What Is Pegging And Why Is It Suddenly So Popular?

Quick Survey: The hottest sexual trend of 2015 was: 1 – Facesitting. 2 – Squirting. 3 – Gender-neutral sex toys. Okay, I have no idea, leave a comment with what you think it was last year and is this year.

Raise your hand if you’ve recently heard about pegging. Keep your hand up if you had never heard of the word until fairly recently. If you had asked most people a few years ago what pegging was, chances are they would have thought you were talking about hanging clothes out on a line or possibly some weird Cribbage ritual. I know I would have. Even when I first heard it in a clearly sexual context I didn’t get it right away.

For anyone who still isn’t in on the hottest sexual trend for 2016, pegging is when a woman penetrates her male (heterosexual or bisexual) partner with a strap-on dildo. The act is nothing new, though it was only recently coined. From a historical perspective, the first incident of documented pegging took place in the 1970 film Myra Breckinridge which was based on the novel by Gore Vidal and which isn’t pornographic in nature. The scene featured in Myra Breckinridge wasn’t explicit as it was a mainstream film. The first explicit scene of pegging was in the pornographic film The Opening of Misty Beethoven which was released in 1976.

Still, pegging wasn’t exactly mainstream. It was, however, gaining popularity in the adult entertainment world. Films like Strap Attack, Strap It On, Boss Bitches, Babes Ballin Boysand Strap-on Chicks were released to an eager audience in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As it became more popular this interest crossed over into adult groups with a more mainstream audience.

At the same time, a general shift in how the public discusses sex had begun to happen. More and more often, people were being open and surprisingly frank about their sexual interests when talking to friends and even family. The boom in social media also helped those with similar interests to connect and discuss every sex act you can imagine. As a dialogue developed between people, more and more couples felt comfortable talking about pegging, though it wasn’t easy to do then.

It’s worth noting that, up until this point, there was no specific word for the sex act of a woman penetrating a man with a strap-on dildo. So when people wanted to share their interest, they had to literally spell it out. That’s where Dan Savage comes in.

The term was coined back in 2001 when Dan Savage, author of the Savage Love column, asked his readers to nominate a word to describe the practice. Other nominations for the phrase included chick-dicking and she-lunking but, in the end, Savage boiled it down to three choices: punt, peg, and bob. More than 12,000 votes were case and Peg was the clear winner, garnering more than 5,000 votes.

Since then, interest in pegging climbed pretty steadily in sex circles. But there’s a big difference between being well known in the sex world and being the focus of an article on Buzzfeed. A recent episode of Broad City introduced pegging further into mainstream pop culture, as did a widely shared Vice article on one woman’s experience with pegging.

With pegging being name dropped more and more often, it’s also becoming more and more common for men to be more open about the kind of sex they like. Anal sex in general is still seen as a bit taboo in our culture, but when it comes to straight guys and anal, it’s often met with equal measures of horror and disgust. The surge in popularity surrounding pegging implies that people WANT to talk about it more and, it stands to reason, that there are more men into the scene than we thought.