Stud

A masculine, sexually confident man, admired for his looks and even more for his performance in bed.

A stud is a masculine, sexually confident man, the kind who looks like he knows exactly what he is doing in bed and probably does. The word is half about looks and half about performance: a stud is hot, but above all he is good at sex, or sells himself that way. Among gay men it usually points to a butch, muscular guy, often a top, though nobody checks.

It is a compliment with a swagger. Call a man a hunk and you are admiring his build; call him a stud and you are admiring what he does with it.

Where it comes from

The source is the stable. A stud is a stallion kept for breeding, and the slang simply moved the idea from horses to men. Green's Dictionary of Slang has it for a sexually successful man in a letter of 1826, signed "the old Stud". For most of its life it was a straight word for a ladies' man, and later in American slang it could mean just a man, any man.

The gay sense, "a masculine male homosexual", grew up behind bars. A 1932 glossary of American prison slang gives "stud. A man", and by 1956 the writer James Blake, who spent years in prison, was using it in his letters for the masculine man in a gay pairing. From there it went into the bars and, later, into the language of porn, where it settled into the meaning of a man as a sexual performer, recorded from 1961.

In porn

Porn loves the word. A stud is the hired muscle of a scene: the hung, dominant performer who does the fucking, while the other guy gets called the bottom, the boy or the newcomer. "Stud" in a title promises masculinity and stamina. Variants like stud muffin (sweeter, a bit silly), black stud and Latin stud are also common in tags, the last two with all the racial baggage that comes with fetishizing a body type.

Close relatives

• Hunk: about the build, not the bedroom.
• Jock: the sporty version, locker room rather than stable.
• Masc: the app word for the same masculine vibe, minus the sexual bragging.
• Service top: a stud who is there to please, not to be served.

Related terms