Photo: weheartit
What could possibly go wrong?
By Alex Alexander — Written on Jun 07, 2016
It was said that Helen of Troy had a face that launched a thousand ships. It was so beautiful, so rare, so desirable, that it was worth going to war over.
My last boyfriend's dick was sort of like that.
It was one of those penises you encounter and know you may never see another like it again: perfectly proportioned, impressively rigid, huge but not terrifyingly so.
While I wasn't tempted to invade neighboring countries over it, you can bet I dreamed of cloning it so when he was out of town or our relationship met its eventual and inevitable demise, I would have one hell of a backup plan.
Enter Clone-A-Willy.
I heard about Clone-A-Willy, an in-home penis replication kit, a few months back in a podcast commercial. It sounded absurd and awkward. The idea of asking a lover to supply the cloneable goods struck me as potentially one of the most easily-derailed conversations of all time.
I imagined a Clone-A-Willy kit would make an excellent gag gift for one of my girlfriends but when one of them joked I should write an article about it, well, it felt like the best idea I'd ever heard. After all, my boyfriend had an impeccable dick. I didn't love the idea of asking him to do it but the side of me that found the whole thing amusing as f*ck won out in the end.
For weeks, I waited for the right moment to ask. The heat of the moment definitely wasn't opportune and of all the crazy sh*t we talked about over dinners and breakfasts and texts, making a non-biodegradable form of his penis that would last for generations to come (maybe to be discovered by future archeologists!) somehow never came up. It's baffling, really.
Finally, one morning after a particularly great night together, as he was standing naked next to my bed in all of his salt-and-peppered, six-packed, well-hung glory, I floated the idea to him. We'd make a dildo using him as the model ... and I'd write an article about it. A bashful smile spread across his face, he hesitated, and then he said, "Yeah, OK. Sounds fun. I'm flattered."
Welp. This was happening.
Ordering a kit to make a carbon copy of another person's body part for my own pleasure evoked mountains of inner conflict. It was literal objectification. He was consenting, it was meant to be fun, he was flattered, but still. I was turning part of him into an object.
It felt a little icky. Was I failing as a feminist? I thought about how I was going to earn money from the whole endeavor and felt like an immense assh*le. I wondered if Hugh Hefner ever felt this way. Then I couldn't believe I was drawing a parallel between Hugh Hefner and myself. Who am I?
I decided then and there to use the money to do something for my boyfriend. Guilt assuaged, I carried on.
Choosing features was easy: no to glow in the dark, yes to vibrating; choosing the color, not so much. There were garish neons (why, god?), a variety of flesh tones (yay for intersectionality?), and jet black. The features I wanted narrowed down the selection.
I imagined he wouldn't want it to be hot pink — and I'm not much for pink anyway. Neon green was possible but I couldn't imagine putting an opaque silicone penis — the color of my third-grade slap bracelets — in my vag, so I ended up choosing a flesh tone reminiscent of a peachy crayon. In real life, it's even uglier than you think. $35 and a shipping address later, it was a done deal.
The next time my boyfriend came over, we opened the box and looked at the contents. One thing was clear: we weren't making a Lelo-grade product here. We spread the components across my bed and he grabbed the flimsy clear plastic tube meant for housing the mold.
We were supposed to measure it, cut it to the correct length, and then proceed. Cutting it with scissors was sure to leave sharp edges, and as anyone who's ever accidentally slipped some tooth during a blow job will tell you, sharp edges and penises are a terribly bad mix.
We bandied some fixes about, then moved on to the other parts: molding powder, silicone, a thermometer, and a motor. There were several steps involved in the process. Measuring, mixing, curing. He looked at me skeptically.
"How long am I supposed to stay hard while that sets?"
"Is it going to be cold?"
"Are you gonna watch? How are we doing this?”
The performance anxiety was creeping across his shy face. I offered different options for helping things go well: porn, sex acts, dirty talk, a striptease, but all that accomplished was a perfectly good erection being used for some actual sex. Some people and their priorities.
Afterward, lying amidst the components of our aborted project, we laughed about the "failure" and vowed to try again next weekend. We would not be distracted. I gathered the pieces, shoved them back in the box, and stashed it under my bed. Next time.
Only .... next time didn't happen.
Our next few interactions didn't take us back to my place and then a few weeks later, my boyfriend disappeared. Before you muster some concern, let me clarify that when I say he disappeared, I don't mean in the form-a-search-party way, just in the turns-out-he's-a-massive-coward way.
That bastard ghosted me and he took my dreams of having a replica of his cock in my nightstand with him. (Before you ask: No, it wasn't because of the dick-cloning. He was about that life.)
It's hard to be mad, though. As much as I enjoyed his girth and length and the idea of having the world's best screwvenir, I imagine few things would kill my lady boner like pulling out a plastic shrine to what ended up being the second-biggest dick in that relationship.
And so, the Clone-A-Willy sits in the back of my closet, a great metaphor for the unfinished business between the perfect-penised man and me. One day I'll likely throw it away because how even do you ask someone to be your second choice for a vibrator model? But for now, it serves as a great reminder that perfect penises always come at a cost — and it's usually someone's dignity.
