Sealed Lips is Mashable’s series on pelvic pain, an experience rarely discussed but shockingly common.
Soon after she started having sex, Emily Sauer realized that deep penetration sent her into bouts of pain. She tried to find advice online, but all she found were blogs gushing over big dicks, and retailers hawking supplements and tools meant to help people with penises get bigger, go deeper, last longer. She tried to talk to doctors, but they all dismissed her pain, telling her she just needed to drink some wine and relax — which didn't work in the slightest. After years of searching, the closest she'd come to finding a fix for her frustrating issue was the following hack: Cut the end off of a tube sock. Roll it into a ring of fabric. Slide it down to the base of your partner's penis, or the toy they're using on you. This will limit their maximum depth of penetration. It was a terrible idea — uncomfortable and unsanitary.
For lack of options, in 2017 Sauer decided to invent her own solution. The result was the OhNut, a series of skin-soft rings that act as a comfortable and body-safe bumper at the base of a penis or a toy. Three prominent sex toy retailers, as well as a number of sexologists, told Mashable that it was the first device device made specifically to limit the depth of penetration that they'd ever seen. And it's been a hit with sexperts and everyday consumers alike, because pain triggered by deep penetration is actually a common problem, especially when above-average-length penises are involved. It's just an incredibly under-addressed issue.
But the OhNut wasn't the first such device ever. Nearly 800 years ago, the Sufi poet Jalal al-Din Mohammed Rumi wrote a poem about a (likely fictional) maid who used a specially-carved gourd during sex to keep her partner from pushing too deep into her. (By the by, her partner was a donkey.) And just over 400 years ago, Giulelmus Fabricius Hildanus, a pioneer of early modern surgery, developed a wearable bumper to limit pain caused during sex "by a too large penis." He put a description of the made-to-measure item in one of his widely-circulated medical texts. Erwin Kompanje, a Dutch medical historian, wrote extensively about Hildanus' now long-forgotten device in the mid-aughts, strenuously arguing that it "deserves a resurrection in today's medical practice."
If we already had rudimentary tools built to tackle deep penetration pain centuries ago, why was Sauer so hard-up for help that she had to reinvent the wheel just five years ago? The answer to that riddle speaks to the importance of diversity and inclusion to the field of sexual health.
A brief history of deep penetration pain (and its erasure)
We don't know much about how the vast majority of human cultures historically thought about or addressed issues like pain during sex because there are few recorded details on the subject in the texts, tales, or items they left behind. But most of the cultures that did leave us ample records about their sexual attitudes clearly didn't much care about the experience of receptive partners during sex. In ancient Greece, for example, "we find some discussions of foreplay and playful seduction," says Alastair Blanshard, author of the definitive Sex: Vice and Love from Antiquity to Modernity. "But the focus of the act of penetration is almost exclusively on the penetrator. This is best summed up by a vase painting showing a man barking 'keep still' to a woman he is penetrating from behind, seemingly indifferent to any discomfort she may be feeling."
The terms we use when talking about sex reflect the widespread and longstanding nature of this penile focus, argues Amy Boyajian of Wild Flower, a sexual health boutique focused on inclusion and education. Specifically, they convey the long-entrenched idea that "the penis-owner is the one doing and leading the action of sex," they explain. "If sex came from a receiver-centered view, we might say envelopment or enwrapping" instead of penetration when talking about intercourse.
Yet in the medieval era, the Catholic Church devoted ample attention to reports of pain caused by a "disparity between the size of male and female genitals," as the historian Ruth Evans noted in a recent academic article — because church leaders believed this size-based pain caused infertility and miscarriages. (It doesn't.) In the name of procreation and the sanctity of the family unit, they recorded ideas on how to address this issue in texts used to train midwives and physicians. It was this thought stream that motivated Hildanus’ work on his penis-shortening contraption. (We don't know if similar beliefs led to the development of Rumi's gourd. In fact, we don't even know if his device actually existed, or if it was just a fanciful literary device.)
No remaining records contain any clues about how widely known or used Hildanus’ device was, if others like it existed, or when it/they fell off of the medical radar. But we do know that leading church figures went back and forth throughout the medieval era on how much stock to put into the pain-fertility-miscarriage theory. Innocent III, a famous late-12th century pope, thought size-related pain was a clear and serious enough issue that he declared it fair grounds for the dissolution of any marriage, Evans writes. But the influential early-13th century theologian William of Rennes argued that pain during sex was no cause for concern — and that women ought to just bear it.
William's views eventually won out, likely because they aligned with the urges and inclinations of all-male decision-making bodies. European medical practice also became increasingly male-dominated and -focused as it slowly professionalized. By the dawn of the modern era, few if any medical experts cared about women's personal experiences of sex. They just wanted to make sure they could satisfy male sexual urges, and reliable pump out children. This consensus left little conceptual space for devices meant to address pain caused by deep penetration.
Sauer and others draw a direct line from this legacy of overt sexual bias in the medical domain to modern practitioners' widespread cluelessness about and dismissiveness of receptive partners' reports of pain during deep penetration. This history also goes a long way towards explaining why even seemingly progressive guides to navigating this sort of pain focus on what a receptive partner can do to accommodate a big penis, rather than on what a penis-haver can do to work with receptive anatomy. Notably, most prescribe relaxation techniques, stretching regimens, plenty of build-up and lubrication, and positions that task receptive partners with controlling the depth, angle, and speed of penetration.
Bigger isn't always better
Western culture also wasn't as fixated on big dicks in Hildanus’ day as it is now. In fact, from antiquity straight through to the renaissance most artists and philosophers extolled the virtues of a dainty dick, painting colossal cocks as grotesque and laughable signs of stupid animalism. No one's entirely sure when, why, or how the shift towards our modern big dick fixation started. (Elements of Western culture likely always had some ever-shifting degree of appreciation for a little extra girth and length as a sign of healthy male virility, even as they heaped scorn on the heartiest of hard-ons.) But over the last few decades especially, many folks internalized the idea that a bigger penis is always better. Cis-hetero men especially are so hung up on size that even many of average and above-average dimensions now think they need to bulk up, somehow.
Until recently, men dominated the adult products industry, explains Hallie Lieberman, the author of Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy, both as designers and consumers. So, their tastes and hang-ups have long set the tone for the sexual health and wellness market. Hence the endless stream of dubious, even dangerous, size-enhancing products and services. These male decision-makers saw no need for something that'd make them look or feel smaller. So, they never thought to revive or re-invent something like Hildanus’ device. It wouldn't have vital, marketable big dick energy.
Lieberman reviewed her archive of over 60 years' worth of sex toy catalogues for this article. To her surprise, she could not find a single device designed to address deep penetration pain before Sauer's OhNut hit the market. (Heather Jeffcoat, a pelvic health expert, recalls seeing one depth-limiting device in a catalogue about 20 years ago, but she wrote it off as too rigid and cumbersome for either penetrative sexual partner to enjoy. She can't remember exactly where she saw this device, what it was called, or which toy maker or medical firm made it, though. And she adds that after that device, she too saw nothing suited to this need until the OhNut came out.)
Systematic neglect in the medical world and the adult industry forced many receptive partners to grit their teeth and push through painful sex for decades. But not all. The sexologist Carol Queen says that Good Vibrations, the sex store chain she's worked with since 1990, has always had at least a few customers looking for depth-limiting devices. Through experimentation, toy experts and consumers alike figured out that they could stack up thick cock rings, or trim the ends off a masturbation sleeve, to create a DIY bumper for the base of a penis or toy.
These hacks are cheap and easy, Queen notes. However, Wild Flower's Boyajian points out that stacking cock rings is not always safe. These rings increase rigidity by restricting blood flow into and out of the penis. That's inherently risky for some folks with circulatory issues or pre-existing penile injuries. And everyone courts injuries and mishaps if they wear cock rings too long, or use one that's too tight, whether alone or in a stack. Trimmed-down sleeves are certainly safer overall. However, since they weren't designed as bumpers, they can be a bit unwieldy in that role.
These DIY solutions spread through the queer community, ever experimental and broadly liberated from heterosexual cultural scripts as it is, over the course of a few decades, Boyajian notes. But "it wasn’t until six or seven years ago that I first saw the same methods discussed by cisgender women who were finding penetration uncomfortable or painful." They believe this reflects a sea change in sexual discourse over the last decade, flowing out of novel online spaces that finally gave women room to publicly critique and organize against the widespread disregard for their experiences.
This broad, public reevaluation of norms and expectations around sex and pleasure, alongside the mainstreaming of the sexual health and wellness industry, then created cultural and economic space for a new wave of products designed by and/or for receptive partners. Which explains how and why a few other explicitly depth-limiting devices, like the established toy brand Perfect Fit's The Bumper Thrust Buffer, launched around the same time as the OhNut.
"Some say they've changed their sex lives, making pleasure through penetration possible."
Amy Boyajian, Wild Flower
"These toys are on the rise," says Boyajian. "Users give overwhelmingly positive feedback on them. Some say they've changed their sex lives, making pleasure through penetration possible."
Still, Queen acknowledges, many people don’t seem to know about them yet — including sexual health professionals. After Mashable asked urologist Dr. Jesse Mills, director of the Men's Clinic at the University of California, Los Angeles, for his thoughts on the OhNut and its ilk, he conferred with several colleagues and determined that none of them had ever even heard of a depth-limiting device before.
This may change as early adopters start singing their praises in mainstream venues, and as their price points go down. (Most currently cost over $65, which is over three times as expensive as an open-ended masturbation sleeve, Boyajian notes.)
But if the history of Hildanus' depth-limiting device and its disappearance into the historical ethet tells us anything, it's that we shouldn't take this trajectory as a given. Medical experts still largely discount receptive partners' accounts of sexual pain. Mainstream culture still glories in the quest for big dicks, to the exclusion of every other objective. And there is always a risk that the tides that've buoyed diverse voices, allowing the re-invention of penis bumpers, will recede — and take these devices back into obscurity again with them. That'd leave the countless Sauers of the world up shit creek once more.
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