The Ultimate Guide to Strap-On Sex: A Complete Resource for Women and Men

By Karlyn Lotney

The first complete guide to dildos and harnesses! For everyone interested in strap-on play—women and men of all sexual orientations and genders. Here's everything you need to know to have great strap-on sex:

* How to choose vibrators, dildos, and harnesses, and get the most out of your sex toys
* How to introduce sex toys into partner sex
* Tips and techniques to make you a strap-on stud
* Adapting strap-on sex for self-stimulation
* Using dildos and harnesses in anal sex
* Packing, genderbending, and fantasy
* A guide to strap-on use for men
* Clit pumping and other advanced sexual techniques
* Fairy Butch's guide to selecting lubricants
* Plus, a comprehensive resource guide of books, magazines, retail and mail order outlets

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cleis Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2000
• ISBN: 9781573446389

Book preview

Play

Introduction

Once you’ve reached adulthood, there just aren’t many places left to play. Swing sets won’t hold you, slides mess up your work clothes, and you’re more likely to be running Excel on your computer than Sim City. Though the kids may have ejected you from the sandbox, sexuality is a playground available to you for the remainder of your days. By being playful with sex, you can try out new personas, genders, and power dynamics. You can travel to any time or place you like and make real personae divergent from your work-a-day life. You can share love and affection with a partner, explore new kinds of stimulation, make discoveries about yourself, and receive affirmation for secret parts of yourself. In other words, sex is a wonderful chance to have fun. I invite you to make strap-on sex—sex play using dildos and harnesses—a part of the festivities.

The first time I strapped it on I was six. I was playing house with some neighborhood kids, and being the major tomboy that I was, I insisted upon being The Dad. I took a rolled-up pair of socks and stuffed them into my tie-dyed Carter’s (this was the early 70s) to approximate the bulge I knew dads had there. After being thoroughly chastised by my babysitter for this early attempt at genderbending, I suppressed my strap-on exploits fully until age 21. At that time, an adventurous girlfriend and I went to town with a makeshift strap-on rig we devised from her father’s boxers, some Levi’s 501s, and a floppy ten-dollar, dead-on-arrival Caucasian dildo we named Andromeda (this was the mid-80s, and we thought we’d invented strap-ons.) My first store-bought strap-on rig was procured at a Los Angeles leather store when I was 23. It returned with me to my hometown of Dayton, Ohio. The first time I used it was in my mom and dad’s house with a gal I had met at the local queer disco. Fortified by Popov vodka, we fell into my parents’ bed and lost our official strap-on virginity together. (This was the late 80s and alcohol was a more common sexual lubricant than Astroglide.)

From these inauspicious beginnings, I started my career as a sex educator at the University of California, Berkeley in 1990, trained on the phone lines at San Francisco Sex Information, and then joined the Good Vibrations staff a year later. If you haven’t heard of Good Vibrations, it is a resource with which you should become familiar. Joani Blank opened the first Good Vibrations store in 1977 in San Francisco to offer folks who wanted to buy sex toys and books a clean, well-lighted alternative to the typically sleazy adult bookstores, many of which offered inferior products, and were unwelcoming to women. Ten years later, a mail order operation was added to bring the Good Vibrations sales approach to people living outside of the Bay Area. Since then, the sex toy business has been revolutionized. Others have followed in the path Joani forged to create stores like Good Vibrations in many cities throughout North America and Europe. (Be sure to check out the Resources section at the back of the book to find out more about Good Vibrations and its sister stores.)

Back to my own strap-on sex pilgrimage. I’m a big-endered butch dyke. I came out as a lesbian in 1982 into Dayton, Ohio’s small queer community, which dwelled mainly in the several bars and clubs available to us. If our sexual communication transpired in these dank surroundings, our sexuality itself was influenced by the vestiges of radical lesbian feminism which had trickled down from more urban centers. Dildos, particularly dildos harnessed to their user’s pelvis, were taboo. As a matter of fact, in my circle penetration itself was regarded as no friend to lesbian sexuality. Though much of my own nascent adolescent and childhood masturbation had focused on inserting various objects inside myself to copious satisfaction, I learned that clitoral stimulation was much more enlightened, and well, stimulating. Since penetration had always been such a satisfying part of my sexual life, this proscription felt confusing and alienating to me in my fledging attempts to find my place in queer culture.

When I moved to San Francisco, the epicenter of the dyke sexual revolution of the late 80s, these prohibitions began to dissipate. I found lovers who were not only excited about penetration, but wanted to experiment with dildo and harness use as well. Through much trial and much error, I developed my skills as a strapper and began to explore how strap-on sex fit into the constellation of sexual power and gender dynamics I wanted to explore in my personal life. I threw myself into San Francisco’s rarefied sex culture, soaking up the copious sexual energy the city, with its public sex parties and leather street fairs, had to offer.

Indeed, I wasn’t in Ohio anymore.

One of the most striking blows to my Midwestern sexual presumptions was my experience of heterosexual couples shopping for strap-ons—not just wild, tattooed and pierced, counterculture heterosexual people, though there were many of them, but the kind of heterosexual people I could have found among my parents’ friends. I’ll never forget the first such couple I helped at Good Vibrations. They were in their mid-50s, conservatively dressed, and since it was noon on Sunday, I assumed they had just come from church. I sauntered over, ready to show them to the massage oil and succulents section, when they asked to see the colors in which the Adam 4—an 8-inch long, 1 7/8-inch diameter dildo made by Scorpio Products—was available. They also wanted to pick the proper size Swashbuckler harness for the lady of the pair, and were hoping for a hue which matched her sweater dress ensemble. My life was changed.

As my career as a sex educator took hold, I soon began to offer workshops in strap-on sex, along with dyke sex workshops on oral, digital and anal sex, sex toys, sexuality and gender identity, and fisting. Dyke Sex Tips for Men and Dyke Sex Tips for Heterosexual Couples soon followed. In 1994, I began writing a sex advice column for On Our Backs magazine and developed a persona named Fairy Butch to do the talking for me. Fairy Butch is known to folks in the San Francisco Bay Area as the emcee of In Bed with Fairy Butch, a twice-monthly erotic cabaret show. Fairy Butch’s advice columns currently appear in Curve magazine, on PlanetOut (www.planetout.com), and on the Fairy Butch web site (www.fairybutch.com), as well as in a free email newsletter. (To sign up, email [e-mail].) You’ll find Fairy Butch’s tips for strap-on sex throughout the book.

While you likely won’t devote such an overwhelming portion of your life to sexuality, I encourage you to throw open those playground gates and immerse yourself in the fun and theater sex has to offer, and explore what strap-on sex in particular has to offer you. One caveat though: Please don’t allow the information here to become a source of performance anxiety for you or your partner. Use this book rather as a jumping off place, a resource to help you fill your sexual toolbox. Expand on what I have written here, take what works for you, and leave the rest for a later time or for another person. And whether you’ve never seen a strap-on rig or you’re an old pro looking for a few new tricks, I congratulate you for your bravery and sense of fun and adventure. I bid you happy strappin’!

San Francisco

May 2000

1

Myths About Strap-on Sex

There are many myths and misconceptions about strap-onsex and sex toy use. If you are confused about the role of strap-on dildos in your sex life, you’re not alone. Here are some facts to allay your fears:

Sex toys are for couples with sexual problems.

This misconception has been created in part by the notorious misnomer, marital aids, with which sex toys have often been saddled. The use of sex toys can be a great option for anyone—single or involved with one or more partners—who wants to expand their range of sexual possibilities. You may try sex toys to address a sexual difficulty, or you may simply want to elaborate on an already good thing. Some of the most sexually happy and healthy couples have sex toy collections which rival the wealth of King Tut’s Dynasty.

Strap-on sex is only for lesbians.

Poppycock. Although hordes of lesbian and bisexual women proudly claim a strap-on rig or two among their valuables, many heterosexual men and women and gay men are proud members of the strap-on nation. A female member of a heterosexual couple can don a harness and dildo to penetrate her partner from behind, and a man can use a strap-on in conjunction with his erect or flaccid penis. The joys of dildos and harnesses are not limited to the Sapphic contingent.

Only impotent men use strap-on dildos.

Strap-on dildos can indeed enable men with erectile difficulties to penetrate their partners. But men may also strap them on to perform simultaneous vaginal and anal penetration, or to carry on after their erection is spent.

Men who want to be anally penetrated by a partner wearing strap-on dildo are really gay.

A butt’s a butt and a prostate gland is a prostate gland, whether it belongs to a subscriber to Playboy or Drummer. Many heterosexual men love anal stimulation, while plenty of gay and bisexual men do not. Many heterosexual men long to surrender to a powerful female partner with a strap-on dildo, and some gay and bisexual men, especially those who equate anal receptivity with submission, won’t let anyone near their asses. Body parts and particular sex acts are not the province of any particular gender or sexual orientation.

Lesbians who desire penetration really want to be with men.

Many lesbians enjoy vaginal and anal penetration with female fingers, tongues, or dildos. The vagina is rich with nerve endings, and many women enjoy vaginal—and especially G-spot—stimulation. In addition, the rhythmic motions of penetration can indirectly stimulate the clitoris. Again, categories of sex acts, such as strap-on sex or anal penetration, are not specific to any one gender or sexual orientation.

A women who wears a dildo and harness suffers from penis envy or really wants to be a man.

While some female-bodied dildo-donners, such as female-to-male transsexuals (FTMs), do identify as men, the majority do not. Most female harness-wearers are happy to take off their strap-on rig and put it in the bureau drawer after sex. Some women revel in the fantasy of having a penis while they are wearing a dildo and harness. Other women are attracted to dildo and harness use less for the fantasy aspect than for the convenience and pleasure of strap-on sex.

Some FTMs enjoy their unaugmented genitalia just fine, whether or not they occasionally strap on a dildo. For those who want their genitals to appear more like the phalluses of biological males, there are a variety of options available. These include genital surgery and testosterone supplementation through cream, patches, or injections, all of which permanently increase the size of the clitoris. Genital surgery techniques include metoidaplasty, the surgical freeing of the testosterone-enlarged clitoris from the hood and surrounding tissue, and phalloplasty, the surgical construction of a full-sized penis created from skin and nerve grafts from other parts of the body. Other FTMs become adept at clit pumping, which temporarily increases the size of the clitoris.

The one who wears the dildo is in charge.

This is a very common misconception. Whether the phallus in question is a penis or a strap-on dildo, being the insertive partner does not necessarily mean you are in charge of the sex act. In many cases, the receptive partner may be running the show. She may enjoy telling you exactly when, where, and how to penetrate her ass or vagina. She may want you to remain perfectly still as she moves herself up and down to swallow the shaft of your toy. On the other hand, she may want to lie back and let you run the show. A variety of roles are available to either insertive or receptive partner. Good communication can help you figure out which roles will work in your play. Whether or not you are playing with power dynamics, the needs and limitations of the receptive partner must always define the parameters of strap-on play. Trustworthy insertive partners are aware of the health, safety, and pleasure of their partners.

Strap-on rigs are unattractive latex jobs complete with rubber panty and attached dildo, like those used in adult films.

Although there are a few decent, all-in-one strap-on models on the market, most of the dildos used in mainstream porn movies flop around like freshly caught rainbow trout in a canoe. Generally, your best bet is to select a dildo and a separate harness that best suit your needs. Although this approach requires more forethought than grabbing the first all-in-one combination you see at the local dirty bookstore, it will yield far more satisfactory results in terms of both comfort and effectiveness.

Dildos and harnesses are available only at sleazy adult bookstores.

You don’t have to visit a porn shop to buy a dildo. You’ll find the best selection of sex toys—not to mention the best service and most comfortable atmosphere—in clean, well-lighted sex toy stores, such as San Francisco’s Good Vibrations. Good Vibrations was established in 1977 with the idea that sex toys, supplies, books and videos should be available to all adults in a comfortable retail atmosphere, free from embarrassment, sleaze, and sexual harassment. Stores following this model have opened in several cities, including Toys in Babeland in Seattle and New York City, Grand Opening in Boston, A-Woman’s Touch in Madison, Wisconsin, and Womyn’s Ware in Vancouver. Mail order businesses like Xandria and Blowfish cater to folks who do not live near sex toy stores which carry quality products or facilitate customer comfort. (See the Resources.)

Dear Fairy Butch,

I am a woman with a female

Reviews for The Ultimate Guide to Strap-On Sex

[crowyhead · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Lotney (AKA Fairy Butch) writes frankly and wittily about the mechanics and techniques involved in strapping it on. Not just for lesbians, this book covers special information for gay men and hetero/bisexual couples as well. Totally sexy, and totally useful.