The rise of side: «Top or Bottom? I’m a Side». Grindr becomes the first dating app to legitimize the presence in the LGBTQ+ community of sides: men who are not into anal sex
What does side mean on Grindr?
Last year, Grindr added a position called side, a designation that upends the binary that has historically dominated gay male culture, that opened up sexual respect. Sides are men who find fulfilment in every kind of sexual act except anal penetration. Instead, a broad range of oral, manual and frictional body techniques provide a release that’s rich in emotional, physical and psychological rewards. Some adherents refer to these activities as outercourse.
Sex position: the meaning of side is about sexual exploration, visibility and respect
Nearly eleven million gay men around the world go on the Grindr app to find someone to have sex with. They can scroll through an endless stream of guys, from handsome to homely, bear to twink. When it comes to choosing positions for sex, the possibilities have long been simply top and bottom. The only other choice available toggles between those roles: verse (for versatile).
Sides are often subjected to widespread rejection and misunderstanding in the gay community, whose members often view them as immature, lazy or even asexual.
Sexual exploration – a matter of respect. What does side mean in position?
The term side was coined in 2013 by the sex therapist and author Dr Joe Kort, but only in the last year has it gained glimmers of acknowledgment in the wider gay world. Eighteen months ago, Dr Kort made a private Facebook group page called Side Guys to give the men a forum for acceptance and, perhaps, to start a movement.
Things began slowly for the group, with members first joining by the tens, and then by the hundreds. In the last eight months, however, membership has doubled to reach 5,000. Posts by sides young and old come from around the world. Kort said most of the men had found their way to the group via the TikTok videos he had created to spread the word. Other men have been fashioning their own informational videos on TikTok, including the model Barrett Pall, who has 1.4 million followers on the site. In another breakthrough, Wikipedia added a sides definition to its terminology of homosexuality entry.
At the same time, the LA-based gay comedian Michael Henry has created a mock-tutorial on sides that has earned more than 224,000 YouTube views in the last few weeks, making it one of his most viewed clips. In the video, a young guy tells some friends that he’s been seeing an array of men but not topping or bottoming. One friend quizzically asks: «What are you doing with these men? Shaking hands?» After the guy outs himself as a side, Henry asks: «You mean like a potato?»
Internalized homophobia and a heteronormative construct that gay people have the opportunity to challenge – Side sexual exploration is a path towards respect
Over time the reaction within the community had been dreadful. People would get disturbed once they knew that someone is not into penetration. They believe that it’s just part of the sexual exploration
Some people even see the side role as an expression of internalized homophobia. Others see the opposite. Defining penetration as the sole standard for sex is a heteronormative construct that gay people have the opportunity to challenge – «It’s mimicking patriarchal crap».
The side approach is useful for straight people as well, including women who find penetrative sex painful or who prefer oral techniques. The approach can also reintroduce sex to gay and straight men who have erectile issues, because side techniques can make orgasm easier to achieve for some.
A study by George Mason University in Virginia – only thirty-five percent participate in penetrative sex
Many sides believe that lots of men with similar interests are still in the closet about it. There’s evidence that a number of gay and bisexual men prefer side action, at least temporarily. A 2011 study by George Mason University in Virginia, which surveyed 25,000 men who identify as gay or bi, found that only thirty-five percent of them had participated in penetrative sex during their last sexual encounter.
Three-quarters of those men said they preferred kissing, oral and non-penetrative acts. Perhaps for that reason, the sides usually confess they didn’t have trouble meeting men for initial sexual exploration. Only when it came to romantic relationships did their interests – or lack thereof – become a deal-breaker.
Some sides who have long-term lovers said that in order to maintain those relationships, they’ve had to keep them open so their top or bottom partners can experience acts they themselves don’t feel comfortable providing.
Sex, Respect. Sides keep challenging binary thinking, in the realms of identity and sexuality. Grindr category Side give visibility to side category
Talking to the Side Guys, and reading their posts, makes clear that they all have different stories and different preferences. They bond over two things. First, there’s a great joy in recognizing the growing community and the recent spreading of the term. There’s also exhaustion at having to constantly explain their lives to others, as well as a deep residual pain from having such a personal, and meaningful, part of their lives misidentified.
The introduction of the category Grindr represents a step ahead because it cuts right to the sex exploration. Credit for its addition belongs to Bobby Box, a writer on gay issues who penned a piece earlier this year about sides for Xtra, a Canadian queer publication.
The community was wide enough to also include trans and intersex people. To further promote the movement, he has begun marketing T-shirts on his web site emblazoned with the phrase: «I’m a Side with Pride». He’s hoping sides soon feel comfortable enough to form their own visibility groups at Pride marches.
Side sexual exploration: toxic masculinity and the phallicization of sexuality
The non-acceptance of the condition of the category that does not include penetration, i.e., that of the sides, also has to do with toxic masculinity. A masculinity that is usually performed in heteronormative terms and which is one of the vectors of homophobia, among others. An aspect of this masculinism among gay men is the phallicization of sexuality. The term derives from the Greek word phallus which means penis. The naming itself creates a distance necessary to inquire what is really at stake here. The existence of side as a sexual possibility feels to many like a desexualization of gayness, like taking away what is most elemental in being gay. And this is telling of the popular understanding of gay sex as unconditionally phallic.
Grindr’s addition of the option side and the debate on a category that brings freedom and respect
The debate that Grindr’s addition of the option side has generated touches upon the interconnections between gender and sexuality in the most intimate sphere. While this addition is for some a welcome one since it puts under scrutiny the gendered power dynamics that sustain the sexual roles and offers a way out of the phallic sexuality, others find it to be just another instance of the education of desire that Grindr has put forth the last decade, a way of teaching gay men how and whom to desire by offering them the identity categories via which the present themselves to others and as such eroticize the others. But that’s another story.
The term Side in sexuality – the meaning in position
A side, in the sexual sense, is an individual who doesn’t enjoy giving or receiving anal penetration. Instead, sides prefer less invasive sexual acts, although they like sexual exploration: frottage (dry humping), making out, oral sex, intimate touch and massage, mutual masturbation, and other things of that nature.
