Esther

If tribbing does not sound familiar, perhaps scissoring rings a bell? These two terms are often used interchangeably, although their respective genealogies have little to do with each other. Most likely, many of us learned the term scissoring by hearing someone joke inappropriately about lesbian sex, or perhaps by joking or talking about it ourselves. If you are not a practitioner but are a regular visitor to mainstream porn sites, you may know what the term offers as a category of sexual practice. If you're a lesbian or a person with a vulva who has sex with other people with vulvas, I bet you probably have a strong opinion and/or a lot of mixed feelings about this sharped term --scissoring.

In addition to generally referring to any movement that resembles the action of the scissors (for example, swimming breaststroke), scissoring in slang became popular in the 1990s to refer to the sexual activity or set of positions in which a person rubs their vulva against another person's vulva. Because popular culture still has no idea how lesbians can have sex, and sex ed is generally not on the menu; in western cultures (cultures that are allo-cis-heteronormative, patriarchal, coitocentric, phallocratic, finalist, ableist, monogamous, reproductivist, ageist, LGBTQIA+ phobic...) for a vast majority of the population scissoring symbolizes (all) lesbian sex.

As a well-versed "scissoring" practitioner, a proud insider, I feel confident saying, even without knowing de facto, that whoever it is who came up with the term scissoring to refer to this sexual practice (of rubbing); has definitely not practiced it in any possible way (imagine a great palette of rubbing options with or without vulvas involved). In my opinion, only a purposefully abjectual imagination is capable of proposing such a linguistic sign, also purposefully ignoring all that the activity really is, does, or produces: PLEASURE

Think about the qualities of real scissors or their mechanisms. How on earth could a cold, sharp, non-malleable, cutting, somehow dangerous object in interaction with one of its kind serve as a comparison or symbol of sexual practice? Think about the feel of those sharp edges touching, sliding, sounding, and what the opening and closing motion of the scissors can possibly produce by touching or scraping each other. Seriously, try to feel it. Or even, grab two pairs of scissors and give it a try.

Surprisingly, testing it myself with two actual scissors I discovered that there are certain couplings that seem quite interesting, e.g. the contact of flat against flat surfaces of the internal sides gave me, by all means, a very sensual feeling. For lovers of metal and/or of sexual practices that involve cuts and tools, this little scissor test might as well provoke a cute rush. Assuming from popular culture that most of us are somehow vanilla (not kink, BDSM, or friends of cuts and pain), the use of scissoring as a symbol, even considering that it’s slang, seems to make sense only when it describes a visually and sensory unpleasant activity or an activity that is certainly inadvisable (dangerous?); it would also make sense when it comes to being a mocking joke. So I wonder, is lesbian sex inadvisable or unpleasant? Obviously not for its practitioners. How much and to what extent is it necessary to repair ourselves and our cultures, particularly concerning gender, sexuality, and sexual attraction, when it’s still not questioned that a mocking joke symbolizes (all) lesbian sex?

To reinforce my hypothesis of the mocking aspect, we can think of or recreate a famous scissoring hand gesture: make a V shape with the index and middle fingers of your both hands, like one of the symbols of peace. Next, bring the respective interdigital angles of the V-shaped fingers to touch each other, note that your wrists have to twist in opposite directions to achieve the angles’ contact. Bounce your hands a little so that the angles collide with each other, and at the same time release your jaw and stick your tongue out a little while feeling frivolous and/or hateful in your eyes.

To trib, tribbing and tribadism are generally described as a form of sexual activity between women in which the external genitalia are rubbed together; to scissor. Porn websites do use tribbing almost as much as scissoring to name the category that shows mainly vulva-to-vulva interactions, often combining all terms at the same time, to make sure people do find the link with whatever search: “trib scissoring tribbing porn xxx videos free lesbians rubbing wild pussies* whatever-(mainstream)-porn-site.com”.
Note that the above mentioned is referring to an internet search tested mostly in English. Researching scissoring in Spanish “tijerear or hacer las tijeras” would offer fewer but similarly connected links.

Although having a long experience in practice, its name tribbing is something new for me, while scissoring was already inserted in my vocabulary since adolescence. In the same way for a great majority of people, tribbing or tribadism are quite unknown terms, since their use (apart from actual porn sites) has been out of fashion after the Freudian psychosexual regulatory categories of heterosexuality/homosexuality conquered the Western world in the early 20th century. Tribadism is an early modern antecedent to “lesbianism”, and has an equally long cultural history (Traub 82). "If we trace the use of the term forward into present, we find that tribadism is one of those rarely discussed but often practiced sexual activities, and the silence that surrounds it now is as puzzling as the discourse it produced in earlier centuries" (Halberstam 61).

The word “tribade” has its origins in ancient Greek and means “woman who rubs”, referring to “the pleasurable friction of rubbing a clitoris on another person’s thigh, pubic bone, hip, buttocks, or any other fleshy surface. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a known tribade would often also be suspected of having an enlarged and possibly hermaphroditic clitoris, and some early sexologists surmised that a hermaphroditic tribade would attempt clitoral penetration of another female” (Halberstam 59).

The act of rubbing as an active form of sexual interaction between women and/or vulvar owners, whether with partners of the same sex/gender or not, has been understood mainly under coitocentric, phallocentric and reproductive logics, perpetuated in different fashions throughout history. Either because the movement of rubbing the vulva could resemble the (“primordial”) movement of penetrating a vagina with a penis or because non-penetrative sex, non-reproductive sex, especially for women, has rarely been recognized as a legitimate form of sexual interaction; a tribade, in my words "an active pleasure seeker", has never represented a regular, legitimate or dignified person.

In ancient Greece, a tribade was a woman or intersex individual who exhibited male-defined sexual behavior (seeking pleasure by penetrating or rubbing) and was therefore considered the most vulgar version of a woman (lesbian or not). Same-sex attraction was recognized at the time (sources show mostly male-to-male), but all sexual activity would have to be phallic to be possible or enjoyable. Thus we see, once again, that the pleasure that belongs to feminine and non-phallic practices seemed to be a mockery (a vulgar woman) and in the end an impossibility. For those reasons, it was believed that many “lesbians”, or tribades, could derive sexual pleasure from having an enlarged clitoris (with which they would penetrate) or, as Halberstam writes, a hermaphroditic clitoris, referring to individuals with genitalia defined within what we today know as the intersex spectrum.

It wasn't until the late 18th century that anatomists agreed to describe human genitalia according to a “two-sex model”. Prior to that, “thinking about the body was dominated by a “one-sex model” in which a woman was understood to be an inverted man; the male and female genitalia, in other words, were considered to be analogous, but in women the genitalia were inside (vagina as penis tucked inside) and in men they were outside” (Halberstam 60). According to this model, intersex genitalia (formerly called hermaphroditic, but no longer used to refer to humans) were rare but possible cases of genitalia that, as for any other human, had the potential to develop both inward and outward naturally; so, some hermaphroditic genitalia would develop in these two directions simultaneously. Moreover, hermaphrodites were not only defined by specifically genital abnormalities. Social and gender deviances would also be a call to hermaphroditism. All in all, the spectrum of this category would encompass “a range of physical, social and sexual possibilities” that often resulted in violent alterity, which, on rare occasions, also turned the altered, the "monster", into the idol. For example, “In early modern England, the hermaphrodite was, in some contexts, an elevated ideal, the perfect union of opposites. In the abstract it presented a philosophical and spiritual fantasy of harmonious plenitude. But in those rare cases of embodied sexual indeterminacy, it became a disturbing reality and one which troubled medical, legal and social taxonomies of the time” (Gilbert 9).

With the establishment of the “two-sex model”, which defines the penis and the vulva/vagina as two different types of genitalia, the sexual difference becomes more rigid, and the intersex spectrum kind of “disappears”, leaving intersex cases out of the established categories and therefore alien to biological normality; a normality that science has endevored to demostrate ever since (18th century) as a paradigm of truth. Science made intersex not only a rare case, a curiosity, or a cultural monstrosity, but a pathology; whislt the biological norm becomes a matter of sameness. The possibility of bodily difference gets then reduced, and sexual indeterminacy (once idealized as the harmonious plenitude of the combination of opposites amongst other connotative representations) is robbed from culture and spirituality with its challenges; all to turn into a variety of monstrous physical (and soon after psychological) disorders.

(...)

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Dear monsters, hairy femmes, ex-hermaphrodites, people with real or fictional enlarged clits, shaved femmes, intersex, trans in every possible way, penises being vulvas, vulvas being revulvas, rubsters and tribbers of the world, fags, futches, and all those who want to sign up; This is a call to reclaim the act of rubbing as the act of pleasure that most represent us, which many of us started when we were 3 years old by rubbing our buttocks with those of our cousin. Let’s revere the tribades and their determination in their active search for pleasure, vulvar pleasure, the discovery of erogenous surfaces, the pleasure of erotic feeling.

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Gilbert, Ruth. _Early Modern Hermaphrodites : Sex and Other Stories_. New York, Palgrave, 2002.

Halberstam, Jack. _Female Masculinity_. Durham, Duke University Press, 2018.

Traub, Valerie. “The Psychomorphology of the Clitoris.” GLQ: _A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 2_, no. 1_and_2, 1 Apr. 1995, pp. 81–113, 10.1215/10642684-2-1_and_2-81. Accessed 12 Mar. 2021.