The Jockstrap Is a Container Extraordinaire
Written by William Norwich, author of novels ‘Learning to Drive’ and ‘ My Mrs Brown’. William is known for his editing and writing for Vogue US and The New York Times.
Photography by Walter Zak
Virginia Woolf had a room of her own, men have jock straps.
This comparison might sound absurd, even insulting, to Woolf scholars. No offense is intended. Her seminal 1929 essay, delivered in two lectures at the Newnham and Girton Colleges, the first two colleges for women at Cambridge, talked about women’s place in the social and financial hierarchy. Woolf asserted that women must have autonomous spaces of their own if they are to create safely, and satisfyingly, a world hostile to their inclinations.
Nearly one hundred years on, a “room of one’s own” is shorthand to convey a secret or private place to discharge important work and other pursuits. For gay men, and jockstrap-inclined cis-gender males and some trans people, the jock strap is a container extraordinaire. A world of its own, a sartorial force central to protecting desire and asserting identity in societies still hostile to sexuality and its expression. The jock strap is not just like a room of its own, it is a fleshly temple.
What is it about this simple contraption, with origins in the bulging codpieces of the Middle Ages—thongs are beholden to the loincloths of ancient Greece and Rome--that it’s mere mention, let alone a picture on Instagram, or a gallery wall or on the pages of a glorious book, can launch a thousand hips? What motivates companies to enter, at what seems like one new enterprise a week, the competitive world of innerwear, as the category of clothing is called in the apparel industry, selling variations of jock straps one more enticing and enrolling than the next? On the luxury level, even Gucci showed its bulge not long ago with a high-fashion, S & M-lite adjustable leather jock strap, with an adjustable side buckle and elasticized back for snug fit. The cost? 2420 EUR. And, more recently, during the pandemic when so many were left solo home alone to entertain themselves, the jock strap rated second only to a fetish for feet, according to a survey conducted for Bad Girls Bible in which some 987 people reported what they considered sexy.
Jock straps were first made in 1874 by C.F. Bennett for the Chicago sporting goods company, Sharp & Smith. They were bound for Boston to provide “comfort and support for bicycle jockeys working the cobblestone streets” in that quaint mecca of early puritanism. Known originally as the Bike Jock Strap, Bike brand jocks, for decades only available in bridal white, were mass-produced from 1897 onward until 2017. During World War I, every serviceman in the Army was given a jock strap lest they experience “excessive fatigue” in their genital warzone if they didn’t wear one.
The original Bike jockstrap wasn’t all that comfortable, not like the fashionable jocks today. They were found on drugstore shelves, or behind the pharmacist’s counter, next to hernia trusses and surgical stockings. Sighting the first bit of pubic hair on a son, one’s parents came home with your first jock strap, presenting it to a mortified child—who usually cried with embarrassment but couldn’t wait to run and hide in his room or the bathroom and try on the heavy cotton and loose mesh invention. A rite of passage.
After World War II, a young man wasn’t allowed to attend gym class, and gym was mandatory, without wearing a jock strap for his protection. The agony and ecstasy of gym class centered around the changing room. Here’s where the rubber of sexuality, so to speak, hit the road uphill. Those first times donning the jock strap in the company of your peers, in the gym, where truly the fittest, not the brainiest, survived best. The shame of how we thought we looked, like trussed chicken, all while we were pulled in so many confusing new directions, feelings, crushes, the stuff of tonight’s wet dreams…the fellows with more body hair and bigger, hairier dicks, their muscle butts in jock straps…and looking and looking and knowing the danger you risked if the cause of the boner between your thighs didn’t like being watched by you. As well as the guilt and the shame, if you were taught, or had intuited in the ethers, that these feelings and thoughts were not okay with your family, your best buddies, your church, and sadly yourself.
But hey-ho, that didn’t stop me, did it stop you?
Most of us had gym classes a couple times a week. If you were on a team, game practice almost every afternoon. They only gave you the one jock strap unless a brother passed theirs down and you had two. If you remembered to put it in the washing machine, maybe your jock got washed once a week. All those fluids and secretions that pooled there until soap and water came. Herein, then, that subset of jockstrap love, the kink for a filthy, crusty, pungent jock.
According to reporting by the Portland Oregon-based journalist Tove K. Danovich, by the year 2003 it was estimated that some 350 million men worldwide had owned and worn a Bike jock strap at some point in their lives. In the 1990s, most professional athletes stopped wearing them in favor of compression shorts or felt that any extra support wasn’t needed. Meanwhile, beginning in the 1950s, as gay men moved into urban neighborhoods in which they felt safe enough to live out and proud, at least within the perimeters of these communities, many adapted for their personal style the symbols of uber-masculinity that had fascinated them while growing up: muscles and beefcake, gyms, bomber jackets, military clothing, facial hair, tight blue jeans, tank tops and T-shirts instead of button downs, Speedos and jock straps.
“They adopted a manly demeanor and attire as a means of expressing their new sense of self, and in adopting this look, they aimed to enhance their physical attractiveness and express their improved self-esteem,” writes fashion historian Shaun Cole in Don We Now Our Gay Apparel.
Jock strap nights at clubs such as The Eagle in New York, and Slide in San Francisco, advanced the jock strap as a sexual symbol. The fitness revolution of the 1990s also was a revolution in fitness and athleticwear. Gay men and straight men and everyone in between were now keenly body conscious of how they looked in clothing, and out of clothing. The expression beefcake was a compliment, the thicker the better, and beefcake spread like Valentines from the muscle beaches of California to London, Europe, South America, Australia and New Zealand. Companies including 2(x)ist and C-In2 launched in the eearly1990s, selling jock straps that could be worn comfortably everyday as underwear. Bare cheeks under the Prada.
“They’re very popular at circuit parties,” says Franco, one of the body builders at my Manhattan gym, and a sought-after gym trainer and professional massage therapist. “Guys like to show their jock straps off a bit above their pants and gym shorts. I guess that kind of signals that there’s easy access. And tops really like it when bottoms wear jock straps while they fuck. It’s very aesthetically pleasing to see a nice round muscle butt framed by two strings of fabric.”
A couple of times a week, he says, “Clients ask me to wear a jock strap while massaging them. I have no problem doing it, as long as it doesn’t distract from the actual work.”
When it comes to boosting the erotic appeal of the jock strap in photography, much credit goes to Colt Studio and their adonis models and also to the artful icon Peter Berlin whose self-photography is some of the greatest sexual theater in the world.
Clothing was character in his work. Although he did not often wear the traditional jock strap, his costumes, especially his thin cotton pants, fit him like jock straps, cock in, or cock out.
“For me, a naked person is sort of, ‘Okay, that’s how the good Lord did you,’” he told W magazine when his book Peter Berlin: Icon, Artist, Photosexual was published by Damiani Editore in 2019. “But then comes your imagination, your ideas, and you become the artist to take the naked body as a canvas and dress him up.”
Appreciating Peter Berlin, this pioneering self-photographer, has been reductively called a “fetish.” His influence on designers has made him a fashion legend. Well, what is a fashion? What is fetish? Do you have a jock strap fetish? Or is the cock-and-balls enhancing swaddle you’re wearing under your fashionable Kim Jones for Dior suit just high style?
“There is fetish fashion and there is fashion that become fetish; art imitating life or life imitating art?” says Court Vox, the noted sex and intimacy consultant and writer.
Labels like fashion, and fetish, are subtractive, an effort to silo the delicious range of the experiences and interests we beings are having here in human form. “If someone depends on jock straps for sexual gratification it’s safe to say they have an underwear fetish. A fetish can be formed around a specific body part like feet, for example, or around a specific article of clothing,” Court says.
“The jockstrap has long been fetishized, in porn, in erotic photography, donned by go-go dancers, and at festivals. It is provocative, overt and not overt at the same time. It’s a bit of a sneak peek, a tease,” Court continues.
“I’m having memories of my partner walking past me in the living room to get his morning coffee wearing his jock. There is something so casual about the jockstrap, and yet very intentional at the same time. Regardless of whether you’ve been living with others, or living solo during quarantine, the jockstrap is a piece of intentional clothing. Simply putting it on, conjures something erotic and sexual. It has the power to set a mood,” Court says.
The British fashion historian James Laver famously once said that “clothing is inevitable. It is the furniture of the mind made visible.”
All things considered, and excuse me while I refresh my Instagram feed where the boys are, I think we can conclude that if jock straps didn’t exist, courtesy of Mr. C.F. Bennett of Chicago in 1874, gay men would have to invent them.