Lesbians And Their Strap-Ons
People have been making dildos for at least thirty thousand years. We have Greek literature from 2300 years ago that features women going in a group to shop for them. We don’t know precisely when women starting strapping dildos to their crotches to enjoy penetrative sex without a man, but my guess would be that it happened many thousands of years ago. This is an ancient pleasure technology!
I myself first encountered the idea of lesbian strap-on dildo sex in My Secret Garden, which was an eye-opening 1973 book of sexual fantasies that author Nancy Friday collected by doing lots of anthropological-style interviews. Apparently it’s hard to talk about sexual fantasies without also disclosing more than a little about your actual sexual practices. I say this because My Secret Garden is full of women describing what they were doing in bed in those days, as a sort of context for talking about their sexual fantasies. Here’s a self-described butch lesbian named Marion, talking about how she uses her strap-on dildo:
I have a kind of strap. It goes around my waist and up over my shoulders, crossing in the back and then down under my ass and coming back up to the belt again. I had a sandal-maker make it for me. So the dildo is really anchored right down low and in place. I mean, it’s rigid.
Look, you talk to any guy, and the first thing he wants to know, Has he made the girl come? That’s their mark of virility. That’s what they’re anxious about. But me and my dildo, I can make any girl come, every time. It’s simple biology. Men have this business, they don’t even understand. To get deep inside. To plant the seed. That’s biology. Okay, I’m butch, I’m also a woman. I understand the clit. I don’t have that urge to go deep into a woman. Maybe I’m competitive with men. Or maybe I don’t want to just give in to biology. But I don’t care about going in deep. I know about myself and I never forget that the clit is where it’s at.
Notice that Marion had to design her own strap-on harness and then have it custom-made, in order to have the quality and function she wanted and needed. One thing that always amazes me in porn from that era is the primitive nature of the sex toys. They’re always badly designed and made out of hinky-looking plastics that must have been impossible to properly clean. The march of technology has been very kind to sex toy innovation!
As a straight dude, I obviously don’t have much personal insight into actual lesbian sexual practices. Like they used to say back in my grandfather’s day, “All I know is what I saw in the funny papers.” Moreover, a thing I do know it that there’s distinct danger in taking any impressions from porn — modern or vintage — that was made for men. One of the things I love most about vintage porn is the insight it gives into the sexual practices and erotic notions of prior generations. But porn made for the male gaze is porn catering to male sexual fantasies about lesbians. How much overlap there might be with authentic lesbian experiences in the same era is uncertain at best.
To me, though, it doesn’t matter. Porn like this is interesting even if all it tells us is how men were fantasizing about lesbians in those days. The porn magazines they would buy and wank off to tells us a lot about that!
It’s probably safe to say that lurid scenes of lesbian three-ways and overheated wall-to-wall sapphic orgies were mostly dreamed up by male pornographers looking to sell magazines. What little I do know (or imagine that I know) about lesbian sexuality is that lesbians are, if anything, slightly more sexually conservative than hetero couples. I’m not saying that triplets of horny lesbians aren’t a thing, I’m just saying they’re perhaps more infrequent than vintage “lesbian” porn magazines would lead have us believe.
I have the notion, too, that lots of lesbians aren’t hugely interested in staging a perfect simulacrum of hetero penetrative sex. I’ve met more than a few who seem to view the lesbian lifestyle as liberation from dick, not an excuse to celebrate it. Even when they do strap on a dildo, they may — like Marion — “not care about going deep.” This creates anxiety for men who want to think women can’t live without dick, and that lesbians must miss it. I suspect that’s why we see so much male-made “lesbian” porn that puts “hot dildo action” at the center of the imagined lesbian experience. My suspicion is that, in reality, there’s somewhat less of it going on.
