I have an admittedly weak constitution for some things. In general, there's not much I find repulsive or insupportable from the right frame of mind. I had to eat cow after-birth during my first few months in Madagascar, and ever since then I've felt pretty comfortable believing there was little left in the world that could legitimately disgust me (save toenail fungus, which is a terrible thing). Fisting was always something so surreal and abstract that it couldn't possibly elicit disgust. For years, I thought of it as something that was just physically impossible.
The first time I saw the act performed was in a porn magazine one of my college roommates had lying around. It was entirely anticlimactic. Two tiny lesbians were stuck in freeze frame licking each other on a couch beside a fireplace, and in one of the frames, the tiny brunette had apparently slipped her hand into the blonde's vagina up to the wrist. "So it is possible," I thought. It didn't look all that bad. I'm sure that for a professional it's not an Olympic feat to accommodate the squished hand of an emaciated porn actress for an extra few hundred dollars.
A few years later, I was working for a talent management company in Beverly Hills and one of my co-workers called me over to his computer to watch something that a few of the other guys were marveling at in disbelief. At his desk I saw a brief video called "Ass Tulip," in which an actress had her anus fisted by a beefy man, and afterwards, through some horrible capacity of the human body pushed to its mechanical extreme, she was able to flex her butt in a way that made it flip inside out. This is the most nauseating thing I've ever seen in my life. I feel a nauseous tickling in my nose just trying to describe it.
I always thought of fisting as a male perversion. It seemed motivated by a kind of arithmetical thinking that more is always better; something only a man could come up with. I remember the first time I put my hands down a girl's pants and realized I could actually fit a third finger into her vagina. I suddenly began to worry that she might think I was a novice for having only used two fingers for so long. I was totally surprised when she wriggled away after a minute. "Ummmmm, I think three fingers is too many."
I was even more surprised to learn that one of my friends has actually been fisted, and not just in the singular, past tense sense of the word. It was actually a desired and enjoyable part of her sex life for quite a long time. Her girlfriend didn't have Neanderthal hands so this wasn't quite the mind-flipping carnival sideshow rendition of the act that my Google search earlier tonight brought forth. It was something intense and deeply intimate, built up to over the course of several years together with her partner (a woman).
So I was in an already queasy frame of mind when I came across Glamour's sex blog Single-ish, and a particular post about women who apologize too much. It described a night out at a bar playing pool with two men who felt compelled to give counsel at every step of the way to the helpless women trying to figure out which balls went where. The author described how her immediate reaction to missing a shot was to offer an apology to her male pedagogues.
The author would probably balk at the idea of her folksy musing being enjoined with fisting, but the two appeared almost one after the other on my computer. Some people are willing to make freakshows of their lives and bodies. Some people live in hygienically manicured bubbles where the use of the word "darn" affords the luxury of alluding to something ugly without actually having to come right out and say it. Some people stick up for themselves and others flirt with physical ruin for the sake of testing their limits.
I have no interest in ever fisting somebody. The act of writing about it is enough to make me turn my head from the monitor and squint. But then I wonder: maybe there are some women in the world with vaginas that require a fist? Like the mythical micro-penis, perhaps there is an equal and opposite analog in women, the macro-vagina. Could I ever fall in love with someone that had macro-vagina?
I have no idea. But hopefully, there will now be a new entry at the top of the list when someone Googles "fisting" and "Glamour" in the same search.
Previous Posts:
Date Machine: The Woman in the Coffee Shop and The Woman at the Bus Stop
Love Machine: Your Mom Will Do
Date Machine: Scary Movies or I Peed My Pants
Date Machine: Rate My Ethics
Love Machine: Let's Just Be Friends
Love Machine: Must Be Willing to Lie About Where We Met
Sex Machine: Why Women Are Great In Bed
Sex Machine: Why Women Suck in Bed
Date Night: All By Myself on a Saturday Night
Sex Machine: Spank My Ass
Love Machine: Infidelity or How Long Can You Go Without Cheating?
Date Night: The 45-Minute Walkout
Date Night Redux: H's Version of Our Night Out
Celebrity Confession: Who is Lauren Cohan and Why is She Hitting on Me?
Sex Machine: My First Muff Dive
Crying in Public: Remember the Cheerleaders
Sex Machine: Masturbating Upside Down
Date Night: Two Women in One Night
Hooksexup Confessions: Rate My Penis Size
Crying In Public: The Sichuan Night Train
Love machine: How I Date On The Internet
Sex Machine: Rate My Blowjobs
Crying in Public: My Cubicle