Everything You Need to Know About Gangbangs: The History, the Reasons, and the Science
Gangbangs are one of the least discussed sex acts, yet, they're among the most popular fantasies.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a gangbang as copulation by several persons in succession with the same passive partner.
A gangbang is a sexual activity in which multiple people (usually three or more) engage in sexual activity with one person. Gangbangs often involve numerous penetrative and/or non-penetrative sex acts, such as oral sex, anal sex, and/or vaginal sex.
The history of the gangbang is difficult to trace, but it is believed that the first recorded gangbang took place in ancient Rome. Since then, there have been numerous reports of gangbangs occurring throughout history. In more recent years, gangbangs have become increasingly popular, with videos of gangbangs being shared all over the internet.
I find it interesting that whenever I discuss porn-viewing habits with women, gangbang is among their top three favorite categories. This exposes the fact that women’s sexual desires will not be constrained by social shaming. After centuries of cultures telling women they must be prudish, their sexual desires remain.
I don’t think men understand how common this fantasy is for women, and, judging by how common of a fantasy FMF threesomes are for men, it should come as no surprise.
Dr. Justin Lehmiller studied thousands of people to see what made them tick sexually and found that gangbang was the fourth most popular porn genre for heterosexual women.
In 2021, groupsex was the 3rd most sought-after category on PornHub. This tells us just how popular of a fantasy it is, at least among heterosexual people.
Let’s explore the history, science, and psychology behind the gangbang to see what it’s all about.
Mycenaean Greece and Beyond
Dionysus, the god of fertility, wine, theater, harvests, and drunkenness, has been celebrated since the Mycenaean period in Greece. He would be called Baccus in Rome, but his story would remain the same.
From the earliest times, the Greeks celebrated Dionysian festivals with grand sex parties where people could finally let their hair down and behave as they wanted. There were no rules in most city-states, except for murder, and people could drink as much as they wanted and have as much sex—with whomever they wanted—as their hearts desired.
The first documented instances of Dionysian worship come down to us from at least 1500 B.C.E., but his worship and wine-fueled sex orgies may date back to 3000 B.C.E., in ancient Mesopotamia.
Thousands of people would participate in drunken orgies during these festive holidays. As Neel Burton M.D. says in The History and Psychology of the Orgy:
This ‘Dionysian’ impulse for irrationality and chaos can be understood as a natural inversion of, and release from, the habitual ‘Apollonian’ order and restraint imposed by the state and state religion.
The orgy permitted people to escape from their artificial and restricted social roles and regress into a more authentic state of nature, which modern psychologists have come to associate with the Freudian id or unconscious.
But the mentions of these early Greek orgies tell us little about who was doing what to whom and we can assume they were primarily mixed-sex orgies (though some city-states had all-male orgies and others had all-female orgies, or both on different holidays) that focused on male and female pleasure both, rather than a true gangbang which records humankind’s earliest true gangbangs.