Fleshlights and prostate massagers to make each stroke more sensitive (thus making it harder to ‘complete’ each level without spaffing all over themselves). Is the challenge the most important part?

“I think Cock Hero is built on challenge. There’s the ‘beating other guys at lasting longer’ challenge and there’s the ‘making a video so sexy that nobody can last through to the end’ challenge. I think that finding a way to build a competitive community around wanking off at home alone is damn near the very essence of the Internet for teenage boys. It combines sex, creativity and competition in a brilliantly addictive way. There are two main elements to the subculture: competitive wanking (who can last longest before coming) and competitive creativity (who can make the best and/or most challenging videos). Both of these are admirable pursuits. “I think the idea of these videos training guys to last longer when having sex is a total myth. They just train guys to last longer when wanking in a very specific way to a very specific stimulus. It has nothing whatsoever to do with how long they will last when they have sex with a real, live girl. Or guy, for that matter.”

Talk more. Tell me more. I… argh. About halfway through our discussion about Cock Hero, I realised that my questions had veered wildly from ‘here is an interesting psychological insight about the motivations for creating your own Cock Hero video’ to ‘JUST TALK TO ME ABOUT WANKING.’ Which goes to show, I think, why I will never be a truly impartial journalist: I am far too easily distracted by cock. I have no idea if this makes a good blog post, outside a rather weird study in one woman’s fascination with how guys jerk off, and one guy who was kind enough to indulge her with an unusual new game. But I’d kick myself if I didn’t ask the question I really want to know the answer to, so I’ll give the final word to my friend…