I get where you’re coming from, but if it feels good, then what’s the problem? My girlfriend and I aren’t secretly wanting to have sex with a man.” “If you like being fucked by a strap-on, it’s not a reflection on your sexuality. “I don’t care to over-intellectualize or over-politicize it,” said Lori. “I didn’t want a dick all the time, but I wanted to be able to fuck a girl and choke her with both hands, basically.” When I was younger I wanted that,” she recalled. They’re not trans, but they want to be able to fuck their girl without using their hands. “I know lesbians who, when they go on a Tinder date, will pack their penis in their bag,” said Mel. “I just don’t understand why, if you’re queer, you need to bring a fake dick into the bedroom.”

“So is penis envy actually a thing?” I asked. It’s sexual reiki: If I can make you come with my hand, then can I extend that power five inches in front of my hand? Ten inches? Can I sit across the room from you and make you come? When you’re at that level, a fucking phallus seems like kindergarten for me.” The conversation became heated very quickly. I feel erotic pleasure through my fingers. “A lot of women get off wearing a strap-on, either psychologically or because of the way it rubs against their clit, but I don’t.

“My hand is my sexual object,” said Mel, displaying the hand in question, with its immaculately manicured fingernails. Why is this thing on me?”)īut my worst fear is being one of those cyber-feminists who’s offended by everything, so in order to challenge my aversion to strap-ons, I organized a queer, roundtable lunch with strap-on loving Lori and my particularly opinionated friend Mel, a 37-year-old queer actress. (One day, I remember, she put on the strap-on, looked down, and said, “Wait, I’m gay and dicks are weird. Similarly, my androgynous girlfriend resented the fact that just because she wore boys’ clothes, people assumed she wanted a penis. In the years that followed, I found it insulting when people would ask me, “But don’t you miss dick?” As if the penis is the holy grail of pleasure. It was my first same-sex relationship, and I was like, “This is what lesbians do, right?” As it turned out, we used the strap-on only like four times in our three-year relationship-partly because it quickly dawned on me that I didn’t need to imitate heterosexual sex in order to validate my queer sex. When I met my ex, one of the first things I did was run to a sex store and buy a large purple dildo and leather harness. I wondered if I should resurrect my strap-on from the junk box under my bed, where it’s been in exile since my breakup with my now ex-girlfriend four months ago. She made it sound so bizarrely appealing. Before Jim, I’d always thought of myself as submissive, but through that experience I accessed a totally different side of myself.” You have a lot of control, and that became very sexy to me. You have to listen to their physical cues and gauge if they’re having pleasure or if you’re hurting them. “The person has to be very trusting of you. It’s some Freudian bullshit, but it just feels so fun and powerful to have a penis.” This wasn’t the “feminist” answer I was expecting.īeyond the thrill of the power shift, what Claire didn’t expect was how intimate the sex would be. “Even though my dildo is bright pink and it’s this laborious process to strap yourself in, something about it still feels real. “I love wearing a strap-on,” she said, casually flipping her long curls behind her shoulders. Lori sipped her green juice and rolled her eyes.

Like, ‘Does shaving my armpits make me a bad feminist?’ And, more pressingly, ‘Is my strap-on a symbol of male supremacy?’ And if so, should I set it on fire as a performance art piece?” But we’re also being forced to ask ourselves some serious questions.

I was saying something like, “Sure, it’s cool that we live in this post-everything world where gender is over and hetero-normativity is off-trend and all the rules of sexuality have been thrown out the window. On the receiving end of my rant was my friend “Lori,” a 23-year-old MFA student studying queer theory. Last week, I found myself at Cafe Gratitude in Los Angeles, eating a gluten-free scone and fuming about gender, as one does in 2016.

Lesbains using double sided strapon