MLFB: How to be with the risk of injury
Warning: I mention suicide and drug use here.
1. A story of injury
2. Hobbies come with risks
3. The pearl with a turd in it
4. Doing it anyway
1. A story of injury
I’m prompted to write this because in recent months I’ve been in more immediate contact with fisting injuries. We did a triple interview about it on the podcast in a recent episode, plus more people whom I know personally are getting injured (I stop short of thinking this marks an increase in injuries – it must just be time passing and my circle of fisting contacts getting ever larger). Injury can be in the form of infections from fisting (monkeypox and bacterial infections from unwashed hands occur to me), and also from my favourite kind, the one that fascinates and scares me most, the colon perforation. That is the one I am focusing on here, though you could translate what I write to other kinds of injuries such as the abovementioned.
So yeah, I’ve been in more immediate contact with the idea of colon perforation because it happened to a friend a few months ago, someone who I met before he was a fistee and someone I encouraged and coached a bit occasionally as he began his fisting journey. We fisted once and it was beautiful, he’s got a great hole and is a very sexy young man. Then more recently, while he had been playing with someone, he had texted me saying he was worried he might have injured himself, and I helped him calm himself down and wait and see, reminding him that while injuries are to be taken seriously, they are also rare. He decided to keep playing, and then went to sleep. Upon waking up, the pain was worse, so I recommended he go to the hospital. He had a perforation in his depths, at the depth where the elbow enters the asshole. He had emergency surgery, and I visited him in hospital a few days later. He recovered well, only needed one operation and no colostomy bag (hence not needing to go back and get it reversed again). He seems to be doing well.
Another friend last night took a full foot inside his butt. He’s a beauty, smart and sweet, with a huuuge hole that I wake up thinking of with a raging hard-on. He said the foot was “an interesting experience”, reminding me of what people who take a full foot usually say about it, i.e. that it isn’t a fist and doesn’t feel quite right and maybe not some pleasure to be running back to. Again I thought of the risk of injury, which of course is heightened with a foot because it is a) attached to a leg that is much more powerful than an arm and can therefore do much more damage if it goes wrong, and b) the foot is not nearly as sensitive in terms of nerve endings and doesn’t have the same practice in anal insertion as the hand does. (You have the same brain, so if you’re a good and sensitive fister, you’ll do just fine shoving your foot in someone, I’m sure. Nevertheless, the risk does exist, obviously). Thankfully the foot inserting sounds like it was sensible (as can be), and didn’t do any damage.
Hearing of both of these cases, I thought of an acquaintance back in Australia many years ago who was a voracious bottom, back when I wasn’t even a fister yet. He was cute, young, blond, muscled, smart, would have had a great future ahead of him. He perforated his bowel riding some poor man’s arm to/over the elbow while high on crystal meth, something that he must have been very practiced at doing to be at that extreme level. We weren’t close, so I only heard all of this second hand, but my understanding is that the injury was so bad that he had to have multiple surgeries (colostomy bag included). Because we weren’t friends, I don’t know to what extent this hampered his daily life or any details about the decline in his mental health, but I can tell you that his body changed completely, gaining a lot of fat in a very short time, and in his posts on facebook he was very open about his struggle with depression. He killed himself a couple of years later. He was a big Doctor Who fan. He was you, and me.
So when I think about injury, I think about him. And I think about calculated risks, risks in the heat of the moment, and our responsibility for our bodies and for the bodies of our play partners. When we play, we (especially whoever is topping at the time) create a balance between pushing boundaries and lowering risk (the bottom shouldn’t need to be thinking about this as much while he is off flying somewhere on the ceiling). And when I hear about friends pushing boundaries in their butt, I have to just hope that the balance of risk and safety is not being pushed off too far. I get protective of my friends when I fist them, and even more so when someone else is fisting them. At first I want to admonish them for taking extra risks; secondly I think to myself if they’re going to do it I at least want myself to be the top so that I can control the risk vs safety balance…but what stupid, unrealistic, hubristic things for me to think! People are going to play however they play, and with whomever they play with, and the safety of their body cannot possibly be my responsibility in the sex they are having with others. Also I would be hypocritical: like all fisters, I enjoy playing with risk, and have taken some very extreme risks in the past and continue to take more in the present.
I only have two solutions for this. One is to have open conversations about risk when necessary so that in the fisting community we are making risk reduction obvious and bankrupting its taboo, together. Talk about ways to reduce risk; be clear and overt about your risk reduction ideas during a session (eg. wearing gloves if playing in public, washing hands, even something simple like adding more lube). The other is to accept that accidents do happen, and some people unfortunately endure injury and learn lessons in the process. Anecdotally I gauge that only a very small portion of those who get injured die; but that doesn’t speak to the mental health and lifestyle restrictions that injuries inevitably come with for survivors.
2. Hobbies come with risks
We as fisters take risks, perhaps even for various subconscious reasons based on our childhood or other factors (yep, still living out my teenage rebellion). You can’t expect a risk you take to produce a win 100% of the time. Like when you play tennis, you don’t expect to sprain your ankle, but you know that there is a small risk that that or any other imaginable tennis injury could happen. You play tennis anyway, because it’s fun and it’s exercise and it’s just all-round great. For fisting it’s fun and it’s sometimes exercise, it’s intimate connection and deep relaxation and exhilaration and it’s just all-round great too. So we accept that small amount of risk that comes along in the shopping cart. I don’t expect tennis players to talk about the risk of ankle sprains often, especially not directly before a training session or a match. Likewise with most partners it would be weird and mood-killing to talk about injury risk before a fisting session (though I know I’m not alone in having had such conversations at such times). But our art involves a risk that is far further towards the life-and-death end of the risk spectrum than if we were to assess tennis’s injury risk; accordingly we ought to be having conversations with our friends about risk minimisation, keeping ourselves in check about our risk taking, preferably at other moments over coffee. Or over bowling on Sunday. It can be helpful to hear how your partners think about injury, risk, and emergencies. It can build further trust and love. And if your partners are those who would sooner throw you out on the street than help you get to hospital (yes I have come into contact with such people), you might seriously consider whom you are allowing into your hole, Janice.
What could these conversations look like? If we take a general look like at the beginning, I mentioned hand washing as something we can talk about. If it comes to bowel perforation, we can talk about the responsibility of the top to go slow, be the calculating mind in the scene. We can talk about what to do when something goes wrong, a protocol of not dismissing your partner’s concern if they are worried they might have injured themselves; taking them to hospital if there are any doubts, and how to keep each other calm in those situations. Beyond that I really don’t know. But the last thing I would want is to be ill-prepared for an emergency situation; the second last thing I would want is to not have honestly considered and actively accepted the risk associated with my hand puppetry. Knowledge is power, baby.
3. The pearl with a turd in it
The Netflix film “Stutz” is a sort of documentary featuring actor Jonah Hill and his psychiatrist, Dr. Phil Stutz (put aside for now whatever you might think of Jonah Hill). In conversation with Hill, Stutz gives us a bunch of tools for dealing with life better. One of these tools is “The pearl with a turd in it”. It goes like this: we go through life stringing pearls on a necklace. Every task we complete is a pearl that we string; but every pearl has a little turd inside it. So tasks have that little negative element, and even really awesome lovely tasks we have to do have that little bit of turd, the thing that isn’t pleasant, but we do the task anyway because the payoff is far more than the turd. Noticing and accepting this has been helpful for me. Take getting up out of bed as an example: the pearl is that getting out of bed we start our day and get to experience the fruits of that day; the turd is that we no longer get to snuggle in our warm bed, all comfortable, cozy and safe. Fisting’s the pearl, and the turd is the risk of injury. We accept the turd, it’s not going anywhere, and it doesn’t make the pearl any less a pearl.
4. Doing it anyway
So do. It. Anyway! This is for those of you who are intimidated by injury, as I have been on and off for my whole fisting timespan. Actually, I hope you are all like me: I hope you are intimidated by injury. I hope it doesn’t keep you up at night, but I hope you are able to have some proper respect for it. But do the fisty-fisty, the schlumpy-schmlumpy anyway. Take that risk. We’ve seen that there is an inherent risk, one that you can reduce through educating yourself and being in conversation with your partners. We accept the risk, and decide to play anyway, because living a life without risk is a life not worth living (thanks Hallmark™); it’s not having the pearl or the turd. Throw yourself into the risk properly and you can even have some erotic fun with the intimacy that the collective acceptance of such risk provides: trust is an intimately erotic thing to share. And pray to the fisting faeries that your injuries are few, and that you and your partners act appropriately if they do happen.
The takeaway
So remember the above, but remember perhaps as a bottom line to take care of your mental health in the present. We can’t completely remove the threat of injury, but we have a coping apparatus: our minds. If you injure yourself, and you already have some training in things like psychological tools and techniques (like the tool of the pearl with a turd in it), meditation, responsible and open communication, and practice being loving and good to yourself, then you are more likely to be able to manage your mental health through said injury. I speak from experience these days, having experienced psychological trauma in recent years. Our mental health is the one thing we have to cling to when anything terrible happens. We need to strengthen it and rely on it when the time comes, which inevitably it does in life. Tools for robust mental health are things kids should learn in every school. We should be supporting each other to openly talk about our fears, the risks we take or have taken, and in so doing, facing the realities of injury together.
Thanks so much for reading.
– Jaz x
