Tristan Taormino - The Ultimate Guide to Kink - BDSM, Role Play, and the Erotic Edge

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.

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 theoretically 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.