A new generation is asking: Is pegging automatically gay?

When it comes to the various pleasures of the human anatomy, gay people have always been ahead of the booty curve. Straight people, on the other hand, have tended to lag behind, often at their own peril. It’s a commonly accepted fact, for instance, that while queer people have always known about the wonders of the derriere, straight people only learned about pegging sometime in the mid 2000s, approximately after Dan Savage first discussed it on his “Savage Love” podcast but before Shortbus came out. Now, they’re facing a pegging renaissance that has young people asking some very familiar questions. At Cornell University, an age old debate is being revisited afresh by the school’s Big Red Moon Club for queer students. The kids are asking: is pegging an inherently queer activity, or does the butt truly belong to everyone? The responses from students were pretty eye-opening. “The vulgar slang noun ‘pegging’ refers to sexual activity in which a person penetrates the anus of their sexual partner via a strap-on appendage,” writes one attendee who took serious notes during the session. While the kind of sex can be enjoyed by partners of any combination of genders, we know that straight men tend to be ultra sensitive about butt play (in more ways than one.) But if a decision about the queerness of a sex act is determined by society’s relationship to it—rather than an individual desire for it—doesn’t that just muddy the waters even further? How about we take this to the next level? Subscribe to our newsletter for a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy. Subscribe to our Newsletter today “If you say pegging is gay,” one queer couple said during the debate, “you might have some unresolved internal homophobia.” Makes sense—why should everything sexual involving the butt be viewed as gay? And as other attendees pointed out, when lesbians use a strap on, it’s never considered straight. So why should sex between straight couples involving butt play be considered automatically queer? More than 150 students showed up to listen to the arguments for and against, and in the end, the students concluded that pegging “is good, and therefore gay.” I mean, we can’t argue with that logic. But we also have to acknowledge that being gay is obviously about much more than a single sex act. While certain kinks might feel queerer or more forbidden than others, the only thing that unequivocally makes a man gay or bisexual is a desire to love and have sex with another man. The idea that certain acts, positions, or kinks indulged in by straight couples speak to some hidden queerness in one or the other partner feels like it plays right into the hands of MAGA freaks who believe that anything other than missionary sex is automatically gay. If we let the oppressor define which types of sex belong to which sexualities, we’ve already lost. “I don’t say I peg,” explains one Redditor in a helpful thread. “I say ‘I top’, ‘play pitcher’ etc to assert my preference.” Others in the same thread explain that pegging, while often seen as a kink, is the primary mode of sex for many straight couples, with the term pegging itself having come about as a way to distinguish lesbian strap-on sex from straight couples who like to keep it versatile. “What gets you off is different from who you want to get off with,” another Redditor says in a separate thread about pegging being a potential gateway to queerness. And in the words of another eloquent poster, “I can shove a cucumber up my a** and get a prostate orgasm from it. Doesn’t mean I wanna f*ck the jolly green giant. Erotic fantasy can be different from reality.” In the words of another expert, “your anus doesn’t have a sexual orientation.” The bottom line here is that butt play does indeed belong to everyone, but in a repressed culture that still has a lot of unpacking to do around its own internalized homophobia, those who identify as straight might still fear the pleasure they experience from types of sex that are less frequently discussed or represented in the mainstream. We have long way to go in this area, but thankfully Hunting Wives is doing the important work of breaking down these barriers, one pegging scene at a time. Related Is Peter Thiel the mysterious sugar daddy helping to bankroll notorious “looksmaxxer” Clavicular? A donor named “P” is Clavicular’s biggest benefactor. Sign up for the Queerty newsletter to stay on top of the hottest stories in LGBTQ+ entertainment, politics, and culture.