Figging: Anal Discipline

One of the entertaining things about the figging fetish is its bizarre obscurity; it’s one of the few sexual practices left that can still raise eyebrows when people hear about it for the first time, and it’s rare enough that this (hearing about it for the first time) is quite frequently observable “in the wild”.

A recent example pops up in this post and comment thread about pegging (female-dominant strap-on dildo sex):

OutofShell: i confess, i am one of those neurotic victorian types that’s totally freaked out by and avoidant of anything involving asses.

cand86: @OutofShell: Lol, considering all the spankings and figging (ginger in the tush) and whatnot going on behind closed doors in Victorian times, I’m not quite sure that’s the right adjective :)

Lux Alptraum: A partner once tried to fig me. As I recall, it was intensely painful and I had to tap out pretty quickly.

mledward: @cand86: Not to question anyone’s tastes, but finger in the tush? Or Ginger? Because ginger might burn. And it’s spindly.

Lux Alptraum: The burning aspect of ginger is the main point of figging.

BeckySharper: Apparently I have not read nearly enough Victorian porn, because I had NO idea what figging is until this thread. I think I’ll pass on the ginger in my figgy pudding, though. I hate anything that produces a burning sensation in my nether regions, including but not limited to alcoholic beverages, lack of lube, and Monistat-1. (Monistat-1 is like fucking napalm.)

The stills below illustrate a long chemical figging sequence from Device Bondage in which model Dia Zerva is tied up and has a strong greasy-looking fire sauce preparation rubbed in her anus and onto her clit:

It doesn’t take long for her to react to the astonishing pain:

And for the next twelve minutes, her screeching, crying, and jerking at her bonds grows more and more intense as the burn sets in:

Not even a big fat red ball gag and head harness can contain all her protests:

All in all, the sequence last for about twelve tortuous minutes. In order to see the whole movie, you have to buy the shoot via Kink On Demand, or subscribe to Device Bondage; once you’ve done so, there’s a 71 minute streaming movie available, and the pepper figging starts right about the fifty-minute mark.

From the promotional copy:

The climax of the show comes as Dia is bound on top of a box as Cyd thoroughly lathers her asshole, cunt and clit with his intense burning sauce. Dia’s screams, the look on her face, and her body movements and contortions are priceless as the sauce keeps getting hotter and hotter, seemingly with no upper limit.”

This very rough F/f BDSM gallery and flash movie doesn’t show actual figging penetration, and it’s something of a tease whether you’ll find that if you actually join the TopGrl site, which I haven’t. But they are so rough and hard core, my expectation is that you probably would — these are not the sort of pornographers to carve a great big honking fig, and then not penetrate somebody with it on camera.

And make no mistake, this is the largest ginger fig I’ve ever seen:

I did not know that ginger so large existed. Indeed, I’d suspect it of being a daikon radish or something, but they claim it’s ginger. And in this next photo, you can see the cut ends, which look very much like the cut ends of your standard dried up old hand of ginger:

The movie shows a bit more of these “lubricate the fig before you get it inserted” scenes, as well as part of the scene where it gets prepared and peeled:

Definitely a bit intimidating!

So Zille Defeu got punished, with figging and a caning:

I had her dress in her white spandex compression shorts. I then spanked her for a while before proceeding to the main event, as it were: ginger. At the weekend (actually, in the small hours of Sunday night after a friends birthday bash), we got a large chunk of a huge old ginger root. Zille had created an experimental holder from a retired butt plug, and fastened the ginger into the base of the thing.

It was a large piece of ginger, and by the time it was a third of the way in, she was squirming. But we persevered, and got the whole thing inserted.

With the ginger burning brightly, I spanked her to settle the “fig” inside her.

The heart of the punishment was 12 strokes of the cane…

Zille tells it from her perspective here, and has a photo of her hybrid ginger-fig with flange device, too.

If volatile condiments on tender mucous membranes are enough to trigger your interest, you’ll like these pictures even though they don’t involve ginger or tender bottom holes. Apparently this girl earned herself a tongue punishment with the old hot sauce bottle:

Of course that leads to some terrible drooling:

You’d think the poor girl would know better than to make a mess, though! Now it looks as if her mistress plans to beat her breasts with a heavy wooden spoon, and you know that’s got to smart!

Pictures are from this gallery at The Wasteland.

She got one:

So I came home Wed night from softball with a single red rose and ginger root. I gave her the red rose, kissed her and told her that I bought it b/c I loved her. And that I bought the other item in the bag b/c I loved her as well. Then I told her to go upstairs.

I had her lay naked face down on the bed with her notebook. I prepared the ginger root and went upstairs. We went through her list and I had her write in her notebook 5-20 times different phrases as I spanked her with different devices. Then when we got to the items she was the worst at, mainly her attitude and respect for me, I inserted the ginger root.

The effects were immediate. She said it burned. As we discussed things she needed to improve on, we had the ginger root inserted, me spanking her and her writing lines. At one point she begged me to remove it, I got a little worried, since this was our first time, so I removed it. I waited a minute and asked if she was ok, she said she was, so I put it back in until we were finished.

Erica Scott writes about the many uses of ginger, and in humorous but clearly experienced tones explains exactly what she thinks should happen to tops who enjoy figging:

To this usage, I give a resounding FAIL. Ginger contains volatile oils that burn and irritate those tender tissues, along with the expected discomfort and humiliation. Strangely, the perpetrators of this ginger insertion (also known as figging) don’t seem to be too concerned with those factors. In fact, they (gasp) actually seem to delight in them.

There is debate about when and where this practice started, but there is much documentation about how, back in the 1800s, horse owners did this to their poor non-consenting equine friends in order to “liven them up.” However, that was the 19th century, and it’s now the 21st. Today, that would be called “cruelty to animals.” So I ask you — if it would be considered cruel to do to animals, wouldn’t it be even more egregious to do it to humans? Well, wouldn’t it?

A while back on my old MySpace blog, I wrote about my opinion of certain tops rubbing capsaicin (hot pepper) cream onto sore and tender spanked bottoms. I believe I suggested that these tops should have capsaicin cream switched with their hemorrhoid ointment. Well, here is my suggestion for those who insist upon this cruel and unusual usage of ginger: I think they should be required to go a full day with a habanero pepper shoved up their bum. Oh, and with a freshly fierce new one re-inserted each hour.

Tobasco Sauce Up The Butt?

Yes. Very Figging.com. Also, a-hoo-ah!

But not quite how you’re thinking. Y’see, this time it’s bottle and all.

Here’s a video for you. Some hot sauce is applied to the freshly-shaved tender parts of two bondage girls. One of them likes it, the other one screams quite a lot. Afterwards there’s a quick interview where she says she’d come back… but “no more sauce, though.”

You wouldn’t think an accidental vaginal figging would be all that easy to arrange, would you? But, it happened. Sorta…

This isn’t figging, but the hot-pepper lube oil makes it interesting all the same:

From a BDSM graphic novel called Death In The Harem, from Dofantasy.com.

I’ve been meaning to blog this story from Behind Kink about a figging shoot that didn’t go so well. It sounds to me, and looks from the video, like the ginger fig they carved was pretty cylindrical — without the recommended large swelled base or (my preference) a substantial perpendicular bit that you can get by carving a fig from a larger “hand” of ginger and including a wider bit of the “palm” where the individual fingers of ginger are attached to each other:

Anyway, as Behind Kink described the scene:

“Figging,” for those of you new to the practice, is the act of placing a shaved ginger root into a person’s anus to induce a tingling or light burning sensation. Recently on an EverythingButt.com shoot, Maitresse Madeline figged one of Kink.com’s newest models, Mason. But the procedure went awry when the “fig” in question disappeared, vacuumed into Mason’s butthole as if her ass were a hungry little mouth. Mason recounts her anal misadventures here, a tale as cautionary as it is entertaining. Don’t try this at home, kids!

If you follow the Behind Kink link, there’s a video of this incident that includes a lot of graphic closeup figging shots; it’s free and it’s well worth your time. I’m also flattered to say that Kink.com included some of the Figging.com artwork (which we comissioned from Patty a few years back) in their video explanation of what figging is:

Here’s the best and clearest screen grab I could get, that shows the ginger fig they used. Note the fairly minimalist base:

Seriously, you can do better than that yourself, and you should! The base of a good ginger fig should be a lot wider than the inserted part. Start with big ginger and you won’t have a problem with this.

Now here’s Mason, describing the experience in her own words, as transcribed from the video:

“It was a regular everyday shoot, going to work for Kink, for Everything Butt. I was really excited because it was actually my first girl/girl scene that I was gonna shoot. So, the whole premise of the shoot was just basically your everyday girl-dominatrix and I was being the sub. And, Lochai wanted to include a ginger root, or… it’s called figging, and it’s the act of putting a shaved fig [of ginger] into the ass. It creates a burning sensation around the sphincter, and like a cooling sensation at the same time, so I guess that’s the draw towards it. So my dom sticks the fig up my ass, and at first we’re having a lot of trouble having the fig root stay in my ass, it keeps like, slipping out, or for whatever reason, just not staying in. Anyway, I go to turn around, and I guess readjust or something, and all of a sudden, like, my asshole just [she makes a slurping noise] up the fig root. And I sort of realized what has just happened, and I’m like, I just did this, I ate the fig root, my ass just ate the fig root! So we stopped the shoot for a second, to try and figure out what we were going to do about this. So, they’re all reaching in trying to get it out, filming at some parts just because I think it was humorous.

It’s clear in the video that everybody remained in good spirits; they were taking it seriously as a problem, but even Mason was laughing pretty hard about it:

So, they’re getting out the pliers, we tried everything. I think we tried enemas, I think we reached up ever niche, we could no longer feel it, we had no idea where it had gone! The next thing you know, Worker’s Comp is called, and I’m being taken to St. Francis Hospital, where I got to go through Porn Shoot #2 of the day, with ingesting fluids for them to scan my body, and all the nurses coming to stick their fingers up my ass, and yeah, it was awesome!

I got to do a lot of publicity that day for Kink as far as what exactly goes on around here. Well, long story short, I don’t know where the fig root is today. The doctor said it was organic quality, and that it just might break down, and that it will come out, but I don’t really know. It’s a mystery. It’s possibly somewhere in my body, or, hopefully, it’s come out by now.

Although I think someone at Kink.com may have made a fairly elementary mistake in figging best practices, I am nonetheless impressed by the way they kept their cool on the set, kept things lighthearted, yet treated the situation properly as a safety issue and got Mason the medical care that proper prudence demanded (even if, to be honest, it seems to have turned out that there was nothing much medical professionals could do that Kink.com’s own ass professionals had not already done.)