Virgos and Chastes: The OTHER Style of Male Chastity

Virgos and Chastes: The OTHER Style of Male Chastity

Ever heard of Virgos and Chastes? Lifestyle kinkster & FemDom erotica author Giles English analyses the other style of male chastity

What if I told you that male chastity didn’t have to be extra work?

That it’s often OK to treat a male chastity cage as a nice body modification and move on?

That you can use it to get exactly what you want, and nothing you don’t?

You know how male chastity is supposed to work?

She becomes a ‘Keyholder‘, enjoys playing peekaboo with his orgasm – “Now you see it, now you don’t…” – leverages it for domestic service, grants him ‘ruined orgasms’, sometimes pegs him and…

How it’s supposed to work seems like a lot of actual work.

But, back up a little and let me explain.

Male Chastity is a weird fetish in that it’s discovered rather than learned.

We tend to pick up fetishes by association. You reach sexual maturity one summer when the pretty girls are all wearing sexy sandals and flipflops, so now you have a thing for female feet… and the rest is repeated masturbation. (Or – maybe, just hear me out on this one – you become interested in girls well before you’re mature enough to merit their interest, so you develop a thing for physically imposing women who hold you in contempt…)

Male chastity isn’t generally like that. Kinky men discover chastity devices and immediately want one, for reasons they can’t quite put into words (I have theories). The women enthusiasts – they do exist – discover male chastity through a partner and find it starts to feel natural (as long as he’s not annoying about it… we’ll come to that).

So, it’s pretty much: His cock is caged, but now what?

The obvious answer – the one you’ll generally get off the Internet – is to treat the male chastity cage like a combination sex toy and remote control. You fold it into the kind of playful femdom that’s based on extended teasing, and at the same time use it to get things done around the house. I call that Keyholder Style Chastity, because she holds the keys.

It doesn’t seem like a bad idea. Sustainable kink generally takes something the dominant likes and unreasonably improves it. So, if she – or he, but I think gay chastity might work differently – enjoys teasing, a chastity cage means she can literally have her cake and get eaten! And, why not make a sexy game out of boring chores, especially if you have mismatched domestic standards?

However, that’s not what generally happens in the long run.

The typical male chastity fetishist bursts onto an internet forum with stories about how his wife has agreed to lock him up, and how his orgasms will only arrive according to certain rules, and how she’ll regularly edge him and… Then, gradually, the lockups get longer, and the fuss around him being locked dies away.

The problem is that, though a surprising number of women will be initially interested in male chastity (I have theories about that as well), Keyholder Style Chastity isn’t very sustainable day-to-day. Bad enough that it requires a lot of ’emotional labour’ – Do I let him orgasm? How long do I keep him locked? Is he pleading for real? What am I supposed to do now? – and actual physical energy – Oh, I’ve had a hard week, but I have to edge him tonight. Worse, it puts the focus firmly on his genitals and his erotic experience.

It’s true that some playful women enjoy making a hobby out of kinkily tormenting men. Most, however, only rarely have the time, energy, and inclination. And very dominant women, as a baseline, want the dynamic to be about them. (The vanilla equivalent is probably blowjobs. My female friends tell me it can be fun to give a blowjob, it can even be a dominant act – watch him squirm! – but it’s not something most women want as part of their routine.)

Things then generally go one of three ways:

In the worst case, the chastity fetishist pushes back, demands more play around his chastity, and she gets cross and gives up on the whole thing. The couple’s sex life enters the doldrums.

More positively, the couple gets stuck. She keeps him locked, but disengages sexually; ‘locked and forgotten’ is the chastity version of dead bedroom. She may just be glad of the break from his hypersexuality! However, I suspect it’s often because she doesn’t want to go back to vanilla sex, but doesn’t enjoy Keyholder Style Chastity either. There’s a slim possibility the couple will move onto the third option.

In the third option, the couple settles into a sustainable end game where he’s locked by default without much effort from her. Sexual activity continues on her terms, and, when she’s in the mood, there may be play around his chastity. If he unlocks and/or has orgasms, it’s according to a routine or set of rules, and she doesn’t have much to do with it. I call this Virgo Style Chastity because… well she rarely sees a working penis, so she’s a sort of born-again virgin.

Here’s what it looks like from the female point-of-view:

• You only see us caged, especially in the bedroom (“What penis?”)
• You don’t have to hear about our chastity (“Chastity is fire and forget.”)
• You don’t have to explain (“I just prefer you this way.”)
• We’re still lovers and partners (“Husband or Boyfriend 2.0.”)
• We act as if our cage was 100% effective (“He’s caged. That’s it.”)
• We won’t pester (“No emotional labour”)
• We accept there may be no going back. (“Careful what you wish for.”)

– From The Chaste Manifesto by Giles English.

If you think that’s weird, what’s even weirder is that it actually works! The only real limits turn out to be technical and practical.

This takes us back to: His cock is caged, but now what?

Perhaps Keyholder Style Chastity was the wrong answer. Perhaps male chastity is really to do with the gender and sexual identities of both partners. Perhaps it’s also about possessing and being possessed…?

Regardless of the deep stuff, the erotic benefits to the kinky chaste man are undeniably obvious. If you are in a chastity cage, any sexual activity is an exquisite tease, and the knowledge that this will be ongoing pings your masochism. It can also be pretty mind-blowing wearing a chastity cage day-to-day, knowing it’s not coming off for the bedroom (though 24/7 wear is generally more like wearing a wedding ring).

The Virgos – the women in these relationships – are generally more vague about what they get out of it, probably because they don’t need to think about it very much, but perhaps also because it’s basically not very nice. Putting together what they do let slip, it seems to boil down to treating the male chastity device as a body modification – my wife charmingly compared it to having her having the coil fitted.

In Virgo Style Chastity, the woman has guilt-free control of the sexual relationship without any emotional labour. She can get exactly the sex she does want, and none of the sex she doesn’t want.

If she prefers fingers and tongues, then she can relax into enjoying that without any sense he’s rushing to get to the “real sex”, and without the mute appeal of his forlorn erection.

If she likes penetration – a surprising number of women go off this – then it’s with a strap-on dildo of Goldilocks size and shape, for as long or as short a time as she enjoys. There’s no, “Wham, bang, thankyou mam”, but also no, “OMG I’m getting sore, when IS he going to cum?”

Needless to say, once she’s thoroughly gotten her rocks off, there’s no need to summon up the last bit of energy to give him a happy ending that will leave her in a sticky mess.

She can also change her mind, or – say – opt for a massage without any sexual intimacy, or even forget all about sex for a while, and not only is there no forlorn erection, he also can’t (intentionally or otherwise) guilt her by wandering off into porn world.
She can tell herself that her dry spells are still a sort of erotic experience for him, and anyway, it’s not as if he’s missing out on orgasms, is he?

Perhaps best of all, she can do all this in the knowledge that her bugs are features, that he takes a hard-to-explain masochistic satisfaction from her being flagrantly selfish and cheerfully callous about his neutered state.

So, some women really like Virgo Style Chastity.

I swear that when scientists finally take notice and study how male chastity works in kinky relationships, this will turn out to be the baseline. Even the energetically playful dominant women can’t be playful all the time, or every weekend.

Why, then, don’t we hear more about it?

Partly, I think, because it’s a thing mostly done by established couples in the wild, away from the BDSM scene.

Partly, also, because – like satisfying vanilla sexual relationships – Virgo Style Male Chastity is really too uncomplicated to be worth blogging about. I mean, “Last night, I had/gave a really nice backrub then I/she got off through oral then went to sleep.” Fantastic to live, but boring to read about. (It also seems that enthusiastic female sex bloggers are generally also enthusiastic about dicks, and not really into chastity except as a game.)

Mostly, though, I think it’s because nobody has given it a name. It’s probably the real norm, but it’s always felt like an exception to how things should be, a deviation from the ideal. That, and the need to map out a path and offer some advice for Virgo/Chaste couples, is why I wrote The Chaste Manifesto.

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Erotic novelist and self-help author Giles English is a life-long male sub. He lives in a Female Led Relationship with his wife Xena, and is currently in his third year of permanent chastity. Visit his substack to find out more about  The Chaste Manifesto and read his free femdom web novel Bradley Jones’s Chastity.