Beginner’s Hands
I never expected to get fisted. It was one of the few things I happily wrote porn about without the slightest interest in firsthand experience. I didn’t figure fisting was generally the kind of thing control freaks and people with trust issues played with. Then I met my boyfriend. An experienced and devoted fister, he also has “beginner’s hands”—the kind that fit into extra-small gloves. His enthusiasm for the practice piqued my curiosity, though I still harbored uncertainties. Would it feel like being at the gynecologist’s? Would it fit? Would it just feel unpleasant, and then be impossible to get out?
We picked a night and went for a long, slow build-up. I repeatedly implored my boyfriend to go slower, that I wasn’t ready, that I needed to mentally let go a little more. He told me later that I had been a spectacular study in contradictions: my body was fully ready and he’d had to actively work against getting pulled in to honor what my head needed.
When I gave the go-ahead at last, he slipped inside. It hurt like nothing I knew for a few seconds, and then...I was hooked.
This is where most narratives about fisting end. Is it that hard to describe? I and my merry band of fisters and fistees set out to find the answer. Let’s meet our crew of happy pervs: You already know me, new to fisting from both sides.
• Jake, my boyfriend with the beginner’s hands, who is also a genderqueer Old Guard perv of many stripes. His response to my questionnaire for this article: “Ohai!! I like fisting!”
• Yona, a thirtysomething kinkster with 10 years of experience as a fistee: “Hope this is useful!”
• Seamus, a genderqueer fister/fistee for the past decade who just began fisting men: “Oh, I am SO answering this!!!”
In an age where almost everything intimate is considered appropriate dinner conversation, why is fisting still so private? Maybe because it still labors under tremendous misconceptions, especially in the medical field. “Since my partner is biologically female—it says so on my chart—there is an assumption that nothing more than maybe a stray finger goes in my vagina,” says Yona. “When I tell them I get fisted regularly, they are completely confounded. I actually got into an argument with a doctor once who thought I must be mistaken about being fisted since ‘only gay men who are into BDSM do that’.”
Seamus finds a slightly different bias. “When I talk about anal fisting, people will freak out! They start talking about needing diapers, injury, and of course, fear of getting excrement on yourself. This whole country is terrified of its ass.”
Certainly there is a bias in what little fisting information that’s readily available. “Anytime I see woman-on-woman vaginal fisting in porn, the fister always has these huge talon-like nails and she is slipping them in some poor fistee without gloves,” Yona laments. “The nails! The nails! I see a much better representation in gay male fisting porn. Some actually include the trimming and filing of the fister’s nails beforehand, as part of the porn.”
Seamus has seen a distinct presumption “that all fistees are ‘loose’—and I mean that in every sense of the word. Yes, some people are very easy to fist. But that doesn’t mean their naughty bits flap in the breeze.” Gender assumptions have colored Seamus’ experiences as well: “It seems like it’s such a forbidden thing—that only men should fist other men, and that only gay men like fisting. It’s very sad. I feel like fisting goes WAY beyond gender and more people should be open to the possibilities. It was unbelievable the first time I fisted a man. It was a fantasy come true for me. I’d seen men fisted in movies and live, but didn’t think I could find a bio[logical] man who’d trust me enough to accept my hand inside him.”
Seamus isn’t the only one to find real-life situations playing out much differently than one might expect given what little public information is out there. “I really had no idea just how vastly different everybody’s architecture is down there. I really didn’t,” Jake says. “And I had no idea how painful it’d be from MY end [as a fister]! My hand was purple after our first round, and had no feeling for more than a few minutes. Those pelvic floor muscles are stronger than I anticipated, boy howdy.”
My own experience as a fister falls along similar lines. To feel someone else’s orgasm from the inside is both a crash course in physiology and an acid test of just how much intimacy one is truly prepared for. It seems to be this unique mixture of the physical and the emotional that keeps fisters and fistees coming back for more. “I want to be in complete control,” Seamus says, “and I want them to want me to be in complete control—to give themselves over to me.”
“It was such an intense connection,” Jake says of his first—and accidental—experience fisting someone. “Maybe it was the way she could feel every minute movement of my hand and wrist, maybe it was the way I could feel her heartbeat around my fingers. Whatever it was, it was BIG. We both became addicts almost immediately.”
“I was so focused on what the physical act of fisting would be like that I never thought about what the emotional and psychological effects would be,” says Yona. “But there is something beyond the physical that I had only gotten a tiny taste of during my first brief experience. I knew I wanted more.”
“It was the intimacy that brought me back,” Seamus notes. “It’s almost like holding someone’s essence in your hand. All pretense falls away—no one can be ‘cool’ when being fisted. You are at your most raw and basic—it’s beautiful. ...I never thought it would be so intimate. Fisting my wife is often a transcendent experience.”
Trent Reznor, Dark Shaman of the Fist-Fuckers
The intensity of fisting is obvious to those who care to look for it, even if they haven't experienced it themselves. Sorcha, a monogamous, happily married mom who identifies as “bendy-straight,” writes scorching-hot fisting fiction without firsthand fisting experience. “It’s HAWT,” she says without reservation. “It implies a level of trust that I really like. I like the...well, not the extreme nature of it exactly, but the pushing of limits that way. I find that when I’m writing the bottom character in that scenario, it really puts him into a deeply altered (in a good way) headspace. I also love the way it puts the top into an über-responsible and caring position, as well. It’s awesome to have a real badass character doing it and being able to show his caring and even tender side that way.”
As a pornographer who had a good start on my career before I ever busted my cherry, I can relate to Sorcha’s ease in writing something on research and personal connection alone. “There’s some really good info on the Web these days, and having kinky friends to ask for fact-checking really helps, of course,” she says. “Since I pretty much grew up in the gay bar scene, it’s something I’d heard of even though it wasn’t really talked about in the mainstream.”
Indeed, one of the few pop-culture references to fisting exists in the Nine Inch Nails song “Wish,” a live concert staple. As a fist fucker, it’s eerily powerful to stand in a crowd of thousands all shouting “Gotta listen to your big-time hard line bad luck FIST FUCK!” and pumping their fists in the air, but how many actually get the reference? (There’s no question Reznor gets it; when the EP “Wish” debuted on won a Grammy, he quipped that a fitting epitaph would be “REZNOR: Died. Said ‘fist fuck,’ won a Grammy.”)
As invigorating as sharing what may or may not be a genuine experience with thousands of people may be, it doesn’t hold a candle to that moment when the thick part of my boyfriend’s hand slips inside me. As great as the orgasms are, as powerful as the control is, I believe there is a reason why “intensity” is the word that comes up again and again: a good fisting blots out the deadlines, the laundry, and the bills, and that singular attention in an increasingly multitasking world is a rare and beautiful commodity.