Stone butch and dykes : sex, gender and revolution
“And I’m wondering: did it hurt you the times I couldn’t let you touch me ?”
Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues
My dick is purple and it can’t hurt you (2024) by Adel Dymskoy
For a long time, I couldn’t imagine myself dating a butch. In fact, I couldn’t picture being with anyone who wasn’t femme. Who would I be if I couldn’t hide behind this strong, masculine, top persona? Giving up that role —being the one who’s touched, the one who’s kissed —was something I thought I could never allow myself to do.
For many butches, mascs, and transmasculine people, feeling sexual pleasure with partners is uncommon. In lesbian relationships, one partner often gives while the other receives pleasure. Lesbians who prefer not to be touched are sometimes called “stone butch” or “stone top.” But being “stone” is not merely a sexual stance; it’s an aesthetic and an attitude, often expressed with a profound sense of masculinity. However, this masculinity takes a unique form that subverts the heterosexual masculine ideal. Economically, butches challenge this ideal as well— they are often more exposed to homophobic discrimination than their femme partners, making them more likely to experience social descent by working in factories or manual labor, while femme partners are sometimes able to retain social status more easily, becoming the main economic source in the relation. Butch bodies become dissident by reclaiming masculine codes and transforming their purpose. Rather than reinforcing the heterosexual norm, they embody a subversion of it, reorienting masculinity outside the bounds of reproduction and heteronormative expectations.
Yet, despite this transformative redefinition of masculinity, there remains a haunting question: why does this reluctance to be touched run so deeply among stones, tops, mascs, and trans people? Why me? Why us? Will I ever be able to actually feel pleasure ?
Could the answer really be that we are the monsters? That we, who can’t cum or be touched without tensing every nerve and retreating inward, are somehow the problem? No. I argue that this is fundamentally a societal issue around desire, pleasure, and gender. In the long history of sexist, cis-heteronormative representations of sex, men are depicted as the ones who desire, whose arousal is immediate and unfiltered. Women, on the other hand, are framed as the ones who endure male desire, the ones who are penetrated, who ‘receive’. I’m not the one who desires—not in this way. I don’t connect with this so-called ‘sexual urge.’ But I’m also not the one who ‘gets fucked,’ because, deep down, being fucked feels synonymous with being a woman.
Thinking of this deeply personal struggle as a societal issue wasn’t obvious at first. Like many, I initially saw myself through an individualist, liberal, capitalist lens, thinking it was a disease, a curse alienating my body and mind. Maybe it was the price I had to pay for denying my female identity. I even thought that sleeping with men might “fix” me. It took time to break out of that individual mindset—to stop seeing myself as isolated from the world and start recognizing myself as a product of an economic and political system. My body had been shaped by years of indoctrination and abuse, a cycle of violence that disciplines our bodies and minds.
One author profoundly helped me reach this terrifying yet liberating understanding of my body, Paul B. Preciado. It was my ex’s girlfriend’s mom—a psychiatrist—who first handed me one of his books, maybe the most important one he ever wrote: Testo Junkie.
In this book, Paul B. Preciado pushes us to reconsider what we define as technology: media, culture, hormones, architecture, and social structures all qualify. For Preciado, technology includes any object, material or immaterial, that shapes and sculpts our bodies and experiences. By questioning technology as an omnipresent force that molds our bodies, Preciado destigmatizes the act of reshaping oneself—whether through sexual practices with objects like dildos or by injecting testosterone. He dismantles the boundaries between the ‘normal’ body and so-called ‘monstrous’ bodies — trans people, butches, fags, freaks — revealing that the body is a malleable entity, continually reshaped by external forces.
Reflecting on this, I’m struck by how the heteronormative portrayal of coitus has shaped my own body image since birth, numbing certain areas while making others so sensitive that I feel almost skinned. This rigid framework of desire and bodily roles feels like a technology of its own — a set of rules that governs and defines how we see and feel our own bodies.
I want a transsexual revolution of sex. I want to fuck and I want to be fucked. I want to cum and I want to make people like me cum.
The new sex and biodrag
Subverting normative societal structures doesn’t involve inventing a third alternative that sits outside the gender binary. Constructs like man/woman, masculinity/femininity, heterosexuality/homosexuality, top/bottom derive meaning only through their opposing relationships; isolated, they lose significance. Yet, this binary lens deeply informs how we perceive the world. Consequently, the subversion of these structures—especially of heteronormative sexual codes—must unfold within this binary framework.
Preciado’s concept of biodrag encapsulates the personal endeavor of reshaping the body through hormones, fundamentally questioning the idea of “male” and “female.” Biodrag transcends binary constraints, embodying a radical engagement with the body that recognizes it as infinitely adaptable, untethered to static notions of identity or gender. This act becomes a powerful statement: a reclamation of the body as malleable, designed not by biology alone but by our desires and choices.
Shooting myself with testosterone makes me horny (2024) by Xavier Red
The Strap
The strap-on, commonly used as a sex toy, especially among queer couples, consists of a latex or plastic phallus attached to a harness around the waist. This setup allows the wearer to simulate penetrative sex, hence the name "strap-on." I initially held strong negative feelings toward strap-ons, seeing them as extreme or even perverse. How could someone dare to imitate something they were not and could never be? Didn’t the strap-on undermine the essence of heterosexual penetration, where the penis is often seen as driven by an intrinsic desire? In a lesbian relationship, the strap-on shifts to be an instrument of mutual pleasure—a way of giving to and connecting with a partner.
The strap-on has the potential to become a symbol of sexual revolution. Beyond subverting the sacred status of the dick, it can—and, I would argue, must—reshape our desires by detaching penetration from the heteronormative framework, separating it from the notion of the “real” dick, with its pulsing blood and hardness. Unlike what I first thought, a strap-on isn’t an attempt to recreate a penis, the supposedly “lost prize” of lesbian sex. It’s more than that. Anyone involved can wear it, anyone can penetrate or be penetrated; thus, penetration becomes less entangled with femininity. It doesn’t follow the pattern of soft-hard-cum-soft; it’s always hard, freed from the rhythm of the male orgasm.
In his book, Preciado offers a striking, shocking, and arousing account of his first time being fucked with a strap-on—by none other than Virginie Despentes.
“Virginology
The new year. I get stoned. In every way possible. Always more so. The first time she fucked me with my own dildoharness, she made me come as if I were a schoolgirl. Being taken by your own dildo-harness: an act of extreme humility, relinquishing all forms of my hormonal, prosthetic, or cultural virility. She induces me to produce a form of femininity I’ve never allowed myself. Not an essential femininity, or a nature hidden behind the drag king, but rather, a kind of “masculine femininity,” a “drag king femininity.” I’m her king bitch, her trans whore, a kid showing his vulva behind her big cock. I’ve become her slave, getting pierced angrily, a nymphomaniac who’d like to unzip every fly in search of sex organs to take into my mouth, for every orifice. Without her, I would have stuck to my insatiable instinct to penetrate. Only she, queen of the bitches, had the right to transform this body into a hole that’s always open, at her disposal. Gloriam penetrationis.”
The next sexual encounter you’ll have
The sole purpose of writing this is to prompt readers to question their own ways of fucking, their own fantasies and desires. Challenging what makes you wet or hard is a way to reclaim control over the shaping of your body and mind—a truly political act. Why do so many of us so easily declare that we’d never date a trans person, a butch, or a too-feminine fag? Why are we so easily manipulated when it comes to our attractions? Rethinking your sexuality is rethinking society as a whole.
Xavier Red
