Are straight dudes ready for a pegging renaissance?

Straight people might love to act like they’re nothing but wholesome and vanilla in bed, but we know better. It’s a matter of public record that straight people can get quite freaky indeed between the sheets, and perhaps there’s no better reminder than the recent streaming hit “The Hunting Wives.”

Granted, the characters doing the pegging in that show are far from straight, but they are freaky. More than that, they’re got their finger on the pulse…quite literally. At this depressingly regressive moment in American culture, when straight people are acting straighter (and more annoying) than ever before, it only makes sense that pegging would come back in style to relieve some of the tension.

How about we take this to the next level?

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In 2001, Dan Savage introduced his readers to the term “pegging,” his word for the act of straight anal sex in which the woman is the dominant partner. Soon enough, we were in the middle of a bonafide cultural pegging bonanza. In a 2006 episode of “Weeds,” Justin Kirk takes it up the butt from his bisexual dream girl. In 2007, future whistleblower Stormy Daniels pegged a guy on the Courtney Cox drama “Dirt.” By the mid 2010s, pegging was all over pop culture, from a “Broad City” episode to Melissa Barrera on “Vida” to that Deadpool moment. The straights had taken to pegging with aplomb, and there was no stopping them.

There was just one problem, as straight people saw it: isn’t it kind of gay to let your wife put something up your butt? That, at least, was the fear for certain pegging enthusiasts. And if there’s one thing we know about straight people, it’s that they are often paralyzed by the fear of being or even seeming gay. Which is a shame, because pegging can be fun for everyone involved—but especially for the straight men who get to experience “intense, never-ending, and sometimes exhausting” prostate orgasms.

But we may be in for a straight strap-on revival, thanks to that “Hunting Wives” scene. Online, the discourse is flowing. And in the bedroom, we could be looking at a full-on pegging renaissance.

Despite the shock that greeted this “Hunting Wives” moment, many couples felt seen. The truth is that men of all sexualities may enjoy taking something up the butt, and that’s simply a fact of life. Women also have plenty of reasons for enjoying the dominant role in sex.

“A woman’s desire to take a man, to look at him, spread him open, and enter him, emerges from a rich and complex blend of erotic curiosity, psychological inversion, and intimate power,” one poster on the subreddit r/straightpegging writes. “When she gazes at his an*s, especially when he offers it to her willingly, she is not simply observing a part of the body often kept hidden; she is witnessing a form of surrender. The male body, long cast as the active force in sex, becomes in that moment something unveiled, yielded, and available.”

Poetry in motion, people.

Let’s hope “The Hunting Wives” gives straight people the gusto to ask for what they really want in bed. Because one thing is quite clear: the happier straight people are in their own lives, the less likely they are to mount a cultural crusade against gay people!

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