The purple strap-on Nikki wore to fuck Jenny in that sex scene of last week’s The L Word: hot. The fact that it it took five years for a sexually explicit dyke series to feature a strap-on in a sex scene: weird. (Alice and Dana's play toy notwithstanding.) Watching Jenny awkwardly play dress up for Nikki was excruciating, as was Nikki’s response when Jenny asked her how she was gonna fuck her. “Like a man!” Nikki squealed straightly. Oooooh, hot! But I will say this: the act itself was actually pretty dead-on. It looked real. I was impressed -- shocked that I was finally seeing it, but impressed nonetheless.

I understand why there are fewer oral sex scenes on the show. and why the camera always zooms in on the femmier actress’s face when sex is portrayed. The general public is still homophobic, Showtime is still fairly mainstream and anything too different would be too gay to bear. It’s why Danny Noriega was voted off American Idol last week. It’s why former mayor Ed Koch never came out of the closet. It’s why Michelle Rodriguez, Brooke Shields, Janet Reno and most WNBA players still haven’t. America can only swallow so much gay. A butch woman in the throes of ecstasy, an extended close-up on a women receiving oral sex from another woman: too gay. But ideologically speaking, strap-ons are pretty straight. So, seriously, why did it take till the tenth episode of the fifth season of our beloved The L Word for a harnessed dildo to get any stage time?

To an extent, for political reasons, I get it. Many women (the type who spell “women” with a “y,” obsess about “Mich Fest” and have beaded armpit hair) are anti-strap-on or anything phallic whatsoever. They're the type who wouldn’t be caught dead wearing anything that resembles a phallus cause they’re not that type of guuurrrrrl. To them, I say “Keep on keepin’ on, sister." Or is it sistyr?

But to the rest of you, I ask the following question: What are your thoughts on strap-ons? I find that it takes a minute to get used to them, no doubt. But once I did, they’ve been nothing but lovely, each and every time.

The only unpleasant experience I’ve ever had with a strap-on was in an airport in Rome. Actually, unpleasant doesn’t do it justice. I was traveling with my family and my girlfriend at the time and a tiny man with two different-length legs was checking random bags. The line to check-in was long and winding and he was stopping at every tenth passenger or so to first ask a bunch of questions about the content of their luggage, and then to tear through their bags like a madman, making sure that they hadn’t been dishonest in their pre-tear interview. I was one of the chosen ones. My girlfriend’s face went white as a ghost. She had spent two weeks trying to win over my difficult family and now she feared that her efforts had been made in vain.

"In your bag, there is explosives?” he asked.
“No.”
“There is strange parcel accepted from stranger?”
“No.”
“There is liquid or drugs?”
“No.”

He bent over and began digging through my bag. “There is battery operated machine?” he inquired, elbows deep in wrinkled laundry.
Fuck, I thought. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“There is anything in bag with battery, or operated on a batteries.”
I took a deep breath. My gf turned away, mortified.
“What’s going on?!” pestered my mom.
“Nothing, Mom. Can I have a second?”
“Katherine, the line is moving. What do you have in your bag?!” My dad bellowed.
“Guys, you probably don’t want to know.”
They looked from me to the gf, and then turned beet red.
“Oh.”

I looked the guy in the eye. I could be openly mortified, or I could pretend that it was no skin off my back and tell him. “I have something with batteries in my bag.”

The guy looked annoyed. His bi-focals had slid to the tip of his greasy beak-like nose. “Is alarm clock, is Walkman, is Discman…? Show it to me. Remove batteries here in your hand.”

I reached into the side pocket. I was holding up a line of about 60 people by now and my parents were pretending to read the paper about four feet away. I pulled out the vibrating strap-on and proceeded to remove the batteries from the inside and present them to him in my outstretched palm.
The man was studying it uneasily. It was the color of gun metal and had grooves along the sides. It was huge.

“What is that one?” he questioned.
“It’s a vibrating penis,” I answered. On the inside I was beyond humiliated, but I wasn’t about to let him, the people gawking in line or my parents see that.

The man started sweating and tried to maintain his cool as he nodded and then scurried away, looking for his next victim. “Thanks you,” he called limply over his shoulder, without looking back.