A Salute to Dildos

You ladies of merry England
Who have been to kiss the Duchess’s hand,
Pray, did you not lately observe in the show
A noble Italian called Signior Dildo?

Wrote the alcoholic, bisexual, syphilitic and scary smart John Wilmot, Lord Rochester, when he penned the politically satirical “Signior Dildo” in 1673.

Like most of Rochester’s poems, this one swerves seamlessly between anxious praise and painful derision, between the deeply personal and the abjectly political, between male and female, between heterosexuality and homosexuality, between just about every polar opposite you can imagine. Rochester was never a man to be easily pinned down, personally or politically. In this particular poem, however, the praised and derided, loved and hated, feared and desired, vexed object in question is the dildo.

The dildo is an ancient object. One found in a German cave dates back about 28,000 years, suggesting that we humans have been using tools to for pleasure since the ice age.  Before their current silicone, stainless steel, pyrex and jelly incarnations, dildos were often carved from stone, ivory or wood, or fabricated by stuffing a leather pouch with rags, horsehair or other filler, which is the type that Rochester’s “Signior Dildo” evenhandedly celebrates and vilifies.

But enough of dusty dildo history. I write here today not to bury the dildo, but to praise it. I, as Rochester predicted of his reader, have fallen down and worshipped the dildo. I  love my dildo, and I am not ashamed to admit it.

The dildo is one invention that, like Athena from the brow of Zeus, popped forth fully formed and not in need of much improving. Sure, the juggernaut of technology has given us better materials from which to create our dildos, and certainly those artisans crafting the dildo have added various bells and whistles—from carving along the sides to versions that could ejaculate, which, parenthetically, were available in the mid-eighteenth century. And certainly one could argue that the vibrator has done much to improve the efficacy of the stalwart and immobile dildo, but I would counter the vibrator is a different animal altogether. It might incorporate the dildo, as in the rabbit, but the pure dildo remains proud, upright, virtually unchanged.

The dildo like many perfect tools is intended to do one thing and to do that one, very important, thing perfectly. In this respect, the dildo is much like the windmill, the hammer, the wheel, or duct tape: it is a thing of precision, simplicity and beauty. Over time, the dildo hasn’t changed much, and it represents the very best of what humans can create to make their lives better.

I have to wonder about that Paleolithic dildo. Did a woman, left alone in the cold night while her mate was out hunting mastodon, carefully sculpt it out of its six separate stone pieces? Or did her mate make it for her? Was it part of a religious ceremony, like later dildos used for ritual defloration? Or was it an object devoid of any symbolism, created for the sole purpose of pleasure? I like to think it was. I like to think that our ancestors realized the power of the dildo: the pure ability to give a zipless fuck, Even if it was created in a time before zippers.

I have owned two dildos. The firstI purchased in 1991 with a boyfriend at a lesbian-owned sex store located in the aerie of an anonymous building on 57th street in Manhattan. The second, the one I own now, I bought last year. Made of a dense and delicious silicone that feels surprisingly like a real cock,  it is the Vixskin Cowboy, and it is a squat hefty thing. I have two njoy wands, which I love a lot, and a Juicer Pyrex dildo too, but I consider them to be variations on the dildo themes, less traditional and conventional, if still lovely in their own cold-slick surface and adamantine hardness.

My earlier dildo was orange as a Cheet-O; my current dildo  is a color Babeland names as “root beer.” It’s an unrealistic brown tone; no real man of color is the shade of this dildo. But then, no man of no color is the shade of the “cream soda” dildo that Vixskins makes either. This dildo has highly realistic details: snaky veins curving up the shaft, a differentiated head, and a shape that duplicated a human phallus. It also, rather troublingly, has two half-testes attached. They bother me, not physically, but emotionally, because they’re both equally there and not there at the same time. I realize the balls help to keep the dildo in a harness were one to use it with a harness, but they still trouble me. I cannot, however, find it in myself to simply cut them off. I don’t want to neuter my dildo.

And this truncated aspect of my dildo brings up, as it were, what might be most problematic about the tool of today. Unlike older dildos that were made without a thought of a harness, and were therefore long and slender, tapering happily to a in infinite nothingness, today’s dildos look decidedly lopped off. Severed rudely at their base, contemporary dildos look like decapitated heads, which is a bit off-putting to contemplate, so generally I don’t.

The will to repress and deny can be a beautiful thing.

But not as beautiful as my dildo. The wonderful thing about dildos is that they  can fuck a woman—or a man—as she (or he) wants to be fucked at that moment. Using a dildo, I don’t have to direct, ask, whisper or nudge. I need not flip or twist or arch, unless I want to. It’s all of the pleasure and none of the obligatory communication or occasional frustration, and that is sometimes a very good thing. Sex toys—vibrator or dildo or combination thereof—are one advantage that women have over men. Men’s sextoys are less good. Ours are awesome, and they testify silently, or in a low-level humming, how we don’t really need you men to get off.

Men, however, needn’t feel threatened by the dildo. And not merely because there is nothing like the human touch, the arms and legs and skin, the human breath, the human tongue, the gift of speech, and the electric press of the person. But also because the dildo, as much as it squishes masculinity into this one  reductive tool, can also embody a man and all that manliness suggests.

The dildo gives me the ability to fuck another man without fucking another man, in short. My dildo, which does not look like nor feel like my boyfriend’s cock, gives me the gift of dalliance without threat, pause, guilt or complication. Any time I want to fuck someone else, I can. I can wash off my Cowboy, get into whatever groove I wish, and have at it. He can be someone I know, someone I don’t, someone I’ve only read about. In my own little corner, in my own little world, I can fuck whomever I want to. And when I’m finished, I can do it again with someone else, or I get up out of my bed, wash off my dildo and get on with my day.

My dildo too allows my boyfriend and I to fantasize together what it might be like to have a second man in our bed. What it might feel like. What it might look like. How we might feel about it. And it allows us to do it safely, controlled by our own voices and wishes, without the risk of the actual human. We can try a threesome on for size and we can do it whenever we want, without the inherent hassle of aligning three separate New Yorker’s schedules.

My dildo offers a full plate of freedom, a freedom that oddly, rarely, and ecstatically, comes with almost no responsibility.

My dildo, you are an unsung hero, even given that when I use you I sing hushed garbled praises. You are a silent partner. You may lay unused for days or weeks, but when I take you out, you are always, ever, uncomplainingly, ready to work.

Dildo, I salute you.