Is there anything more exciting than slipping your hands into someone’s pants (including your own) and allowing your fingers to explore? Even those of us who can’t read braille find our fingertips flooded with information, and our hands are capable of reciprocating the carnal communication with their own system of tactile gestures. For real: third base doesn’t get the love it deserves.
Um, that is, if manual stimulation of the genitals and anus is still considered third base. We’re pretty much out of the loop on baseball euphemisms. Is oral the new third base? What does that make fingering? Shortstop? That’s a hot position.
Watch Them Fingers Fing
What’s so great about fingering? Uh, everything. Generally speaking, your hand is your first and most frequent sex partner, so over the course of your sexual maturity, your hands learn the finer points of testing, teasing, and touching. Finger yourself and you learn to finger others!
Furthermore, while your hands contain fewer nerve endings than your genitals, they’re still mighty sensitive and can tell you things about your partner the rest of your body can’t. Oh sure, you could get your eyes at crotch level to see whether your lover is wet, but it’s so much easier to send your fingers on a fact-finding mission. They’ll tell you everything you need to know about a person’s warmth, wetness, openness, and a whole bunch of other things that can’t be put into words. Genital intercourse is awesome, don’t get us wrong about that, but there’s something incredibly intimate about having your hand inside someone and getting them so excited that you can feel their heartbeat. That’s something your phalanges are made for.
Finally, as far as we’re concerned, fingers are the perfect tools for anal stimulation. They’re thin, flexible, gentle, you can’t lose them, and they’re the best at massaging the prostate (in gents) and the perineal sponge (in ladies).
[Above: Behold, the first exploratory touches that ultimately lead to "Teenage Sodomy 3"]
Mano Maintenance
Does fingering count as safe sex? Yes, but let’s not pretend that safe sex is a binary issue; it’s a sliding scale of risk assessment, and there are definitely right and wrong ways to finger. Here are some points to keep in mind the next time you’re dancing the knuckle shuffle.
· Watch your nails – In general, it’s best to keep your fingernails short, clean, and filed so you reduce the risk of scratching someone’s insides. “But why and how do so many pornstars finger their pussies or assholes when they have long, flashy nails?” you ask. We have no idea, actually. In such scenarios, the performers probably arch their fingers so there’s as little nail-on-flesh contact as possible. If you have long nails and don’t want to cut them, you can always…
· Wear gloves/finger cots – Some people consider hand protection to be overkill, but really, it’s a nice way to add another barrier between genitals and germs that hang out under your nails and in the oils of your hands. Finger cots are nice if you only want to wrap up a digit or two, but they can come off in slippery situations; full latex gloves tend to stay in place. To avoid ripping the latex with your nails, pad the tips with a little cotton.
· Keep it wet – This is one of the cardinal rules of sex, but it deserves repeating. There’s no shame in adding extra lube to an already wet orifice, especially when using latex which tends to dry people out.
· Be responsible about the anus – Touching assholes is a lot of fun, but for the love of God, be mindful about where you put your fingers after they’ve been inside an anus. Going from ass to pussy–or from any hole to any other hole–can spread germs and cause infections and then nobody will want you inside them.
[Above: Look at all the (safe) fun being had by "Madison Young's Art House Sluts"]
Fingering Vs. Fisting
Why is it that porn can show fingering as much as it pleases while fisting is considered way more extreme and has earned people obscenity charges? It’s all manual stimulation, right? So what’s the difference?
For starters, the thing that separates fisting from fingering is the thumb. You can have up to four fingers in someone’s asshole and get away with it, but as soon as the thumb goes in, you’ve officially entered into fisting territory. This is why we have websites like Four Finger Club: they can talk about “pussy stretching extreme sex” and make jokes like “Our girls can really take a handful!” because they make sure the thumb is visible at all times and, as one site so elegantly puts it, that “all five digits do not disappear inside the plane of the lips or sphincter ring.” This isn’t the law, it’s just a guideline that production studios follow to avoid prosecution.
As for why fingering is cool and fisting isn’t, well, that’s a big and confusing issue. It has something to do with the idea that fisting is like punching and is therefore an act of internal violence, but when you pick that argument apart, you eventually get mired in a mess of obscenity laws and archaic community standards. And we should mention that the laws (and skirting of laws) differ for gay porn.
For simplicity’s sake, all you need to know is that fingering is fantastic, fisting is also awesome, and one day the world will declare International Fisting Day an official holiday because fisting will be destigmatized and accepted as a safe sexual interaction between responsible adults.
[Above: James Darling wears a glove on each hand for his scene with Papi Coxxx. Via Queer Porn Tube. Some clips courtesy of AEBN Porn Pay Per View Network and Video On Demand (theater.aebn.net)]
[At top: picture via Explicite Art (expliciteart.com)]
