Figging: Anal Discipline

Could Figging.com be credited with rescuing the practice of figging from obscurity? Big-time sex blogger Bacchus at ErosBlog thinks so, according to his recent interview at Sunni’s Salon. From page 10 of the interview:

Sunni: I can see where someone trying to learn and expand his or her thinking through reading sex blogs could be left feeling completely behind the times. I have to admit, I didn’t know anything about anal bleaching or figging until I started looking through your site and others that you link to … there’s a lot of, um, unusual stuff that goes on out there! [laughs]

Bacchus: I would hope people aren’t comparing their own sex lives to the reports of sex bloggers, and then feeling inadequate from the comparison. Honest or not, sex bloggers are pioneers of a sort. They aren’t going to be writing about the middle of the bell curve. Except when they do. If you actually read all the sex blogs on my blogroll, you’ll find plenty of tales of semi-rigid erections, elusive orgasms, good-but-perhaps-a-little-boring vanilla sex, all the things that make normal sex normal and unremarkable. My daily blog posts, on the other hand, do often have a sensationalist aspect; I’m pointing at the unusual or the exceptional precisely because it is different, and therefore interesting.

As for the exotic fetishes like figging, those are to some extent a creation of the internet. I remember when I first linked to http://www.figging.com; it had half a dozen links maximum, and when I did a Google search, those were the only mentions of figging on the whole internet. Since that time dozens of sex bloggers have talked about trying figging, and they frequently mention figging.com as the source of their inspiration. So an obscure Victorian practice — if that’s even true — has exploded in popularity because of one web site striking a spark in an atmosphere of sexual curiosity.

I’m not sure how much credit Figging.com ought to get for the recent explosion of figging talk on the internet, but the level of obscurity when this website began was actually worse than Bacchus says. The first Google search for “figging” to find stuff for this website returned only four relevant hits: the Master Michael article, the Wikipedia entry, an entry on Spanking Blog, and one other blog report of a figging.