Pull your pals a little closer – it’s time for more ‘Locker Room Talk’ from Benjamin Davis.

Why Don’t Men Cuddle with Men?

Look, I’m not saying you want to fuck your dog. I’m just asking the question: Do you want to fuck your dog?

Wait, sorry. Hold on, let me start from the beginning.

There is a man I work with. I’ll call him Mr. Gordon. He is big, broad-shouldered and sweaty. I want him to hold me. I want Mr. Gordon to hold me in his big sweaty arms.

Recently, my brother had a baby – my brother is big like Mr. Gordon. On Sundays, I Skype with my brother while he feeds his baby. When the baby is finished eating, he lays her on his broad chest and pats her back until she burps. This is how I want Mr. Gordon to hold me – a burp would be a bonus. Since Mr. Gordon is not a mutated 15-foot-tall giant, I’d settle for light spooning or a role-playing game of bearskin rug on hardwood floor.

Sadly, Mr. Gordon is married. This got me thinking, so what? I’m not talking about sword fighting or salad tossing, I’m talking about cuddling – why is cuddling between men so taboo? I have plenty of girlfriends who tell me often of their girl-on-girl cuddle fests. No one bats an eye.

Yet, if I try to crawl into bed with one of my friends to nuzzle them like a lost kitten, I’ve crossed a line.

As far as I can tell, the reason why straight men don’t often cuddle is pretty clear. It is the same reason why they don’t measure each other’s dicks in increments of palm: they don’t want to be called gay. Because, as you might’ve guessed, gay men have no problem cuddling other men. And, when I think back, most of the men I’ve cuddled with in my life have been gay or bisexual. However, ever since Batman thwarted the gay agenda to put chemicals in the water to turn our MMA fighters gay, things have calmed down and people are more accepting. So, why are straight men still afraid of cuddling?

I asked another coworker of mine what he thought about man-cuddling. “Maybe we’re all just afraid of being vulnerable,” he said. “Like, with each other?” I asked. “No,” he said. “No—” he paused as Mr. Gordon walked between us. We both watched him go before continuing. “No, just everyone in general. Or maybe,” he glanced over at where Mr. Gordon stood by the printers, “maybe we’d all become bisexual, you know?” I did know, as a man with a ‘pants-on-or-off’ cuddling policy, but that wasn’t helping my case, so I moved on. This was not about sex or sexuality, yet the further down the rabbit hole of straight male cuddling I fell, the more it kept coming back to that. Maybe it is impossible to extricate vulnerability from sexuality. Maybe straight men are right to fear the gay in cuddling other men – we all know the dangers of vulnerability: boners.

If I wanted to take sex out of the conversation, there was really only one option: family. I couldn’t turn to my brother since, in a recent game of Dungeons & Dragons, I spent the whole time rolling to see if I could hold his ass like a prison-bitch who misplaced their bandana. There are only so many times you can make that joke with your brother before it gets weird. So, of course, I called and asked him why we never cuddled as kids. He chalked it up to our family being a distant bunch but did note that we all cuddled the dogs a lot. That got me thinking, so I asked him why we cuddle dogs? After a long pause, he sighed and told me, “It feels nice.”

It was such a simple truth: we don’t want to fuck dogs! Wait, no, that wasn’t it. It feels nice. That was it. That is the simple truth of cuddling – it doesn’t need to be sexual; it is about warmth and comfort. It feels nice ­– man, woman, dog, gay, straight, hair, no hair, pants, no pants. The reason men don’t cuddle is because we over-complicate the idea of it, we bedazzle it with hang-ups. If you’re worried about being vulnerable, maybe you should try a little vulnerability; if you’re worried about being gay, maybe you’re a little gay. And if you’re okay with being a little vulnerable, and okay with being a little gay, and you still can’t separate the sex from the snuggle, I’ve got a quick question about your disposition toward dogs.