Gentleman Handling is a subscription website that launched in 2002 as a collaboration between Feck (the same company that runs Beautiful Agony, I Feel Myself, and I Shot Myself), and Sensate Films, which is a small, women-owned "producer of premuim-quality, process-based erotic media".
Gentleman Handling is to male masturbation much what I Feel Myself is to female masturbation. The goal is to "strip the image of male sexual pleasure from its less-than-savoury pornographic contexts and situate it in a style of imagemaking that is honest, attentive, and reverent". There are plenty of sites that cater primarily to gay men that feature male masturbation. But these sites are often full of porn clichés, and they frequently present the men in ways that are extremely objectifying and, frankly, unattractive, especially to heterosexual women. Gentleman Handling, on the other hand, aims to present its "contributors in a manner that highlights their human-ness, their individual sexual style".
And, to a large extent, they succeed. The videos are beautifully shot and extremely personal.
Unfortunately, Gentleman Handling ceased new production in May 2013, with the following announcement.
The production of quality porn where the contributors are fairly paid has become an unsustainable business model, thanks to the proliferation of 'free' and pirated content on the Web. While some existing sites are able to survive, thanks to a historic database of customers, startups seem almost certain to fail unless they join the race for ever more extreme and degrading porn. We are very disappointed we can't continue this Project and take this opportunity to thank all those who have participated so far.
That is indeed depressing, but it is hard to imagine that the fact that this site focuses on men does not have as much to do with it as the prevelance of internet privacy. And that's probably even more depressing.
