This one time at Pub Nite, I was playing Kings with the women’s rugby team. Someone pulled the card where we had to do a mini version of “Never Have I Ever” and one girl said something about sex. “How do you define sex?” I asked. Her response? “Like all the way.” “No, but what does that mean? Like—” “Oh, scissoring counts!”
WOAH. I was slightly baffled, but pretty amused at the same time. “Scissoring is NOT a thing,” I tipsily shouted across the table, “It’s a myth!”
I’m not even sure how scissoring would work. I mean, I think scissoring, I think … two pairs of scissors … perpendicularly trying to cut each other…and then the scissor blades are supposed to be the … legs and … it just doesn’t sound appealing (or comfortable!) at all. It’s kind of like in the fourth grade when I tried to make my Barbie dolls have sex with each other and their parts didn’t fit. The only way I could make Ken’s smooth, subtle bulge even close to coming in contact with the impressively flat space between Barbie’s legs was if I turned one of them sideways. But that’s not how sex works … is it?
To be fair, Barbie’s permanently etched-on panties and Ken’s lack of manhood (so to speak) make it rather difficult for them to have sex. Also, it must be incredibly complicated to fuck with someone when both parties involved are incapable of bending (or, for that matter, spreading) their legs. Just saying.
Anyway, what am I trying to explain here? Oh right! Scissoring isn’t real.
Except then something happened that made me question my previous stance on the supposed (or not so supposed) sex act.
So I was flying back after spending my fall break at home, and in the midst of pretending to do my Poli Sci reading I heard one of the flight attendants tell the penis next to me the satellite was broken so the penis couldn’t watch some sports game, but that to compensate all of the movies would be free. Now obviously I had to take advantage of this opportunity and decided to give The Real L Word a try.
Surprisingly, there wasn’t a whole lot of nudity/sex. I probably would have been slightly more disappointed about that were I not on an airplane sitting next to a complete and utter stranger, accompanied by his girlfriend. Gross. Anyway, maybe that was just the less inappropriate, less awkward airplane cut.
ANYWAY, I got pretty into it. And then, what do ya know! They started talking about scissoring. This one girl, Lauren (she was really pretty and had pink-ish blonde hair…kind of), was saying that she loooved it, and then I believe it was Kiyomi (the quintessence of lesbian beauty, if I do say so myself) who was not as big a fan. (Side note: they were also super attracted to each other … I wonder, if they ended up fucking, do you think they scissored?) I gotta say, it was pretty frickin’ convenient that the satellite wasn’t working. And that they had The Real L Word. And that I watched it. What a relevant coincidence!
It’s funny, because I was so ready to write about how not real scissoring was. But like, if the lesbians on TRLW do it …
I decided to take another gander at the idea of scissoring not being a myth. Because, you know, maybe I had the wrong idea. Maybe it wasn’t like two barbies attempting sex after all. And I was pretty surprised at what I found …
Apparently, scissoring is sometimes used as an umbrella term for all forms of “tribadism” or “tribbing”, which is basically one chick rubbing her vulva against some part of the other person’s body, according to Wikipedia. Oh, but it may also involve fingering or some sort of dildo. Oh, also the chick can rub her vulva against inanimate objects too and it’s still scissoring, as long as it’s to receive sexual pleasure. By these generous standards, a lot of innocent people out there, lesbians or not, have scissored unknowingly.
But there is also a scissoring position, believe it or not. And that is the awkward Barbie-and-Ken, two-pairs-of-scissors, one-person-lying-awkwardly-on-her-side sort of deal.
Sooo what does this all mean? Is there a happy medium between the sweeping generalization of scissoring and the scissoring position? Is scissoring, in fact, something that people do? Is it exclusive to lesbians?
I personally hold my stance that scissoring isn’t real. Now obviously I can’t make a huge sweeping generalization and say that nobody scissors, because that’s just as bad as the sweeping generalization that everybody scissors. Unfortunately, it’s really just a matter of how you interpret the mystery known as scissoring.
