I Did It for Science: Strap-On

To literally have sex with myself.

State your hypothesis in the form of a prediction that can be verified by the results of the experiment.

Woody Allen once called masturbation "sex with someone you love." Paul Anka crooned, "You always hurt the one you love." Where these truisms intersect, we shall file my thirtieth and final experiment. At the end of this trial, I will have gone some way toward settling my balance at the karmic bank, as well as that of any hetero guy who ever begged his girl for a back-door key.

Please list all the materials required for this experiment (including, if applicable, how they were obtained).

Make Your Own Dildo kit:
Bucket
Penis tube
Scrotum bowl
Molding Gel in powdered form
Rubber solution (a)
Rubber solution (b)
Thermometer
Stirring stick
Easy-to-follow instructions

Harness
Water
Lube
Razor
Assistant
Asssortment of pornography

In this portion of your report, you must describe, step-by-step, what you did in your lab. It should be specific enough that someone who has not seen the lab can follow the directions and recreate the same lab.

Recently, I met Hooksexup's editor for lunch. With a heavy heart, I told him that after nearly three years of writing about my monthly sexual experiments, there was little left for me to do. "Well, you can fuck yourself," he scowled from across the table.

"Listen, I don't mean to leave you in the lurch, Michael," I said. "But I just don't see where I can go from here." (He had previously decided that all of my new ideas — most of which involved being dispatched to the Perfect 10 mansion — would only prove to be experiments in shark jumping.)

"No, I mean fuck yourself for science."

"How do you propose I do that?"

"Mold your dick, then have someone strap it on." Obviously. "It would be a great finale to the column."

In the past, I had received plenty of emails suggesting that I take it from a girl wearing a strap-on, and had quickly deleted them. Michael's twist on the idea was as terrifying as it was completely brilliant.

If you could suck your own dick, would you? In high school, it was a truth-or-dare question I would always take the dare on. But like most men, I'd already logged countless hours — and risked irreversible spinal trauma — trying to make it happen. For the record, I came tantalizingly close but ultimately decided it's a gift you're either born with or you're not. Sort of like making that weird shamrock shape with your tongue. However, if there were a correlation between Pilates and the ability to blow one's own horn, I'm certain that it would overtake baseball as the No. 1 youth activity in the country. The Dungeons and Dragons franchise would be devastated.

But I digress. Recruiting lab assistants had proved difficult in previous experiments. But the prospect of putting me through some measure of discomfort and humiliation brought volunteers out in droves. Even people I hardly knew slid out of the woodwork. Ultimately I chose Kat, a tri-sexual woman I'd briefly dated. Kat was renowned for having tried — and mastered — almost every deviant sexual act known to man. As such, she was virtually unshockable. I was comfortable with her, in the way you might be comfortable with a nurse, a rabbi or your drifter uncle.

The company that enabled this experiment is the plaintively titled makeyourowndildo.com. They didn't invent cock molding, but they've certainly been integral in bringing it to the populace at large. Most recently, the Make Your Own Dildo kit was featured in an episode of The Osbournes. I prevailed upon the company to send me a kit, then dutifully blocked out a weekend (along with any notion that my high-school peers would ever read this).

Quantify the effects of the experiment.

The dildo kit arrived in a bucket, which held a long tube, a sort of plastic half-grapefruit with a hole in it, two containers of latex, some molding gel, a thermometer, and a very thorough instruction manual. Kat arrived just as I had unpacked everything on the kitchen counter. Without a word, she opened a book bag and pulled out a stack of porn DVD's and magazines. "You're going to need some inspiration," she said. I was kind of hoping Kat would be my inspiration. Atypically, she was dating some guy called Trevor, whom she had decided to be monogamous with.

"Wait a minute. But he doesn't mind you shagging me?" I asked.

"We've talked, and neither of us consider this a breech of our agreement."

Seems the weekend was shaping up to be experimental for everyone involved.

I read the instructions twice and let Kat double check. They included all sorts of handy tips: what to do if your erection pointed either port or starboard, how to use paint to color your dildo, how to use a cock ring to ensure a good take, etc. With mixing bowls, wooden spoons, measuring cups and several pounds of white powder spread out before us, we looked like Tony Montana as he might appear as a contestant on Ready Set Cook.

Kat and I quickly learned that, as in comedy, the most important factor in replicating your penis is timing. Once you've determined how much molding powder you need, you must ensure that the water is exactly seventy-five degrees before you add it. Anything hotter or colder will increase or decrease the amount of time you have to achieve an erection. At seventy-five degrees, you have exactly three minutes to fluff up and insert yourself into the gooey mixture. Our water was at eighty-three. We decided that when it cooled to seventy-five, Kat would mix things up while I went into the other room to concentrate.

Have you ever waited for water to cool eight degrees? It takes longer than you'd think. While we waited, I took some of the porn mags, found the most interesting pages and arranged them on my bed. Then I took the garbage out and ran to the bodega to get some milk. When I got back, we were still only at seventy-nine. I was seven minutes into Crocodile Dundee 2 when Kat shouted that it was time.

The pressure was on. Being semi-erect at your dildo casting would be like having a typo in your tattoo. I was doing pretty well when Kat came into the room to check on my progress. Then I did really well. When she crossed her arms and leaned casually against the wall, I was in danger of doing far too well. "I was going to put on a little show, but it looks like you're doing all right with that copy of Tight," she said.

Kat sat on the bed and flipped through the personals in an old copy of Gazongas. She peered at me, checking her watch periodically. "Fifteen seconds," she said. As Kat walked into the kitchen, I followed her, my fist pumping furiously. "Okay, sink it in, and don't move for sixty seconds." I stood there, with the tube pointing away from my body at a forty-five degree angle, and slipped my penis in. As a pleasurable physical sensation, I'd rank it just below getting a wet willy.

"Get me the copy of Tight!" I howled as I was enveloped by the chilly, porridge-like mixture and realized that I was racing against time.

Kat came back with the magazine — and her tank top pulled up over her perfect boobs. "Does that help?"

"Yeah, it does," I said, switching my gaze between Kat and a two-page spread of a four-leg spread.

"Five, four, three, two, one. Okay, you should be done. "

Despite the initial shock, I felt confident I'd made a good impression. "Is it going to stick to your pubes?" worried Kat as I began pulling the tube away from my body. I'd read that when Cynthia Plastercaster did Hendrix, they had to remove him from the mold one hair at a time. The process was so tedious that he passed the time fucking and coming into the mold. Luckily, I wasn't attached at the short 'n' curlies. But as I started pulling harder, I discovered that I was . . . stuck. I pulled slightly harder, to no avail.

Kat collapsed against the fridge, bent over with laughter.

"I'M STUCK!" I screamed. This was entirely her fault. Her body still shaking, Kat reached up and gave the tube a tug. Something gave, and with a giant sucking sound I came free of the mold. The feeling was totally, bizarrely familiar. It was exactly like having an impression of your teeth taken at the dentist.

Kat unscrewed the caps from both bottles of rubber and mixed them up in a bowl. I was taken aback by the color, which was distinctly peanut buttery. Kat then poured the rubber mixture into the hole in the mold. As per the directions, we leaned the tube against the wall at an angle to ensure a level finish. "It says here that you're best off leaving it for twenty-four hours," she said as I cleaned up the kitchen from all the debris. "I'll swing by tomorrow at six. We could get dinner afterwards — my treat." With that, she departed. Thankfully, she left her porn behind.

Every time I walked past the mold, I couldn't help giving the replica penis a little prod. Although the anticipation was killing me, I managed to wait until Kat returned the next evening to unveil our creation. She seemed about as excited as I was. I flipped it upside down and the penis slipped right out. "Wow," we said in unison. Aside from being the color of pumpkin pie, the replica was exactly like my own schlong. The detail was absolutely incredible. You could see veins, texture and everything. As described in the instructions, there was some excess rubber, so I made like a mohel and wincingly cut it away.

Holding the disembodied replica of my cock was totally bizarre. I felt like that scary witch in The Dark Crystal, the one who held her eye in her hand and could look around corners with it. By far, the strangest aspect of having a penile lookalike in your hands is the unique perspective it gives you. Normally, you're looking at your rig from above and at arm's length. Just holding it at eye level will do wonders for your self-esteem. "Wow," I said out loud as I came eye to eye with it. "Go on, then!" chuckled Kat. "Don't pretend to be all coy."

I put it in my mouth, instinctively ensuring I covered my teeth with my lips. Jaw agape, I looked to Kat for approval. "You can do better than that!" she laughed and gently pushed it an inch or two deeper. I gagged. "Well, you're not going to win any prizes for that performance."

Sucking cock is more of a physical drain than I could have ever imagined. Spraining my neck and/or jaw was a constant fear, and I was in total charge of speed, depth and vigor. When a wang is attached to 160 pounds of dude, it must be an even more daunting prospect. Especially when they grab your head, as so many men are apparently wont to do.

I spent the next few minutes just looking at it. Then Kat took it from me and gave me a firm, stinging slap across the face with it. THWAPP! "OW!" I cried. "What was that for?"

"Well," she grinned, "some people like that. But I'm not one of those people. How about you?"

She made her point. Kat was exacting revenge for an evening of light bondage and heavy drinking toward the end of our short-lived affair. As she'll tell you, I got the procedure ass-backward; I started asking questions once the ball gag was in her mouth. Could you tell if "HHMMFF!!" means yes or no? Exactly. Now I had an angry red mark across my cheek.

Holding the dildo at such close proximity was an ego boost, but it instilled greater apprehension about taking it in the ass. Now, as some of you may recall, I'm no stranger to the pleasures of the back yard. But my 2002 experience with Aneros was a lot different. That time, I was in control.

"Are you ready?" Kat asked me, rifling through her bag for her trusty strap-on harness.

"Not really," I confessed. "Can we wait a while?"

From my experience with Aneros, I knew that I needed to feel just so before proceeding with the night's main event. We spent the next hour watching the seemingly omnipresent Crocodile Dundee 2 — which, incidentally, improves with every viewing — and working our way through a bottle of red wine, which did its job in relaxing me. Kat looked at me, made a small circle with the thumb and forefinger of her left hand and inserted the forefinger of her right hand. She quickly noticed the trepidation I wore like a kabuki mask. "Chill out. You might even like it. I've had really intense orgasms from anal." Her frankness always kind of unsettled me; now it made me blush.

"Could I have one of your specials first?" I asked. Among many other vocations, Kat was an accredited massage therapist.

"But I didn't think you liked massages."

"Well, usually I don't. But I think I need to relax more, and we're out of wine." Kat looked at her watch and sighed. "I don't usually work without my table, but . . . okay. Get on the bed." I got undressed, and Kat dug in for one of her typically vigorous and painful sessions. Usually I'd spend most of the time pleading with her to be gentler. But this time, I thought any pain I'd suffer during the massage would offset any later discomfort. I would just save my pleading for mercy until then.

"How do you feel?" asked Kat after a twenty-minute massage culminated in a really good-feeling butt rub. "Pretty good," I said dozily. Kat fetched the dildo from the kitchen, and I heard her buckling everything into its proper place, a process similar to saddling up a horse. "Get on all fours and really stick out your butt," she said.

After all my adventures, I've become desensitized to a lot of normally titillating stimuli. For better or worse, I'd practically forgotten what it was like to be naked in front of someone you're not dating. Having my ring-piece exposed to all and sundry brought that exposed feeling flooding back in the most intense way.

I turned around. Kat had stripped down to shorts and a tank, exposing her colorful sleeve tattoos and toned thighs. With her jet-black hair in a high ponytail and her secretary glasses slipping down her nose, she took up position behind me and dripped some Astroglide into my ass crack. This was simultaneously refreshing and defiling, like taking a nosedive into a yellow snowbank. Kat opened the Muppet Show lunch pail she had set on my nightstand and retrieved the smallest condom I had ever seen. It completely negated the ego boost I'd received earlier in the evening. "Are you trying to say something?" I stammered.

"No, idiot. They're finger condoms." She put one on her first two fingers, then pulled out a regular rubber, rolled it onto the dildo and poured a liberal amount of lube onto it. Kat was a sex educator for a few years, and you can hardly flip someone the bird without her wrapping it up. I thought the condom was a good idea anyway , I had considered using the dildo as a bookend or paperweight afterward.

Understandably, I think, I felt extremely vulnerable. I was pretty confident that no one had ever seen me from this angle before. The lights were dimmed and the mood set. I buried my face deep into my pillow.

"Are you okay?" asked Kat.

"Hmmmmmff," I replied. She put her hands on my waist and made slow, strong wax-on, wax-off movements on my ass cheeks with her hands. This brought a terrific amount of heat to the general area, and a not-insignificant amount of heat to the hole area. She paused to apply more lube to her sheathed fingers, then I felt something sink inside. Here's where the novelty of being the recipient comes in. As the guy, you know when something is going to be going in some place, but there's nothing as scary and exhilarating as waiting for it. It's like winding up a Jack-in-the-Box. You know what's going to happen, but that doesn't make it any less jarring.

"Relax!" Kat demanded.

Expecting someone to relax when a finger is worming its way into your ass is like expecting a cat to purr as you rub its fur the wrong way. "Oh my God!" I said, lifting my head from the pillow. Kat's finger felt sharp. My head filled with visions of stumbling into the ER with a pale face, a broken ass and hokey story about sitting on a light bulb. "Is it all the way in?"

"Not even close," she said. "It's going to get worse before it gets better, so you really need to suck it up."

Shit. I gripped the corners of the mattress and tried to think good thoughts. In her journal, Lady Hillingdon (1857-1940) reported that she would simply lie back and think of England. I gave that a shot.

Now, there's no delicate way to put this, so I'm just going to come out and say it. Taking a foreign object in your ass is like shitting in rewind. Having a good poo can be really satisfying, but the other direction is fucking terrifying, at least at first. There's a definite fear of making a mess you'll never be able to forget. To her credit, Kat was doing a great job of talking me down. "You are doing so good," she said as she slowly eased in another finger. "Wow, you're a natural!" She sped up her technique. "Watch it!" I replied through clenched teeth. After a few minutes of slow in-and-out, I felt okay enough to loosen my white-knuckled grip on the mattress and was ambulatory enough to look at Kat over my shoulder.

At this point, I realized I was officially taking it in the ass, something my seventh-grade peers had predicted almost fifteen years ago.

"See, it's kind of fun after a little while, right?" Kat asked.

"Well, I'm slightly less concerned about shitting the bed, if that's what you mean."

"Okay, ready?"

"As I'll ever be."

Kat removed her fingers, leaving me feeling . . . open. As if a wintery draft were going right into me. "Ohhh," I groaned in a distinctly non-macho tone.

"Yeah, that part feels weird, right?" commiserated Kat. I screwed my eyes shut and prepared for the worst. When you're not used to it, the tip of a finger can feel like the business end of a Louisville Slugger. I tried to remain relaxed as Kat commenced insertion.

"Holy Christ!" I screamed.

"Shhhhh! It's okay!" she soothed.

"That's easy for you to say! Is it all the way in?"

"Not even an inch," she said. "But the worst part is over , promise!"

She stopped moving and gave me some time to get used to the feel of my own cock in my ass. One can actually adapt to it physically, but I'm sure it's going to be a recurring theme in future therapy sessions. Kat drizzled more lube onto the area in question. As she pushed in further, the sensation wasn't nearly as intense as it was at first. Despite her initial brusqueness, she was actually going really, really slow and being as gentle as possible. Which must have been weird, because it really couldn't have been doing anything for her in terms of physical sensation. Could it?

Kat tightened her hands around my waist and pushed them together. I felt like I was being carried. I found the dynamic as sexy as it was novel. Kat sensed my increased comfort level and gradually began going in deeper and faster.

Until she got a little too deep.

Funny how different pains can make us react in a universal way. A stubbed toe will invariably make you open your jaw to its fullest extent; hitting your thumb with a hammer will most likely cause you to squeeze your top teeth to your bottom lip and exhale through your mouth, while burrowing an object too deep in your bum will make you form a tiny circle with your mouth and inhale like Cheech Marin at a Amsterdam hash bar. Kat noticed my reaction and eased off. Although I got more comfortable, the sensations weren't getting more or less intense. As acclimated as I was to getting coarsely rodgered, I found myself virtually incapable of forming coherent sentences. All conversation was coming from Kat, who, by the sounds of it, was a lot closer to coming than I would ever be. She took my hand and rested it on her damp cotton panties, then cruelly swatted it away as I tried to yank them to one side. We went on like that for about five minutes.

"Um, when do we know when to stop, Kat?" I asked. The purportedly monogamous Kat then pulled out a trick I like to use myself. You're probably familiar with a little thing called the "reach around." I'll tell you, it's a crazy feeling to be on the receiving end of one. It wasn't long before I was done, and I have to admit, my orgasm was extremely intense, twice as powerful as anything I'd ever felt before. It totally took me by surprise. "That's how we know we're done," said Kat. "Pretty hot, right?"

I buried my head in the mattress. "Uh-huh," I sighed, not really wanting to acknowledge how crazy good it felt. Kat slowly disengaged, leaving me with that weird open feeling again. It was even more jarring this time. I felt like I didn't want to move for at least an hour.

"So you've got a new conversation piece, you've lost your cherry, and I think that we know each other on a whole new level now. Quite a night!" As Kat jumped up to watch some TV and call her boyfriend, I stayed motionless on the bed. I laid there, thinking I'd crossed a line and could never go back. Then I realized Kat had promised to buy me dinner but was making other plans with Trevor. I felt cheap and used. But in truth, I kinda liked it.

I learned some valuable lessons from this experience. First off, when it comes to taking it in the can, I can roll with the best of 'em. Initally, it was a really weird, uncomfortable, awkward sensation that felt totally alien. If you've ever been tutored on the correct way to grip a golf club, you'll know exactly what I mean.

Getting humped means you're giving someone else a massive amount of your trust. It's like a really well lubricated, naked trust-fall. Allowing yourself to be that prone and vulnerable feels sexy in a way I've never known, and I'm pretty sure most straight guys don't either. There's no conceivable reason why I wouldn't try it again, other than my own laziness.

A friend of mine saw the Make Your Own Dildo kit at my apartment and asserted that getting fucked could "turn me gay." That's like saying that listening to The Commodores' Greatest Hits would turn me black. (Unfortunately, it doesn't. I've tried.) I can tell you that taking it from a hot woman with a strap-on will neither inspire you to contradict Thom Filicia's decorating advice on Queer Eye nor flail your limbs upon hearing the opening bars to It's Raining Men. I think the experience ultimately made me more appreciative of women, more secure in my heterosexuality and more grateful to the ladies I persuaded to let me "go there" over the years. I think most straight guys should take a leap of faith and try it out. If you're trying to get your sweetheart to let you go Greek, offering to take it in the heinie first is a most egalitarian gesture.

Aside from not being able to sit down afterward, this was kind of like the final episode of Seinfeld, where everyone gets their just desserts. I was an innocent lad when I started this column back in 2001. Since then I've attended orgies, been shrink-wrapped, wrestled Amazons, been immortalized in rubber, had a male-male-female threesome, went tantric, picked up supermodels, been psychoanalyzed by a dating coach and stripped in front of three hundred women. In the process, I've tried to convey what it feels like for a regular Joe to participate in some pretty freaky shit.

A few thoughts before I leave you. I think a great man once said that nothing worth doing is easy. I'll bet you that man could take it in the ass like a champion.