As a woman, I go for my pap exam every year. The doctor gives me a surgical-blue paper gown, tells me to undress, and leaves the room. In the midst of winter, it's normally as cold in the office as the clinical setting itself and I hurriedly get naked, unwrap the paper clothing and fumble it up my arms and over my shoulders. Every year I have the same silly dilemma: should I take off my socks or leave them on? Yet, before I ever get to my decision, the doctor walks in, unhinges the metal stirrups with a scraping and startling clang and tells me to lie on the table with my ass near the edge and my feet in the stirrups.

"I've warmed it up, but it might still be a bit cool," the doctor tells me. "Try to relax."

Relaxing is not exactly what I do when someone is cranking open my vagina with a speculum, and for many women it's one of the most powerless positions that she's likely to be in, barring an SM scenario. Alternately, it's such a common experience for women that few of us think of the speculum itself in any sort of fetish way, yet there are some that love being examined so intimately whether during their pap smears or in medical play.

The speculum (Latin for "mirror", from specere, "to look at") consists of a hollow cylinder with two hinged parts that have rounded ends. James Marion Sims invented it in the mid-19th century in response to a female patient who had had a riding accident. He needed to get a thorough look into her vagina, and up until that point, doctors relied on touch rather than sight. In order to get a better view, Sims fashioned a crude, spoon-like tool from pewter that he used to expand the vaginal walls and this later “became the first prototype for the speculum¹."

Today, most medical speculums are made of plastic and have been popularized on porn sites like K Scans and Doctor Tushy. Still, some enthusiasts prefer the coldness of metal to plastic, and these are readily available at specialty sex shops in North America. However, many women wouldn't particularly agree that the use of specula is erotic, though certainly some do, and incorporate the use of the speculum into their typical sexual scenarios or in their medical fantasies.

For female recipients that I have talked to, there appears to be a strong relationship between the use of the speculum to emotion and medical role-play, and little correlation to fetish as defined, in part, as an object necessary for sexual gratification².

"I actually didn't like my semi-annual exams until one day there was a very handsome intern present," said one poster in response to my query on a public BDSM board. "I never used to fantasize about specula or anything of that nature, but that sure changed. I guess lying there so exposed and vulnerable awakened something within me. I still use that memory in my private time, although I never experienced it in my sex life. For me, it is more the control thing that works, and the probing, exposure, shame, etcetera, is what does it for me."

While the fantasy of investigation and the relinquishing of power over to another through a procedure in a clinical setting play into the pleasure of medical fetishism for this particular woman, I discovered that there were other pleasures, particularly for men. I was, however, unable to find anyone that had a specific fetish for the instrument itself. In fact, it often seemed that there was something far more complex than a specula fetish.

Andre Chance, webmaster and owner of A Wizard of Ass Productions, explained that "playing doctor is a very natural, even an instinctive way of exploring the other sex, or whatever gender one is interested in, and a key tool for exploring is probing, which can take place in many forms... including specula."

If the speculum is the instrument, and the fascination is with exploration and probing, then what exactly is the turn-on? Actually, I discovered that it didn’t seem like a fetish at all. As said, there is an element of role-play with investigation and examination, but when it comes to speculum-use, the main object of infatuation appeared to be a partialistic interest with the vagina.

Partialism is defined by Dr. Thomas Stuttaford as the "tendency to be turned on consistently by a particular part of someone else's body, and minor degrees of partialism are part of many, if not most, people's sexual patterns. They may not acknowledge it, but it is likely to be one of many factors that draws one person to another. Men will admit without compunction that they are attracted by women with large breasts or small breasts, large buttocks or small buttocks, long legs or short legs, or blondes, brunettes or redheads but, irrationally, would be furtive about admitting an attraction to feet (or the vagina and cervix in our current query)³."

For some porn sites like Speculum Plays, it immediately appears that the interest is not on the specula, or even enthusiasm with role-play, but on partialism geared toward the mysteries inside the female body. There is little information regarding this particular form of partialism, beyond its rising popularity on medical fetish and mainstream internal camera porn sites. Yet, I am beginning to see an obvious growth in the number of sites employing the internal cam, not simply for a quick glance inside the female body, but on sites where the camera stays relatively focussed on the building fluids in the vagina as a significant form of sexual foreplay.

In an aesthetic sense, there seems almost nothing attractive, personal or erotic about the vaginal walls or the cervix. However, Seth Washavsky, innovative founder of the Internet Entertainment Group was one, if not the first, to employ the dildo cam as a form of porn, back in 1998. He seemed to have an enthusiasm for it, and succinctly described his voyeuristic excitement in an interview with Po Bronson. "First, you see the walls dripping, and a lot of undulating motion. Then, when it happens, there's just an explosion... squirting from the walls. It's amazing⁴."

Rather than a simple partialistic or voyeuristic gaze where the surface of a female body (breasts, buttocks, pussy) is surveyed like in glamour-style Playboy photos, the clinical gaze of a dildo-cam goes beyond the artifice of the outward female body and probes past the surface, investigating the depths of the interior in a way that I can only describe as an attempt to reveal the mysteries of femininity and female sexuality.

In an article called On The Cutting Edge, Anne Balsamo discusses the laproscopy and computer tomography as redefining the range of human perception⁵. While Balsamo does not discuss sex, it's difficult to read her article without wondering if these same new technologies aren't also having an effect on redefining, and shaping the direction of medical fetish porn, as well. As new technologies reveal the workings of the human body, so to does the pseudo-medical dildo cam give access to the mysterious and fascinating female orgasm, which otherwise has eluded men. Now, not only can we see the exterior or the surface of a woman's face while cumming, but we can go inside and prove that she's not only turned on by the phallus, but that she's not faking it, and that proof, it seems to me – the satisfaction and excitement about the depth of her submission, the penetration, and the undisputable reality of the female orgasm - is one part of the whole purpose and turn on in medical fetishes surrounding the speculum and ultimately partialistic pleasure of the cervix and vagina.

References

[1] Brinker, Wendy. James Marion Sims: Father Butcher. 12 Jan. 2006.

[2] Will. FetishFish. Fetishism Part 1. 08 Nov. 2005.

[3] Stuttaford, Dr. Thomas. Body and Soul: Sex Matters with Dr. Thomas Stuttaford and Suzi Godson. TimesOnline. 31 Dec. 2005.

[4] Bronson, Po. Lets do it: A journey into Club Love. 04 March 2006.

[5] Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ed. Visual Culture Reader. Chapter 19, Balsamo, Anne. On the cutting edge: Cosmetic surgery and the technological production of the gendered body. Routledge, New York, 2001. Pg. 224.