Gallery
My husband also is not particularly well-endowed. He’s not unusually small either, but of the few sex partners I’ve had over my life, he’s on the smaller end. There’s really only a few positions that “work” for us. And just so it’s clear, that doesn’t bother me at all. But it certainly bothers him—to the point where he bought a large strap-on dildo that’s hollow on one end so that he could wear it. It was a little surprising to me when he told me about it and then showed it to me. And it was BIG, so I was also not sure that was going to be something I would like either. But I agreed to try it. And the first time in particular, I did not like it. Even with lube (which made it pretty cold, too), it was pretty painful to the point of having to ask him to stop. That pretty much stopped that whole session too.
You absolutely can become accustomed to a certain kind of sensation, and we humans are prone to diminishing returns when it comes to novelty. Your husband’s factory-installed and add-on phalluses provide a chance for size variety. I think it’s wise to keep his actual penis in the rotation, along with digital penetration, oral sex, or whatever else pleases the two of you.As for the sensitivity of your vaginal canal, depending on how much energy your husband has after ejaculation, you might focus on his pleasure first and yours second. And you should continue to have sexual encounters without the dildo entirely, to mix things up. You also might do Kegel exercises. These generally help with pelvic floor tone, along with other physical benefits. They also tend to help people get a more nuanced awareness of their genitals, which might help you feel your husband’s penis more acutely.—Stoya
Connie said she usually kept the box in the pantry, near the urn of her daughter’s cat, Spanky. In the box were the other antiques the mason had found with the dildo: six charred envelopes from the 1890s addressed to Captain James B. Coffin; letters from the same James B. Coffin to Grover Cleveland and Assistant Secretary of State Edwin Dehl; a dirty and frayed shirt collar; a pipe that still smelled of tobacco when I fit my nose in the bowl; and a green glass laudanum bottle. These items must have been hidden in the chimney by James’s wife, Martha “Mattie” Coffin, sometime between when the letters were dated and when she died in 1928. The fireplace was later sealed up, and a closet was built in front of it. With these valuables, Connie kept a CD recording of her late husband, Tom, being interviewed about the dildo for Nantucket Public Radio. “It’s the only recording I have of his voice,” she said.
“You’ve seen Connie’s,” Maggie said to me near the end of dinner. “Hers is plaster. I took artistic license in the play and made it a ceramic penis, and made it hollow to be filled with warm water.” She included a ceramic dildo in her monologue “A Short History of a Colonial Dame,” performed through the 1990s in Nantucket, New York, and Iowa City. It was during those performances that she thinks she was spreading the term “he’s-at-home” and securing its role as the “common item” that her husband later wrote about in Time and Tide. In her monologue, she’d hold a box and pull from it copies of the items found in Connie’s chimney. “And at the very bottom,” her script reads, “a ceramic penis. [Hold up penis]. In perfect condition.”
That’s when the woman allegedly “pulled out a dildo” and started hitting her husband with it. After a peaceful day on Saturday where his wife “was well behaved,” according to the man, she started drinking on Sunday.
