Why can women brag about their Tarzan vibators, while men must hide their blow-up dolls?
This from the delightful book ‘Hopscotch & handbags” by Lucy Mangan:
“A few years ago, I was sitting in the kitchen having a cup of tea with two friends. We had all been without sex or relationships for a very long time and were feeling decidedly like spinsters-of-the-parish. So we fell to discussing whether the time might have come tp purchase a vibrator (or rather, three. I’m very fond of both my friends, but I’m an old-fashioned girl at heart and I draw the line at sharing sex toys.)”
It is, as I said, a delightful and terribly insightful book (and look) into the world of maturing or, at least, growing girls. This column, however, is not about that book. It’s just that when I read the above quote, a slightly inconsequential thought hit me - to wit: Why is it perfectly normal these days for women to own any number of vibrators and other sex toys and talk about these matters openly, while men don’t have this option?
In other words, why are Tarzan or Popeye vibrators, or dildo duckies & dormice not merely accepted but ever so slightly sophisticated, while the whole concept of blow-up dolls and hand-held vagina replicas is embarrassing to the self esteem vanishing point of seriously disturbing?
I’m sure it has to do with image, and self-image. If we disregard the use of sex toys by couples, for a woman to own a vibrator or dildo is, in a way, to say: ‘I don’t need a man to get orgasms.’ The fact that you also don’t need toys to get an orgasm is irrevelent; the possession of a sex toy can be seen as evidence of ‘liberation’ and, as I already mentioned, a certain level of sophistication.
For men it is a different world. Men are supposed to be the hunters; the ones who need to be able to brag about their conquests. For a man to be found out as the owner of a blow-up doll or some other toy, is to be exposed as someone who can’t get a real woman.
So, where a woman can claim that she uses a sex toy because she has no need for men, a man will do everything he can to hide his toys because they are proof that he can’t get the women that he must need.
I know all of the above is an oversimplification, but not by very much, I think - and isn’t that a bit weird? In almost all other matters most men and women at least talk the talk, when it comes to emancipation. Walking the walk is, obviously, a different matter entirely.
Still, wouldn’t it be nice, to imagine a world in which three men could have the same kind of conversation about their sex toys as Lucy Mangan had with her female friends? Mind you, get these things out of the taboo sphere and you probably couldn’t stop men talking about these toys. Just look at the amount of time and energy men spend on discussing stereos, cars, mobile phones and any other damn gizmo you can think of.
So, if having sex toys would ever become normal (let alone even vaguely sophisticated) for men, it’s hard to see how they would ever stop talking long enough about those stupid toys for them to use them.
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