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.

In fact, according to one 2015 survey by Autostraddle, an online platform for lesbian, bisexual, and queer women and nonbinary folks, over 40 per cent of people who identify as lesbian, bisexual, or queer women scissor on the regular. And even in the world of porn, Pornhub’s 2022 year in review tells us that “Lesbian Scissoring” searches grew over 151 percent worldwide that year, and women were over 155 per cent more into it than men were.

So, scissoring is real. For some people, it’s really hot. And it actually doesn’t even need to be about vulvas or lesbians – everyone has the potential to enjoy a good scissoring sesh. Speaking to the experts, GAY TIMES has the ultimate guide to what scissoring is really about, ignoring the stereotypes and “rules” people needlessly apply to this kind of sex, and how to use scissoring in your own sex life.

So, what is scissoring?

Gigi Engle, sex therapist and educator at dating app 3fun, says that scissoring is widely considered to be a very specific thing: two women with their legs intertwined (like two pairs of scissors with the blades intersected – hence the name) but it’s actually open to all genders and backgrounds.

She explains to GAY TIMES, “Scissoring is mostly practised by people assigned female at birth. It could be two cisgender women, two transmasc people, a cisgender woman and a transmac person.”

Engle also believes that scissoring doesn’t have to rigidly only include that specific position. “It can look like people rubbing their vulvas together or one person straddling the other’s leg and kind of dry humping,” she says. Equally, two people with vulvas could scissor in a classic cowgirl position if that’s pleasurable to them, or it might even involve one partner rubbing their genitals on another area of their partner’s body – like a leg, stomach, or arm. Whatever works for you!

Importantly, clinical sexologist Bima Loxley notes that people with penises, and partners with different genitalia can engage in scissoring.

Frotting, for example, is a sex position that looks a lot like scissoring for penises. Two people with penises can stand face to face, lie down with their legs intertwined, left leg straight on the bed and your right leg raised upwards with your partner kneeling between, and rub their penises against one another to give each other pleasure.

Instead of gatekeeping scissoring, we should celebrate being creative with how we interpret labels and play with sex.