[“As history has shown, and as I was at the time experiencing, a strap-on can be sexy, but it can also be a failure and a threat. It draws attention to how contradictory and fragile our definitions of male and female are, and how tightly we cling to them, even in relationships between women, where gender and sexuality are more flexible.
I think it’s important to look at how this played out, not just in the history of straight men policing lesbians but in the lesbian community policing itself. In the 1940s and 50s a bar scene began to develop in cities across the country, marking the first time when lesbians, particularly working-class ones, gathered publicly and in large numbers. During this time a butch/femme culture developed that included strict codes of dress and behavior both in and outside the bedroom. Butch women slicked back their hair, wore suits and jeans, and were, generally, the “givers” of sexual pleasure. Femme women wore dresses and makeup and were the “receivers” of sexual pleasure. In some ways, this culture was liberating, as it represented a powerful, cohesive group aesthetic and safety in numbers. Especially for women who actually identified as butch, it was also a chance to finally adopt masculine dress without being seen as failed or dangerous but rather as sexy and loveable. For others this culture was a trap, pushing women into restrictive sex and gender roles in the same ways heterosexuality had. It is by no means the only lesbian aesthetic, but I think part of the reason it has stuck around for so long in the popular imagination as the way lesbians are is because it allows straight people to again see themselves as the center of the sexual world.
In either case, strap-ons were not widely used, or at least not talked about. In Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, a book that documents the lives of Black and white lesbians in Buffalo, there is a pretty exhaustive set of interviews about sex acts and terminology, but no one mentions owning, liking, or even trying sex with a strap-on. Indeed, the one mention of a dildo is one of bewilderment as Vic, a self-identified butch, talks about her friend pulling her into the bathroom to show her the new strap-on she got. “Jesus, she whipped this thing out . . . I’m supposed to be butch and my face felt like a neon sign. I could feel the embarrassment. How do you admire a dildo? No seriously, what do you say?”
Butches in the book took great pride “in their own hands and their ability to please,” which “did not dispose them to think that a dildo would improve their lovemaking.” It’s interesting that they considered the dildo less potent and successful than hands. This could be read as displacing the power of the dick, but, coupled with the silence surrounding strap-on use, it also points to a greater fear about the lesbian body. How regulated and small it had to be to exist. How easily it could be diminished by something outside itself, or destroyed altogether.
In the lesbian radical feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s, there was also a great deal of attention focused on creating distance from dicks. Jill Johnston argued in A Lesbian Nation that the only true road to female liberation was the conscious “withdrawal at every level from the man to develop woman supremacy.” This meant that not only butch/femme dynamics but also penetrative sex were out. Anne Koedt developed the theory that the vaginal orgasm was a myth perpetrated by Freud in order to center male sexual desire for penetration, though her evidence for this was a study done by Kinsey—a man—that found the vagina was not particularly sensitive to touch. True orgasms, Koedt argued, only came from the clitoris—even though she interestingly also called the clit “the female equivalent of the penis”—so if women wanted to have enjoyable sex there was no need for penetration, only clitoral stimulation. Andrea Dworkin went so far as to call the penis “a hidden symbol of terror” and argued that “violence is male, the male is the penis.”
Dorothy Allison writes about the effects this had on herself and other lesbians at the time. “No one admitted to using dildos, wanting to be tied up, wanting to be penetrated, or talking dirty—all that male stuff . . . my lover wanted us to perform tribadism, stare into each other’s eyes, and orgasm simultaneously. Egalitarian, female, feminist, revolutionary.” In attempting to free themselves from the penis, in many ways radical lesbians ended up reinscribing the power of the dick and sacrificing the range of sexual pleasure they could experience in the process.
In a counter to this, the lesbian sexual outlaws of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s argued that dildos were actually great, not problematic, but primarily because they didn’t reference the penis at all. Some even argued that wearing a dildo turns a woman into a cyborg, not woman, man, or even human, just a body involved in the mechanistic movements of giving and receiving pleasure. While there is something freeing about this argument, as it gets us out from under the idea that we can’t talk about strap-ons and that a woman wearing a strap-on is only trying to make up for a never-ending lack, it still bypasses the sticky, complicated reality of the gendered/human world we live in and the simple fact that sometimes lesbians want strap-ons to look like penises.
All of this begs the question: can a dyke wear a dick and just have some damn fun?”]
amy gall, from my dick, your dick, our dick, from wanting: women writing about desire, 2023
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