The last time I spoke about “pegging” in front of a group of people was on a work away day when a very sweet, older colleague overheard the conversation and assumed we were talking about laundry. No one had the heart to explain to her what the word now meant, so we all sat round, chatting about peg bags and retractable washing lines until lunch was over.
In order to avoid such confusion here, I shall start this article by telling you exactly what pegging means.
Pegging is slang for a being anally penetrated by a partner, using a strap-on. People of any gender or sexuality can peg or be pegged, but it is usually thought of as a straight sex act, with the woman doing the penetrating. It has very little to do with laundry, and even less to do with the benefits of a rotary washing line.
The term was popularised by a contest in Dan Savage’s long-running Savage Love column in 2001, after he realised that there was no common name for that sex act. And for absolutely no reason whatsoever at all, I have found myself thinking about pegging quite a lot over the last few weeks.
I’ve never done it, not because I am particularly averse to the idea, but I’ve never been asked to. It’s not a sex act that has ever appealed to me. Like poodleballing and water sports, it’s just not on my radar. Of course, if I was with someone who loved it, I would absolutely roll up my sleeves and get stuck in. Who knows? I might even find out that I liked it too. There has been many a time that I have found myself enjoying something a lot more than I assumed I would. Laser Quest, for example.
I may not have pegged anyone, but I am absolutely fascinated by it. To be precise, I am fascinated by the hang-ups many straight men have around being penetrated.
For those who don’t know, the prostate is a small muscular gland that produces the seminal fluid found in ejaculate. It lives about two inches inside the rectum and contracts during orgasm. When stimulated, for some people it can produce an instant and very powerful orgasm. It doesn’t even need a penis to get involved. How amazing is that? Just give it a tickle and kaboom! If I had a prostate, I’d never leave it alone.
So why are so many straight men all clenched up about bum fun? If you’re reading this and thinking, “I’m not, Kate,” then hurrah! I love that for you. But, the fear of doing anything that might be perceived as “gay” is so pervasive among heterosexual men that it has a name: homohysteria.
It has long been documented that many straight men view any stimulation of their bottoms as “emasculating”. Research papers have been published on this very subject. I suspect it’s the perceived link between being penetrated and passivity. That penetration equates to a loss of masculinity or, putting it bluntly, being the girl. It’s complete nonsense: women are not the passive recipients of sex, I assure you. But this stereotype has been with us for a very, very long time. You can see an equation between masculinity and penetration playing out throughout history, not with pegging (though I’m sure it’s there), but with men having sex with men.
For example, if you wanted to really insult a Viking you could call him a “rassragr”, which translates roughly to “arse coward”, and meant a man who has allowed another man to penetrate him, or “bottoming”, to use the modern vernacular. This was considered so insulting that it was written into medieval Icelandic law that “a man has the right to avenge with combat for these terms of abuse”. It’s not that Viking culture viewed same sex shenanigans as being inherently wrong, but they did associate bottoming with effeminacy, and that was considered shameful. There wasn’t the same stigma attached to the person doing the manly act of sticking it in.
You can see this in Ancient Roman culture as well. Men having sex with men was mostly fine, as long as you weren’t the one being penetrated. If you did that, then you were regarded as unmanly and little more than a big girl’s blouse, or toga in this case. When Julius Caesar’s enemies wanted to smear his reputation, they mocked him as “the Queen of Bithynia”. Why? Because they wanted to put it about that Caesar had bottomed for King Nicomedes of Bithynia while undergoing his military training as a young man. This was considered so serious that Caesar was forced to deny it under oath. Again, it wasn’t that men were having sex with each other, it was all about who was doing what to whom.
Fast-forward to the present day and there is still a lot of gendered power-play caught up in the act of penetration. It has even leaked into the way we talk. Take the adjective “fucked”, for example. There is nothing in the dictionary definition of this word specifically about who penetrates whom, but if someone is fucking and someone else is being “fucked”, there is an active/passive binary at work. Then think about what we mean when we say that “something is fucked”. See what I mean? We still shame the act of penetration, even on a linguistic level.
It’s something that Germaine Greer noted in The Whole Woman when she wrote: “The penetree, regardless of sex, cannot rule, OK? Not in prison, not in the army, not in business, not in the suburbs. The person on the receiving end is fucked, finished, unserviceable, degraded. Not actually, you understand, but figuratively.”
The act of pegging subverts all of this, and I am completely here for it. I suspect that is why this particular sex act is still considered taboo and shocking by many. It doesn’t help that the few depictions of pegging on TV are negative and play into old tropes around emasculation.
Deadpool shows Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) wincing through a pegging by his girlfriend to celebrate International Women’s Day. Peepshow depicted Jeremy (Robert Webb) very reluctantly submitting to his girlfriend after she agreed to a threesome. When he objects, the girlfriend reprimands him with the Shakespeare quotation, “me thinks the lady doth protest too much.” You know, because he’s a lady now. “It was a kind of deal, I suppose,” Jeremy thinks to himself. “Don’t want to get a reputation as a deal welcher. Might stop me getting a mortgage.”
I’ll admit that those are both good jokes, but they do little to destigmatise pegging as emasculating. Just use a bit more lube!
I’m having a lot of fun making jokes about bottoms in this article, but the fact is that anxieties around penetration and masculinity have very serious consequences, ones that go far beyond not suggesting a pegging session with the missus.
Prostate cancer is the most common type of cancer of men in the UK: someone dies from this horrible disease every 45 minutes. Yet one of the biggest barriers to reducing this shocking statistic is not just treatment, but stigma and embarrassment. Research has shown that “men who have had prostate cancer experience it as an emasculating journey resulting in feelings of stigmatisation”. The fear around a rectal exam is actually stopping men from seeking help. In fact, according to one 2008 paper, 53 per cent of male patients who refused a digital rectal examination did so out of shame.
In 2016, fashion designer Tom Ford garnered headlines around the world when he said that “all men should be penetrated at some point”. And I agree with him! Not because, as Tom explained, “I think it would help them understand women”, because it wouldn’t, and that just rehashes the tired trope that women are entirely passive during sex. No, I think all men should be penetrated at least once because they really need to make peace with their prostate and relax about anal play.
Mandatory pegging may be an extreme stance to take, but I think it would do us all a lot of good. Not only would new depths of pleasure be revealed, but I think it would challenge toxic masculinity and heteronormativity. Hell, I think it could make the world a better place.
I’m mostly joking, of course. I don’t think anyone would vote for the Mandatory Pegging Party anyway, but I do think pegging and bum fun in general is something cis men need to be a bit more open to. It won’t make you any less of a man to admit that there is a lot of fun to be had here, and making friends with your prostate might even save your life.
And as they say, behind every great man is a great woman… hopefully, with a lot of lube.
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