I like to put my fake suction-cup cock in my jeans sometimes, sticking out through the open zipper, buttoned at the top to hold it in place. I admire my hard cock in the mirror, poking through my jeans. I slick my long hair back and curve my body in the mirror, topless, like a horny punk admiring his engorged member, dreaming of who he desperately wants to fuck. It makes me feel powerful, sexual, outside the male gaze. Now I am the male gaze.

When I wear this cock, with the head just a little too bubblegum pink to be realistic, my internal self-gaze changes. It feels unfamiliar and titillating. As much as I’ve committed myself to my feminism and my rejection of patriarchal religious purity culture, I grew up being taught a very specific view of femininity and the narrow role meant for a ‘godly’ woman. I developed an ever-present awareness of who and how I was supposed to be in order to please both god and my future husband.

“A woman must continually watch herself ... Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually ... Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” (John Berger, Ways of Seeing)

There is the feeling of wearing my cock, and then there is the feeling of using a cock inside a harness, with a lover.

“I hope you don’t find this presumptuous,” they said, watching my face for its reaction. “I bought something for us today.” My lips turned into a smile, and I felt my anticipation build, intuitively knowing that they had brought something to fuck me with, to love me with.

To bring a cock and harness into queer sex holds so much meaning at once. It is an acknowledgement of desire to penetrate into the other, to touch deeper in ways the fingers and tongue cannot. It is also an acknowledgement that queer sex is expansive beyond heteronormative ideas of what sex can be. The cock is irrelevant, its lack of necessity expressed in the very purchasing of it. It’s part of a large toolbox, not the main event.

Strap-on sex is dismantling whatever remains of my own internalized homophobia toward my own queerness.

“...queer, as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it…” (bell hooks)

I am at odds with internalizing how I view myself as simply a woman to be gazed upon by men. I am at odds with resisting my desire for anyone who is not a cisgender man. I am at odds with not recognizing myself and who and how I want to love. I am at odds with defending how I know my own sexuality to someone who feels they are entitled to an explanation. I am at odds with needing to place myself into a definable box.

Madeline Rae is a sex educator and writer living on Treaty 1 territory. She holds a BFA in performative sculpture and a BA in psychology, and she is pursuing schooling to specialize in sex therapy. Rae is trained in client-centred sex education, reproductive and sexual-health counselling and harm reduction. She works locally in both feminist healthcare and community support work.

Published in Volume 76, Number 17 of The Uniter (February 10, 2022)