One of the most important items on this list is the lubricant. The classic of the 1970s and 1980s was, of course, Crisco. You knew you were with a cheap date if he showed up with generic vegetable shortening. When the AIDS epidemic got under way, the use of water-based lubricant became important for other types of sex, because oil can weaken the latex in condoms. Some fisters will swear that water-based lube is not thick enough and doesn’t last long enough to make for a friction-free ride. I’ve seen recipes for mixing water-based lube with shortening, which allegedly gives you a product you can wash out of the sheets. (Don’t count on it.) With experimentation, you will come up with your own answer. But I’d like to point out that you can use the thicker, longer-lasting grease if you are not going to need safer-sex protection later on. If you aren’t going to be using condoms to contain sperms-and-germs, and if you are using nonlatex gloves, oil-based lube won’t be dangerous. Keep in mind that the grease is going to linger in your tail for a few days, so think about what your sex life is going to include after the current date.
Remember that lubricant can be a source of disease transmission. If you have a big container of it, put some in smaller containers that can be discarded after play is done. Some people use paper cups; squeeze bottles or pumps are also handy. Just make sure that any lube you’ve touched is never used with another partner. Even if you are both healthy, the bacteria and other microorganisms from the colon could make somebody else sick.
Keep the room nice and warm. Cold makes muscles tense up, and your asshole is a muscle. For most of us, decent music is also very erotic and helpful during tough bits of the play. It can lift the mood and strengthen the bond between players during nonverbal moments. Keep up with what’s current in the clubs and make your own tapes or buy good ones. Think of it as lubricant for your ears.
What is the best way to position your bodies? Slings became popular because they created a weightless sensation, and the top could move one back and forth, like the rocking of a cradle. But many people don’t like them. It can be hard to make a good pillow for a sling, and who can ignore a crick in the neck, no matter how loud their prostate is humming? Some bottoms do better if they can get up on their hands and knees. I think it’s good to keep the option of changing positions, since moving the whole body will also affect the target orifice.
JOURNEY TO BLISS
When you are facing the bottom, with the bottom on their back, you probably want to make the initial approach with your left hand: the rectum naturally bends the same way your wrist will bend. Apply some lube to the outer opening and massage it in. Use fingers or toys to gradually expand the opening. You actually want to get lubricant inside the rectum. That’s tricky until the asshole begins to gape a bit, and you can shove some in on your fingertips. You can hook one finger around the lip of the anal orifice, stretch it a bit, and use your other hand to tuck a gob of lube past the ring of muscle. If you are already inside and it feels like you need more lube, carefully remove your hand, fill up your palm, and go back in. Then squeeze your hand to release the lube.
Should you talk to the bottom or let them go off on their own mental trip? I prefer partners who stay connected to me while we play. I need to check in with them about what feels good and what does not, how fast or deep I should go—so I want that channel to stay open. I recommend not letting the two of you get too far apart. If you can maintain communication nonverbally, through body movement and eye contact, that’s fine—but it’s also not too common. It’s okay for the top to ask, “Are you groaning because you want more, or are you having trouble?” Reassure the bottom that it is okay to ask for a break, more lube, less lube, tit work, genital stimulation, etc. Also let them know that the play is not goal-oriented. If you don’t get your whole hand inside them, that’s okay. (And they won’t believe you unless that’s true, so curb your enthusiasm.)
Talking can be a way to take control of the bottom’s internal experience. By tweaking his or her emotions, you can also make their body give sway. Fisting can have dozens of different meanings in the context of the relationship between top and bottom. It is the top’s job to identify, name, and sell that meaning. “You’re doing this because you belong to me. It’s the ultimate way of giving me ownership over your body.” “I want to get you higher than you’ve ever been before. You know that nobody can make you feel the way that I can make you feel.” “You’re a dirty little piggy. You can never get enough. Now everybody is going to know what an utter whore you are. See how much you need this?” “I’m touching you because I love you. Every time I push into your body, I’m pushing my love into you. And when you respond and give me what I want, I know that you love me too, because that energy hits me right in the heart. Feel that? Feel how much I love you?”
Remember that there are two bodies present. You can take a break and get sucked off, sixty-nine, do some bondage and flagellation, put on a hood or blindfold, trade back rubs, masturbate, or do anything else you both enjoy. I do not recommend doing play piercing or any other play that breaks the skin during fisting. Sweat and lubricant will be flying everywhere, carrying little travelers, and you don’t want butt germs to enter the bloodstream.
As the butthole opens up, the top will feel some tension around the largest part of the hand. It takes experience to know when you should ignore it and go forward or wait for more dilation. The bottom’s opinion ought to prevail. Use your fingertips to stroke the tissue inside the opening. Keep your hand pointed, folded up as small as possible, with the thumb tucked into the palm. You may approach this point of tension, back off, then work up to it again several times before you slide inside. Use your breaks to drink some water and make out. (Please don’t tell me you are going to turn someone into your sock puppet but you won’t kiss them!) When someone is learning how to get fisted, they may play without being completely penetrated for quite a while before their body learns to trust that these strange sensations are okay, and relaxes. Remember your prime directive: The Asshole Must Feel No Pain!
If you are lucky enough to be admitted, let the shape of the bowel direct the curve of your hand and wrist. Fisting is safest when you don’t go any deeper than your wrist. Just sit where you are for a while, and let the bottom’s body settle down. They may shake all over, cry out, and even cry. It’s intense. You are in a very sensitive area, so you don’t have to do a lot to create a big reaction. When you do start to move, keep it small. Make little circles. Gently open your hand a fraction of an inch, then close it again. Wiggle your fingertips. See what the response is to each of these gestures. If a prostate is available, a little extra pressure in that area can be sexy. But few men enjoy having the prostate hammered, so don’t overdo it.
If there is enough wiggle room, get the fingertips of your other hand into heaven. This can help to introduce more lubricant. Also, some people enjoy a slow in-and-out in which you trade hands, one slipping past the other. Rotating your hand from side to side can also feel good. Eventually, you may be able to use the traditional in-and-out motion with one hand.
Having something that big inside your body usually changes the sexual response cycle. For example, guys may not get erections even if they feel very excited. Sometimes stimulating the penis or clitoris or vagina can help open the butthole up. But sometimes these sensations are too much, and don’t have the desired effect. This can change from session to session. Often, people wind up focusing on the rush they are getting from the anal play. If they have a genital orgasm, it may come at the very end of the play. Fisting can sometimes make people piss. Get your next trick towel out, mop up, and proceed apace. It’s a way of letting go, expanding emotional horizons, and releasing inhibitions. It can also feel grand. Don’t make people wrong for an experience they can’t prevent. Go with the flow. Literally.
From time to time, it is normal for the stimulated bowel to generate waves of contractions. Small ones can be ignored. Just hold still until it’s over. But if you feel your hand being pushed out, let the body do what it ne
eds to do. The feeling of having the hand expelled can be as pleasurable as being filled up. The anus is stretched no matter what direction you are going in. Engage in another activity or take a break until the bottom feels ready to get plugged again.
The bottom’s physical challenge in a fisting scene is obvious. The top is also running a marathon, and perhaps those challenges need to be explained. The top will be putting out a lot of emotional energy through minute concentration and attention to detail. This is a lot of responsibility, and that affects an ethical person. It’s also a huge ego rush. The top will probably be in uncomfortable positions for extended periods of time. If your nose itches or you have sweat in your eyes, your hands may not be clean enough to safely address the problem. (Have a clean bandana with the towels.) Your hand or arms can fall asleep. Your back can hurt. You may feel sleepy or get bored. Let’s acknowledge that you are touching somebody else a lot, and for most of that time, no one is touching you, so you can experience alienation from your own body. The experienced fisting top learns how to minutely adjust position so blood can flow back into the feet or arms. With practice comes greater stamina.
You also learn when a cry for mercy actually means “I need just a little more to be able to get off”; when to call the opening in question a pussy or start narrating a fantasy about giving birth; when to shut the fuck up; and how to bring somebody down from the heights.
The orgasm is a marker for the end of a vanilla sex scene. Given the altered nature of the body during fisting, there may not be a single big explosion. Nevertheless, you can’t do this forever, although it may sometimes feel as if you have created the perfect perpetual motion machine, a piston drilling for oil distilled from the Shadow itself. Sometimes the bottom will sense that they are through and signal that they need to stop. Sometimes the top needs to decide they can’t continue, and inform the bottom that they are running out of steam and need to start coming back down to earth.
The process of extracting your hand can sometimes take as long as getting in. This isn’t common, but you need to be aware that you don’t just yank your hand out, wipe it off, and point the way to your door. Use the index finger of your other hand to open the asshole a bit, in case a seal has developed. You’ll feel a release of air and can safely continue pulling back. Rotate your hand and verbally encourage the bottom to help you. Sometimes if they take a deep breath and gently bear down, you’ll be smoothly expelled.
There are other ways to do fisting than what I’ve described above. Some people enter the body past the wrist. There are also people who like punch-fucking, a rough and quick form of penetration. I am dubious about the safety of these activities. If you are going to do them, try to find an experienced person who understands the risks and can tell you how to minimize them. Where is the line between enough and too much? Every self-aware person has to confront that question and do their own experiments. My answer probably won’t fit everyone else.
AFTERCARE AND SAFETY
If you still like each other afterward (you will probably like each other more), you can cuddle, say sweet things, and drink more water. Then it may be time to have a snack and go to sleep. But the top has usually built up quite a head of steam during this process. He or she needs some attention. The specific nature of the top’s reward ought to be spelled out in advance. If you don’t want to get off with the bottom’s help, go home and treat yourself to a mean, slow session of jerking off, or find another warm body to do you. If tops ignore their own physical needs, they will eventually start to pull away from a specific partner or the technique that is perceived as draining and frustrating.
Forgive me for getting into the creaky old time machine once more, but I want to point out that fisting used to be a pitch-and-catch activity. There were almost no guys who topped exclusively, or men who did nothing but spread their legs and take it. It was understood that everybody was there to get fucked. Nobody with any common sense would trust their asshole to a man who hadn’t experienced fisting himself. There was no shame in getting fisted. In fact, the more you could take, the more macho you were, in an odd way. This was in direct contrast to the SM community’s more strictly segregated and formal roles.
Unfortunately, the brotherhood of butt worship has been subsumed into BDSM culture, for the most part, and that has meant a greater polarization between tops and bottoms. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Those high-and-mighty deities of leather with their perfect boots have got their own appeal. And the tops aren’t bad either. But I like to remind people that there are alternatives, different ways of looking at how these exchanges of erotic energy work, historical shifts and new possibilities for the future.
In conclusion I want to talk a little about sexual health and how to deal with an accident. During a fisting scene, it’s extremely likely that the top will be exposed to whatever lurks within the bottom’s bottom. This is why I encourage both parties to support their immune systems. A case of amoebas is hard to diagnose and unpleasant to treat. Hepatitis is more easily transmissible than HIV. Another potential problem is HPV, the human papillomavirus, which causes genital warts. Touching an infected part of someone’s body and then touching yourself can pass it on. This is an extremely common virus, but some forms of it can dramatically increase a woman’s risk of getting cervical cancer. There is a vaccine available for young women, and I urge everyone eligible to consider getting immunized. If you are going to have oral sex or penile penetration, then you may also have to worry about syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes, and the rest of the STIs. Be as healthy as you can be, use protection, and get tested regularly. If you come down with something, inform your partners, get treated, and don’t pass it on. We can prove that we are a community by taking care of one another.
You can’t rely on pain receptors to tell you if something has gone wrong deep inside the bowel, which is why the safest type of fisting is when you don’t go any deeper than your wrist. Farther in than that the lining is much thinner. And if there is a problem, it will take longer for blood to show up, increasing the risk of a life-threatening issue.
Keep track of the color of your lube. Wipe some on a white towel from time to time. If it is turning pink, you are getting a little bit of blood, which means the lining is abraded. It’s time to stop and find something else fun to do. If you see a spot of red blood, quit. Apply some ice. The bottom needs to monitor their belly and their body temperature. If they get a hard belly, experience internal pain, or start running a fever, it’s time to call 911 and get to the emergency room. If you see a lot of blood, you’re in big trouble. Apply pressure and call for help. This may mean that you need to keep your hand in place, inside the person, until medics arrive. Peritonitis takes hours to develop, but people bleed to death at top speed.
Hospitals can be scary places. Health workers like to think they have seen it all, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be sarcastic or judgmental toward people who have sex-related accidents. I don’t know why those situations should be more embarrassing than a car accident, but reality is often unkind. In the ideal world, all of us would have insurance and primary care doctors who understood our sexuality. But we have to be prepared to cope with less than perfect emergency rooms. A top who abandons a bottom in this situation is a complete and total jerk. Stay with the person who is hurt. Advocate for them. You need the staff to understand that this is not a case of domestic violence. It was consenting sex that went wrong, and you are very, very sorry. If it looks as if they might report this to the police as a case of assault, call your lawyer. (You do have a lawyer, don’t you?) There are no known cases of this happening, but who wants to be the exception?
Now you can see why I urge you to approach handballing with the greatest of respect. I have never to my knowledge hurt anybody I’ve played with, but I’ve also frequently refused to do things I felt were unsafe, even if my partner begged me to continue. Bodies are unpredictable things. If there is a weak spot in a partner’s blood vessel or rectal lining, I could theoreticall
y hurt them even if I was doing something I’ve safely done to others. Err on the side of caution.
Honestly, this game is not for every player. Some of us are disqualified just by virtue of our bodies. Hips or orifices refuse to stretch that much. Minds or hearts know it is not wise, but refuse to let go. Some of us might be able to go there, but we know that we can’t deal with the consequences if an accident happens. If you don’t have good medical care and access to legal protection, don’t take risks that exceed your resources. I would offer the same advice to someone who liked to be catheterized, for example, or anyone who wanted to get pregnant, for that matter.
If such scary things could happen, why do people do handballing at all? Should we declare fisting off-limits for the Safe, Sane, and Consensual crowd? I’m not sure the question is even worth asking, because when people want something for purposes of arousal and physical delight, they will go to great lengths to do it, even if it is dangerous or forbidden. Sometimes forbidding something makes it more appealing. I believe it is better to give people a lot of information about the pros and cons of various sexual behaviors so they can decide for themselves.
Handballing is like modern dance, the feats of Hindu fakirs, or an ordeal that creates a shaman. People do it because it demands everything they’ve got. There is a high obtained from pushing your body to the limits and beyond, and in doing something extraordinary that most people can’t even imagine. Giving up control of such a private and demeaned part of the body, allowing someone else to pleasure you and worship your butt, lifts centuries of culturally induced shame from our shoulders. It is a way of saying, I am different, I can do something amazing, I know a closely guarded secret. My life has magic in it.
The Ultimate Guide to Kink Page 19
