The Lost Art of Dry Humping

tribaissance now!

We are in an anti-Renaissance. Rather than gaining artistic and creative momentum, art forms are dying off.

There is the lost art of conversation. In the words of a fellow substacker, we are facing the lost art of fingering. In cinema, movies that aren’t about big men with USA flag emblems saving the planet or CGI gorillas running around in the sand do not get the green light. In “literature,” books that do not have eighth-grade wattpad-level enemies-to-lovers arcs about fairies and gnomes, like slop in the trough for consumers who — I suppose — development executives have reduced to the level of swine, do not get sales or even publishing opportunity.

The lost art of dry humping is another unfortunate sign of the times.

Dry humping is not just about crotch-to-crotch contact. It’s really the rubbing of genitals onto any body part — arms, abdomens, thigh/leg (lesbians know what I’m talking about). In lesbian world, this is called “tribbing.” When people talk about “scissoring,” this is really what they’re talking about, and it is done between women, just not at the angles done in porn.

So as someone who has been having sex with women a lot more again lately (I’m a bisexual who identifies heavily with riding what’s known as the “BIcycle” wherein sometimes my attraction to women is more up, while other times it’s up for men) losing dry humping as part of my regular repertoire has been a major loss!

But also, for anyone, dry humping should be a key part of sex.

It builds build-up. Sex is not a prefab tiny home, it’s a bespoke castle where every brick must be laid by hand, every stone placed methodically, patiently, slowly. Everyone is always talking about foreplay, and for good reason.

There’s nothing better than a long makeout session where someone presses their quadricep against my clothed vulva. Or stimulating someone’s clitoral region with my tightened thigh while I lick and bite the side of their neck.

Even more unfortunate is the fact that dry humping has become so near-extinct that Mormons have created their own term for it: durfing. That’s right, the phrase and practice of dry humping has become so out of fashion that Mormons have been led to believe they invented their own sexual ritual, and even felt entitled to uniquely label something that has existed for centuries. This is kind of like Columbus “discovering” the Americas, or tech bros inventing a “luxury rideshare shuttle service” that’s just the bus, but $35.

The loss of this art was brought to my attention, actually, by having sex with someone who seems to be a master of it. On our forth date, Tania and I reached the culmination of our mutual seduction. And she taught me about the lost art of dry humping. Call it a seducation. Tania is an older woman I have been hunting for sport, essentially, and I finally caught my prey.

Tania is older — 63 — and I am 25. I know some of you may be clutching your pearls, reflexively squeezing together your cobweb-ridden inner thighs, grasping at the “Reagan ’84” coffee mug you’re holding, and if that’s the case, then you really do not belong here. But best of luck with the rest of your evening, whether it be crocheting or painting picket signs to protest your nearest Planned Parenthood.

With that out of the way, let me just say that Tania’s instruction in the dark arts has something to do with her age.

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We begin in her kitchen. She sits on a tall chair, overlooking the kitchen counter.

We kiss between sips and drags, feeding each other the last of the wine and the joint.

Tania takes a final drag of a joint she rolled for us, and puts it out in the last of the wine, resting in her glass like a burgundy pond.

She starts biting and sucking on my neck. I feel my whole body release, finally. I want to lick her neck back; feel the warm, smooth skin glide on my tongue while I inhale pheromones and sweat.

I grab her by the side of her face and move her so that I can get to her neck. She, a lifelong dominant top with 45+ years of experience, laughs in my face when I make this initial attempt at domination. I like being laughed at, at least by her. It’s the sincerest form of degradation and belittling I can get.

Writing and thinking about sex confronts me with the failures and limitations of the English language. Like the Inuit people have hundreds of words for different kinds of snow, I’m a sexual creature who longs for hundreds of words to describe the body; I want a word for the side of the neck, the back of it, the sensitive skin right between the breasts, the soft dips of skin above the collarbones and beneath the ribcage, the skin right behind the knee and elbow that when touched or licked, sends a thin rod of cool lightning through the whole body.

We keep going back and forth to our necks like this until I finally cave.

“Can we go to your room?” I ask.

I try to push her onto the bed, and am met again with another laugh, like I’m a child who has offered to complete her taxes. She gently sits me on the bed by holding me at my waist, then sits next to me. We start kissing again but this time she’s slowly rubbing just the center of her palm over my breasts, my ribcage, my back. I put my hands under her shirt and I feel the strong, taut, thick muscle of her abdomen and upper back. Even though I cannot see what her skin looks like her under button-down, I can feel the tan, the way her skin glows from decades of weightlifting and fucking and living.

We lie down in one fell, synchronized swoop, me on top of her. I try my hardest to impress her. She has 40 years of experience on me, and I want to be good. Really good. I want to be good so badly.

I’m also overcome with pleasure from feeling her lips on mine, and finally, from rubbing my thigh against the area between her legs. I’m getting some reaction, but I can also tell that she’s getting used to me, and me to her. It’s a delicate dance.

I also know that she wants to be the one to take the lead, and I’m actually not used to that with women.

So weirdly, in knowing what to do, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to be passive and submissive with a woman, because when I’m with women, I’m certainly always the top when it comes to the strap-on, and dynamically, I’m usually the one initiating, leading, and aggressing.

But that’s not what Tania wants. I decide to give up and give in. It feels good to finally let go, to not think. I try not to think about not thinking. Suddenly I feel her hand pulling on the back of my hair and it’s like a current pulling away my thoughts, my ruminations, my anxieties. I feel light-headed and wanting.

Her style of domination is far less aggressive in the beginning than what I’m used to, too. It’s a very slow build.

Instead of pushing me off of her, she simply begins to roll to the side, so that I land gently on my back now, with her on top of me. She presses her thigh against my crotch hard, while kissing and licking my neck. I could be here forever. Like a body answering my prayers, Tania stays in this position for a long time, with her leg between mine and her mouth now all over my collarbone, my chest.

I’ve never been in this position long enough to really take advantage of it. So now I start fully humping and rubbing and grinding on her thigh. I buck my hips fast and wild, like a fist pounding desperately against a door.

Heat builds between us, friction begets more heat. Embers birth their own fires from the mother flame. I feel close and we’ve only barely just begun.

I’m trying not to think during sex, but it does occur to me that I haven’t done this in a long time; I haven’t gotten off purely on someone’s leg and kissing and touching with all of our clothes still on. That’s the next thing to go, naturally. We take each other’s shirts off and embrace.

Then, she pushes me gently onto my side. Holding me from the back, she starts kissing the back of my neck. This is probably one of the greatest sensations in the entire world. She starts pressing her body more and more into my body, until we’re one continuous panel of flesh.

I’m turned onto my stomach and she presses herself on top of me. She starts grinding herself against my ass and it’s one of the hottest, most unexpected things anyone has ever done to me during a hookup. She’s getting hotter and hotter against me; I love the feeling of being used for her pleasure. I’m more turned on now, just feeling the hardness of her body on top of mine and being held face down.

Next, I am on my back. Tania slowly moves down my body, her lips now on my nipples and I’m telling her she can suck and bite a lot harder. As she moves up and down my chest and torso, she cradles my thighs in her hand. She uses this hold to keep her chest and torso pressed against my inner thighs and the space between them.

As Tania leaves small bite marks on my stomach, she presses her arm against just the outside of my clit, gaining more precision than before as she presses into me down and back, left and right.

Then she reaches down with her hand. Finds my clit immediately. Her finger alternates between pressing up and down on it, or making small flicks from right to left, my preferred motion. Right when it starts to get too sensitive, she starts drawing soft circles around my clit, slowly drawing a smaller and smaller circle toward the center, like a hiker trekking up around a mountaintop.

When the mountain climber reaches the summit, she asks me, “Are you hard for me? Is that your erection?” I feel like a flock of a thousand birds swarms up from my stomach to my chest. She’s the only woman I’ve met besides myself who describes a hard clit that way. I literally always say I feel erect, and for someone to say that to me and be the reason for it is euphoric.

Then, she does something I’ve also never experienced before. She puts her thigh over her hand while she’s fingering me, so that now there’s a ton of pressure and weight on my clitoris and her hand. She then pulls her hand up with half of her fingers inside me now, and it feels like my body is bouncing outside of herself. When I ask her why she does this, she says, “It traps your clitoris in my hand, so even if you move, there’s nowhere for you to go.” I start grinding onto her again, and now the effect is tripled; her palm is pressing against the top of my vulva, her thigh is bearing weight on her palm, and half of her body is leaning onto me.

Afterwards, I feel restored and revived. We scratch each other’s backs and keep touching until we drift off to sleep. In the moments of silence I have to think, I think about how much dry humping (or really, tribbing, since I guess once the clothes come off the humping isn’t so dry anymore) went into the hook up: my thigh between her leg, hers between mine, her on my ass, my vulva against her bicep, then her whole body rubbing on mine.

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Most young lesbians know about “the knee/leg thing,” which is when you’re on top of someone making out, and you put your thigh or knee between their legs so you can use the press of your quadriceps/knee to put pressure on their clitoris.

Real grinding should ensue, if we are to revive the lost art of dry-humping.

However, this “knee thing” is the main extent to which I’ve experienced tribbing as a queer woman who sleeps around quite a bit with other women. There should honestly be a lot more, and I want to utilize other positions and body parts in my future endeavors.

Hooking up with Tania makes me realize how little I trib, and how much dry humping has decreased in my body’s erotic vocabulary. She turned me onto my side and stomach and back to hump me, or to have me grind on her in so many positions and styles; I grasped the depths to which I’ve been lacking when it comes to foreplay.

I realize Tania is 63 and that’s why she’s so substantially skilled in the fine art of dry-humping.

There’s a sense of lesbian traditionalism that comes with this much dry humping — tribbing, when we do it anyway. I feel like I’m having sex in the 1970s or 1980s. There’s something very retro, very classic, vintage even about sex where the majority of acts are some body part rubbing against the crotch. There’s something teasing and primal about it too. Why does it feel vintage, though?

Because tribbing is a lost art because it’s foreplay. And we lost the art around the same time we lost all the others, around 2013, I think. Tinder launched in 2012 and was in common use a year later, and I think this is when culture ended. For the last year or so, we’ve also been tumbling into a recession which has killed any ability for people to slow down, relax, connect, be present.

Tania is a boomer. She experienced a pre-Reagan economy. Only people who lived through that rare window of American prosperity between 1970 and 2008 have the time to trib.

I think you could probably measure economic prosperity based on the amount of tribbing in sex.

There’s something deeply capitalistic about skipping a good dry hump. It’s getting straight to the bottom line, so to speak. Rushed, unsensual, cold, fast, results-driven sex.

Perhaps we have lost the art of dry humping along with others — the fine art of conversation, the art of seduction, the art of romance — because these things technically don’t “get” you anything. Foreplay in the long-term makes orgasm more achievable and certainly stronger, but you can get someone there without it. Doing things for the sake of doing them, for more casual pleasure, feels like “a waste of time.”

Everyone is in a rush now, and everything is optimized. We have become so used to trying to “expedite” “maximize” “facilitate” that we forget there are some realms where more time, more waste, more indulgence, more slowness is actually better.

Good sex is a road trip. One where you don’t care about “making good time.” Take the pit stops. pull over to enjoy the view. Bad sex is often the kind we have now; it’s a stressful commercial flight, it’s the sexual equivalent of pre-check, rushing past every step just to get to the destination on the cheap, rather than enjoy the journey.

I want to bring back this pre-2008 style of sex. Back when we weren’t all so stressed, frazzled, porn-ified, objectified in the economic and sexual sense, instead more sensual, less inhibited, more in touch with ourselves and others.

Tribaissance now!

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The next week, I get a text from an insanely hot man I used to hook up with two years ago.

“Hey, been thinking about you lately. How are you?”

Yeah, yeah, I’m sure you’ve been thinking about me. When we’re in his bed a few days later, he presses his thigh against my crotch. This time, I don’t brush past this so quickly. Instead of going quickly through the motions, I keep us there. I pretzel my legs around his so I can properly, roughly hump his leg. My cashmere shorts brush against my skin. He says, “It’s so hot when you rub yourself on my leg.” Hearing that is so hot to me, not only because I get off on verbal stuff like that, but also because of how degrading it is. I feel like a dog humping another animal in the park. Once again, I get close just from knocking my whole pelvis against a thumping quadricep.

In the coming months, I want to slow down and dry hump a lot more when I hook up. Sometimes it’s the best part.

xoxo,
femcel