When I was a kid, my family did a lot of camping. Not that shitty yuppie camping where you drive your RV to a resort campground with groomed lawns and fancy restrooms - I mean like real, out in the wilderness, pitch-a-tent-and-start-a-fire camping. And in my many hundreds of childhood hours spent exploring the vast wilderness of the Pacific Northwest, there was one precaution given to me regularly: watch for nettles. Nettles are similar to poison ivy - nondescript plants which, upon contact with the skin, cause a painful, itchy, stinging sensation. Though rarely seriously harmful, the nettle’s sting is nonetheless highly unpleasant - I can say that with experience, from my many careless romps through the forest overgrowth on those camping trips. But I hadn’t even heard the word “nettle” in well over a decade, until the other day, when I found it somewhere I never would have expected: on a porn site.

Indeed, the BDSM community’s endless quest for new ways to injure their genitalia has led them to an uncharted frontier of pain: poisonous plants. Urtication is the official term for the use of stinging nettles in sexual acts. According to urtication.com:

“Nettles cause intense burning sensations in the skin where applied, very similar to the sharp pain of a whip… But while a whipstroke comparatively fades rapidly (within an hour at least, with aching for a few more) the hot, intense burn of a nettle can last for up to 24 hours!”

Well, that sounds absolutely fantastic! Why would I only want to be in agony for an hour? The other “benefit” of nettles is that they increase sensitivity in the applied area - particularly useful for whipping and spanking, as they “turn even the most jaded iron bottoms into mewling kittens.” That’s… good to know.

But nettles aren’t just for butts - as these pictures from Club Daniela show, you can use them on nipples, and even vaginas! Hooray!

Look at the close-up of the last photo, and notice, as the site points out, that “you can see little bumps on her puffy sore labia. Those are the tiny blisters that give the stinging nettle its fearsome reputation!” Maybe I’m just a pussy, but that is about as far away from sexually appealing to me as a fresh bowl of Rosie O’Donnel’s diarrhea. Fuuuuck.

Unfortunately for all of us, stinging your birthflaps with poisonous leaves isn’t the only way to get off using potent vegetation. Figging is the sexual practice involving the insertion of ginger root or even chile peppers into the anus. Yes, while I’m busy desperately trying to avoid the little bit of ginger they put on the side of sushi dishes, some people are sticking huge chunks of it into their rectum. Naturally, this would cause an intense burning sensation, which is why the practice would never even begin to occur to 99.9 percent of the population. You could probably safely even add a few more nines onto that figure and have room to spare. Regardless, there is a devoted community of figgers in the BDSM world, and their experiences are collected at figging.com. One first-time figger describes her inaugural adventure with ginger:

“Anyway, he worked the knob of ginger into my pussy and within a minute I was writhing. It could have been worse…..I mean….he could have poured hot oil on my pussy and then lit it on fire. I managed to keep from screaming by smothering myself with the pillow. … with my pussy on fire and Eddie very obviously enjoying the show, he plugged my butt with another bit of root. Now, just let me say that my pussy apparently had NOT been on fire. Or if it was, it was a mild little smoldering fire. My asshole felt like he’d just shoved a blowtorch up inside me and went to town with it.”

You’re probably thinking how incredibly appealing that all sounds, so thankfully this how-to guide exists to aid you in your first figging experience.

Oddly, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of figging porn out there, but I did manage to find this gallery from a spanking fetish movie’s figging scene. Gooooood times.

Posted in bizarre insertions, severe pain at 9:06 pm