Sexual history has a funny way of embarrassing people who pretend pleasure was invented yesterday. Every few years, someone rediscovers an old object, an old trial record, an old moral panic, or an old piece of erotic art and acts shocked to find out that human beings have always been inventive with desire. The strap-on dildo sits right in the middle of that historical discomfort. It is treated as a punchline, a scandal, a queer accessory, a porn category, a straight man’s panic button, or a radical slogan, yet the record keeps telling a much older story.

Society loves to pretend sex toys are modern corruption, but the archive keeps telling on us. The church knew. The courts knew. Artists knew. Disabled people knew. Queer people knew. The only thing new is not the strap-on; it is the public’s selective willingness to admit that pleasure has always been more creative, more adaptive, and more queer than polite society wanted to confess.

That is the first correction this history requires. The strap-on is not merely a contemporary sex-shop product or a prop from a television comedy. It belongs to a much longer record of bodies, tools, gender play, disability access, queer intimacy, heterosexual anxiety, religious punishment, medical marketing, and cultural theft. Its history is difficult to trace in a clean line, not from lack of use, but from the kinds of records that survived. We often know about strap-ons from the people who condemned them, prosecuted them, sketched them, studied them from the outside, sold them under coded language, or turned them into pop spectacle.

That matters for how we read the evidence. Church penitentials, criminal trials, erotic drawings, colonial-era ethnography, medical-device catalogs, feminist sex-shop histories, and television scripts are not neutral windows into private life. They are fragments. Some were created by hostile authorities. Some were filtered through shame. Some were built from fantasy. Some came from commerce. Taken together, however, they reveal one stubborn truth: worn dildos have appeared across time, geography, gender, and sexual identity in ways that polite history has rarely handled honestly.

So this is not just a history of a sex toy. It is a history of who gets punished for pleasure, who gets pathologized for sexual invention, who gets erased from the record, who gets access to intimacy after injury, and who gets credit once queer language becomes fashionable enough for a runway. The strap-on has been treated as evidence of sin, proof of crime, adaptive technology, lesbian culture, heterosexual novelty, comedy device, and political slogan. The object stayed. The meaning kept changing.

What We Mean When We Say “Strap-On”

A strap-on dildo is usually understood as a dildo or insertive object attached to some form of harness, strap, base, underwear, or body-worn structure. Some are solid. Some are hollow. Some are worn by people with penises. Some are worn by people without them. Some sit above the pubic bone. Some are used for vaginal sex, some for anal sex, some for gender expression, some for disability access, and some for intimacy that does not fit neatly into the narrow categories people keep trying to impose on sex.

That definition sounds simple, but history makes it messy. Dildo history and strap-on history overlap, yet they are not identical. Freestanding phallic objects appear far earlier than the last thousand years, and scholars have discussed phallic artifacts in ancient and premodern contexts. A strap-on, however, requires a wearable component or at least a method of attaching the object to the body. That distinction matters, since the meaning changes when a toy is held in the hand versus worn as part of the body.

The strap-on unsettles people precisely through that attachment. It troubles the lazy assumption that penetration belongs naturally or exclusively to men. It turns the phallus into technology rather than destiny. It lets a person wear, remove, share, exchange, exaggerate, reject, or reinterpret a symbol that cultures have attached to male authority for centuries. That is why so much panic around strap-ons is never truly about silicone, leather, wood, or harnesses. It is about control.

A dildo by itself can be dismissed as a private object. A strap-on makes a social argument, whether the user intends that or not. It says anatomy does not own desire. It says sexual roles can be chosen, performed, refused, revised, or made playful. It says a body can be extended. It says intimacy does not have to kneel before the old rules about gender, marriage, masculinity, femininity, or respectability.

This is why the archive around strap-ons often appears in places where authority is already anxious. Confession manuals. Court records. Colonial reports. Medical marketing. Obscenity law. Pop culture controversy. Each record says as much about the observer as the user. When authorities write about strap-ons, they often reveal their own fear that pleasure might not stay where they assigned it.

The Church Knew: Burchard of Worms and the Penitential Record

One of the most cited medieval references appears in the early eleventh century through Burchard of Worms, a bishop whose Decretum was completed around 1023. Book 19, often known as the Corrector or Corrector Burchardi, functioned as a penitential guide for confessors. It listed questions meant to draw out sins during confession and assigned penances for various acts. That format is essential. We are not reading a queer memoir, a sex manual, or a personal account. We are reading a church document organized around moral discipline.

The passage often discussed in strap-on history asks whether women made an implement shaped like a male member, fastened it to their genitals or another person’s body, and used it sexually with other women. The prescribed penance was five years on legitimate holy days. The phrasing is striking, not just for what it condemns, but for what it accidentally preserves. The church did not invent the act by naming it. The question exists because such conduct was imaginable enough, known enough, or feared enough to be placed inside a confessional framework.

This is where the church record becomes more revealing than it intended. A moral authority trying to regulate sin preserved evidence that women’s sexual lives were more inventive than later respectability would admit. It tells us nothing reliable about how often these devices were used, who made them, or how the participants understood themselves. It does, however, show that the idea of a wearable phallic device used between women was already legible to religious authorities a millennium ago.

That does not mean we should romanticize the record. The Corrector does not offer celebration. It offers discipline. It frames the act through sin, confession, and punishment. Still, the presence of the act inside a penitential guide pushes back against the modern myth that strap-on sex is some recent queer invention, a product of Pride parades, feminist bookstores, internet porn, or twenty-first-century gender politics.

In reality, sexual technology has always moved faster than official morality wanted to admit. People made objects. People improvised. People fastened things to bodies. People used whatever materials were available to create pleasure, play, intimacy, and sexual possibility. Burchard’s text may have meant to police the body, but it ended up preserving one of the clearest medieval traces of a practice that modern scolds still pretend is new.

The Courts Knew: Katherina Hetzeldorfer and the Violence of the Archive

The 1477 trial of Katherina Hetzeldorfer in Speyer is one of the most disturbing and revealing moments in this history. Hetzeldorfer was prosecuted in a pre-Reformation German legal setting for conduct that involved sex with women and gender presentation that did not conform to the expectations of the court. Helmut Puff’s scholarship on the case has become central to modern discussions of “female sodomy,” a category Puff uses carefully to describe a legal and rhetorical problem rather than a stable identity label.

The trial record includes a description of an instrument made with red leather, cotton, a wooden stick, and string. That device, as reported through the court documents, functioned as a wearable phallic object. The detail is hard to forget because it is so material. Leather. Cotton. Wood. String. This was not a metaphor. It was an object made by hand, attached to the body, and then turned into evidence by the legal system.

Modern readers may see Hetzeldorfer through lesbian, butch, gender-nonconforming, or transmasculine frameworks. Those readings can be meaningful, especially for queer and trans people searching a hostile archive for signs of lives like ours. Still, caution is necessary. The records were not written by Hetzeldorfer as self-description. They were produced by authorities who were trying to define, judge, and punish conduct they found intolerable.

That is one of the hardest truths about queer history. Sometimes the evidence survived only because someone was harmed. We learn about people through arrest, trial, confession, punishment, medicalization, police surveillance, and scandal. The archive can give us visibility and violence in the same breath. It can confirm that people like us existed and still deny them the dignity of speaking for themselves.

Hetzeldorfer’s case should not be reduced to a novelty item in sex-toy history. It belongs to the longer record of how states and churches used sexual conduct to enforce gender order. The strap-on-like device in the trial mattered to the court not simply as a sexual object, but as a challenge to the assumed relationship between anatomy, authority, masculinity, and sexual role. If a person assigned female could dress, live, desire, penetrate, and be recognized by others in ways that blurred the court’s categories, then the problem was larger than sex.

That is why this episode still feels contemporary. The same panic repeats in new language. Authorities may no longer use medieval legal categories, but they still rage when gender roles move out of place. They still panic when queer bodies refuse to stay symbolic, silent, or ashamed. They still turn tools of intimacy into proof of deviance when the real offense is autonomy.

Artists Knew: Erotic Art, Fantasy, and the Public Secret

By the nineteenth century, strap-on imagery appears in erotic art from multiple contexts, including German drawings attributed to Albert Hendschel and Japanese erotic visual culture associated with artists such as Keisai Eisen. These images require careful reading. Erotic art is not the same as documentary evidence. Artists draw fantasy, satire, desire, social commentary, and commercial imagination. A drawing can show what people did, what people feared, what people wanted, or what people thought would sell.

Yet dismissing erotic art as fantasy would miss the point. Fantasy itself is historical evidence. It shows what was imaginable inside a culture. It shows what sexual scenes viewers could recognize. It shows which acts carried charge, humor, taboo, or erotic fascination. When artists depicted women using worn phallic devices, they were not working from some twenty-first-century script. They were part of a much older visual vocabulary of sexual play and gendered reversal.

The German examples described in modern accounts include women using red harnessed devices, sometimes in settings that appear domestic, intimate, or theatrical. The Japanese example often discussed in this context shows two women engaged sexually, with one using a theater mask as an improvised phallic form. Whether the scene documents a common practice or an erotic fantasy, it still matters. It shows that the strap-on, or the idea of a body-worn substitute phallus, existed in the erotic imagination well before modern sex shops.

This is where respectable culture gets caught lying again. Public morality likes to pretend that sexual creativity arrives from outside: foreign influence, queer decadence, pornography, feminism, modernity, youth culture, or the internet. The historical record keeps showing the opposite. Desire was already there. The tools were already there. The jokes were already there. The anxiety was already there.

Art did what art often does: it made the public secret visible. It offered scenes that could be hidden, collected, traded, laughed over, condemned, or desired. That visibility did not equal liberation. Women’s desire, queer sex, and gender play still carried risk. But the images remind us that erotic imagination has never obeyed the borders that polite society drew around the body.

Zanzibar and the Problem of Looking Through Colonial Eyes

The Zanzibar material often cited in strap-on histories comes through Michael Haberlandt’s 1899 ethnographic work, later discussed in Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities. The account describes several sexual practices between women, including a term translated as furnishing oneself with an ebony penis. The object was reportedly crafted from ebony, attached with a cord, sold discreetly, and hollowed so warm water could move through it in imitation of ejaculation.

The details are fascinating, but they require care. Ethnographic writing from this period often preserved information that might otherwise have been ignored by European archives. At the same time, such records were frequently shaped by colonial gaze, racial fascination, outsider assumptions, translation problems, and the unequal relationship between observer and observed. We may be reading about women’s sexual practices, but we are not necessarily hearing women explain those practices in their own voices.

That tension does not make the account useless. It makes it complicated. The Zanzibar material widens the history beyond Europe and reminds us that worn phallic devices were not confined to one culture or one sexual identity. It gives evidence of craft, secrecy, commerce, and embodied sexual knowledge. It shows that women’s sexual practices with each other included language, technique, and tools.

Yet the source also warns us against treating non-European sexual history as a cabinet of exotic curiosities. The phrase “ebony penis” can easily become titillation in the wrong hands. The better reading asks how sexual knowledge moved through communities, how women created pleasure outside official structures, and how later observers filtered that knowledge through their own categories.

The colonial record often has a double function. It documents and distorts. It preserves and objectifies. It makes visible and misreads. A responsible strap-on history has to hold those truths together rather than pretending the source is either pure evidence or worthless contamination.

This is especially vital in queer sexual history, where the surviving record already leans heavily on outsiders. Churchmen, judges, physicians, ethnographers, police, and journalists have written far too much of the archive. The work now is not just to collect their evidence, but to read against their authority. What did they see? What did they miss? What did they misunderstand? What did the people they studied, punished, or described know about their own pleasure that the record failed to honor?

Modern Manufacturing, Medical Cover, and the Politics of “Marital Aids”

The modern commercial strap-on enters a different kind of archive: manufacturing, medicine, obscenity law, and consumer culture. Hallie Lieberman’s Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy is useful here, since it traces how American sex toys often had to hide behind medical language, marital respectability, or coded marketing. This is where the strap-on becomes part sex toy, part therapeutic device, part legal workaround, and part cultural compromise.

In the 1960s, Ted Marche, a ventriloquist and manufacturer, began producing strap-on devices in a commercial context. These products were often marketed as marital aids, especially for men with erectile dysfunction. That framing was strategic. In a legal climate shaped by obscenity law and sexual censorship, a device could be made more acceptable if it served marriage, male sexual function, or medical need. Pleasure by itself was suspect. Pleasure with a doctor-adjacent excuse had a better chance.

This is where the politics get revealing. A hollow strap-on worn by a man could be framed as preserving heterosexual marriage. It did not have to threaten male authority if it was sold as a tool that extended it. The device became acceptable when it kept the husband in the sexual picture. The same basic object, used by women with women or by queer people for pleasure and gender play, could be treated as deviant, obscene, or laughable.

That split tells us a great deal about American sexual morality. The problem was never the object alone. The problem was who used it, for what purpose, and whether its use protected or disrupted the hierarchy. A strap-on that helped a man perform husbandhood could be softened into a marital aid. A strap-on that let women penetrate each other became something else entirely in the public imagination: dangerous, queer, funny, obscene, or too much.

The medical cover around sex toys should not be dismissed as mere hypocrisy. It was also survival. Manufacturers and users had to move through legal and social systems that punished sexual openness. Medical language created space, but it also narrowed the story. It made sex acceptable when tied to function, marriage, dysfunction, or repair. It left less room for pleasure as pleasure.

That tension still lives with us. People remain more comfortable discussing sexual tools when they can be attached to therapy, relationship maintenance, disability, erectile dysfunction, pelvic health, or trauma recovery. Those uses are real and deserve respect. Yet pleasure should not need a permission slip from medicine before it becomes legitimate.

Disabled People Knew: Gosnell Duncan and Sexual Access

The story of Gosnell Duncan deserves more than a passing mention in any serious strap-on history. Duncan, who became paraplegic after an accident, recognized a need that mainstream sexual culture preferred to ignore: disabled people have sexual lives. They have desire, relationships, fantasies, frustration, grief, curiosity, and the right to pleasure. After attending a disability conference in 1971 and asking whether people with paralysis or other disabilities would purchase strap-on dildos for sex, Duncan began creating body-safe silicone products through Paramount Therapeutic Products.

His work shifted sex-toy history in practical and philosophical ways. Silicone was easier to clean, more durable, and safer than many earlier materials. Custom sizing and above-the-pubic-bone designs addressed real bodily differences rather than assuming one standard user. Duncan’s products were purchased by men, but lesbians and other users also sought them out. That crossover matters. A device created to solve one access problem opened possibilities for many kinds of bodies and relationships.

Disability history changes the moral frame of the strap-on. It pushes the conversation beyond kink, novelty, and scandal into the deeper question of who is allowed to have a sexual self. Disabled people are too often infantilized or treated as though their bodies exist only in medical charts, care plans, insurance paperwork, and inspiration stories. Duncan’s work rejected that erasure. It treated sexual access as part of human life, not an indulgence reserved for nondisabled bodies.

There is a radical decency in that. A strap-on can help someone reconnect with a partner after injury. It can help a person experience control, confidence, or pleasure in a body that has changed. It can make sex possible when anatomy, sensation, mobility, or stamina no longer fit old patterns. It can turn adaptation into intimacy rather than loss.

This part of the history should make people less smug. The same object that gets mocked in straight comedy or treated as scandal in queer culture can be a tool of dignity for a disabled person. That does not make it less sexual. It makes our definition of sex more honest. Human bodies change. Pleasure adapts. Tools help. There is nothing shameful in that.

The disability-rights context also exposes another failure in sexual education. Many people are taught sex through anatomy charts, abstinence warnings, disease panic, gender stereotypes, and silence. Very few are taught that bodies vary across ability, injury, illness, age, and sensation. Duncan’s contribution reminds us that sexual knowledge is not complete unless disabled people are part of it from the start.

Pegging, Pop Culture, and the Comedy of Male Panic

By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, strap-ons began appearing more openly in popular media. The term “pegging” is usually traced to Dan Savage’s readership, after the 1998 sex education film Bend Over Boyfriend helped push the act into broader public conversation. The term later entered the Oxford English Dictionary, a small but telling marker of how sexual language moves from subculture to mainstream recognition.

Pegging’s rise reveals another cultural pattern: strap-ons become publicly discussable when straight male discomfort becomes the joke. Television and film often frame pegging around surprise, embarrassment, masculine panic, or the supposedly hilarious reversal of roles. The joke depends on the idea that penetration feminizes or humiliates men. That idea is not sexually liberated. It is just old patriarchy wearing a new gag.

Shows such as Sex and the City and Broad City helped bring strap-on references into mainstream conversation, but the framing often leaned on comedy. Samantha’s encounter in Sex and the City played with sexual exhaustion and role reversal. Broad City made pegging visible to a new generation through misunderstanding and awkwardness. These scenes opened space for discussion, but they also showed the limits of what mainstream audiences could handle. The strap-on was allowed on screen, often so long as laughter softened it.

Orange Is the New Black offered a different kind of moment through Big Boo, a fat butch lesbian character whose strap-on was not treated solely as a cheap punchline. Viewers and queer critics recognized the significance of seeing a butch body, sexual confidence, and explicit strap-on use handled with more directness than television usually permits. Representation does not solve stigma, but it can puncture the lie that queer sex must always be hidden, sanitized, or made acceptable through heterosexual reaction.

Pop culture visibility is never the same as respect. A strap-on can be used for comedy, queer intimacy, feminist provocation, straight experimentation, or political metaphor. The public may laugh, gawk, applaud, or panic. None of those responses alone equal understanding.

The most interesting question is not whether strap-ons have entered the mainstream. They clearly have. The better question is what kind of strap-on visibility gets rewarded. Straight novelty often gets laughs. Celebrity provocation gets press. Queer educators, sex workers, disabled users, and community-based pleasure activists often get shadowbanned, dismissed, harassed, or erased. The object becomes marketable, but the people who carried its stigma may still be treated as disposable.

“Peg the Patriarchy” and the Problem of Credit

The slogan “Peg the Patriarchy” shows how quickly queer sexual language can be lifted, flattened, and sold back to the public. Sex educator Luna Matatas began using the phrase in 2015 and trademarked it in Canada in 2018. For Matatas, the slogan was not simply a joke about penetration. It referred to subverting systems of oppression tied to colonial masculinity and gendered control. That meaning is sharper and more layered than the quick media summaries that followed.

When Cara Delevingne wore a custom Dior look with “Peg the Patriarchy” at the 2021 Met Gala, the phrase gained a wave of mainstream attention. The problem was credit. Matatas was not credited at the time, and public conversation often treated the slogan as a celebrity fashion provocation rather than the work of a queer sex educator. The controversy was not merely about a phrase on clothing. It was about the familiar pattern of queer labor becoming visible only once attached to wealth, whiteness, fashion, or celebrity.

This pattern repeats constantly. Queer people create language under pressure. Black and brown queer people create language under even heavier pressure. Sex educators create frameworks in spaces where platforms punish explicit education and reward sanitized spectacle. Then, when the culture decides a phrase is catchy, the originator gets treated as optional.

The irony is thick. A slogan about subverting patriarchy was absorbed into the machinery of celebrity fashion without proper credit to the educator who made it meaningful. That does not erase the slogan’s value, but it does expose the limits of mainstream adoption. If a culture can wear queer sexual politics but refuse to credit queer educators, then the politics have been turned into costume.

That is why the strap-on’s modern history cannot end with visibility. Visibility can be shallow. Visibility can be stolen. Visibility can make the object famous and leave the community behind. The harder work is credit, context, education, and respect.

“Peg the Patriarchy” became a public flashpoint because it condensed many of the strap-on’s meanings into one phrase: sex, gender reversal, resistance, discomfort, humor, and anger at systems that treat penetration as hierarchy. Yet the phrase also risked misreading. If people think pegging is degrading because being penetrated is degrading, they have not escaped patriarchy at all. They have just moved the insult around.

A better politics of pleasure rejects the hierarchy entirely. Penetration is not ownership. Receptivity is not weakness. A strap-on is not automatically domination, parody, or revenge. It can be tender, funny, erotic, awkward, healing, casual, intimate, affirming, or deeply ordinary. The meaning belongs to the people involved, not to the frightened audience outside the room.

What the Strap-On Keeps Revealing

The strap-on has survived a thousand years of projection. Church officials saw sin. Courts saw crime. Artists saw erotic charge. Ethnographers saw cultural curiosity. Manufacturers saw medical utility and commercial opportunity. Disabled people saw access. Queer people saw pleasure, gender possibility, and self-definition. Pop culture saw jokes, shock, and eventually marketable edge.

That range is the history. The strap-on is not one thing, and that is exactly why it keeps bothering people. It refuses to stay inside a single category. It can support heterosexual sex and disrupt heterosexual assumptions. It can be a marital aid and a lesbian symbol. It can be medical, erotic, playful, political, private, theatrical, tender, or ridiculous. It can make a body feel more whole without pretending the body was broken.

The panic around it has always been bigger than the object. A strap-on turns the phallus into something detachable. That alone rattles cultures built on the fiction that anatomy grants authority. If a phallus can be bought, carved, sewn, strapped, shared, worn, removed, or replaced, then it loses some of its sacred fraud. It becomes a tool. Sometimes a sexy tool. Sometimes an adaptive tool. Sometimes a symbolic tool. Still a tool.

That is why the history feels so much larger than a sex toy timeline. This is a story about how people find ways to live inside bodies that law, church, medicine, and culture keep trying to regulate. It is about the gap between what authorities say people do and what people have always done. It is about pleasure that survives shame. It is about intimacy made from leather, wood, cotton, ebony, silicone, harnesses, language, and nerve.

The strap-on does not need to be made respectable to be worthy of serious history. Respectability is often the trap. The goal is not to make every sexual object sound clean enough for a committee meeting. The goal is to tell the truth: humans are sexual, inventive, adaptive, and far less obedient than official history pretends.

That truth may make some people uncomfortable. Good. Comfort has never been the measure of honesty. The strap-on’s long record shows that desire does not wait for permission, that bodies are more imaginative than doctrine, and that queer pleasure has always existed in the spaces where society insisted nothing was happening.

So the next time someone acts like strap-ons are evidence of modern decay, hand them the archive. Hand them Burchard. Hand them Hetzeldorfer. Hand them the artists. Hand them Zanzibar, with caution and context. Hand them Ted Marche and Gosnell Duncan. Hand them Luna Matatas. Hand them every queer person who already knew the joke was old and the fear was older.

The strap-on was never the scandal. The scandal is how long society has known and still pretended not to.

References

Burchard of Worms. (ca. 1000–1025). Corrector sive Medicus / Book 19 of the Decretum.

Haberlandt, M. (1899). Ethnographic writing on sexual practices in Zanzibar, later discussed in Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities.

Lieberman, H. (2017). Buzz: A stimulating history of the sex toy. Pegasus Books.

Puff, H. (2000). Female sodomy: The trial of Katherina Hetzeldorfer (1477). Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 30(1), 41–61.

Savage, D. (2001–2024). Public writing and commentary on the term “pegging” and its later dictionary recognition.

Street, M. (2025, May 23). The 1,000 year history of the strap-on. Them.

Them. (2021). Cara Delevingne’s “Peg the Patriarchy” outfit sparks controversy.