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Description

When Alex first saw fisting in porn, he never imagined that years later he’d be training people how to do the slow, sensual act across New York City.

 

Find Alex on social media at @BadAlexCheves.

 

As expected, Good Sex contains mature themes and may not be appropriate for all listeners.

 

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Transcript

SPEAKER

Alex Cheves

Alex Cheves  00:00

The best book I’ve ever read on fisting was actually called “Fist Me” by Stephan Niederwieser, something like that you can find it on Amazon. In the book, he famously said that when a guy orgasms on fisting, it sounds like someone’s giving birth to a cow. And that is the truest thing that anyone’s ever said, like when you’ve come from like, I don’t know what it is. But when you come from a fisting orgasm, guys tend to yell at the top of their lungs. It’s a loud experience if you’re at like a fisting party or whatever a place where fisting is happening, and you hear somebody like roaring from the back of the room. They’re coming. They’re having a fisting orgasm.

Alex Cheves

Hi, I’m Alexander Cheves and you’re listening to GOOD SEX. My pronouns are he/him/ his. I’m a writer and a sex educator. And I’ve been working as an escort for about 10 years. And good sex is consensual and exploratory. I must have been like 20 or 21. The first time I even heard about fisting like I found it accidentally on by looking for porn, and the first time I saw it happen on video, I thought it was the most disgusting thing I’d ever seen. I thought it was absolutely horrifying. I thought I was seeing somebody getting killed or permanently injured. I thought like there’s no way that this can be real.

Alex Cheves

My friend and kink once famously said generally speaking, if you see something online and you react to it with disgust, you’re into it. Disgust is a strong reaction and revulsion is an impassioned way to respond to something sexual and revulsion turned into curiosity and curiosity turned into. Okay, maybe I found a few more videos. And then I like started exploring it through porn. But even for years after watching fisting videos online, I didn’t ever thought that I would ever do it. I was like, okay, this is something for those extreme, crazy people and cities. I’ll never be part of that world. Then I was a little bit older and a little bit more sexually confident. And I moved to Los Angeles and I met people who publicly advertised online that they were into fisting, and I learned how to do it.

Alex Cheves  02:23

I did not think it would be something that I would want to do. And now it’s my favorite thing to do. And as a sex worker, it’s something that I tend to do with clients a lot, because there’s a lot of people who are interested in it and just don’t know how to start. We regularly accept fingering and using our hands to please people and every kind of hole. And fisting goes a little bit further, it’s inserting an entire hand usually past the wrist inside of an orifice, whether that’s you know, a front hole, a back hole or whatever. And doing that requires a lot of lube, a lot of training, it usually takes people years to learn how to get fisted. And it feels amazing for both parties, especially for the bottom.

Alex Cheves

Just fisting objectively feels really good. Even though the word fist is a really unfortunate word, because it sort of makes people think of this like violent, aggressive action. And it’s actually very, very slow. A fisting session lasts a really long time, because you’re like slowly stretching somebody open almost like for the first time every time. The way to train for fisting is the same way that I learned how to do fisting is just to start with toys and work your way up to bigger and bigger sizes, you start at a very small size, and you use lots of lubes, and you work your way up. So the first time I meet with a client, I say I’m going to go very slow, I’m going to listen to you throughout this entire experience, not a very rough or aggressive form of sex, even though this may not be what you want, I’m not going to start with my hand, I’m going to start with a few toys and see how you respond. I’m going to use lots of lube; I’m going to move forward when you tell me to move forward. And I’m going to stop when you tell me to stop.

Alex Cheves  04:09

And we see how far we can get. And then we go on to the next session. And we gradually work our way up to bigger and bigger sizes until they’re taking toys that are more or less the size of my hand. And then I try a hand, and that’s how it happens. We know that it’s been around for 1000s of years. I mean, it’s not a jump to go from fingers to hand. There’s a depiction of fisting on like a vase from ancient Egypt, like some people suspect that there’s even like a sodomite getting fisted in the lower right corner of the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo. But the modern-day iteration of fisting started in gay leather culture in the 1970’s in like underground gay sex clubs in San Francisco in New York, and it has now evolved into something that’s much beyond sliding a hand in a hole. Modern day fisters go a lot, go a lot further.

Alex Cheves

Like there’s like 21-year-old now who are taking like two arms to the elbow. And I just don’t know how their bodies work that way. But everybody’s different. like everybody’s bodies, it’s different. Fistings is very powerful experience. Because in a dream session, you do reach this place that feels like sub-verbal, you like retreat into your head, and you’re just in sync, you’re matching your breathing. And I find the best way to maintain that is to just keep gaze. I tell my clients, whatever you do, don’t look away from my eyes, you don’t need to look at my hand, you don’t need to look at anything else. You don’t need to worry about where you are. Because it’s not a destination-based sex act. Just look at my eyes. Tell me if it feels good. If it doesn’t we’re gonna stop.

Alex Cheves  06:22

You know, people have been talking about how it’s gonna be such a fuck fest after the pandemic for like, months. And so we all get it like everyone knows that we’re gonna have a really horny summer. And that’s, I think that’s a great thing. I only want to like, encourage that and celebrate that. But that has made me very nervous because like, Am I gonna be able to have the kind of sex that I had before. I mean, we’ve been a year without a lot of sex. And we’ve all changed. A lot of people have lost their gym routines, a lot of people don’t feel like they look as good as they did before. I certainly don’t feel like I look as good as I did before the pandemic. And so for the first time in my life, I’m like, oh, crap. I’m expected to be as sexually active as I was before. And I don’t know if I’m ready to do that.

Alex Cheves

And I think a lot of people don’t know if they’re ready to do that. I found some people who I consider like sex experts, sex toy experts, and some other kink and fetish writers and some porn stars. And ask them for advice. As it turns out, even the pros are dealing with post-pandemic performance anxiety, like even people who sort of advertise how much sex they have on a regular basis aren’t having that much sex and don’t know how to sort of get back on the saddle. We are coming into a new kind of culture and the expectation to meet a former version of our old selves does not need to exist because we are different. We’re all a little older, a lot of us have lost somebody, you don’t need to look back, we need to look forward. It’s okay to be something different. It’s okay to want different sexual experiences in the future.

Alex Cheves  08:00

During the pandemic, I realized that I am less comfortable as I was with anonymous hookups. And I’m actually looking to cultivate like regulars and intimacy and people that can sort of develop a sort of relationship with I can’t even describe it. And this is a drastic change from how I was pre-pandemic, like, I actually had a rule where I would never have sex with the same person twice, unless they were like, really, really good, like, knock my socks off. Now I’m having a lot of like, fuck buddies and regulars, and it’s very sweet. It’s a totally, it’s a totally different way that I’ve done sex for years. But for whatever reason, like post pandemic, it’s nice to sort of have like a regular face in bed. Even my boyfriend is just sort of kind of is very surprised, because he and I were totally open and we have most of our sex happens with other people.

Alex Cheves

And he’s still very much in the anonymous hookup part of his life. And he’s having a lot of sex with a lot of strangers and one timers. And I’m not. I’m like, sort of developing these like little mini flames. My best sex recently was, it was actually during the pandemic, and fisters tend to know each other because it is such a niche world. And so I had even before the first time I played with him, I knew him and he knew my playmates, and we had heard about each other because all the guys that are into fisting in New York City, for the most part pretty quickly start to sort of hear about each other and meet each other. So you didn’t have to like overtly say, hey, I want to fist you. I knew that was gonna be on the plate.

Alex Cheves

So you can follow me on Twitter, @AlexCheves. You can read my column in print editions of Out Magazine. You can find my work in The Advocate and a couple of other LGBTQ magazines and look for my upcoming book. It is called “My Love is Beast” and it will be available on bookshelves on October 12, 2021. Thank you for listening to GOOD SEX.

CREDITS

GOOD SEX is a Lemonada Media Original. Produced by Claire Jones and Matthew Simonson. Our supervising producers are Kryssy Pease and Xorje Olivares, and our executive producers are Stephanie Wittels Wachs and Jessica Cordova Kramer. Music is by Dan Molad with additional music from APM music. Sound design is by Matthew Simonson. If you like GOOD SEX, the show, not you know, why don’t you rate and review us. Listen and follow for new episodes each week wherever you’re listening right now. Thanks for listening.