Got a question that would scandalize your group chat? That’s what this column is for. Go Ask Alex is an anonymous space for queer readers to ask the questions they’re afraid to ask anyone else—about sex, love, life, and everything in between. It’s judgment-free and completely anonymous.
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Hey Alex. I read your book and loved it, as did many of my friends. For each of us, we've gotten into fisting actually because of your book.
In the fisting world, there's now this urge to always go bigger and take punches like guys online. Why has the scene become so achievement-focused and competitive? I do want to push myself, but I'm wondering how you've navigated this issue. Knowing that will help. Wayne
Hi Wayne,
I’m so honored you got into fisting from reading My Love Is a Beast. The fisting passages are allegedly why the book’s banned in some places, but if it made you explore fisting, the book is a proud success in my eyes. I did not intend it to be a fisting conversion tool, but rather a loving and unfiltered paean to gay life. That said, I did want it to challenge readers.
That double-fisting scene (for those who haven't read it, "double fisting" means what you think it does), I knew, would be tough and grotesque to some, but I wanted them to try and see the beauty in it. I still do.
In 17th-century Dutch painting, artists developed a genre called "vanitas,” still lifes of flowers and fruit rotting on lush tables with skulls, hourglasses, and guttering candles, as a poetic reminder of the briefness of life and worldly pleasures. These works have a Christian undertone, that whole "store up treasures in Heaven" bit, but they always struck me as very Zen, very Buddhist. Because life is brief. You will die. Life is an act of ruin.
What else is aging? What else is living in a body?
Fisting gets a bad rep with the allegation that it ruins the body, that its intensity must damage something. Holes and bodies don't typically ruin and break from healthy, sane (sober) fisting, even over years. But fisting does change the body and its abilities, and that change takes time. When I see a beautifully "ruined" hole, I know that person spent years training it to do that, and in this way, fisting is like those paintings, a beautiful and slightly grotesque reminder that life is brief and pleasure is now.
All this is perhaps a roundabout way of saying that, at its heart, I think there’s something deep and spiritual in the scene that drives us to climb a ladder, to push ourselves. I think we all have it, and sometimes, when we forget the beauty of fisting and focus just on what someone can display on video, yes, that ladder feels competitive.
Jarred H. Martin, a psychologist at the University of Pretoria, has done (believe it or not) sustained academic research on fisting culture. He interviewed 32 gay men who fist for a 2024 paper called "Fisting Subjectivity." He found that fisters consistently see themselves as a kind of sexual elite, framing their practice in athletic terms. One participant put it this way: "The difference is that sex is a sprint and fisting is a marathon. We're the only sexual athletes because the endurance you need for a scene would tire out an ordinary top or bottom."
I don't really believe that: to say we're the "only" sexual athletes seems to negate all the marathon cumdumps and bondage subs and flogging dominatrixes of the world. But I get their point. Another said, "Not everyone can do this, and I think that's what makes us pretty special. It's an elite club that you can only be a part of when you've earned your way in."
That I do agree with. Fisting requires physical and psychological training. Some online commenters have alarmingly said that a novice can do this training in months. I say years. Plural.
To grow in fisting is, in my view, to commit to a very slow process drawn out over a decade or two. I started fisting when I was 19. I'm 34 now. I have trained for this, made mistakes, bled, gone too hard, needed periods of recovery, and spent years learning my body, and I feel like I only got really good at this in the last five years. I'm pro-level now, but that's 15 years of work.
Fisting requires you to learn your body in ways that ordinary sex typically doesn’t demand. You must develop patience, trust, communication skills, and anatomical self-knowledge. So when you feel the pull to go bigger, that’s just a sign that you are indeed a fister. Welcome.
The question is what to do with it. Mostly, you have to rein it in. Every experienced fister has had a severe hemorrhoid (or worse) from having "eyes that are too big for the hole," or from being too horny for more and bigger, then getting hurt. Those who make a habit of this inevitably get badly injured. Some even cause permanent damage, including, in the most serious cases, injury to the rectosigmoid junction, where the rectum meets the sigmoid colon, which is where the most dangerous perforations occur and where fisting injuries most often become medical emergencies.
That competitive urge is common in the community, but when it runs unchecked (as I think it does on X), people get hurt. It is frankly irresponsible for "fisting famous" porn stars to show off their skills without cautioning followers and reminding them that it took years to get there.
I know a list in double digits of men who've been to the emergency room. Some were famous content creators before their injuries. Some could have died. Which means there is an online culture happening in which this reasonable and understandable desire to grow is running unchecked and spurring aspiring fisters to do more than they can. Some competition is fine, but unrestrained competitive fisting is dangerous.
Here's what I've learned from my own experience and from those who’ve been doing this longer than I have: A scene where you stay present, connected, open, and where intimacy is the focus and pleasure is the reason, is worth more than a milestone. The men I've played with who I remember best were present, patient, and focused on pleasure rather than recreating a hot video.
Bert Herrman's Trust: The Hand Book remains a foundational text on fisting and is worth reading if you haven't. It makes this argument throughout. Fisting is ultimately an exercise in intimacy and trust. Some fisters never advance to punches or doubles and enjoy where they are. I have more respect for them than for the maniacs online trying to outdo each other, because they will get hurt eventually, and they are inspiring my community, especially beginners, to play dangerously. I take issue with that.
I try to navigate my own competitive pull by being curious rather than ambitious. In sessions, I’ve learned to quietly check in with myself and ask, What does this feel like? Do I like it? Fisting is a mind game; the mind has to physically relax into a good session before the body can, and in that process, I make sure I’m really enjoying it. Does it feel good? Am I in a good place?
When I'm not, and it doesn't, I don't push through it. Pleasure is the point, not goal posts.
Dr. Evan Goldstein, a colorectal surgeon in New York who works extensively with gay men and has written openly about fisting, is clear: the tissue involved does not forgive rushed escalation. And it’s a blunt fact: Some bodies do have natural advantages. Some holes can take more than others. Chasing others’ standards instead of enjoying and learning yours will get you hurt.
Martin's research identifies what he calls the "lover narrative," a framing in which fisting is seen as an act of connection and care between two people. The fisters who seemed most at peace with their practice, in Martin’s view, hold the lover narrative alongside the athlete narrative rather than letting the athlete narrative be all.
My advice: Find a mentor. Find good regulars who play safely and are willing to learn your body, listen, and want to grow with you. The fisting community, at its best, still transmits knowledge this way, old-school, person to person. Talk to guys who've been doing this for thirty years. I believe they will tell you, almost universally, to slow down.
It is a hackneyed phrase, but it really is the journey that matters, not the destination. It takes wisdom and calm to see that. And that's Zen, baby. That's fisting.
Hey there! I’m Alexander Cheves. I’m a sex writer and former sex worker—I worked in the business for over 12 years. You can read my sex-and-culture column Last Call in Out and my book My Love Is a Beast: Confessions, from Unbound Edition Press. But be warned: Kirkus Reviews says the book is "not for squeamish readers.”
Here, I’m offering sex and relationship advice to Out’s readers. Send your question to askbeastly@gmail.com — it may get answered in a future post.
