Facesitting

What is facesitting?

Facesitting (Dutch: identical, also queening or kinging) is a position where one partner sits over the other’s face. It serves two purposes that exist independently of each other: oral pleasure, and limiting breathing by covering the mouth and nose. Whoever sits can face in either direction.

What facesitting is in practice

Two very different scenes under one word, and the difference lies in whether the nose stays free.

In the first form it is about oral pleasure where the position does the work. The encyclopedia describes how a squatting or seated posture lets the pelvic floor muscles relax, which exposes the labia minora and makes the vagina and anus easier to reach. For that purpose there is dedicated equipment: a queening stool is a low seat with an opening in it, which fits over the face of the person underneath.

In the second form covering is precisely the intent. That same article mentions the smotherbox, a variant of the queening stool in which the head is locked in place with the neck in an opening, as in a pillory, and often padded on the inside. What draws people to it, according to the encyclopedia, is the combination of weight, smell, warmth and dark, plus no longer being able to get away.

A typical course of that second form: whoever sits starts with the weight on the knees and not on the face, keeps the nose free, and only continues after an agreed signal. The duration is agreed beforehand in seconds and not judged by feel, precisely because the person underneath cannot say anything about it.

Why facesitting has a risk profile of its own

Because it is a different form of breath restriction than choking. Sauvageau and Boghossian, in Journal of Forensic Sciences, ordered the forms of asphyxia into four categories: suffocation, strangulation, mechanical asphyxia and drowning. Smothering, covering the mouth and nose, falls under suffocation. Neck compression falls under strangulation. So those are two different things, and the warnings at breath play about the blood vessels in the neck do not apply here.

There is a second mechanism that people overlook with facesitting: weight. The same classification places positional and traumatic asphyxia under mechanical asphyxia, where it is not the airway but the movement of the torso that is the problem. Campbell and colleagues, in Scientific Reports, laid seventeen healthy men after exertion on their stomachs for five minutes with 35 percent of their body weight in sandbags on their backs. Their functional residual capacity, the air that stays in the lungs after a normal exhale, dropped by 13 to 14 percent.

That study is about police force and not about sex: the participants lay on their stomachs, with the weight on the shoulder blades. What it does show is that a portion of one person’s body weight is enough to cost measurable lung reserve, and that the airway does not have to be closed for that.

Why people do facesitting

For a position where the role division sits in the body instead of in an agreement.

For the partner on top, the appeal is in the reversal. Whoever is normally the one doing something lies here waiting still, and whoever normally waits now sets the angle, the pressure and the duration. For the partner underneath the draw is more the loss of overview: no sight, muffled sound, and one sense that takes over everything.

What it can give each person involved:

• For whoever sits the need to perform disappears. Facesitting is one of the few positions where receiving is literally the only thing asked of you.
• For whoever is underneath the gain is that a role that otherwise has to be set out in words fits by itself here. There is nothing to convince anyone of.
• For a couple together facesitting imposes a conversation about duration and signals, and that is a more concrete conversation than talking about power in general.

None of these gains has been measured, they come from what people say about it. And the form with breath restriction belongs in the category where the risk stays no matter how carefully you work.

Misconceptions about facesitting

“If the nose is free, nothing can happen.” The airway is not the only thing. Weight on the torso limits lung volume even with an open airway; that is the mechanism that falls under mechanical asphyxia in Sauvageau and Boghossian’s classification.

“A safeword covers this.” Not in this position. Whoever has a mouth covered cannot say a word. Facesitting therefore calls for a signal that does not depend on speech: squeezing a leg, tapping, or holding something in the hand that drops the moment the hand goes slack.

“It is the same as chokeplay.” Different category. Smothering belongs with suffocation, choking with strangulation, and in the forensic classification those are two separate mechanisms with different risks.

“Facesitting is illegal.” Not in the Netherlands. The confusion comes from the United Kingdom, where the Audiovisual Media Services Regulations of 2014 banned depicting, among other things, facesitting in online porn. That affected the production of videos and not what people do in private, and in 2019 that rule was reversed.

What I see of it myself

I am Victor, a gigolo, twenty-five years in BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. Facesitting almost always comes up with me in the first form, so as a position for oral pleasure within an intimate togetherness, and rarely to limit breathing.

The hesitation stands out, and it is never about safety. Women are afraid of being too heavy. That is the question I get most often and rarely out loud: can you actually hold this. Once that is said out loud once, the whole position changes in character.

The second thing: it goes wrong more often with the duration than with the pressure. Whoever sits on top has no view of the face underneath and overestimates how much time has passed. So I would rather agree on a number of seconds than a feeling.

What you can do yourself

• Agree on a signal that does not depend on speech before you start, for example squeezing a leg twice, because a safeword does not work when the mouth is covered.
• Start with the weight on your knees and only shift it once the other person signals for it.
• Keep the nose free as long as breath restriction is not explicitly the intent.
• Agree on the duration in seconds and have someone count along, because whoever sits on top cannot see the face underneath.
• Do not do this with someone who is alone with you and has no one else if consciousness is lost, and stop at doubt rather than at certainty.
• Say it out loud if you are wondering whether you are too heavy, because that is the question that otherwise keeps shaping the whole scene.

Reading more about facesitting

On this site the risks of breath restriction are laid out in detail at breath play, the category this play falls into is at edgeplay, and the blog category on the dangers of BDSM covers it in plain language.

Off this site, the review article by Sauvageau and Boghossian is the best starting point for understanding why smothering and choking should not be used interchangeably. Whoever wants to know what weight on the torso does can read the article by Campbell and colleagues freely.

Sources

• Classification of asphyxia: the need for standardization. Sauvageau & Boghossian, Journal of Forensic Sciences 55(5), 1259–1267, 2010. Provides the classification of asphyxia into suffocation, strangulation, mechanical asphyxia and drowning, the subdivision of suffocation into smothering, choking and confined spaces, and the fact that mechanical asphyxia covers both positional and traumatic asphyxia.
• Thoracic weighting of restrained subjects during exhaustion recovery causes loss of lung reserve volume in a model of police arrest. Campbell, Dakin, Stowe, Burton, Raven, Mapani, Dawson & Adler, Scientific Reports 11, 15166, 2021. Provides that in seventeen healthy men, after exertion five minutes on their stomachs with 35 percent of their body weight in sandbags on their backs, the functional residual capacity dropped by 13 to 14 percent. The study concerns police arrests and not sexual positions.
• Facesitting. Wikipedia. Provides the description as a position where one partner sits over the other’s face with the possibility of oral-genital or oral-anal contact, the synonyms queening and kinging, that the sitting party can look in either direction, the queening stool with an opening and the smotherbox in which the neck is locked in place, the relaxation of the pelvic floor muscles in that posture, the noted appeal of weight, smell, moisture and dark, and that the British Audiovisual Media Services Regulations of 2014 banned depicting facesitting in online porn and were reversed in 2019. The section about the components has carried, since August 2024, its own notice that more sources are needed.

Related terms

• Breath play. The overarching practice of breath restriction, with the risks and the rules of thumb.
• Edgeplay. The category where a risk stays no matter how carefully you work.
• Breath control. The English scene name for breath restriction, and why that word misleads.
• Deprivation. The removal of sight and sound, which happens by itself with facesitting.
• Service-oriented submission. The angle in which the role underneath in facesitting is usually placed.
• Forniphilia. The form in which the body becomes furniture, with time instead of weight as the risk.
• Furniture. The Dutch word meubelstuk for that, with the knee as the spot where it goes wrong.
• Queening. The variant in which covering the mouth and nose is the intent, with the origin of the word and the furniture.
• Trampling. Weight on a body via the foot instead of via the seat, with the same question about breathing.
• Smothering. The act itself, with the medical literature on why you cannot see anything afterward. The smotherbox gets no entry of its own: it is not a separate term but the queening stool above, with a closure around the neck added.
• Oral sex. The category facesitting falls under, with the Dutch figures.