Someone tell the straight boys that fingering is back.
If I asked you to do a join-the-dots sort of puzzle with either your (maybe hypothetical) penis, your tongue, or your finger, I’m guessing that you’d do best with the finger, right. I Sellotaped a pen to my knickers, because I’m interested in good science like that, and gave it a go. The things I do, honestly. Anyway, I was honestly totally unsurprised to find out that my hands were more dextrous than either my fake willy or my mouth. Because when I go to do basically any job, my instinct is to use my fingers.
Now I’ve femme-splained literally the use of your hands to you (I’m breaking this down really simply for the Brads at the back) let’s get on to the good stuff.
Fingering fucking slaps.
Fingering is literally one of my favourite parts of sex. It might even be (controversial) the best part of sex. So why, ever since I started having penetrative sex with men, has it been relocated to the sidelines of my sex life? Like, why is fingering now the tentative warm-up, basically barely more than a poke to see if I’m wet or not?
When your hands are part of your body that literally is the most dextrous, that you have the most control over, and that you have ten of, so it’s ideal for like, hitting your clit on the outside and the back of your clit (that mystical g-spot) from the inside, I just don’t know why we’re sleeping on fingering so much as a concept.
In my one-woman personal and totally anecdotal experiment of pleasure (AKA spilling my sex life on the internet), I’ve broken my arguments for fingering down into a sort of timeline of what’s up.
First: I learned to orgasm by masturbating with my fingers. When I was thirteen I used to while away hourrrsss, just me and the fingertips on my left hand. I got to know my body until they were wrinkly like I’d been swimming. It was how I figured out how I wanted to be touched – by touching myself. And whilst my post-vibrator sex life makes a solo finger bang seems a little bit like an acoustic set or an analogue watch, there is still something totally charming about it. My hands get the job done. And because my natural instinct is to focus on the clit, which for me and also like, basically every other woman, is what really gets me off, my fingers are just so much better suited for the job than any phallic object in up my fanny.
Second: when I started involving other people in my sexuality, fingers were also a pretty crucial part of the equation. Before I was having sex, boys and girls putting their hands in my pants was a kind of tentative exploration into sexuality and our naughty bits, a kind of segue from the heavy makeout phase into… oh you like me like THAT… Wandering hands are basically the thing that separated pre-teen dating frolics from legitimate sexual desire – a really big part of my formative sexuality was based on hands.
And when I have sex with women, my fingers still constitute the backbone of the action. I have a lot of time for toys and tongues, yes, but fingers map onto a really intimate way of knowing someone’s body and touching it without the expectation of being touched. Because we have so much control over our hands, it’s an incredible way of learning exactly how someone wants to be touched. Whether it’s little clit flicks or flirty inside-the-fanny flutters, if you want to pleasure someone exactly right, it might be best left to the fingers.
But for some reason, whenever a dude’s penis gets put into the equation, the penis becomes the centre of the sex. How many times have we all been caught in the blow job as foreplay, penetration as sex, wham-bam-job-done pipeline, and had all the attention end up on their dick, our poor little clits aggressively ignored? And whenever a straight boy does finger me, it’s always as a warm-up to penetrative sex, or as a kind of ‘let’s get you off too’ afterthought. Either that or it’s an aggressive jackhammer of a hand in and out of my minge, where a boy assumes that the best thing they can do without having penetrative sex is by exactly mimicking it with his index and middle fingers. It’s uninspiring, and it’s unarousing. When there are at least two whole bodies and infinite ways to touch and be touched, it is honestly gutting that we’re still letting the penis alone be our priority.
Penis-centred sex is when a man’s orgasm signifies the end of sex, it’s when penetration is the main event NOT because it’s what the woman enjoys the most, but because it’s what the man is after. And I think that centring the penis in sex is exactly why straight women find it’s hard to get a man to go down on them, and why fingering is pretty synonymous with teenage fumbles.
The first time I ever came during sex with a man was when we couldn’t have penetrative sex because of an STI scare (long story), and he fingered me to orgasm anyway without letting me touch his penis once. And I was shaken. It was the first time in my adult life that my pleasure had been totally and unquestionably at the centre of the experience.
Fingering, a sex act that gives so much more pleasure than it gives back, forces empathy. It prioritises the vulva, the clit, and the way that the person receiving it feels, over literally anything else. It’s a curious, interesting, exploratory and selfless touch. It gives without expecting to receive, it maps onto our early solo sexual experiences, and because it comes from as dextrous a part of our body as our hands, it means that if our partners REALLY want to touch us how we want to be touched? The best possible solution is that we bring back fingering.