Homemade isn’t always best

Q I’m a straight teenage male, but I can’t climax unless I am
stimulating my anus or rectum. I use various objects, like cucumbers.
The reason I don’t buy a toy is that I live in a very religious
household and my parents would disown me if they found a sex toy in my
room.

I take a toilet plunger and wrap the handle with toilet paper and
tissues. Then I take a plastic bag and put it over the top. After that,
I wrap a rubber band around the bottom part of the bag so it can’t
slide off, lube it up and fuck away! I really like this: I can put the
suction part on the floor, sit on the handle part and basically ride it
while I use my hands to stroke my dick/balls.

I know you’re thinking, “Gross! Do you realize that thing’s been in
the toilet?!” But I sterilize the handle with Lysol, then put soap on
it before wrapping it with toilet paper. I also put disinfectant on the
plastic bag, then wash it off with water. After I’m done, I put more
disinfectant/soap on the handle and wash it off so people who are using
the plunger for its normal use don’t get my ass germs. I’ve been doing
this for about five years and haven’t felt any bad symptoms except the
occasional trace bleeding (I think it was due to not enough lube—or
it may be due to the ridges of the bag). A few times I actually bled a
lot (about the same amount as a medium cut on your finger) for two or
three days, but I didn’t feel it in my butt and only knew that I was
bleeding when I took a shit.

Are homemade dildos a bad idea? Am I putting my family at risk by
getting my ass germs on the plunger? –Always Nervous Until
Sanitized

A For the love of god, ANUS, get your hands and ass on an actual sex
toy—they make dildos with suction-cup bases—before you do some real
damage to yourself. Your 10-step toilet-plunger-into-anal-sex-toy plan
is ingenious, I’ll admit, and your concern for the health of your
family is touching. But given a choice between explaining your
masturbatory routine to your parents because they found a dildo in your
room or explaining it to them because you wound up in an emergency room
because your luck ran out and the bleeding didn’t stop, ANUS, I hope
you would opt for the former.

If you’re worried about the repercussions of discovery—such as
being disowned—then hide the dildo someplace other than your room.
Got siblings? Hide your dildo in the room of your least favourite. If
you’re an only child, find a beat-up-looking box, a couple of porn
magazines that predate your family’s tenure in your home, and hide the
box with the dildo and old mags in the crawl space or a drop ceiling or
the rafters. If your folks find it, they’ll think it belonged to some
perverted previous owner or tenant, not to their
straight-but-needs-anal-stimulation-to-climax son.

A word to my fellow parents: If you find a penetration toy hidden in
your child’s room—why were you snooping?—do not freak the fuck out,
do not disown your kid and do not discard the toy. Your child probably
went to great lengths to obtain that toy—teenagers can’t just walk
into sex shops—and he or she probably didn’t decide to run the risks
of obtaining and concealing a sex toy until he or she had a bad
experience with an improvised sex toy, e.g., plunger-related rectal
bleeding, difficulty retrieving a cucumber from the vaginal canal. If
you make a scene and take the toy, your child may not acquire
another—but your child’s experiments with insertion will continue. He
or she will just go back to using produce (swiped from the fridge for
use, then returned to the fridge after use) or plunger handles or
worse.

Q My boyfriend always goes soft after he penetrates me. He’s come in
me only a handful of times—and I’m a bottom! When it comes to oral,
he doesn’t have trouble staying hard. Even more curious: He’s only
21! Can someone that young really have erectile dysfunction? We’ve
tried cock rings, and they don’t help: He can keep his hard-on for a
little longer (enough time to get inside me without getting soft), but
it doesn’t take long for him to get soft again. Dan, what do you think
is going on? He’ll be super-hard when I’m sucking him off, then I’ll
start jerking him a bit, then he’ll get inside me and then he’s soft.
Is there anything we can do? Does he have erectile dysfunction?
—Lover Is Missing Poundings

A Your boyfriend is hard during oral sex and when you jerk his cock,
LIMP, and only loses his erection when he’s in your ass or about to go
in. Hmm. That doesn’t sound like ED to me—there’s no such thing as
“act-specific ED”—but more like YBDLAS, or “your boyfriend doesn’t
like anal sex.”

Your boyfriend may feel pressure to perform, LIMP, as being fucked
is important to you. (Please tell me that he’s coming inside a condom
when he comes inside you.) And he may feel some pressure to conform.
Anal sex among gay men has been elevated to the status of vaginal sex
among straight men, LIMP, in that it’s somehow become the defining sex
act, despite the fact that roughly a quarter of all gay men don’t enjoy
and don’t indulge in anal sex. Your boyfriend may be one of those guys,
but he’s too inhibited to tell you how he feels because, hey, it’s
buttfucking and he’s gay and all gay men are buttfuckers and if he
doesn’t enjoy buttfucking then he’s some sort of defective gay
buttfucker.

Tell him he doesn’t have to do it if he doesn’t enjoy it and, for
the time being at least, you’re taking anal off the menu—lifting the
pressure off his shoulders and dick. Focus on the stuff that works for
him right now: oral and JO. And remember, LIMP, if he’s coming in your
mouth, he’s still coming inside you.

Q When I bottom for my BF, if he can’t get it in right away, he goes
flaccid. What can I do? —Boy Only Needs Erect Dick

A BONED put this question to me—via index card—at a “Savage Love
Live” event at UC Santa Cruz. I was in a bad way that night—sick with
the flu—and somehow misunderstood the question. I read it as the
person being fucked went limp when penetration wasn’t immediate, not
the person doing the fucking. Sorry about that, BONED.

A Ask the BF what the problem is. He may be worried about you—is he hurting you?—or perhaps the pressure on his cock as he attempts to push it in is painful for him. I don’t think it’s the same problem as LIMP’s boyfriend; your letter seems to imply that there isn’t a problem when the boyfriend bottoms for you, so it’s not about disliking anal sex. It could be, though, that your boyfriend is more of a bottom, i.e., prefers the receptive role during anal intercourse. A lot of bottom guys can top, of course, but some need to quickly get in there and start pumping away, because the sensations help them maintain their erections even as they do this thing—fucking—that they would really prefer to have done to them. A delay in the action, such as an inability to get it in “right away,” could lead to the problem you describe, BONED.

This article appears in Oct 22-28, 2009.