There’s very little documented history of the figging fetish; most of what’s available amounts to speculation, legends, and oft-repeated notions from a few of the figging files that circulated on the early internet. But lately out on the internets there’s been a trending new notion that’s being repeated as fact wherever somebody casually tries to explain what figging is all about. The notion is that figging is specifically something that was done to Victorian wives (as opposed, I suppose, to anybody not wifely who might be getting a punishment or a kinky fucking).
We know this notion is new(ish) to the internet because back when Figging.com was new, I Googled “all the things” that had figging as a keyword, and looked at them all. (It was a pretty short list, and they’re pretty much all mentioned, summarized, or reproduced in the first dozen posts here on Figging.com.) Horses, yes; wives (specifically), no.
So after encountering this “figging for Victorian wives” notion several times in recent months, I did some looking, and sure enough, found what I think is the source. It’s a place Figging.com has been before, but I didn’t pay the “color commentary” enough attention at the time, I guess. There’s a paragraph here that’s the source of this meme, I believe:
There is some mention of the act of figging in Victorian literature. It could have started with the punishment of school children, but it’s well known, and widely accepted in scholarly circles, that Victorians were quite kinky in their bedroom play and many men of the era enjoyed spanking games with their wives. Since we have evidence that they used methods such as bare hands, caning, and riding crops, it’s likely that someone was watching horses and decided to plug his wife with a bit of ginger while applying a crop to her backside and riding her round the room.
It’s a nifty notion, possibly even a true notion, but it’s utterly unsupported by citation or evidence. In short, it’s just speculation.
There is a well-documented strain of Victorian sexual behavior that places kinky behavior in houses of prostitution, some of which were highly specialized in the satisfaction of peculiar fetishes. My own speculation would put figging as a practice more likely to have occurred in those settings, which were already socially-optimized for transgressive sexual practices.
So, the next time you see it repeated as fact that figging is something Victorian men did to or with their wives, specifically? Now you know where it came from.
