The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

by Jane Ward

A secret about lesbian sex that I don’t think I have ever seen written about before is that lesbians appreciate different things about the vulva and vagina than do straight men. If popular culture and the rise of vaginal tightening and rejuvenation procedures are any indication, straight men value a “tight” vagina. But this is incomprehensible to me as a dyke. If I only had a nickel for every time I have heard queer people brag about being size queens with capacious vaginas and/or anuses that welcome fists and giant dildos, I’d be a rich woman! In queer space, what makes an orifice “good” is not how it feels to the person going inside it (for whom it might make sense for the emphasis to be on tightness) but how the orifice feels about itself: what it wants, what it can do, what it can enjoy. For many humans, the capacity to take something very large into one’s body is extremely pleasurable, and this is much more difficult when one has been told that the goal is to keep all orifices small and tight. It is fine, of course, if size is not one’s thing, but the point here is that it makes queer people—like my comrades quoted above—quite sad that in straight culture, a vagina is evaluated according to its capacity to please men and not its capacity to experience pleasure.53