Bling For Your Thing: Is Pejazzling a Pro-Vajazzling PR Hoax?

Often I see sex-related news stories, and I think: “There’s absolutely no way I would ever write about that, because it’s stupid.” As I’ve been informed by erotica writer Nikki Magennis, that’s because I keep reading the Daily Mail.

The Daily Mail does indeed seem to be decidedly Foxy — it holds down the delirious-sensationalism side of the spectrum over on the right side of the Pond. But in the matter of hotgluing bling to your weewee, I have an internal debate between the Pejazzling is Sex-Negative Thomas and the Pejazzling is Merely Body Ornamentation, and It’s the Press Coverage That’s Sex-Negative — If you’re pro-piercing, you should be pro-Pejazzling.

As sex educators and psychotherapists are fond of observing, “Should” is a four-letter word. The problem is, I think Pejazzling itself is a media hoax designed to get more free press for Vajazzling. Period. Not because “men would never do that” — I’m quite confident some of them would, and others wouldn’t. I think Pejazzling is a hoax for purely anatomical reasons.

In the first place, the very term Pejazzling seems anatomically ignorant, like the term Vajazzling. Anyone unclear on the difference between a vagina and a vulva should not be selling things to glue onto either one. Had it been called Vujazzling, I could have lived with that. In a “just society,” vulvas should have every opportunity to get blinged out all to hell, without being ridiculed by the likes of me (insofar as anything out there happens without getting ridiculed by the likes of me). It is my considered veteran-sex-educator opinion that bling for your vagina proper should be limited to things like stainless-steel dildos, smart balls and insertable shiny vibes.

And as for Pejazzling? Look, the penis does things that the vulva just doesn’t. Or, rather, that certain tissues in the vulva do, but in an entirely different anatomical context, given (potentially, though not always) drastically divergent fetal development. And Vajazzing appears, for the most part, not to be Vujazzling either, but Pujazzling, for Pubic Region jazzling, for either gender.

Y’see, for anatomical males, it seems to me that gluing rhinestones to your dick would be highly impractical however it was done. (For males utilizing a non-anatomical penis, this gets a lot simpler — but gluing crystals on a dildo or soft pac is not what I’m talking about here).

If you glued them on when you were erect, you’d have to stay erect or your rhinestones would likely go poppity-pop all over creation, and likely roll under the refrigerator. Such a thing wouldn’t be very blingy in practical terms. On the other hand, if you glued rhinestones on your willie while you were soft, it seems like you’d have to utterly refrain from popping a boner or, again, they’d go popping off, probably accompanied by your howls of agony.

That would, quite frankly, be a heck of a dom/sub scene — I could envision a CFNM cocktail party, kaffee klatsch or ladies’ bridge party, with some lucky gent expected, nay, commanded to maintain his erection, under threat of a humiliating storm of airborne rhinestones while the ladies laugh merrily. But I’m fairly sure that’s not what the Daily Mail has in mind.

While I’ve never had a genital piercing myself, I’ve been there in piercing salons while nice folks named things like Natasha and Scrape politely and painstakingly manage the measurements necessary to estimate the proper size and placement for a Prince Albert while maintaining both professional detachment and the world’s most admirable flavor of businesslike objectivity possible around a boner. That doesn’t sound much like grabbing a tube of Superglue and a box of shiny things, and having at, saying “Oh, don’t worry about it — get hard or don’t get hard, it doesn’t matter.”

That shit just wouldn’t work — and so, I think the whole thing is a dumb PR hoax intended to sell more Vajazzling products, and fetch eyeballs for the Daily Mail.

In this, the Photoshop job above, from Unicorn Booty, is decidedly unhelpful, although, to be fair, Unicorn Booty makes up for it with some crystalline prose:

That, my friends, is a whole lot of Azzle. Vajazzle.me, the good folks who made applying rhinestones to your vagina a worldwide sensation, are proud to announce something for the fellas. Pejazzling is logically Vajazzling for men…Now you can treat your penis like it’s the diamond encrusted totem pole you’ve always known it to be, and don’t even get me started on those disco balls of yours.

[Link.]

Remember when I mentioned the Daily Mail‘s sex-negative asshattery? Well, check out the blingy prose:

It was an inevitable twist in a tawdry tale. Following on from the almost cult-level success of the ‘vajazzle’ comes its evil twin brother, the ‘pejazzle’.

Vajazzling – the decoration of the female nether regions with Swarovski crystals – has enjoyed a surge in popularity after The Only Way Is Essex’s Amy Childs started offering the service at her beauty salon.

[Salons] have reported a surge in numbers of women visiting for a more professional service, where crystals are applied individually with tweezers in a bespoke design.

But as popularity of the body adornment trend has grown, it has become clear that it is not only women interested in the service.

According to salon owners, 40 per cent of customers requesting the body bling are men.

As a result, the online supplier of the crystal designs has responded by designing a range of stick-on crystals just for men, named Pejazzles.

And who better than to launch the range than TOWIE star, club promoter and self-confessed Pejazzler, Mark Wright?

Mark is, he says, ‘keen to speak out’ for the growing number of men he claims are Pejazzling.

‘Women don’t necessarily want a rough and ready man. Some prefer a man who’s groomed and takes care of himself. It’s each to their own,’ he says.

[Link.]

“Almost cult-like?” This thing definitely sounds like a hoax.

For a society that affords those who possess genetically-provided penises some very strange privileges, the Western world in some ways has an even weirder relationship with male genitalia than it does with female. Those with penises who spend too much time thinking about them  are ridiculed not just by sex-haters but by sly, savvy sex educators who get sick of hearing guys bellyache about whether their cocks are big enough to “please a woman.” Seriously. We make fun of them a lot, and it’s sometimes a little weird…but then, it’s weird how many men are convinced that their three or five or seven “inches” (as if an erect penis had only one dimension) will never be “enough” to “please” a partner.

In the mainstream media, on the other hand, a man’s “obsession” with his own body seems to be defined as anything beyond an absolute minimal interest in whether he needs a bypass this year. Except within narrowly defined parameters of fitness and sports, being interested in your own body even in a non-sexual sense, is often treated as a little less than masculine. In the U.S., at least, a man being focused on ornamentation or sensual pleasure is cause to question his heterosexuality. What’s more, any degree of ornamentation as “extreme” as Pejazzling brings up transphobia — in which genetically male-bodied people who cross a certain ill-defined bling line run afoul of what it means not just to be a straight male, but what it means to be male.

In that context, Pejazzling is likely, insofar as it gets any press traction at all (which I hope it does not) to offer another too-easy chance to promulgate sex-hatred — and not just in those media outlets that seem genuinely attached to their agenda to make all of us feel like shit for having genitals. Among sex-savvy readers and writers, I fear Pejazzling will be a curiosity to be ridiculed.

But what’s the alternative? In the Daily Mail article, Pejazzling is treated like a curiosity to be slyly ridiculed, one that has to be “defended” by its proponents, who seem to be paid spokespeople.

So if this “trend” is nothing more than a public relations ploy by a company that sells this stuff, then while I think it’s dandy to adorn one’s cooter and/or one’s manhood, I can’t help but wanna vomit at the blatant commercialism. I’m left in my own weird flavor of Moral Panic, not knowing what to think about Pejazzling.

And that, reader, is a strange place to be.

Image via Unicorn Booty.