ILLUSTRATION BY HENRY CRAGG
A dildo has one enormous advantage over a penis: it never has to worry about losing its erection.
So why do so many feel like they already have?
I got paid to masturbate for five years (aka review sex toys for magazines). Deliveries of rabbits, bullets, wands, eggs, suction toys, things with apps, things with remotes, and things I had to hold up to the light or flip over a few times before figuring out where they went were commonplace. We’re talking twice a week. I learned that almost anything becomes quantifiable once it hits a spreadsheet.
Eventually I developed the same occupational brain damage anyone does in their profession. A sommelier detects acid instantly; a mechanic hears a belt going bad before the vehicle even pulls in. I can pick up a silicone dildo and know whether its drag, density, flexibility, base, seams, or propensity to collect lint is worth going anywhere near my — or my reader’s — pussy.
Still, for all that time, I’d accepted one of the strangest things about them without even noticing. A lot of fake dicks, I realized, are built more like gummy worms than the God-given erections I’m so fond of.
So, as I write this, I’m holding one by the balls and watching the shaft droop toward my sheets. It has veins. It has a head. It’s an eerily plausible shade of beige (if you’re into that). Someone recreated the topography of a human dick, then forgot to give the bastard a spine.
Obviously, there are hard dildos. Glass ones, metal ones, and hard plastic ones with roughly the bedside manner of a curtain rod. But silicone, the material used for most of the toys I actually want inside me, comes in an entire textile vocabulary: soft, firm, dual-density, realistic, ultra-realistic (??). Companies painstakingly reproduce veins, skin texture, circumcised heads, foreskins, even the fuzz on a pair of balls. But what good is visual realism in the dark? Shouldn’t a realistic dildo be judged moreso by how it feels?
Exactly how hard is a hard-on?
Erectile rigidity has been measured, graded, squeezed, strapped into devices and studied during sleep, by the way. There is a machine called a RigiScan (which, yes, you’re going to want to Google). There are pressure thresholds associated with penetration and an astonishing amount of clinical literature devoted to figuring out when a dick is hard enough to fuck. Imagine if all medical research had to clear the same evidentiary bar as a hard-on.
Silicone hardness can be measured using durometers, and toy makers deliberately formulate materials to produce different kinds of firmness and flex. So somewhere between urology and polymer engineering, there should to be an answer to the question I somehow never asked during five years of professionally evaluating sex toys.
Why does the dildo have to feel like a dick at all?
The dildo isn’t necessarily trying to imitate a penis any more than a chair is trying to imitate a lap. Maybe it was once, but an artificial object isn't at the mercy of blood pressure, cerebral activation, or the limits of libido. For all intents and purposes, it can be harder. Heavier. Curved in ways anatomy could never. Rigidity could be an advantage rather than an imperfection. But, I guess, so could flexibility.
We have spent thousands of years making artificial penises. Given complete control over the material, shape and mechanics of the erection, why would the best one be the closest copy of what biology happened to give us?
After years of testing sex toys, I realized I had never actually asked what seems, in retrospect, like the first question:
What makes a hard dick good anyway?
Unfortunately, science makes this more complex than grabbing a few erect men.
Turns out, there isn’t really one thing worth calling “hardness” when it comes to an erection. A penis has to be rigid in more than one direction. There’s radial rigidity, or how resistant it is to being squeezed inward, and axial rigidity, which is essentially how much force you can put on the end before the whole operation buckles.
The second one is obviously of particular interest to us receivers of the world. Researchers have historically treated around 550 grams of axial buckling force — just over a pound — as a rough benchmark for an erection capable of vaginal penetration. Somewhere in medical history it had to be determined exactly how much force could be applied to the head of a penis before the dick folded like a cheap lawn chair.
Things still get slippery with the whole 550 grams thing, though. The RigiScan measures rigidity around the circumference of the penis, not how well the thing holds its ground when pushed from the front. In one study of 36 men being evaluated for erectile dysfunction, RigiScan readings above about 55 percent rigidity were necessary for vaginal penetration in the researchers’ model, but still weren't enough to guarantee it.
Two erections can earn similar-looking numbers and behave differently when actually asked to do the job. Geometry matters. Tissue matters. Pressure matters. Dicks are annoyingly artisanal. And that’s not even counting the men attached, who may be tired, drunk, nervous, distracted, in love, or thinking about the Knicks.
The more I read, the less a penis seems to resemble the thing that the dildo in my hand is impersonating. An erection is a pressurized structure made of living tissue that yields when you squeeze it, changes with arousal, and has a shaft and glans that don't behave identically. It is also attached to a man, so nerves, mood, chemistry, ego, SSRIs, and the occasional catastrophically timed thought join what was already a complicated hydraulic system. Even medicine has trouble collapsing all of that into one useful number (not for lack of trying, clearly).
The dildo cheats.
Silicone makers can choose softness the way a mattress company chooses firmness. There’s a scale for this called Shore hardness, and at the squishier end, changes in formulation can mean the difference between something that gives pleasantly under a thumb and something you can damn near tie in a knot.
More interestingly, a dildo doesn’t have to be one consistency all the way through. Some “realistic” toys use dual-density construction: softer silicone outside, firmer silicone underneath. Press your thumb into one and the exterior gives; bend the whole toy and the firmer core starts doing more of the work. It’s a neat little materials-science trick designed to put two seemingly contradictory qualities in the same dick: squish and structure. Flesh and boner.
Did somebody have to cut a penis in half to figure this out?
Perhaps I’d been bullying my fake dicks unfairly. A dildo can hang from my hand like it’s had a long night without that floppiness necessarily telling me how easily it will buckle when force comes straight at the head. A soft exterior and firmer core also mean that what my hand reads as “soft” isn't one mechanical property at all.
I’d been administering the locker-room test: Does it look hard? Does it stand up straight? Would other dicks respect it? Bullshit metrics.
A penetrative toy needs enough structure to resist folding under the forces it's subjected to while still having whatever give its maker wants at the surface. How much a dildo droops in my hand and how much force it takes to buckle it head-on are related questions, but they aren't the same question. To know exactly how much better one construction performs than another, I'd have to actually load-test the things. Please don't threaten me with a good time.
My floppy dildo wasn’t necessarily doing a bad impression of a penis, but taking liberties with its source material. So if manufacturers can manipulate firmness so deliberately, what exactly are they optimizing for?
You can comparison-shop dildos by length, girth, color, suction cup, harness compatibility, circumcision status, whether the balls look like balls and whether it resembles a dragon, horse, or tentacle. Firmness is sometimes specified, particularly by smaller silicone makers, but there is no universal consumer language for it. One company’s “soft” is not necessarily another company’s soft. “Realistic” can describe appearance, texture, density, anatomy, or simply the proposition that this object is meant to remind you of a dick.
Evolution had considerably more on its plate than making a penis feel good to whoever received it. A penis has to urinate, become erect, deliver semen, preserve living tissue, and recover to do it all over again. Sexual selection may have helped shape the equipment, too, but whatever combination of evolutionary pressures got us here, our pleasure was never the only item on the brief. The penis, bless his heart, has been doing several jobs at once this whole time (in spite of your lack of orgasm all these years, Sarah).
The dildo has no such obligations.
It doesn't need a urethra or erectile tissue. It doesn't need to preserve blood flow, ejaculate, or source post-nut clarity. It doesn't even technically need to look like a penis. Remove reproduction, urination, circulation and the man attached, and the brief gets very short.
Humans have been making phallic objects for an absurdly long time. One famous specimen from Hohle Fels cave in Germany is a roughly 28,000-year-old, penis-shaped piece of siltstone — shaped, polished, incised and apparently also used as a hammerstone. Archaeologists have identified dozens of other portable phallic objects in Upper Paleolithic Europe. Whether any particular prehistoric phallus went where my mind immediately wants to put it is something else.
Think about the things humans have improved by abandoning faithful imitation. Running shoes aren't molded bare feet. Mattresses aren't patches of soft earth. A chef isn't trying to make butter taste more like milk. We take the useful principle, ditch the constraints we don't need and make the experience we actually want.
A dildo can have a curve no penis could or should maintain. It can have ribs, bulbs, textures, rotating parts, two heads, no head. It can vibrate. It can be bright fucking blue. None of these are defects because they don’t look or feel like your boyfriend.
Yet the humble flesh-colored dildo remains strangely tethered to the original, perhaps because realism itself is erotic. There is pleasure in simulation, in the visceral fiction of a body where there isn't one. Maybe the hand wants flesh while the body wants backbone. Dual-density silicone at least gives designers a way to chase both at once.
Glass and metal toys haven't disappeared, either, despite having approximately nothing in common with erectile tissue. People buy them precisely because they're rigid. There’s no squish to swallow the pressure, so even small movements can have outsized consequences. At the opposite end, very soft silicone has its own devotees because it yields, bends and forgives. You can misbehave a little more with something willing to meet you halfway.
Dangling a dildo by the balls tells you about as much about its performance as dangling a man by his.
I spent years partly judging fake erections by a test they were never equipped to pass. We can measure how hard a hard-on needs to be to get the job done. We can measure silicone, too, with enough science to kill the mood.
But the floppy dildo in my hand was never really the mystery. I just wasn’t using it right.