DIY DICK
On gender hacking & packing
Beef made me a packer out of silicone, she fashioned it for me with her hands... She picked out a pale green for my packer, the colour of those flowers you see growing by the roadside, with furry leaves. -D.Mortimer, One Night A Beef Jerk Saved My Life (123:2021)
Wearing my (DIY) dick feels good. It smells good too. Like synthetic man. The texture is similar to those squidgy stress toys shaped like animated fast food with googly eyes. You know the ones that you can win in the 2P coin slot machines on the pier in a seaside town? Except the one I’m wearing is a couple of condoms filled with hair gel. I hold my dick up to my nose and soak up the smell of cologne (thanks to Vo5 men's hair products) through the old T-shirt it’s wrapped in, before shoving it into my boxers. I turn to my friend standing in my kitchen to ask him if it looks proportionate in relation to the rest of my body. He confirms it does as I grope my crotch.
When I was cruising the online catalogue in preparation to visit London School of Economics (LSE), I came across the archives containing Stephen Whittle’s work, just when I almost gave up on visiting the archives at all. The three to four week bureaucratic process it took to sign up and register to access them almost put me off going entirely. I learned that Whittle’s work could only be found at LSE and so I decided to go and check it out.
Stephen Whittle is a trans activist in the UK active since the 70’s. He founded the first FTM network in 1989 and co-founded the lobbying group Press of Change which led to many case law wins in the European Court of Justice and of Human Rights for trans rights since the mid 1990’s. He has done a lot to support trans people on both a grassroots and institutional level.
Sitting down with a stack of folders of Whittle’s work at LSE, I rifled through documents, legal files and pamphlets for the FTM network. One resource grabbed my attention: The White Book: A Really Indispensable Manual for Inhabiting a Trans Man’s Being by Stephen Whittle (1998). The manual was printed with black ink on white A4 sheets of paper and bound together with a plastic coil spine. It was published by Press for Change for the FTM Network, and in commemoration of Brandon Teena.
It’s a comprehensive work that covers everything from trans terms, to medical transition, exploring androgyny, forms of dress, sex reassignment surgery, and answering frequent questions like, is there a cure for transsexualism?
The section that I got stuck on was the page outlining how to make DIY packers. It was the first time I read about making a packer with condoms and beauty items, and at the same time it seemed like the most obvious and realistic method (face palm to forehead moment).
For making your own packer, the instructions guide readers to stuffing condoms with hair gel and encasing them in fabric cut out from old T-shirts. The method feels very hack-y. It subverts and re-purposes the use of ‘everyday’ items associated with things cis men stereotypically use: condoms and cologne infused hair gel. The re-purposing and reclaiming (or queering) of old T-shirts to wrap the thing in is quite genius (note to self, stockpile your old T-shirts so you can make them into dick covers). A packer made out of condoms trumps other options (IMO), like crochet packers, silicone Mr. Limpy’s, styrofoam cups or rolled up socks because it feels like digging into gloopy and raw hands-on gender fuck-ery.
In The Countersexual Manifesto (2018), Paul B.Preciado introduces the concept of ‘countersexuality’ to challenge norms around gender and sexual identity. The traditional system is heteronormative and contains people to not only specific gender binaries but also a rigid container of sexual acts and behaviours: active/passive, man/woman, giver/receiver. Preciado introduces the dildo as a countersexual object that turns fucking into a paradoxical act and defies the aforementioned binaries (72). This means that the dildo, and everything beyond it, becomes unidentifiable as an organ in the traditional dynamics of man/active, woman/passive, which then renders the hetero-binary gender role system meaningless (ibid). The dildo is part of what Preciado calls ‘prosthetic sexuality’, where he argues that sexual identity and expression are not tied to biological anatomy. Instead, they can be creatively reconfigured through the use of prostheses, symbols and rituals which opens the opportunity to transcend the fixed categories of male/female, hetero/homo and so on.
I extend this mode of thought to my flaccid packer, which, like a dildo, disrupts biological assumptions of who can have a dick and what materials constitute a dick too. My bulge disrupts how people are viewing my gender, how I connect to my gender (depending on the day), confusing public spectators, and maybe even myself to a degree who only sometimes feels like a dick owner.
Preciado argues that ANYTHING can be a dildo: a limb, an object, a device, a metaphor even (?) The dildo is adaptable and can attach to different body parts (thigh, mouth, arm, or on top of another dick). It can also be used with other tools (harnesses, sexual devices) which decouple sexual acts from the rigid binary.
The dildo is very unserious, multipurpose-full and a very creative hacker indeed. As Preciado says, here is an object that must be boiled at a high temperature to get it good and clean, an object you can give as a gift, throw in the trash, or use as a paperweight (72:2018).
The ritual of creating a dick by repurposing condoms to fill them with hair gel, instead of cum, to shove them into my boxers to create a bulge, and to have others perceive it and interact with this crafted thing, destroys binary ideas of gender, biological sex and sex tools too. In the kitchen I took my dick out of my pants so my other friend could have a feel of it. She holds it up to her nose, takes a sniff, then tosses it from one hand to another in complete awe. “Oh my god it smells so good! And it’s like one of those stress balls; how soothing!”.
The dildo is the foreigner…The dildo is an intruder, an outsider, a hacker. -Preciado (72:2018)
And so is a packer. Make your dick out of hair gel, mould your own with silicone mimicking the colour of nature, wear it in your pocket, or in your sports bra if you so wish. Call it whatever you want, describe it like it’s food, a household item, a character. Be a gender hacker. Be a countersexual. Create your own dick.
So how do you make a DIY condom dick?
Materials needed:
Hair gel: in a tube so it’s easier to distribute. Choose a scented one for extra gender.
Condoms: without ribbing or texture. Unless you fancy it.
An old t-shirt: crop one (T-boy coded) and use the offcuts to create the casing.
A marker: to draw outlines on fabric.
Scissors and a a sewing kit: a needle and thread (meditative) or a sewing machine (quick)
Create a dick:
Grab a condom and squeeze a dollop of gel into it. You want to shimmy the gel down to the tip. Grab the condom rim and move it up and down quickly so the gel falls down. Repeat. Once you have a good amount of gel in there, literally stroke it down, but don’t pack it too tight so the gel can move freely without bursting. Layer a second condom on top. Whittle says he used up to 5 condoms to get the right phallic container. Up to you.
Knot the condom at the top and there you have your penis.
Make balls:
Use another two condoms and squirt gel into each of them- about 2 inches worth. Whittle said that his cis guy friend said to keep the balls small. I made mine a little bigger because I like the weight. Once you are satisfied with the amount of gel in the tip of the condom, grab the excess material and knot it further down the base so the ball shape stays in place.
Once you have two of those, knot the two balls together once they have been knotted separately.
Now you have the whole package ;)
Create a case for your junk:
Grab your scrap fabric and lay your shaft on the biggest/widest piece of fabric. Take your pencil/marker and outline the phallus on the fabric. Don’t draw too closely. You will need extra space on either side of the shaft so when you sew up the fabric there’s enough leeway to funnel the dick into the casing without it getting stuck.
Use a sewing machine, or a thread and needle to sew the casing, leaving an opening to feed the shaft through.
Cut out a large rectangle out of the remaining fabric and place the balls next to each other so you can measure how much leeway you need on either side of them. Then you want to flip the excess cloth over the balls to cover them like a pastry parcel. Sew on either side of the rectangular to encase the balls in them. I sewed up the rectangle/square first then kept an opening on top to put the testicles in.
Make sure you have a big enough flap of fabric left on top so you can cut a hole in it. Then put the phallus through the hole so it lays perfectly over the square pouch with balls.
Reinforcements & decor:
I used a safety pin to keep the shaft in place and to attach it to the balls. You can also use it to pin the packer to your boxers if you don’t have a proper crotch pouch for it to sit in.
Customise your packer: I used a Hello Kitty accessory as a Prince Albert piercing. Get creative with patches, fabrics and colours.
The customisation of a packer reminds me of the exploration of fashion hacking as a means of queer world-making in Barry and Drak’s collaborative work, Intersectional Interventions into Queer and Trans Liberation (2019). Adapted from Otto von Busch’s (2009) fashion hacking methodology. Fashion hacking redistributes power from the fashion system to previously passive consumers by skill sharing/constructing a share economy of resources outside of the fashion world (685).
In this way, participants learn about the fashion system’s rules through reclamation, and participation in fashion through DIY. Fashion hacking often expresses queer futures: things that have been repressed or invisiblised by mainstream institutions. Thus queer world making, emerges as fashion hacking, used to defy heteronormative systems including relational ways of connecting and through forms of dress. In this vein, fashion then becomes accessible to marginalised communities using DIY as a gateway (Barry & Drak, 2019).
In their work, Barry & Drak work with queer and trans people in a series of makers workshops with a focus on collage and DIY fashion. The participant’s feel empowered to express personal politics, and to convey their own life experiences through the clothes they wear and through the process of making.
Although creating gender affirming apparel wasn’t mentioned in this article, it makes sense for the DIY packer to fit into the framework of fashion hacking. For one, the use of clothing (T-shirts) have been creatively adapted to suit a need specific to trans masculine experiences. You can’t find packing pouches if you go into H&M, but you can use an H&M T-shirt to create packing pouch.
The use of packer customisation intersects with both a countersexual and fashion hacking discourse. The countersexual constructs a dick from condoms and gel, re-assigning the use of sex tools and beauty items, and re-framing how the dick is used in both public (to wear) and the use of that dick in private (to be grabbed by a partner, to be sniffed by a friend). While the fashion hacker uses clothes to wear and re-purposes them as things to use for DIY genitals. A big fuck you to the fashion world and to the hetero-binary world as we know it.
The packer brings friends and lovers together, while also providing a creative and economically accessible option for trans people to access gender euphoria. This aligns with how queer and trans people, and particularly those of color, create eccentric looks out of imagination—not money—to foster joy, pleasure and visibility at home and in public (Barry & Drak 2019). Queer world making centers community over capitalism and priortises creativity over consumption (ibid).
More names! More Inventions! More Dicks! (D.Mortimer, 124: 2021)
In the countersexual world, embodying the use of prosthetics and reimagining sexual engagements are embodied actions that bring about new narratives and new modes of existence for people (2018). It’s an opportunity to break free. The DIY condom packer is countersexual because it disrupts normative understandings of the body. The DIY packer is a fashion hacker because it subverts the normative and mainstream use of clothing items, transforming them from fashion to necessity by/for trans people.
Defying transient fashion trends, the T-shirt is a staple item that makes its way to your dick to hold it (literally/ metaphorically). In contrast, the dick is a transient object that may sit in your pants, but may migrate elsewhere over the course of an hour, a day, a month, a year, and will most likely be used outside of its intended purpose.
Like Preciado claims, the dildo [like the packer], won’t settle for imitation. That is why it must constantly transform itself, surpass itself in such a way that it lit- erally moves beyond its form, beyond the size and excellence of that which it supposedly imitates (68:2018).
The DIY dick is a labor of love, and also a gender hacker which chews gender norms up and spits it back out again into an incomprehensible blob ready to be re-morphed, misunderstood and re-hacked into something bigger - and better?
To be continued…
Sources
Ben Barry & Daniel Drak (2019) Intersectional Interventions into Queer and Trans Liberation: Youth Resistance Against Right-Wing Populism Through Fashion Hacking, Fashion Theory, 23:6, 679-709.
Last Night A Beef Jerk Saved My Life, D. Mortimer. Pilot Press, (2021)
Paul B. Preciado, The Countersexual Manifesto. Columbia University Press, (2018)
The White Book: A Really Indispensable Manual for Inhabiting a Trans Man’s Being.