["Soon after the great vaginal penetration question was settled and and the antifantasy faction was dealt with came the issue of the lavender silicone cucumber-shaped dildo.
Even though dykes had been using all kinds of dildos for years, no one talked about it. It was seen as bar dyke and regressive, certainly not lesbian-feminist.
Few lesbians would admit to owning one. I can remember a screaming fight I had with someone at a pro-and-con porn workshop who was denouncing the use of dildos as, yet again, "What men do to us— not what lesbians do."
I've been told she kept hers in a shoe box under the bed.
Our answer was to explain that dildos were absolutely lesbian. They were our heritage and history, a link with those who had bravely gone before. Dildos did not represent the penis. Couldn't we take ours off and put it into a drawer? It was a removable object purely for pleasure and did not endow its wearer with any innate ability to keep its recipient barefoot, in the kitchen, or oppressed.
Then we threw away the lavender silicone cucumbers. They were embarrassing and they broke. We bought bigger dildos; we wore them under our jeans (or our skirts). We bought the kind with simulated veins and balls from porn shops. We walked differently when we wore them to the bar. Girls bought us drinks, we used the men's john. I named my collection of graduating sizes "The Tools of the Patriarchy." We looked people in the eye when we had that bulge in our crotches. Some of us perfected our long-forgotten skills of rolling on a condom.
A very butch friend asked me for help in figuring out why she liked her femme girlfriend to fuck her with a dildo. "Nerve endings," I told her. It meant she had the right anatomy to come from vaginal stimulation. And we were both happy with that lie. The reality is what we both knew, that we all want to be fucked senseless, as Sharon Olds points out in, "The Solution." More than that, some of us need to be also taken sexually in a way possible only by being entered and used by a cock and what that represents. Because we are dykes, we want a dyke on the other end of that cock.
We lied to you and I lied to my friend. Plastic dicks represent much more than sex toys for pleasuring nerve endings in vaginas. When we strap one on, it becomes ours."]
Jan Brown, Sex, lies, and penetration: A butch finally 'fesses up, from The Persistent Desire, edited by Joan Nestle, Alyson Publications, 1992
