About Penetration

My desire to write about penetration was born from the acknowledgement of its importance. Penetration plays a role in our perception of the world: it is the root of many types of discrimination, it is linked to misogyny, and it plays a crucial role in the legal definitions of sex and rape. Yes, this is a taboo, but the need to break the taboo and shine a light on this subject felt too great not to write about it.

Kids are most commonly first introduced to the idea of penetration in sex ed, when they read anatomical descriptions of a heteronormative scene along with an explanation of the fertilization of an egg cell. As teenagers, they might start experimenting with sex acts and learn from experience that sexual acts can also include manual or oral stimulation. Among straight kids, girls will oftentimes start performing those acts on boys before the boys return the favor. Part of this phenomenon is caused by the perpetuated belief that boys’ sex drive is significantly higher than girls’ and their need for orgasms more urgent, giving boys the societal “OK” to ask for pleasure before girls receive it. Another part of this phenomenon is children’s poor sex ed, feminine shame in asking for pleasure, and the general confusion around how to pleasure a vagina, particularly in ways other than emulating penetrative sex by sticking one’s fingers up the hole in question.

Penetration and the length and circumference of the penetrating object(s) in sex are at the very center of our collective understanding of sex and its quality. In modern Western society, we constantly reinforce the narrative that a man with a bigger penis is inherently better at sex while men with smaller ones are the butt of many a joke because of their supposed inability to perform. Of course, any person who has ever been penetrated will assure you that there is no direct link between the size of a penis and its ability to sexually satisfy. For those who are very insecure: rest assured that you do not need a penis for many sex acts. Without a doubt, sex includes much more than just penetration, and anyone who has consumed any amount of queer or feminist content will know that penetration equaling sex is a very heteronormative position. Ideally, we should try to broaden our horizons. Maybe we can come to understand that any sexual act is sex. Still, when people talk about their first time having sex, they usually refer to the first time they experienced penetration.

If sex is most often understood as an act of penetration of a woman by a man, this creates issues for anyone who does not penetrate or is not penetrated the way they ‘should’ be. If sex is exclusively penetration, two people without a penis cannot have sex. This very idea is at the core of the historic invisibilization of lesbians. While gay men have been persecuted and shamed for sodomy, no one really understood what lesbians even did in the bedroom, and sort of just left it at that.

You do not need to have a degree in psychoanalysis to know that sex is more than just a physical act: sex is a mirror of our psyche and a demonstration of power. Obviously, there are forms of sex that take the play with power to the extreme, such as literal power play in BDSM. But even the most “vanilla” kinds of sex are, intentionally or not, a demonstration of one person’s power over another. The penetratee is the powerless actor, as their role is by default reduced to passivity. Since the societal idea of sex is a penis entering a vagina, the penetratee is most commonly a woman, a woman whose body gets assigned the role of a space to be entered. Now, anyone who has had sex before will remind you that there are many positions during which the penetrated partner has more control than the penetrator. If we want to be true to biology and not a gendered distribution of power, we could shift perspectives and argue that any position during which the penetratee is on top is, in fact, not a penis entering a hole, but rather a hole engulfing a penis.

Because to penetrate is to dominate, there is a stigma around agreeing to be penetrated. I argue that this stigma is strongly linked to misogyny. If the penetratee is willfully giving their body to someone to stick their penis into, they are the pleasure object of the man. This belief is not a modern invention: it has a very long, very frustrating tradition, and is probably as old as misogyny itself.

Reading queer discourse on social media, one will often come across posts detailing how the ancient Romans and Greeks were accepting of homosexuality and would even encourage sex between men. While this is not technically wrong, it is also not the whole story. Our (well, some of us) Greek and Roman forefathers did not distinguish between hetero-, bi-, and homosexuality the way we do today, and, therefore, could not be homophobic in the way we understand it. On the other hand, their society did regulate sexual activity according to class and role distribution. While ancient Greek and Roman men did not really have a problem with penetrating boys or enslaved men and women, there was shame and stigma around extramarital relations with people from the same class or family and around being penetrated. Roman society was especially patriarchal and focused on virility. Being penetrated as a man meant that one not only willingly allowed another person to conquer one’s body, but also willingly took on the role of a woman. And a woman was (and still is) the worst thing a man could want to be.

Due to the historic invisibilization of lesbians, we do not know very much about ancient lesbians; what we do know, however, is that lesbian sex was frowned upon because it allowed one woman to take the role of a man while dominating another woman. This form of non-heteronormative sex clearly confused even the oldest civilizations because it broke with binary gender roles and standards of what a man and a woman have to be: active and passive, dominant and submissive.

The idea of penetration as a power play and the stigma around being the penetratee is still present today, and very likely the reason we do not learn to define sex as anything more than penetrative when we are first introduced to it. If people are free to take up any role they want during sex, no matter the act they want to perform or the constellation they find themselves in, gender roles would be much easier to understand as fluid and switchable.

Many cis men are opposed to or even scared of being sexually dominated. Among gay men, there is a stigma around being a “bottom”, someone who prefers to be the penetratee. There is the idea that bottoms are more effeminate, which is not necessarily thought to be caused by their decision to assume the dominated role, but is thought to be at least correlated to it. Cis men, gay and straight, feel the need to be masculine in every part of life. Virility comes with many advantages, but also with the cost of never being able to let one’s guard down. One could say that throwing any of these privileges away is crazy; why would you willingly allow anyone to conquer you or your body by not being the one to set the rules, by being penetrated instead of doing the penetrating? What kind of a man is one who lets another man take over his body but a woman, the weakest link, the weakest half, one of those whose bodies are not theirs to rule over?

Making the choice to throw at least some of this agency away is a very powerful one. Bottoms make this choice, trans women make this choice. They choose freedom over convention, freedom to decide over their own bodies and whether or not to take over other’s. This is part of the reason why LGBTQ individuals face such discrimination, because they demonstrate how fragile binary gender norms are when not held up by cultural and religious rules. Furthermore, these individuals and their decisions challenge hard-set ideas on what power is. By recognizing the inherent power in being both the penetrator and penetratee, we can begin to reimagine power roles both in and beyond the bedroom.