Porn has indisputably given large portions of the population new sex things to try and enjoy, like shaving their crotches, doing anal and taking jizz shots to the face. But occasionally there are still those lingering sex acts that don’t seem to go completely mainstream, if only because people aren’t quite sure it’s real or if it’s just a porn thing. One of those things seems to be pussy slapping.
Pussy slapping, also called cunt spanking, clit slapping, clit smacking, vagina slapping, and clit tapping, is pretty much what it sounds like. Though one might get the visual image of an open-handed slap on the pussy as if it were a face, that’s not quite the way it goes. It can involve the head of a dick slapping the clit, a hand, a finger, or objects such as rulers, or for more advanced kinksters, a whip or belt. In some porn, it’s related to squirting.
Whether or not women can have an orgasm from this act may be debatable, but given the fact that women have fewer orgasms on average than men, it can’t hurt to try. (Related, a ballgasm is the term for when a woman climaxes from repeated clitoral slapping with the testicles — usually from doggy style.)
Of course, we have no idea how many people slap the pussy. It could be happening thousands of times a day the world over. But there are no hard slap statistics on the rotation of this move in the sexual repertoire. Anecdotally, I remember seeing it in some generic faux lesbian porn once in the 90s, but no one ever actually tried to slap my pussy in college. (To be fair, I grew up in the very repressive South.)
Yet, cut to today, and pussy spanking or slapping is a standard porn category. And it must be ubiquitous enough in porn, and intriguing enough in real life, that people are taking to forums like Reddit and other sexual health forums to find out if women actually like it, or the reverse — why guys are actually trying to do it.
“Why do you guys slap your dick on a vagina?” someone asked on Reddit a month ago. “It’s rude not to knock before entering,” someone replied. “Chicks love it,” responded another. “Seen it done on the internet,” said another. “I have to copy everything I see on the internet.”
While all of those things appear to be factually correct (not to mention the fact that the Dutch have a term for men putting their penises on things, like faces or cheeks, called “Swaffelen”), someone else added what they thought was the most biological explanation. “The head of the penis has the most nerve endings out of any external part of the male body,” Hooligan666 said. “The clitoris has the most nerve endings out of any external part of the female body. By ‘slapping’ the head of the penis against the clitoris, it creates enough impact stimulation without causing pain, and females have had clitoral orgasms from this. It also creates heightened arousal in males.”
But everyone else on the internet is not so confident in the act’s appeal or results, and most other discussions of pussy slapping involve people trying to find out if anyone actually likes it.
“Do you like your pussy being spanked during sex?” Black_Magic83 asked online in 2011, adding “I love it, even if it is with my hand, his or with his cock.” Others agreed. “With his cock yes J,” said “Untamed.” Others also echoed this sentiment, but added the caveat that pussy slapping is not an everyday activity. “Also have to be in the ‘mood’ for that kind of play,” RideNaked2 added. “I don’t like it ALL the time.”
And this isn’t a totally recent question. Back in 2007, someone asked a sex forum if any REAL girls have actually tried clit smacking and like it or orgasm from it. “I don’t really want to bring it up to her until I know it’s something that is pleasurable to girls and is not just some made up thing by the porn industry,” reader TheKeg writes. One woman said she knows clit slapping would feel good, but she doesn’t know if it would actually get her off. Another person said “If a guy ever did that to my clit during sex, I’d walk out.” Another warned: “Don’t do it! It’s just a porn thing!”
Still, many men apparently insist on slapping first, and asking no questions ever. “What is it with guy’s slapping their girlfriend’s vagina?” anonymous asks at Girls Ask Guys. In full:
I slept with my boyfriend for the first time the other day, he went down on me and suddenly, without a warning he slaps me right between my legs. It did not really hurt, so I didn’t say anything but like 30 secs later it does it again. It didn’t hurt but it didn’t feel nice either so I asked what he was doing and he said he finds it sexy.
Is that common? and if yes, why? What do you get out of it, I mean I can kinda see why you would slap a girls butt, but her vagina?
The answers are all the same, more or less: he obviously saw this in porn, and he obviously takes it way too seriously, and if you don’t actually like it, you’re gonna have to break the news to him, because otherwise he will continue to labor under the pussy slapping assumption that it is in fact, awesome to all women.
There are numerous Reddit threads asking what’s up with clit slapping, to which someone replied, “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with a little twat swat.” Another person explained it was their biggest pet peeve about porn, because it doesn’t look pleasurable. For every forum like the above where women chime in to say they enjoy it, there are other posts from women who emphatically do not.
Physiologically, there’s plenty of reason to suggest that it’s pleasurable, though, even if a 36-page guide to clitoral sex only devotes one line to it (‘‘Slapping’’ with a suitable object may be pleasurable too.) Someone on Quora took the time to ask, “What does slapping a pussy do?” to which a self-proclaimed dominatrix said this:
Any area of the body that gets slapped, whether lightly or not, will all act on a similar basic level. Blood will rush to the area of impact and that area will become more sensitive and raise in temperature. It then may begin to swell if the slapping is persistent. I advise you smack your own genital area first to give you a good idea of how sensitive it is. Start soft and go slow with a partner and keep open lines of communication.
Unsurprisingly, clit slapping shows up on BDSM checklists for pain/sensation play, and in light BDSM erotica stories online, such as “The Parking Garage,” in which a lonely single woman is groped in a parking lot by a stranger who taps her clit with his dick:
His hand in her hair tightened its grip, yanking her head back roughly. At the same time, he slapped the thickness of his manhood against her sex. Hard. The shock of his meatiness cuffing her, caused her to call out, the echoes rocketing through the garage.
He spanked her most intimate place again and again, harder each time. It was exquisite. With each tap, her need was building again, in that desperate place below her belly. She was back at the edge, ready to fall at any moment, waiting for the push.
It’s also in some of the harder stuff.
It has scant mentions in mainstream American dialog, other than that time in 2013 when Amanda Bynes got her vagina slapped by a cop, according to her own tweet account of the incident.
But clit tapping has some unexpected fans in Christians, and they are among the top results on how to actually do it in a real relationship. Christian blog Uncovering Intimacy devoted a whole post to “clitoral slapping” for more adventurous Christian marrieds, where they laid it out in a totally straightforward fashion:
Have the wife lie on her back. The husband lies on his non-dominant side facing his wife. In this position, the husband can reach over his wife’s leg and cup her between the legs, covering her clitoris and labia majora (lips) at the same time. His left hand if free, if they wish, to grab her butt or get involved in some anal play, if they enjoy that activity. From there, you simply start by gently “slapping”.
The post made a best-of roundup of best Christian sex links of that week. And they went on to offer a series of other tips on how to pull this interesting sex act off, including warming her up and getting ’er wet first. Anticipating their readers’ response that this is an insane thing for Christians to do (or maybe anyone), they explain why it’s good — increased blood flow and nerve response, the relationship between pleasure and pain, and the submissiveness of the wife.
All of which is to say that if anyone had any doubts about pussy slapping in their own lives, knowing that God is obviously way into tapping the clit is a relief, to say the least. The real question, though, is would God be just as cool with slapping dicks?
Tracy Moore
Tracy Moore is a staff writer at MEL. She covers all the soft sciences like psychology, sex, relationships and parenting, but since this is a men’s magazine, occasionally the hard ones. Formerly at Jezebel.
