Inside the Futanari Clinic, a surgical operation unfolds in which the female sexual organ is reassembled: accompanied by the tearing of flesh, this near-death experience rearranges the female body into something uncanny. Through this corporeal mutation, she is reborn within another body—one marked by a newly constructed identity: that of the dominator. (Futanari: Anime characters with both male and female genitalia, usually female-presenting.)
Queer artist Calayah, through the act of pegging, invites us to reconsider how femininity, sexuality, and identity are translated, imitated, and technologically produced and reproduced. Through this performance that converts females into intersex subjects with dildos via an operation at once excruciatingly painful and strangely sweet, she explores the false sexual empowerment granted to women within the phallocentric script of pegging. Her work exposes the gendered masquerade and performativity of sexuality, interrogating the disciplinary power of patriarchal sexual scripts over women’s embodied subjectivity.
Calayah’s artistic practice generates a profound sense of tension, juxtaposing qualities that appear contradictory—sweetness and violence, bliss and horror. Influenced by Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s seventeenth-century sculpture The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, she captures the paradoxical affect of pain fused with joy, even ecstasy with surrender.
Upon closer scrutiny, viewers encounter the concealed horror underlying this sweetness, subtly embedded within the visual composition. The immaculate white birthday cake, for example, symbolizes the female body prior to social inscription. Yet once penetrated by the surrogate phallus, the cake is violently transformed—mirroring the enforced reconstruction of the body. The operating table offers a deceptive serenity, a brief anesthetized sweetness that accompanies corporeal laceration and the experience of nearly crossing into death. In this process, both psyche and soma are radically altered.
Following Michel Foucault, sexuality could be understood as socially and historically constructed, often serving political or ideological functions. Gender oppression, in particular, is rendered insidiously invisible because of its de-politicization: instead of being framed as a field of power, it is naturalized and stripped of its political dimensions.
The politics of gender thus interrogates unequal relations of domination and subordination. For contemporary women, the articulation of desire is mediated by structural power relations, out of which the practice of pegging emerges. Pegging is characterized by three salient features: gender reversal, phallic centrality, and the assertion of both active female desire and male anal pleasure. At its core, however, pegging is a replication of masculinity: once women don the prosthetic phallus, they enact traits long attributed to hegemonic male dominance. They stand taller, their voices deepen, their authority is amplified.
John Gagnon and William Simon’s Sexual Conduct (1973) introduced their sexual scripts theory, which posits that all social behavior—including sexual conduct—follows culturally constituted scripts. As Shakespeare famously wrote, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Sexual scripts theory rejects the notion of sexuality as a raw impulse, conceiving it instead as scripted performance within social conventions.
In phallocentric discourse, penetrative intercourse is positioned as the climactic centerpiece of sexual activity—equated with sex itself. Correspondingly, the erasure of the clitoris in social discourse mirrors its marginalization within heterosexual sexual scripts. In pegging, although women derive psychological pleasure from disrupting conventional gendered positions, physical pleasure remains comparatively minor. The emphasis continues to fall on reproductive utility, while female pleasure itself is conceptually absent. Desire and corporeality become entirely disembodied.
Precisely because gender oppression is structurally concealed, women engaging in pegging often do not perceive their disciplining within a patriarchal frame. As Calayah asserts: “Empowered women do not need to look for another symbol to replace the penis.” While pegging undoubtedly offers women access to a dominator’s identity, such empowerment remains tethered to the replication of masculine forms of dominance and therefore circulates within patriarchal discourse. In a culture where women’s opportunities remain constrained, envy is directed not toward male anatomy but toward male power and privilege. The phallus becomes a convenient synecdoche of structural inequality. Otherwise, why is there so little talk of “womb envy,” despite the uterus’ reproductive primacy?
Within the Futanari Clinic, Calayah dramatizes the psychic intensification of phallic envy. The surgical environment materializes a cult of the phallus, visually staging how pegging produces a “new male.” Ritualistic tropes abound: candles kindle the sacred, white surgical caps suggest sublimated libido. The use of water-filled condoms invokes a metaphor for phallic envy—women’s symbolic longing for power mapped onto prosthetic substitution. Their limp, suggestively absent-yet-present forms function as metaphors for the omnipresence of phallocentrism in patriarchal culture.
Significantly, even as Calayah identifies pegging as a trap of false empowerment, she posits a cautious optimism: “Admittedly, pegging destabilizes heterosexual structures to a certain extent. Women become subjects of desire—a phenomenon emerging from women’s rising consciousness. Yet I consider such awareness of feminine sexual subjectivity still in its developmental stage. In the future, women need more freedom, inclusivity, and love in the external environment, so as to cultivate diverse, intersubjective sexual scripts.”
