Michael Vegas: Challenging Masculinity

This podcast has been a godsend to me in many ways. One of them is that the practice of sitting down with different people and actually listening to them often challenges internal biases I wasn’t really aware I had. Case in point: my guest male pornstar Michael Vegas. Michael is a very popular and strong performer— I’ve worked with him many times and he’s never let me down. The girls love him. But Michael has a kink— one that he’s only recently become very open about. Micheal loves to be pegged by women. If you don’t know what pegging is— well, it’s when a woman dons a strap on and fucks a guy in the ass. Most of us would associate this kind of sexual activity in something like a fem-domme scene, where the man was being degraded and emasculated. But Michael approaches this very differently: in his pegging scenes, he often continues to play the dominant role, demanding and instructing the woman to penetrate him. If this sounds like it’s impossible to imagine as dominant behavior, he reminds me that you can definitely have a fem-domme scene where the woman insist that her submissive male partner fucks her. So really the part of the equation that makes this idea difficult to reconcile, is that a man could want to be anally penetrated and yet still retain his masculinity. So what this episode with Michael had me thinking about was not only why I always considered pegging to be an emasculating act, but also what exactly is our idea of masculinity, and is it perhaps a bit too rigid? You know, we almost always talk about women on this podcast— the unrealistic societal pressures, the unfair and inflexible way we are pigeonholed into a very particular ideal of what femininity is. But what about men? I think that sometimes we lose sight of the very real and very similar social structures imposed upon them— and talking to Michael brings me back to the realization that perhaps so many of our problems around sex today isn’t the patriarchy, but us in general. ALL of us. And the only thing that’s going to change us— is… us. Forgive me if I sound super dramatic- I mean it seems that I’m using a conversation of pegging as a jumping off point for a grand epiphany about the dilemma of social norms and how it boxes us into corners of shame and self-loathing… but then again, why can’t it be? If Michael can make me think twice about how I see men’s sexuality… maybe he can do the same for you. It’s definitely worth thinking about.