If this review was a porn video, there’s a good chance you would be seeing the words “This video was uploaded to XVIDEOS.COM” slowly scrolling across the top of the screen. Not that I think you’re looking at the top of the screen, because your focus is right here, on the hot guy who’s gonna tell you whether Xvideos is the right place to go for gay bondage videos. Spoiler alert: it’s not an easy answer.
Xvideos has been around forever, and it feels like it in a lot of ways. I’m not here to tell you it sucks, I’m just here to lay down the truth and warn you before you go down its moist holes. Think of the website as your first condom: it has sentimental value, sure, but how long has it been sitting in your wallet?
A style without any style
A lot of porn websites today look like a sci-fi control panel, with endless confusing buttons that you need to take a two-week course on just to masturbate. Other sites think the peak of web design was the 20th century, with interfaces that make Windows XP look sleek and modern. Xvideos is a weird combination of the two styles, with minimal features that still look smooth and business-like. You might even be charmed by the simplicity, at least until you start clicking around, at which point that charm disappears real fast.
This site was clearly made by people who know what it’s like to be horny and in a hurry, because they kept everything as simple as possible. You have a big search bar, a single top bar with items designed to be ignored, and then you’re dropped right into the videos. The first impression is fine, but the shitshow starts as soon as you try to go to the next page.
I don’t know how this is possible, but every single page has a different number of videos. Page 2 gives me ten videos, page 3 gives me seven, and page 4 gives me five. This is so stupid, I thought I was doing something wrong at first... but how the hell do I click “next page” wrong? Xvideos tells me that there are almost 2,000 videos here, but I honestly think they’re fucking with me, because it looks like less than 200.
If you think that both of those numbers sound way too low for such an old website, you’re goddamned right, because it turns out this is actually a common bug. When I sorted videos by “Newest” rather than “Relevance”, I got a completely different list of videos, which now has 22,000 items. How do you fuck that up!? This kind of thing is extremely embarrassing, and it’s double-embarrassing on a site that’s older than its average performer. The bug occurred every time, even across different PCs, so I’ve really got nothing else to blame but the site itself.
I also don’t really know why the website has a “location” button, because as far as I can tell, it doesn’t affect anything whatsoever. Whether I tell the site I’m from Argentina, Denmark or Egypt, I get the exact same videos in the exact same order, with all the same categories and even the same ads. What’s the fucking point, then? Are the web designers just showing off their flag icons? It didn’t even change the currency for the premium subscription, so I have to assume it’s just there to let people roleplay being in a different country to enhance their jerk-off session.
Things are looking up (while you’re tied down)
Things get a little better when you pick a video. The ads are obnoxious as always, but what else is new. The important thing is that the site has a video tagging system, and to my shock, it’s actually good. It’s a low bar when I’m excited about something so basic, but after the awful searching experience, my expectations were under the floorboards. You can’t really blame me – these days I’m happy if the thumbnail I click leads me to the video I wanted, rather than sending me to a different fucking video, on a different fucking site, in a different fucking language.
An unexpected surprise for me was that closed captions are very common on these videos. It’s a little goofy, since in most videos I’ve seen the actors don’t have much more to say than “Fuck yeah” or “Mmmh”, but even if it’s funny, accessibility is good to have, so I support it. It’s not just the English-speaking videos either: a lot of foreign language videos have translation subtitles too. So if you’ve always wanted to find out what the foreign hotties are mumbling while getting railed, it’s your lucky day!
As long as you stick to the main search and video lists, you won’t see any pop-ups or get redirected to other sites. You can tell I’m already scraping the bottom of the barrel to find something positive to say, though; truth is, Xvideos is as ready to hit you with redirects and has shady ads out the ass, so anything that isn’t a video search or a subscription button should be avoided like hot lava.
Gay bondage, on a budget
Xvideos has a huge library, and most of it is amateur material. And when I say amateur, I MEAN amateur: I’m talking regular, everyday guys who are into bondage and decided to record their sweet, sweaty act of love for fun. So if you’re not used to that definition of “amateur”, be ready to see a lot of badly lit bedrooms, hand-made equipment and regular guys who look like your coworkers or your dad’s friends. I’m not saying this is bad, to be clear, I’m just saying some people don’t like so much “reality” in their porn, so there’s your warning.
You can find higher-budget videos too, with handsome hunks in front of high-quality cameras on fancier sets, but frankly they’re not worth the effort. There’s good stuff here and there, but it’s mostly crap, lazily pumped out by the same handful of channels, on the same sets, with the same couple of guys doing the same stuff over and over. It’s like if soap operas had leg bars, and maybe you enjoy that. But I prefer to have variety, not the same handful of guys who look as tired of each other as I feel watching them.
If you want to see something new and unique, you’re shit out of luck. For such a big site, It’s amazing how quickly I got bored of seeing the same couple of things. Warehouse sex, oversized bed, medieval dungeon full of chains, over and over. The fact that I have written “medieval dungeon full of chains” and “bored” in the same paragraph should tell you just how uninteresting the offering is here.
Xvidoes also offers a subscription service, although I can’t imagine why you’d want to use it, because the videos they tease you with look exactly the same as the ones you’re getting for free. The page that explains why you should subscribe is as low-effort as the rest of the site, and it seems to heavily favor straight content anyway, so it gets a big fat nope from me.
X means 10, but that’s not my score
Is Xvideos good? Abso-fucking-not, both in content and in technical quality. I still cannot believe how cheap the entire thing feels, almost like it’s a low-quality duplicate of a better site made to get a quick buck. But this fact is only shocking until you stop to look more closely, at which point you reach the same conclusion I did: they just don’t give a shit.
The site designers don’t give a shit, the professional content makers don’t give a shit, nobody involved gives a shit, and you probably shouldn’t either. There’s worse sites out there, for sure, but that doesn’t mean this one is good either. It’s like having sex in the hallway: I can think of many worse places to fuck, it’s relatively clean and relatively safe, but why would I pick it over any other room with furniture, or at the very least a better view?
The only exception here is the amateur content, which is by far the strongest part of the site. There’s almost 20 years of home-made lovin’ to dig into, and there’s something heart-warming about seeing multiple generations of man-love side by side. If that’s your thing, then you might just find Xvideos to be a worthwhile visit. Maybe that’s how the website has stayed alive all these years, because I sure as hell can’t think of any other reason I’d want to come back to it.
