For the past couple months I've been keeping up with new uploads to the pegging tag. As it stands, a good portion of posts involving strapon sex are improperly tagged upon upload; many people will apply pegging to female/female, male/male, or intersex/etc instead of its gender exclusive male/female pairings.

As I'm thinking about it, is pegging as a tag worth keeping around? Its usage by a large number of e621 users is functionally identical to a search of strapon_sex male_penetrated, with a load of other genders being incorrectly tagged upon upload in a large number of cases.

Pegging as a tag is one of the few non-gender tags that is extremely gender-exclusive. It by its existence does not apply to andromorph or maleherm characters, unlike similar male-related tags like femboy, because it automatically implies male_penetrated.

That being said, pegging is a very popular and niche fetish in the real world, with its role-reversal themes being prominent in its existence. Aside from said role-reversal themes, it's no different than any other strapon sex on its own. The only thing differentiating it from regular strapon_sex on this site is inclusion of feeldoes in its definition.

That's why I'm sitting here and wondering what would be the best course of action for this tag. Its use is extremely messy and inconsistent, it's extremely specific and exclusive for no particular benefit- removing the multitude of tags pegging applies on the many improperly tagged posts can be a massive pain.

But it can't simply be aliased to strapon_sex because of its inclusion of feeldoes, unless feeldoes become part of the definition of strapon_sex.

Thoughts?

from kind of an outsider perspective, I've always thought the definition we use for this this tag is kinda dumb. I think restricting it to only f/p/m situations makes it a really strange outlier, and I've never heard a good argument for why, and I've only seen two users even make an attempt, one of them being Fluffball (via wiki edits), whose philosophy on tagging I obviously do not jive with.

as I've said several times in the past half-dozen years: in my opinion, this tag should be applicable to situations featuring a character who is sans penis (female, andromorph, null) using a strapon to anally penetrate a character who has a penis and no vagina (male, gynomorph). it's statistically still role reversal in all of these situations.

if we do not change this tag's definition to broaden its scope, it has been pretty much entirely deprecated by the existence of the directional penetrating tags (x/p/y), and really should just not exist.

dba_afish said:
from kind of an outsider perspective, I've always thought the definition we use for this this tag is kinda dumb. I think restricting it to only f/p/m situations makes it a really strange outlier, and I've never heard a good argument for why, and I've only seen two users even make an attempt, one of them being Fluffball (via wiki edits), whose philosophy on tagging I obviously do not jive with.

The only good argument I can possibly think of is keeping in-line with real-world definitions for pegging - usually it's strictly a woman/man thing, but it can include trans women with penises of their own, and trans men without one, therefore making restricting the usage of pegging to male [has penis] and female [does not have penis] even more pointless even before you consider the multitude of body types we have here on e621.

And in order to broaden the definition of this tag, we'd first have to unimply the multiple gender-related tags it already implies- male/female and male_penetrated would need to be unimplied.

A) I agree with removing pegging (aliasing it to strapon_sex) It is just strapon_sex female_penetrating_male.

B) TIL we don't consider strapless strapons to be strapons. That's really silly. I don't like that

previous discussions:
topic #4857 _{this thread says it's 4 years old but it's obviously not.}
topic #11831
topic #14122
topic #14092
https://e621.net/forum_topics/24758?page=7#forum_post_254792
topic #23377
topic #26364
topic #28650

dba_afish said:
previous discussions:
topic #4857 _{this thread says it's 4 years old but it's obviously not.}

It says it's over 4 years ago, which is technically correct

dba_afish said:
previous discussions:
topic #4857 _{this thread says it's 4 years old but it's obviously not.}
topic #11831
topic #14122
topic #14092
https://e621.net/forum_topics/24758?page=7#forum_post_254792
topic #23377
topic #26364
topic #28650

Man, this conversation has been going on for so long and still pegging remains a Problem Tag to this day.

I do ultimately think that pegging should be aliased to strapon_sex, especially since dba's mention of the female_penetrating_male tag does make it pretty much obsolete.

dba_afish said:
from kind of an outsider perspective, I've always thought the definition we use for this this tag is kinda dumb. I think restricting it to only f/p/m situations makes it a really strange outlier, and I've never heard a good argument for why, and I've only seen two users even make an attempt, one of them being Fluffball (via wiki edits), whose philosophy on tagging I obviously do not jive with.

Pegging has to do with role-reversal. Rather than a male penetrating a female in her nether regions, it's a female penetrating a male in his nether regions as if she was male (using a strap-on or something phallic attached to her crotch). The point of it is to take normative male-on-female penetrative sex and flip the positions/roles. And since there's a push to include fingering and fisting and other such things as penetration, female_penetrating_male isn't a good substitute.

watsit said:
Pegging has to do with role-reversal. Rather than a male penetrating a female in her nether regions, it's a female penetrating a male in his nether regions as if she was male (using a strap-on or something phallic attached to her crotch). The point of it is to take normative male-on-female penetrative sex and flip the positions/roles. And since there's a push to include fingering and fisting and other such things as penetration, female_penetrating_male isn't a good substitute.

yeah, I understand that. and, as I've said, I'm not particularly in favour of a total dissolution of the tag. I still think it has some potential utility, and I don't really see how including situations involving other genders hinders that utility at all, if this was changed pegging f/p/m would still return the same results as pegging prior to the change. by the numbers, everything I described is still technically role reversal, maybe not by quite the same degree, but role reversal nonetheless.

dba_afish said:
yeah, I understand that. and, as I've said, I'm not particularly in favour of a total dissolution of the tag. I still think it has some potential utility, and I don't really see how including situations involving other genders hinders that utility at all, if this was changed pegging f/p/m would still return the same results as pegging prior to the change. by the numbers, everything I described is still technically role reversal, maybe not by quite the same degree, but role reversal nonetheless.

I don't know, I don't really see the role reversal aspect applying to intersex and ambiguous characters. It's not really about strict numbers, but the general expectation -- m/p/f is normal vanilla sex that most people expect in life, and pegging is flipping that around. g/p/f is not normal vanilla sex, it's already somewhat unusual, so flipping it around doesn't really hold the same connotation. It's like saying bestiality could include human x animal_humanoid and human x anthro; it can make some sense since it's a human with a non-human animal, and feral bestiality would largely return the same results that bestiality currently does, but that's not the connotation the word carries or the expectation people have for it.

And with ambiguous characters, they're... well, ambiguous. How can we say ambiguous_penetrating_male is a role reversal for pegging purposes if we can't say what the ambiguous character is? If it's male_penetrating_male it wouldn't be a reversal of hetero-normative sex. To be honest, ambiguous_penetrating_male is kind of weird for the kind of penetration we're talking about. If you can tell there's a strap-on doing the penetrating instead of a penis, I think that's a fair basis for assuming the character lacks a penis, so should at least be tagged as female_penetrating (barring other details that would indicate them being intersex). If you can see a penis on the penetrating character, they wouldn't be ambiguous. If you can't see a strap-on and can't tell they have a penis, then you can't say there's penetration for pegging purposes (it could still work for fingering, tentacles, etc, but that wouldn't be pegging regardless of the penetrating character's sex).

watsit said:
And with ambiguous characters, they're... well, ambiguous. How can we say ambiguous_penetrating_male is a role reversal for pegging purposes if we can't say what the ambiguous character is? If it's male_penetrating_male it wouldn't be a reversal of hetero-normative sex. To be honest, ambiguous_penetrating_male is kind of weird for the kind of penetration we're talking about. If you can tell there's a strap-on doing the penetrating instead of a penis, I think that's a fair basis for assuming the character lacks a penis, so should at least be tagged as female_penetrating (barring other details that would indicate them being intersex). If you can see a penis on the penetrating character, they wouldn't be ambiguous. If you can't see a strap-on and can't tell they have a penis, then you can't say there's penetration for pegging purposes (it could still work for fingering, tentacles, etc, but that wouldn't be pegging regardless of the penetrating character's sex).

off topic, but is using the ambiguous penetrating tags when there are characters you cant determine the species of the wrong way to use them? i have been tagging it on those kinds of posts for a bit now.

dinbyy said:
off topic, but is using the ambiguous penetrating tags when there are characters you cant determine the species of the wrong way to use them? i have been tagging it on those kinds of posts for a bit now.

yes, ambiguous there is meant for ambiguous gender

watsit said:
Pegging has to do with role-reversal. Rather than a male penetrating a female in her nether regions, it's a female penetrating a male in his nether regions as if she was male (using a strap-on or something phallic attached to her crotch). The point of it is to take normative male-on-female penetrative sex and flip the positions/roles. And since there's a push to include fingering and fisting and other such things as penetration, female_penetrating_male isn't a good substitute.

Even with this in mind, aside from the role reversal, there's nothing about pegging that makes it stand out from regular sex with a strapon. Many people - about 1/5th of taggers based on removals alone - seem to agree with this idea via the notion of them adding the pegging tag to posts where it shouldn't be added to. Almost 19% of times pegging has been added to posts, it has been subsequently removed from said post. And even still, a huge amount of posts currently with the pegging tag have said tag applied incorrectly - on posts with no themes of pegging [there is no visible strapon], on solo posts, on images where pegging is imminent but not happening yet, on posts where the pegging supposedly happened but is not currently happening, on posts with female/female or gynomorph/female or etc pairings. These mistags are constant, they are pervasive, and without the diligence needed to clean them up and remove them, pegging quickly becomes a wastebin tag with very little useful meaning or anything separating it from normal strapon_sex.

watsit said:
I don't know, I don't really see the role reversal aspect applying to intersex and ambiguous characters. It's not really about strict numbers, but the general expectation -- m/p/f is normal vanilla sex that most people expect in life, and pegging is flipping that around...

And with ambiguous characters, they're... well, ambiguous. How can we say ambiguous_penetrating_male is a role reversal for pegging purposes if we can't say what the ambiguous character is? If it's male_penetrating_male it wouldn't be a reversal of hetero-normative sex. To be honest, ambiguous_penetrating_male is kind of weird for the kind of penetration we're talking about. If you can tell there's a strap-on doing the penetrating instead of a penis, I think that's a fair basis for assuming the character lacks a penis, so should at least be tagged as female_penetrating (barring other details that would indicate them being intersex). If you can see a penis on the penetrating character, they wouldn't be ambiguous. If you can't see a strap-on and can't tell they have a penis, then you can't say there's penetration for pegging purposes (it could still work for fingering, tentacles, etc, but that wouldn't be pegging regardless of the penetrating character's sex).

I agree with you on the importance of pegging as a niche and the role reversal aspects. It's one of my favorite themes in sex and porn. But as it stands, based on TWYS and its current and historical use on this site, pegging is no different than strapon_sex aside from the genders of the characters involved. Expanding its definition would not do anyone any favors. It would only make it conflate more with strapon_sex and make it even more pointless of a tag! So right now pegging is stuck in this limbo where it theoretically has a use, but is being misused so frequently that its use has long left it in the dust.

dinbyy said:
off topic, but is using the ambiguous penetrating tags when there are characters you cant determine the species of the wrong way to use them? i have been tagging it on those kinds of posts for a bit now.

ambiguous, when used as part of a paring tag or similar, specifically refers to ambiguous_gender. so these tags are to be used when the character lacks visible gender pointers, either because not enough of the character is visible to determine a gender or because the character is fairly androgynous and lacks visible genitals.

if the character has genitals (or is genitals) a character will always fall into one of the remaining 6 categories.

moonlit-comet said:
Expanding its definition would not do anyone any favors. It would only make it conflate more with strapon_sex and make it even more pointless of a tag!

I disagree? I dunno, like, t4t strapon sex stuff like this, and also stuff like this or like this still _feel_ like the same (or at least an analogous enough) situation a lot of the time. and also, posts like this are so few and far between they're really not going to effect the composition of the tag _that_ much.

I thought Pegging is specifically F/M
Strapon_Sex would be F/F
I just think it's misinformed people making silly mistakes

fuyu_graycen said:
I thought Pegging is specifically F/M
Strapon_Sex would be F/F
I just think it's misinformed people making silly mistakes

There's no reason for strapon_sex to be gender-exclusive. It's the most gender neutral term for sex with a strapon, and anyone can do it- even people who have a penis.

male/male
post #4929549

gynomorph/gynomorph
post #4083115

Even if we, for some reason or another, opt to keep pegging as a tag despite its increasing presence as a wastebin tag, adding more gender-exclusive tags for sex of this variety would only make the problem worse, not better.

pleaseletmein said:
yes, ambiguous there is meant for ambiguous gender

Yeah, though ambiguous penetration is not helping matters

The bulk update request #9322 is pending approval.

remove implication pegging (3701) -> anal_penetration (347084)
remove implication pegging (3701) -> male/female (671393)
remove implication pegging (3701) -> male_penetrated (226210)
remove implication pegging (3701) -> sex (1027339)
remove implication pegging (3701) -> sex_toy_penetration (4570)
remove implication pegging (3701) -> sex_toy_in_ass (31318)
remove implication pegging (3701) -> toying_partner (9559)

Reason: down with pegging

(strapon_sex female_penetrating_male should return identical results, and of course can be used with any other gender combination if desired)

After:
alias pegging -> strapon_sex