I can't say the word dildo! I just wont do it. It just sounds too much like Bilbo, as in Bilbo Baggins. It makes me hear all the lyrics of Leonard Nimoy's The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins in my head. In fact, it's so insidious I will now force you to make that connection as well by presenting you with this video:
Why not dildo? Well, it's not sexy. Why can't we say cock? Or dick? Or tool, or toy or anything besides dildo. Personally, I think the term cock is just dandy. Queer females have de-maled, demasculinized, and degendered the word cock. Cock is a perfectly fine word. Masculine or feminine, it belongs to us if we use it.
I wrote a book called Girl Meets Girl with the goal of looking at dyke dating in a manner that includes all the ways in which we experience gender and sexuality. I stand by my scissor-kickin' sisters of the eighties that eschewed the dildo as heteronormative and a tool (ha!) of the patriarchy. But that experience is not mine.
By the time I got down to writing Girl Meets Girl I had just left On Our Backs magazine after five long years. I'd moved from San Francisco to New York and started working with Velvetpark magazine. I had spoken at tons of Pride celebrations in big cities and small towns all over the country and I'd done a huge reading tour with another book called Box Lunch. I was living on Parisa Parnian's couch during that time and we talked sex all day long. All day long. And in between trying to write, Grace Moon, the publisher of Velvetpark, and I were traveling to big gay gigs in other cities and passionately discussing gender and sex during 17 hour car rides.
I talked to dykes everywhere about their dicks and dates. I mean, what I'm trying to say is, I've talked to a lot of lesbians, even the ones who hate it when you call them lesbians. And the thing that kept coming up was that much like feminism, lesbian consciousness has gone through a series of waves. We've entered a new wave of lesbianism. Even the meaning of lesbian is obscured by the politics of who qualifies as a lesbian and who doesn't.
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Right now in our queer world we've created a consciousness where gender and biology aren't related. We created a postmodern butch-femme where either role is anything and everything and you can't make assumptions about someone based on the way they dress. We're over identity politics. We are deconstructing the lesbian community and rebuilding it from the ground up to suit the way we fuck and fall in love.
When I got the first draft of the Girl Meets Girl back from my editor, her queries were all about my use of language and labels. Throughout the entire manuscript my editor changed cock to dildo. It was so funny. Red pen, dildo, dildo, all over the damn thing. She even left me a snarky little note about how I needed to realize that "most people" don't use the word cock. And I was like, "Then why the hell would they want to read my damn book?" In the end we agreed to mix it up.
It's difficult to talk about the experiences of queer women in a language that doesn't recognize our existence. But it's as relevant to change the meaning of language as it is to create new language. The beauty of English is that it's mutable. Our society is a mixed bag. The language we use every day includes all ethnicities and all experiences of people in this country. Together we have created wonderfully integrated language.
Think about the words you use every day. Where did they come from? The Spanglish slang, the 'shizzle my nizzle' of hip hop culture, the charged language of queer sex, the visceral terms of leathersex, the abbreviations of txt messaging and IM, and the 'LOL' of internet culture. Even the Farkian slang on the Internet is used by all of us.
That said, I believe in the power to de-hetero and reclaim words by bringing them into the vernacular of queer female experience. I use the language that comes from my own community. And I understand that it doesn't really matter what you call yourself or your girlfriend or your strap-on. The information still applies. Go ahead and use whatever words you like, but don't feel hemmed in. And let the dyke next to you use the words that hold meaning for her.
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