Girl on the Net

One of my favourite kinds of guest blog is when somebody drops by to educate me about a type of sex that I know almost nothing about. So today’s gorgeous intro to ecosexuality, by Aaron El Sabrout (@toreachpoise on Insta and @sayyid_qishta on Mastodon), is exactly my cup of dandelion tea. Aaron is a writer, illustrator and ecosexual who is here to talk about being into fucking plants. Huge thanks to him for this beautiful overview of what ecosexuality is, the appeal of getting sexual with nature, and his thoughts on consent when it comes to plant-fucking.

Note that this piece contains depictions of literal plant-fucking, and I am not an expert in what is safe here. This is Aaron’s story, it is not advice and shouldn’t be treated as such. Plus, note that Aaron is a trans guy who is pretty comfortable with his genitals and will be using the terminology he normally uses to refer to his parts. You should not assume that all people with similar parts use the same terminology for them!

A field guide to ecosexuality: what fucking plants means to me

“Dude … I think I’m into, like, actually fucking plants.”
“Yeah, bro, we all knew that. We’ve seen it from miles away.”

It’s kind of weird how the things that come as a shock to you about yourself are always so obvious to other people. You think you’re self aware and all that and you don’t even realize. Like how the first published poem I ever wrote included a description of a flower as a “plant dick,” how into tentacles and other weird non-anatomical penetration I’ve always been, not to mention the fact that I’m an avid forager and continually in training as a herbalist.

But like… you can’t fuck plants, right? That seems unhygienic, maybe even toxic.

Look, I’m no scientist or expert, but what I am is a guy who has been eating plants from the wild and putting strange things up his cunt for years. As far as safety goes, I figure anything that you can eat and rub on your skin is probably safe to put inside yourself temporarily. However this means I only use plants I can identify and know are safe to eat, being mindful – of course – of potential irritants. After all, you can definitely eat chilis but they cause a burning sensation in the mouth and nose, even more if you get them in your eyes, so I don’t really want to find out how irritating they would be to the pussy!

What’s so appealing about plant-fucking?

If you’re an average person unfamiliar with ecosexuality, probably a larger question in your mind at this point is “why would anyone want to do this?” The notion of fucking plants probably conjures images of desperate housewives sticking cucumbers up themselves because they were too embarrassed to buy sex toys. For me, my sexual feelings toward plants have grown organically (heh) from my overall fascination toward them. As I have spent time in nature, getting to know the land and all its different plants, learning which of them are food, what medicines they contain and ecosystem services they provide, as I’ve brought these plants into my home, processed and dried them for hours, and put them in my body in the form of food and tea… well, I started to wonder what it would be like to put them in my body in other ways. To rub my dick against a posy of soft goldenrod flowers, their sweet and bitter tannic smell filling the room.

So that’s how I ended up sending my friend a photo of me with a red clover blossom up my pussy. I walked out into the field in the morning with my dog, the last night’s rain still dewy on all the flowers, bees lazily buzzing among them. As the pooch frolicked, I walked through the clusters of pink flowers that were almost waist high, waiving in the breeze. I made an offering and I asked for permission. I harvested a number of flowering tops to steam for dinner that night, and I picked one stem extra long to take home with me. I walked home with my harvest in a dog poo bag – a forager’s favorite due to the fact that dog owners always carry them, and nosy assholes don’t bother you about taking something away from the park if they think it’s dog shit! I was shaking with anticipation. I didn’t understand why it turned me on so much, but I think I get it now. The idea of communing with something larger than yourself is so powerful, feeling like you belong to nature and nature belongs to you, you’re a part of it. We already incorporate plants into our bodies throughout our lives, as food and medicine, and doing so sexually ritualizes that in a particularly intimate way. Within many traditional cultural worldviews, we are in relationship with the land around us. Why wouldn’t that relationship sometimes also be sexual?

Consent and ecosexuality

Indigenous scholar Dr. Kim Tallbear has pointed out that consent applies somewhat differently when it comes to our more-than-human relatives. Settler society cares nothing for the consent of plants when it is constantly clearcutting forests and turning over wildflower fields to build apartment buildings and highways. We already lack basic respect for the ecologies around us in most settings. It’s actually by building relationships with the land that we understand what it needs to do best and thrive. After all, we have to eat other beings to survive, and traditional societies developed sophisticated protocols for maintaining their environments -such as the honorable harvest (discussed in Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimerer) – that maintain a good and sustainable relationship with the land and other creatures around them. A hunter can’t exactly ask for a deer’s permission to kill them, but they can gain a kind of species-level permission by observing things like how many deer there are and what time of year it is relative to the dear’s life cycle, as well as expressing gratitude for the harvest and only taking as much as they will use. Similarly, when we harvest plants, if we observe their life cycle, the other species that rely on them, and how much there is – if we “ask permission” and leave enough for others – then we can receive consent. And to be clear, this is not to excuse or condone acts like bestiality – plants don’t have feelings the way that animals do, they’re not harmed by the acts that you’re doing. Animals can communicate directly with us in ways that plants can’t. And even ones that don’t, like. Just no. It’s just plain wrong.

In contrast, when I slid the slightly fuzzy stem of clover into my pussy, it felt really… right. I was shocked to discover how slick I was, my juices running down the stem toward the sticking out flower. I snapped a few pictures, marvelling at the visual of the flower growing out of me, becoming my cock. This is an image I’ve been obsessed with for years, the subject of a short story I wrote many years ago in which a guy gets fucked by a mysterious swamp plant and grows a dick that he can then pass on to others (I’m adapting this story for my upcoming game – Sporulation! – keep an eye on my site here for release in August 2024). Even though I’m pretty happy with my body nowadays, I haven’t always been, and the topic of body modification and autonomy is very close to my heart (and dick!) as a trans person. It’s just thrilling, to see your body change, to take different forms, and seeing a little flower growing out of me felt just like that. Like I was becoming something more, in relationship with the land around me.

As I wiggled the stem around inside myself, it was scratchy but gentle, the little leaves tickling against my insides. I felt present with the feeling all the way inside me, the whole time, in a way I don’t necessarily always feel during sex or masturbation. I often have to focus on fantasies to get off, especially alone, but this wasn’t like jerking off, it was being with another being, Red Clover, a being I had known and loved for a long time.

I took some pictures, played with the clover until I had cum, and then kept the blossom in a little vase for a few days until it wilted. When it was dried I returned it to the field it came from. The field had been mown (without asking consent from me, the clover, or the bees) during the time I had the flower with me, but a few clovers had poked back up and begun to bloom. They were mostly the more tenacious white kind, but the red clovers were there too.

I left the flower among its relatives: an offering and a hope for future relationship.