In Praise of Strap-Ons

When I started working at Good Vibrations I thought very, very few men (except my own dear darling, of course) liked to be done by a woman wearing a strap-on. I had already challenged myself when it came to many other misconceptions I’d had about men’s sexuality, but somehow I thought my sweetheart was just about the only guy around who liked his girls equipped with a great big dildo (or, for that matter, a teensy-weensy little dildo, although he doesn’t get worked up over teensy ones; he’s a size queen, and calls them “earplugs”).

Then I worked the sales floor and started talking to the customers.

Friends, there is a movement afoot in America today that even Camille Paglia doesn’t seem to know about. (One wonders what she’ll say when she gets the word.) I’ve worked the Good Vibes mail-order phones, too, so I know that this isn’t just an isolated Bay Area phenomenon, though San Francisco may well be its epicenter. No, it extends into suburbs and small towns all over this land, where people still make snide comments about fruits and nuts even as they depend on us to export fun, new sexual ideas out to the hinterlands.

Let’s call it the Ladies, Roll the Men Over and Fuck ’Em Up the Bahouk Movement.

I’m not the only Good Vibes worker to be initially surprised at how frequently the couples in the Dildo-and-Harness aisle are not dykes (by now everyone expects this, even though not all dykes use dildos) but One Of Each. And how often even a solo strap-on purchaser will confide that her intended is not a girl but a guy. Most of us came in not expecting this; now I include this information in the new workers’ orientation tour.

The fact is, lots of heterosexual couples (bisexual couples, too) are switching roles, insertion-wise. We’re living in a time of gender-role slippage. This is evident everywhere, and it would be pretty surprising if it were not also evident in the bedroom. While some het couples manifest this by sending Her out to earn the bacon while He takes the kid to the park, others outfit Her in high domme drag and a strap-on tool. Among younger adults, some of whom have grown up never questioning the rightness of gender equality, a strap-on may just be a way to even out the responsibility: Let Her take the driver’s seat while He lies back in receiving mode.

Only a neo-Luddite hermit could have escaped all the talk of anal sex the plague years have produced. From the Surgeon General’s brochures to right-wing sex maniacs’ fulminations about sodomy, butt sex has been in the news. Didn’t old Jesse “I’m No Rocket Scientist” Helms say a few years back that heterosexuals don’t practice sodomy? Hell, no—many of them have gotten downright expert at it. They don’t need to practice any more; now they just bend over and indulge.

Anal sex is also very big right now in porn. With all the butt-bangin’ being shown, it should come as no surprise that some of the guys watching might want to get in on it. Yeah, yeah, I know the masculine gender role implies boys will want to dish it out, not take it. Well, things aren’t what they used to be.

Besides, let’s get real. I noticed from about the age of fourteen that the boys who were my friends were totally fascinated by buttholes and everything that could be done with them. They progressed rapidly from fart jokes (and contests) to constant references to cornholing; I see no reason why other men, even substantially older ones, shouldn’t be just as interested, nor why it should be only the gaseous potential of their own assholes that fascinates them.

Getting fucked up the bahouk is pleasurable—perhaps especially for men, whose prostates are most easily stimulated that way. The prostate is a pleasure organ in males, although men who’ve never had prostate stimulation often don’t know this, and more’s the pity. The intense focus on not being anally penetrated, which many males in this culture inherit (what do you think they’re obsessing on when they go nuts over gays in the military?), may be one way to keep them from turning into uncontrollably pleasure-oriented, work-shirking monsters. You know, it’s bad enough you guys have penises and a constant testosterone drip. What if you were always looking for fire hydrants to sit on?

Examine that antipathy and you’ll find a common anti-gay argument: “Gay men just have too much fucking pleasure!” To some homophobes, that anal sex is “unnatural” is completely beside the point. They’re jealous, pure and simple. (Lovely irony in that, too, since homophobic males are more likely to want women to stay in their archaic, gendered “place.” By suppressing women’s sexuality, the already-jealous men help create the women whose role it is to reject sexual advances. All the chickens come home to roost, as my granddad used to say.)

The one fatal flaw in this logic of prejudice: Straight men have assholes, too. A guy need not rely on a big-dicked fag in the communal showers at Basic Training to discover this fact. He might just as easily, in this day and age, learn it from his girlfriend.

Women like to fuck men with strap-ons partly to explore their own sexual “maleness,” butchness, top space or whatever you want to call it. Many women, raised by mothers who never dreamed their little girls would need strap-on skills, relish the opportunity to overthrow traditional female sexual socialization in such a profound way. It’s not penis envy anymore, Sigmund, when we have about sixty styles of detachable penises to choose from, including the kind modeled directly from Jeff Stryker’s dick.

Some couples who switch this way will play overtly with gender, cross-dressing or taking on new personas. They’ll play at being gay men together, or they’ll take a cue from The Kinks, who sang “Girls will be boys and boys will be girls” over twenty-five years ago. I know one couple, both cross-dressers, who explore a topsy-turvy heterosexuality in which animus and anima roll the dice to see who gets to be on top. And any dominatrix in the land will tell you that plenty of straight men will pay good green money to be put in a Catholic schoolgirl skirt and made to star in a private rendition of Buttfucking Lesbians from Hell.

In other cases, genderplay isn’t what motivates the woman. Instead, it is her desire to feel herself in a truly sexually active role: penetrating, not penetrated. Perhaps this turns her on; perhaps she wants to see how it feels to him. Perhaps she has a degree in Women’s Studies and is taking it to the streets. Too, gay and bisexual men have been bragging for years that men who know how to take it will excel at dishing it out, and it’s hard logic to argue with: Strap-on play can serve as fuck-training for the boy on the bottom.

Occasionally, I think, the woman dons a dick motivated by something like revenge; she wants to put him on the bottom quite literally. More than one woman has come to Good Vibrations looking “for something his size, so I can show him how it feels.” (More than one man, sweating, has come on the same quest on behalf of his Mistress.) These folks sometimes alarm me. Unless they’re playing mutually pleasurable power games, I worry about the potential here for truly sex-negative power-tripping and acting out relationship dynamics that, if I think too much about them, give me hives. If she doesn’t like anal sex but has done it to please him, she may decide he “deserves” the same treatment—though what on earth possesses him to roll over for a woman who’s going to show him how bad it is, I can’t imagine. What these couples need is an introductory Communication Night with Isadora Alman, a ticket to the Sex, Love and Intimacy workshops, and a copy of Anal Pleasure and Health—or maybe just a quick Mexican divorce. They don’t need a strap-on.

What does it say about the couple’s sexual ideas and expectations if either of them feels that to be penetrated is to be lower than one’s penetrator, that this would be punishment or revenge? This scenario might only be positive if the two are very consciously playing S/M, where these traditional assumptions can get worked for their symbolic erotic potential. Buttfucking a man in a scene can carry a huge charge, getting into edgy and cathartic territory. If that’s the kind of energy the participants want to call up, I’m all for it. I do believe we transform the culture one step, one fuck, at a time. I worry though about the folks who take their power plays and “lessons” so seriously that no one ever really learns anything—at least, nothing new.

The things I learned the first time I felt the grind of a dildo base on my clit—with a hungry-assed man on the other end of it, his weight settling down on me—turned all my left-over essentialist assumptions about gender upside down. The look in his eyes combined voracious slut and sweet, yielding submissive. I had never seen that look in the eyes of a man, and I realized in a flash that I hadn’t known male sexuality could incorporate feelings like that: I’d seen them in women during erotic play, but mostly I recognized them as my own. If men and women aren’t necessarily different species—if we all have the capacity for hungry, well-fucked abandon and the horny top-energy that filled me when I saw that look in his eyes and began to learn what my hips were capable of—what does that say about our other possibilities? To me, it says we’d better look for all the other ways our assumptions and learned roles hijack our potential for growth, our capacity to surprise ourselves and each other.

When you get right down to it, strap-on play in a hetero-or bisexual context lets you play fast and loose with the anatomy and assumptions that have, in fact, been destiny for too many people. Gender difference can make for great sex, if that difference is erotic for you; even (maybe especially) in a same-gender couple, butch/femme play, a queer species of gender difference, can heat sex to white-hot. When it’s the basis of rigidly enforced social policy, though, it doesn’t work so well. When women sport dildos and men throw their legs in the air for us, we use gender transgression as a sex toy, and not surprisingly, this can be a charged, powerful way to play. It upends (pun very much intended) what we think are the old, familiar rhythms of intercourse, and when we do that, we find all kinds of new possibility.