Skip to content

Manly Strap-Ons Still Selling Like Hot Bronuts

I usually avoid linking to anything on Buzzfeed. On principle. I forget exactly what that principle is but I’m sure it was a very good one.

However this list of ’27 gendered products’ is rather funny. ‘Gendered products’ is of course a polite way of saying manly strap-ons – things that have to be butched up so that men’s penises don’t shrivel and blow away when they use/do them. Scary things like sunscreen and soap.

I say ‘men’s penises’ but really I mean American men’s penises. Most of the manly strap-ons are American – very American – and began to come on thick and strong during the faux backlash the US had against metrosexuality in the late Noughties. Remember the ‘menaissance‘? Thought not.

Strapping a ‘man’ word onto something not very manly (manscara, mandates, manbag) was a kind of phallic pacifier, a lucky charm against any anxiety about sexual ambiguity. In other countries, such as Australia, this might have been done with humour and irony – but not in the US.

It was after all the US which gave us, in all seriousness, the ‘lumbersexual’ – the manly strap-on man (who worked in IT or artisan coffee retail). And before him the ‘ubersexual’, the ‘heteropolitan’ and the ‘machosexual’. All hysterical reaction-formations to the metrosexual.

Four years ago I hoped that manly strap-ons and campy codpieces had peaked – or drooped – with ‘hegans’. You know, men who don’t eat meat but aren’t faggy at all but MANLY. I was so wrong. Apparently there is such a thing in the world as ‘Mangria’ – though probably you shouldn’t drink it with a raised pinky, or even too much fruit.

And ‘bronuts’. Which you eat when you want to ‘snack like a man’. Whatever the bloody Nora that means.

My favourite though is the manly soap with grips – a very practical addition. Ensuring, of course, that it is NEVER DROPPED.

Become a patron at Patreon!

1 thought on “Manly Strap-Ons Still Selling Like Hot Bronuts”

  1. ‘Bronuts,’ ‘menaissance,’ anything with ‘man’ added at the start…I can’t stand the portmanteaus. I do wish the Americans would leave the English language alone. When your nation invents horrifyingly bad and clumsy words like ‘bromance’ and ‘staycation’ and (worst of all) ‘mansplain’…a pox be upon your pronunciation, langmanglers! (Language manglers)(least ‘langmangers’ sounds like a legit Scottish word)(chuckling here)

Comments are closed.