Golden shower

What is a golden shower?

A golden shower is urinating on someone for sexual pleasure, with everyone involved consenting to it. The term comes from English scene slang and passed into Dutch untranslated. A golden shower is one act within urolagnia, the umbrella word for arousal that has to do with urine or urinating.

What a golden shower looks like in practice

Usually in the bathroom, and shorter than you would expect. A common sequence: the couple agrees beforehand who urinates and what may and may not get touched, the person receiving it sits or stands in the shower stall, and it lasts less than a minute. Then the shower goes on.

What people underestimate is the temperature. Urine leaves the body at body temperature and feels warm on the skin, not wet like tap water. For some that is the whole point, for others the reason not to do it again.

Where the word comes from

From slang, not from science. The encyclopedic description of urolagnia lines the words up: urolagnia, also urophilia or undinism, is the arousal that goes with urine or urinating; golden shower is the everyday word for urinating on someone for sexual pleasure; watersports is the wider word that also takes in other acts with urine.

Urolagnia comes from the Greek: ouron for urine, lagneia for lust. In the 1970s leather scene the preference even had a color: yellow, in the handkerchief code people used to show what they were after without saying a word.

Psychiatrically, the placement is more cautious than the slang suggests. The same source reports that the DSM-5 files urolagnia under the residual category other specified paraphilic disorder, and that a diagnosis only follows after six months of ongoing distress or impairment. So enjoying it is not a disorder.

Why people want a golden shower

For the surrender, and because it is not tidy. The appeal rarely sits in the fluid and almost always in what the act says: someone allows something that is allowed nowhere else.

• For the person receiving it the gain lies in letting go of their own rules about clean and dirty. It is a boundary only you can give up, one no one can move for you.
• For the person doing it it sits in noticing that the surrender is real, without anything that hurts being needed for it.
• For a couple it is often mostly a test of how well they talk. This act cannot be adjusted halfway through, so everything hangs on the conversation beforehand.

It is not rare. In the study by Jennifer Eve Rehor of 1,580 women from the kink community, 45.7% took part in urine play in some form and 36.5% did or received it themselves, against 95.7% for spanking. Middle of the pack, then, not the margin.

What it does not do: a golden shower does not replace a conversation that was never held. Anyone hoping that one shocking act will loosen something that has been stuck for months is in for a disappointment.

How people go about it

Almost always with the logistics first: the spot is chosen in advance, because a bathroom solves the cleanup problem and a bedroom does not.

After that the forms differ:

1. On the body, in the shower. The most common form, and the one where the least goes wrong.
2. Watching only. No touch, but the whole act. In Rehor, 26.1% said they had only watched urine play, so this is a form of its own and not half a turn.
3. On the clothes or on a spot that marks something. Here the accent sits on ownership rather than humiliation, though the two run into each other.
4. On the face or in the mouth. The variant with the most conditions, and the only one where hygiene really comes into play.

What separates the careful version from the careless one is not intensity but order: first agree where the body may be touched, then everything else.

What a golden shower is not

“Urine is sterile.” It is not. Hilt and colleagues showed in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology that 52 of 65 urine samples (80%) grew bacteria once an enhanced culture method was used, while 48 of those 52 had been reported as “no growth” by the standard lab protocol. They found 35 genera and 85 species, with Lactobacillus (15%) and Corynebacterium (14.2%) at the top. So a healthy person’s urine is not dirty, but it is inhabited.

“It is humiliation by definition.” No. Humiliation is one frame alongside marking, surrender and plain arousal. The encyclopedic description names only the act and the sexual pleasure, with no motive attached.

“If you want this, something is wrong.” Also no. For a diagnosis the DSM-5 asks for ongoing distress or impairment, not for the preference itself. A golden shower between consenting adults is not a clinical fact but a choice.

“You can catch all sorts of things from it.” More nuanced. The World Health Organization describes how Schistosoma eggs leave the body through feces or urine, but also that infection runs through fresh water and snails, not skin to skin. Direct contact with urine is not that route.

What I see of it myself

I’m Victor, a gigolo, active in BDSM for over twenty-five years and trained as a psychotherapist. Of everything in this glossary, this topic comes up sideways most often, wrapped as a joke or as something “someone else” would want.

It is rarely about the act. It is about the reaction. People are more afraid of their partner’s face than of the urine, and that is exactly why a golden shower is bad to do on impulse and good to talk through in advance.

What you can do yourself

• Pick the spot first. A shower stall or bath takes the biggest objection away before the conversation about preferences even starts.
• Agree whether the face and mouth are in it, and treat that as a separate question, not a detail of the same plan.
• Drink plenty of water beforehand. Diluted urine smells and colors less strongly, which makes it more approachable for most people.
• Keep it away from eyes and open cuts, and rinse with water straight away if something does get into an eye.
• Do not drink it. Hilt and colleagues showed that urine holds living bacterial communities, and drinking is the step where that starts to count.
• Agree on a safeword and shower together afterward, because that last part belongs to the agreement and not to the cleanup.

More about a golden shower

On this site, the article on forms of humiliation that women find arousing sets out the frame a golden shower most often lands in.

Off this site, Rehor puts urine play next to more than 125 other acts with a number attached, and Hilt and colleagues is the source the “urine is sterile” story runs aground on.

Where this fits on this site

A golden shower is not listed by name on my profile, and I do not quietly write it in there. What is written is that almost everything is open to discussion and that I have few no-gos. If you want to know whether this falls under that, ask beforehand; the page on the BDSM date sets out how we agree on that.

Sources

• Sensual, Erotic, and Sexual Behaviors of Women from the “Kink” Community. Jennifer Eve Rehor, Archives of Sexual Behavior 44(4), 825–836, 2015. Provides the figures on urine play among 1,580 women from the kink community: 19.8% did it to another, 27.2% received it, 36.5% one or the other or both, 26.1% only watched it and 45.7% took part in some form, against 95.7% for spanking. Also provides the point that earlier research into this kind of behavior came almost entirely from clinical and criminal records.
• Urine Is Not Sterile: Use of Enhanced Urine Culture Techniques To Detect Resident Bacterial Flora in the Adult Female Bladder. Hilt, McKinley, Pearce et al., Journal of Clinical Microbiology 52(3), 871–876, 2014. Provides that 52 of 65 urine samples (80%) grew bacteria with an enhanced culture method while 48 of them had been reported as “no growth” by the standard protocol, and that 35 genera and 85 species were found with Lactobacillus (15%) and Corynebacterium (14.2%) the most common.
• Schistosomiasis. World Health Organization, fact sheet. Provides that Schistosoma eggs leave the body through feces or urine, and that infection runs by those eggs ending up in fresh water where freshwater snails release larvae that penetrate the skin.
• Urolagnia. Wikipedia. Provides the description of urolagnia as arousal linked to urine or urinating, the synonyms urophilia and undinism, the boundary of golden shower as urinating on someone for sexual pleasure against watersports as the wider term, the Greek origin of the word, the yellow handkerchief in the handkerchief code, and the placement of urolagnia in the DSM-5 under other specified paraphilic disorder with the requirement of six months plus distress or impairment.

Related terms

• Consent. The agreement that has to be in place before a golden shower, because nothing can be steered along the way.
• Fetish. The broader category urolagnia is usually filed under.
• Degradation. The frame many people place a golden shower in, while it is far from always the motive.
• Exhibitionism. Another preference where the watching itself is the point, just as in the watching variant above.
• Plasseks. The Dutch umbrella word for this whole area, with the RIVM guidelines on what does and does not pass on through urine.
• Spitting. The same kind of play with saliva, and the only form that asks for no preparation.
• Watersports. The wider slang word, with what happens when people name only that word.