The Whole Lesbian Sex Book (34 page)

There are a number of vibrators designed for anal insertion, including a long, slender, curving vibrator with a flexible spine that allows it to retain any shape you bend it to.

Don’t forget to start small! Buy the smaller butt plug; you can always move on to something larger later on. (See chapter 17, Sex Toys and Accoutrements, for more on penetrative toys.)

Anal Penetration—Safely

The number one safety rule for anal penetration is:
If it hurts, stop!
Don’t engage in any activity that could possibly abrade the lining of the rectum. Don’t continue any activity that causes bleeding.

Why would a lesbian need to wear a latex glove for anal sex? No semen, no problem—right? Wrong! If you have small cuts on your fingers, you could be infected by your partner’s
E. coli
bacteria.
⁶
Before you toss out the gloves, pour some vinegar over your hand. If you have any small cuts, you’ll know!

Don’t share toys without thoroughly cleaning them with disinfectant soap and hot water. Even if you use a condom on that dildo, clean it before you use it on yourself or another partner. Always clean toys after anal sex and before vaginal penetration, to prevent anal bacteria from getting inside your vagina. If possible, buy silicone toys, which you can clean by boiling for two or three minutes. Or, keep a set of “dedicated” anal toys.

Where to Learn More

You may find an anal sex workshop at a sex toy boutique near you. If not, check out instructional videos and DVDs on anal sex—see the resources section for videos and DVDs by Tristan Taormino, Shar Rednour, and Nina Hartley. Sex ed begins with masturbation; to explore solo anal eroticism, see Joseph Kramer’s
Anal Massage for Relaxation and Pleasure—
it’s all about boys, but we have rose-buds, too. I highly recommend Tristan Taormino’s Anal Advisor pages (see link below). In Q&A format, Tristan addresses over 100 topics specific to anal play.

When it comes to sexually explicit content, lesbians have a long history of borrowing from gay men. Perhaps by the time of the next edition of this book, there will be websites for lesbians who want to learn about anal fisting. For now, I highly recommend RedRight, a website that takes its name from the hanky code. A red hanky in the right back pocket indicates that one is a fisting “bottom” (receptive partner). See below.

Safer Anal Penetration

• Get a manicure. Make sure your nails are smoothly filed.

• Use latex, nitrile, or vinyl gloves.

• Put on a fresh glove when you switch activities or partners.

• Use water-based lube.

• Use condoms on your dildos. Always use a fresh condom when switching sexual activities or partners.

• Don’t share dildos and vibrators without cleaning between uses.

• Don’t allow bacteria from the anus to enter the vagina.

Suggested Web Links

REDRIGHT

www.winternet.com/~redright/redright.html

TRISTAN TAORMINO ANAL ADVISOR

www.puckerup.com/anal_advisor/anal.htm

SOURCE OF SIDEBAR

Tristan Taormino, “Beyond Our Bodies: Emotional and Psychological Aspects of Anal Eroticism,” from
The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women
(Cleis Press, 1997).

chapter fourteen

Gender (Not Destiny)

Lesbian sex begins and ends with who I am as a woman.

GENDER IS SEXY. That lesbian in heels and hose is so unmistakably feminine and so aggressively erotic—and so unconditionally interested in her own sex. That butch exudes sexual confidence—standing with thumbs hooked in belt loops, flexing her thigh muscles to draw attention to the lump in her jeans. That ambiguously gendered person is at once hotly erotic and so startling as to be disturbing.

For some, gender is a plaything, the best sex toy in the play room. They enjoy cross-dressing and purposely mixing gender signifiers—femmes with dicks, butches in femme drag. For others, gender’s a matter of style, a way of presenting oneself to the world. And for still others, words like
butch, femme, queer,
and
transgender
speak to a deeply held identity, one that can’t be peeled off at the end of the night like a costume.

Whether a dildo is just a dildo is up to you, of course. How you relate to gender is personal—and no opinion of your gender matters but your own. You needn’t locate yourself on a gender continuum of masculinity and femininity or label yourself at all unless that’s useful for you.

Your gender identity can shift and change over the course of a lifetime. Or your gender identity may remain constant—but your acceptance of yourself, your capacity to be on the outside exactly who you are on the inside, may grow over the years.

What does gender have to do with lesbian sex? Think of your
sex
as your physical equipment, your
gender
as what you do with it, and your
sexual orientation
as the territory of your desire.

What Is Gender?

How do you know you’re female? Are you female because you have a clitoris? Because your adult life has been marked by cycles of ovulation and menstruation? Because you were raised as a girl? Because you were forced to be female? Because you “feel” female?

Gender is more than anatomical sex; gender is how you relate to your biological sex. Your gender identity may or may not agree with your biological sex. For instance, you may have a woman’s body and identify as male. You may experience your clitoris as a cock, your breasts as a chest.

You may have a woman’s body and delight in your femininity—yet know to the core of your being that your experience of the feminine bears little resemblance to that of a heterosexual woman. The distinctions may be beyond words. Your queer gender may place you utterly beyond the realm of “male” and “female”—and even words like
lesbian
and
bisexual
may have become irrelevant for you. You may find all of the outward signals of gender irrelevant—your woman’s body speaks for itself. You may view yourself as androgynous. Or you may prefer to skip the discussion entirely.

You may be anatomically male and identify as female. On you, a penis is your clitoris; a prostate, your G-spot. Regardless of how you’re “read” on the street, you know you’re female.

So, then, what makes a person female or male? Is it anatomy? Identity? Some combination of the two?

Gender roles can be defined by fashion (who wears the pants), economics (who gets the paycheck), and sexual roles (who’s on top), as well as the particulars of culture and religion, history and class. (Remember when Rosie the Riveter was expected to morph into a Stepford Wife? “No more power tools for
you,
honey!”)

You may try to “read” gender by observing secondary sex characteristics, such as facial structure and facial hair, fat and muscle distribution, body mass, vocal pitch, movement, and linguistic style.

You can determine “sex” anatomically by looking at the external genitalia. Historically, women were defined as nonmales: penis = male; no penis = female. You can look, instead, to reproductive biology: A female has ovaries, a male testes. You can examine hormones, defining a female as a person who produces more estrogen and progesterone than testosterone. You can look at genetics, defining a female as a person with XX rather than XY chromosomes.

Male and female sexual anatomy is actually quite similar—we share the same bits of engorging erectile tissue and the same nerve endings. We’re simply arranged differently. In the early stages of fetal development, there is no anatomical difference between male and female. The genitals begin to differentiate at about the eighth week.
¹
Glans tissue develops into either the glans of the clitoris or the glans of the penis. Clitoral hood and foreskin develop from identical tissue, as do the labia and scrotum, the testes and ovaries, and the shaft of the penis and the shaft of the clitoris. It isn’t until the fourth to fifth month of pregnancy that you can reliably detect a fetus’s sex from an ultrasound procedure.

Intersexuality

But what if all gender characteristics aren’t in alignment? In fact, according to the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA), one infant in 1,600 is born with something other than XX or XY chromosomes, and one infant in 2,000 is born with what medical professionals refers to as “ambiguous genitalia.”
²
Intersexed infants may have genitals that don’t appear distinctly male or female. So who’s to decide whether that genital appendage is a clitoris or a penis?

Unfortunately, medical authorities consider it their prerogative to make that decision. A baby’s phallus must be a minimum of 1 inch long to be considered a penis; however, a clitoris must
not
be longer than ⅜ of an inch. That leaves more than ½ inch of what one writer calls “a veritable pubic Twilight Zone, the land of ambiguous genitalia.”
³
What happens to the infant born with a phallus longer than ⅜ of an inch but shorter than 1 inch?

The medical response to intersex conditions has been to intervene surgically—in some cases soon after birth and in other cases at puberty (when unexpected sexual development may occur). Most intersex infants are determined to be female: the overly large clitoris is surgically reduced to a “normal” size. As a result of such mutilation,
⁴
many intersex women have reduced clitoral sensitivity, and some are unable to reach orgasm.

The rationale for early medical intervention is that what a child doesn’t know won’t hurt her—which, of course, is anything but true. The real reason behind most surgery on intersexed children is discomfort with the idea that “male” and “female” might be something other than immutable categories.

Not surprisingly, human variation doesn’t fit into those two neat little boxes. According to the ISNA, “Anatomic sex differentiation occurs on a male/female continuum.”
⁵

Yet the medical approach to intersexuality is rooted in the idea that to function “successfully” in society, children must have a “fixed” gender identity from an early age. The child’s genitals must “match the standard anatomy” for his or her gender. Boys must have penises, and girls must have vaginas “with no easily noticeable phallus.”
⁶

Are intersex women lesbian? Bisexual? Heterosexual? Can you tell by looking at a person’s genitals if she or he is intersexed? What pronouns do intersexed people prefer? All of this will vary from person to person. Ask.

I’m transgendered due to an intersex birth condition, a dyke, and femme by nature. Thank the Goddess we are more than the adjectives we and society use to identify us!

Transgender and Transsexual

Transgender
is an umbrella term that includes all who don’t feel that their designated sex (female or male) exactly matches their gender identity. This can include male-to-female transsexuals (MTF) and female-to-male transsexuals (FTM), along with transvestites, drag kings and drag queens, and butches and femmes who view their experience of being “female” as different from the dominant social construct.

Some people think of their gender on a continuum, so some butch lesbians may identify more strongly with female-to-male transsexuals than they do with women.

A
transsexual
is a person whose intent is to live as a gender other than that assigned at birth. Most transsexuals engage in some process of altering primary and secondary sexual characteristics, through hormone treatment or surgery or both. Some transsexuals live full-time in their chosen gender without any alteration of physiology. They don’t feel that they must alter their physical bodies to match conventional definitions of male and female. Others engage in hormone treatment without any intention of undergoing genital reconstructive surgery—because the surgery is very expensive and the results are often less than optimal. Transsexuals can be homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual, and may identify as either butch or femme. They may wish to pass as just another man or just another woman—or they may identify as transsexual or “third gender.” Regardless, male-to-female transsexuals are women and female-to-male transsexuals are men.

Gender reassignment can affect sex drive. Many MTFs in transition experience a drop in sex drive when they begin taking estrogen, and many FTMs notice a sharp increase in sex drive when they begin taking testosterone. But the hormonally driven changes in libido are only half the story. Greeting the world as a newly formed person is no small challenge—remember puberty?

Male-to-Female Transsexuals

I am a woman who happened to be born male through no fault of her own.

Hormonal treatment for male-to-female transsexuals involves taking anti-androgen and estrogen, which results in a decreasing of male secondary sex characteristics and an increasing of female sexual characteristics: less body hair, less muscle mass, higher-pitched voice, growth of breasts, softening of the skin, rounding of the hips, and the development of a girlish tush!

Surgical techniques include upper-body surgery to enlarge breasts (though many MTFs find estrogen enhances their breasts quite adequately) and lower-body surgeries to reshape the male genitalia into a clitoris and vagina.