Why fingering, why now?
"What does it mean for us as a society?"
Hello and welcome back to The Overthinker’s Guide To Sex, a sex and relationships newsletter by journalist Franki Cookney.
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I first wrote about the “fingering trend” back at the start of January. It didn’t make a lot of sense then, and it still doesn’t make a lot of sense now but in a curious way, I do actually feel like this has been brewing. The idea that fingering is underrated is something I see constantly on social media, and it pops up in women’s media all the time too. “When it’s done right it can be a very erotic experience,” promises one post, as if this is something that’s unique to fingering. Another argues that we shouldn’t overlook fingering because it can be “such an integral part of someone’s sex life” (despite what you may think, reads the subtext).
True, it can be tricky to know exactly how someone likes to be touched, and there are doubtless a lot of people out there doing very unpleasant things without much thought or care or skill, but this can surely be said of literally every sexual activity under the sun. What I want to know is, why fingering and why now?
The opening line of this Bustle article seems to say it all: “Getting to third base aka getting fingered used to be a massive deal, but now it just seems to be a given— something we don't hear about very much.” I mean… yeah? That’s not because it’s fallen out of fashion, babe, it’s because you’ve grown up. Just because people aren’t talking about fingering, doesn’t mean they’re not doing it. But while not hearing people talk about fingering on an individual level doesn’t seem particularly significant to me, I do think there’s something in the idea that we don’t hear about it on a cultural level. After all, just last October I wrote how bold and exciting it felt to see Adele Exarchopoulos’ Agathe get fingered in Ira Sachs’ Passages, noting how rare it was to see on screen. And not just in television and movies. It’s pretty rare these days to see fingering in porn, or not as an activity in its own right. There are more videos tagged “fisting” on Pornhub than there are fingering. There are more videos in the categories “smoking” and “French” than there are fingering and even those videos that are tagged as “fingering” are rarely that. Sure, fingers touch genitals, but usually as part of a bigger scene. You may argue, of course, that fingering does not make for a very exciting spectacle and this is why we don’t see much of it in porn. But that doesn’t explain the market for masturbation videos.
Even FrolicMe, a porn production company focussed “on female pleasure,” despite entreating its audience to “rediscover fingering” in a highly detailed and impassioned blog, does not have a “fingering” category. That’s not to say there is no fingering in Frolic Me’s films (there’s lots), but it’s not considered something people would tune in for specifically. The message we’re getting is that fingering is incidental. Or else, and certainly in the case of mainstream cishet male-gaze porn, it’s a pitstop on the way to something else… usually fisting, fucking, or squirting.
And so I feel myself becoming convinced. Maybe fingering is being overlooked. Maybe it has fallen out of favour and someone (Lesbians? Lovehoney? That guy on Tik Tok who fingers fruit?) needs to help bring it back into fashion.
So when an email from Gigi Engle popped into my inbox entitled “Is f!ingering back in style?” I knew I had to get her on the phone. If you don’t know Gigi, she is a sex therapist and super prolific writer to the extent that I have lost track of the amount of times I’ve been researching something and seen her name, either as a quoted expert, or as the author. If you are Googling a subject within sex and relationships you will one hundred percent find an article with her in it. So it struck me that she was a very good person to talk to about the concept of “trends,” because she’s treading the line, daily, between producing content and giving quotes for mainstream media (print, digital, and social), and working with actual clients in a therapeutic setting. She is as much at the mercy of the algorithm as anyone trying to find an audience, yet she knows full well that people’s real world experiences are subtle, complex, and not easily hashtagged. If anyone can answer the question “Why fingering, and why now?” it’s her. I hope you enjoy our chat.
Franki Cookney: Thanks for agreeing to talk to me. I was going to say that it was a totally weird coincidence that I got your email when I did, but it's not really a weird coincidence because, as we're about to discuss, it's a trend! But I had literally just been thinking about writing something about the idea of sexual activities as trends, and then I got your newsletter asking “Is fingering back in style?” and I was like, “Yeah! Is fingering back in style? Let's talk about that!”
You’ve been writing about sex for about fifteen years and so the first thing I wanted to ask you is how many articles would you say you'd written to or contributed to about fingering or that include fingering?
Gigi Engle: Hundreds, I would say.
FC: I briefly Googled your name and “fingering” (which out of context sounds very weird) and it’s so many. So when we talk about the idea that fingering is back in fashion for 2024, what does that even mean?
GE: Well, essentially, it's meaningless in the sense that fingering never really went out of style in the first place, right? Sex isn't trendy, but because there's like this big push at magazines now to be writing all these little SEO-heavy stories and making everything very cute and trendy and like, “Oh, this is the hot new thing!” but really we’re repackaging a lot of older content, and also just normal sexual things. But I think it's also because fingering specifically is linked to a lot of the stuff that we see on Tik Tok and other platforms that demonise using sex toys.
FC: Okay, is that a thing?
GE: Yeah, very. It's like [this idea that] sex toys are addictive, which they are not, and that they damage your clitoris. A lot of wellness influencers who are supposedly sex positive will be like, “If you can't get, or can't have orgasms through your own fingers, what are you even doing? You need to be connected more with your body,” and it's like, okay, girl, whatever.
FC: I feel like that's almost coming off the back of the “clean” trend, you know, this idea that everything has to be natural and as close to its original form as possible?
GE: Exactly. Yes. It's always been this vestige of purity culture to say that sex toys will damage your body. That's patriarchy trying to control women's bodies and their pleasure and orgasms. But then, building on top of that is this wellness trend, and these wellness people, who are saying all kinds of things. You know, they're the same people who will tell you that steaming your vagina will cleanse you of the energies of past lovers and that kind of thing. It really intersects with the whole witchcraft, astrology [scene].
FC: But then it just goes way too far? Because I feel like there's a lot of value in [being connected to your body]. I'm thinking of Betty Dodson's work around masturbation, for example, and there's definitely a positive to encouraging people to not feel icky about touching their own bodies, right?
GE: I think it's context dependent. It's like, are you trying to not use sex toys because you think sex toys are shameful and inherently worse than using your hands? Or are you just trying to connect with your body in a more organic way and feel more embodied without the shame element?
FC: I remember speaking to Ruby Rare on my podcast series in 2019, and we were talking about how when we were at school, fingering was this really embarrassing idea. And in some ways, it was almost more permissible to use sex toys because you were, like, adding in some extra element. The idea that it was you touching your own body and enjoying that was somehow more shameful than saying, “Oh, I have this toy that gives me an orgasm.” So maybe fingering being back in fashion is a reclaiming of that. Like, maybe there's a positive spin here?
GE: I think there's positivity to it for sure. It's like: Touch yourself! Enjoy your body! Experiment! Do all these things that are very empowered and that's really good. I just think we need to be mindful of the fact that no form of masturbation [or sexual stimulation] is superior to any other.
FC: How do we know when something is a trend? Like, who decides?
GE: It's pretty based on Google searches and the amount of hashtag trending topics; how many hashtag hits there are on something. So I think what usually will happen is an editor or whoever will be like, “I've just thought of this or seen this somewhere, is this a trend?” and then they'll do the Google stats on it, and if they’re high enough, they'll start writing articles about it. And then another media outlet will see they wrote about it, and they'll piggyback on it and write about it, and now we have a trend.
FC: And then at what point do brands jump on that? When I included fingering in my newsletter at the start of the year, which was about “sex trends to love and hate,” I got it from reading all the brand predictions. So at what point did the brands sort of pick up on that and jump on it, would you say?
GE: I guess it's the same kind of modality of figuring out what people are searching for and what people are looking for. Again, I think it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation. It's like what came first, did the brand decide it was a trend and then media picked up on it? Or was the media saying it was a trend, and then a brand picked up on it?
FC: I think what we're saying is that, either way, both the media and the brands are then kind of snowballing it. Maybe there was a bit of an organic upsurge with people tagging posts about it, or searching for it, but then once places start writing about it and talking about it, then it's a done deal. It's a trend now because it's everywhere.
GE: Yes, exactly.
FC: So why fingering? Like, what does it mean culturally, when fingering is a trend?
GE: I think it's part of more of us embracing masturbation as being a good form of self-care (as meaningless and buzzy as that term is) so part of that is embracing that. And also a lot of it is like, people are more tolerant of female sexuality in general and the more education we get around female pleasure and female orgasm being something that's actually important, I think, the more that makes it something people become interested in learning about.
FC: What does this say about us as a society right now that we're sort of returning to this? Because if I'm being really honest, it does feel like a little bit of a shift from let's say six, eight years ago, when there was a lot more focus on kink, and adding accessories into your [sex] life. And there's something about fingering that’s quite a return to the basics, I guess.
GE: It kind of reminds me of the way that fashion goes in and out of style, right? Like right now, we're back at Y2K, again with the fashion and it's kind of like, have we already done all of the new stuff? And now we're cycling back to the classics.
FC: I do definitely think that's the kind of thing that happens. I got approached by an editor a couple of years ago who basically wanted me to write something saying, why vanilla sex is back in fashion, and I was like “What??”
GE: Vanilla never went out of style!
FC: Exactly. Initially, I thought, I'm not writing that, that’s insane, but then I thought about it and I realised I do think we have moved away a little bit from the idea that the most exciting sex is the sex where we're “spicing it up” and adding in kinks and getting handcuffs out. There is definitely a lot more discourse now around finding what works for you. And obviously for a lot of people that’s going to be vanilla sex
GE: Emily Nagoski specifically says this in her new book Come Together. She says the stuff that makes for a really exciting and good, lasting sexual connection isn't the novelty and kink and adding in all this shit. It's really about finding the sex that you enjoy having so you want to go back for it.
FC: I guess one reservation I have about this whole fingering trend is that it feels like quite a hetero-centric viewpoint. You know, the idea of a return to “outercourse”, which is the term that one brand used to describe it, kind of feels a bit like they're saying, “We know penetration is the main event, but here's a fresh idea!”
GE: I think I take a different viewpoint on that, in that I think that actually people are making a conscious effort to level the playing field with sexual acts, and trying to trying to pull away from the hierarchy. So depending on how you're covering fingering as a trend, it can be heteronormative but it can also be very queer. I think another aspect of this, too, is that one of the reasons the classics are back is because Gen Alpha and Gen Z are of sex education age, and they're now learning about sex. So it's like, yeah, we're back to basics.
FC: I do agree, and I have observed in my career as well, that sexual activities, like everything else, go in and out of trends in the mainstream. But how helpful do you think it is, socially, when these things go in trends? Who's actually benefiting from it? Because, as we discussed at the beginning, often what happens is we just get this huge glut of articles, this kind of huge, snowballing effect, and a huge amount of discourse. And I suppose I'm wondering whether that's actually contributing to social progress, or whether it's just fueling a market.
GE: I think it's a bit of both. If trends are the way that we're gonna be able to talk about sex education in the media now that we're so focused on ad revenue, then I guess it's a necessary evil to make it trendy or whatever to get out there. But at the same time, it's like, is this actually helpful? By making it this way, are we just feeding the content machine?
FC: And there's a danger with being like “this thing is in” that at some point it’ll be “out” and so are we just not talking about it anymore?
GE: And also we run the risk, anytime something is trendy, of people covering it in a way that's shitty and shameful, or really heteronormative or aggressive and that's not great either.
FC: And I think there's always a bit of conflict there—I feel it, I'm sure that you do as well—in that we are also part of the market. And to a certain extent we have to jump on trends too, in order to draw an audience into our content.
GE: Yeah, I mean, my newsletter is literally that! I wrote the thing about fingering being back in style. I'm guilty of it too! So I'm not up on my high horse.
FC: And then, here I am! Sure, I'm deconstructing the trend, but I am ultimately writing about that. So it’s like, are we part of the problem?
GE: I mean, a little bit, but we know that!
FC: I guess it's like what you said earlier, the only thing you can do is just be responsible with it. Your newsletter was very much in the tone of, “Okay, apparently this is a trend and I have the expertise to tell you everything I know about it so here you go!”
GE: That's how I see it. I'll roll my eyes like, “okay, it's a trend,” but then I think it’s an opportunity to educate people because they're searching for it.
FC: Yeah, and if they are searching for it, then I guess that does mean they are looking for that information. So if it’s an opportunity to put useful information out there, then that’s fine. And people who already know how they like to be fingered and how to talk about it and how to negotiate it are not the ones searching for it, so they don't need to worry about this glut of content.
GE: Right!
Does the idea of fingering as a trend jibe with your experience of the world? How about sex trends more broadly? Are we stuck in a trend loop, constantly re-upping the same old tired content? Is history doomed to repeat itself over and over again? Let me know!
Loved this whole damn conversation! Brilliant. As you said, I think cishet malecentric porn where fingering isn’t a focus may have shoved this trend.
The men I’ve experienced really have no frigging clue even how to finger a person these days. It’s all violent speed fingering designed to make you squirt, seeing the squirt as asking how good the orgasm was (uh, buddy, no) or a cursory prod before penetration. And believe me I’m a great communicator. Or I try.
There was this one French man however…