A gatekeeping-free guide to scissoring, an unnecessarily divisive sex position
Beth Ashley speaks to sexperts including Gigi Engle and clinical sexologist Bima Loxley, as well as a range of IRL scissoring enthusiasts, to show that scissoring is for everyone – and to deliver some tips on how to do it very, very well… WORDS BY BETH ASHLEY HEADER DESIGN BY YOSEF PHELAN Scissoring gets a pretty bad rap.
Referring to a sex position where two people rub their genitals together, scissoring can’t win. It’s either fetishised and considered to be the only kind of lesbian sex available (according to everyone but lesbians, funnily enough) or regarded as a position that’s not real, or not worth it.
It’s all over our media, and usually being poked fun at. From scissoring jokes on Gogglebox, of all places, to the rather miserable scissoring demonstration given by Kyle Richards and Dorit Kemsley in in The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills last week, us gays have to deal with a lot of bad scissoring takes on telly and social media.
And they translate into real life, too. Scissoring is pretty divisive for an innocent sex position among LGBTQIA+ people, with one camp thinking it’s not a real position anyone actually goes for and is just a male-gaze position from mainstream porn, and some absolutely loving it – proving that, yeah, it really is a thing.
