Scat

What is scat?

Scat is the collective name for sexual play with feces; the clinical word is coprophilia, from the Greek kópros for excrement. Looking, touching, smearing, and sometimes swallowing fall under it.

What scat means in practice

More looking and smearing than swallowing, and almost always in a place that can take a mess.

A common picture: two people agree beforehand that nothing comes near the mouth or the eyes, choose a bathroom or a covered bed, and keep it to the visible part. The act itself is quick. The cleaning up and the rinsing off take the most time, and that is exactly the part people underrate when they try it on impulse.

The word covers a wide field. For one person it is purely about looking, for another about being made into a toilet slave, and only a small group seeks out actual swallowing. Those forms differ widely, so “I do scat” says little on its own.

Where the word comes from

From the Greek, by way of the clinic. The encyclopedic description of coprophilia puts it as the paraphilia in which arousal and pleasure are tied to feces, with scatophilia and scat as common other names. The word comes from kópros, excrement, and philia, fondness.

Psychiatrically the placement is cautious. The same source files coprophilia under the residual category for paraphilias that are not named separately. A preference, then, is not a diagnosis. Only when persistent distress or impairment is added does the manuals speak of a disorder.

Why people want scat

For the boundary itself, more than for the material. Toilet training is the first rule a person learns, and there is little that falls so completely outside what is proper as deliberately giving up that rule.

• For the one on the receiving end the payoff is in a surrender that cannot be taken back halfway, and for some that is exactly the point.
• For the one doing it it is in sensing that the surrender is real, without anything painful coming into it.
• For a couple it is above all a test of the conversation beforehand, because nothing can be adjusted along the way.

And then the part that comes with it right away. What is off between two people stays as crooked afterward as before. For most people this is a boundary that stays closed, and there is nothing wrong with that.

How people go about scat

Carefully or not at all, because the margin here is small.

The forms run from light to heavy: only looking, smearing skin that is then washed, the play around the toilet slave, and the rare variant with swallowing. What marks the careful version is the order. First agree which body parts take part and which do not, then choose a place that is cleanable, and only then begin. The careless version skips that conversation and lets the bathroom afterward make the agreement.

What scat is not

“Scat and watersports are the same.” No. Watersports and pee play are about urine, scat about feces.

“If you want this, something is wrong with you.” Also no. For a diagnosis the manuals ask for distress or impairment, not for the preference itself.

What I see myself

I am Victor, a gigolo, twenty-five years into BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. This subject reaches me rarely as a wish and more often as a fear: someone wants to know whether she is strange because it fascinates her. She is not.

What I notice is that the conversation is usually not about the act but about the other person’s gaze.

What you can do yourself

• Keep feces away from the mouth, eyes, and broken skin.
• Work with a cover sheet and gloves, and choose a room you can fully clean afterward.
• Agree on the heaviest variant, the swallowing, separately and do not treat it as a detail of the same plan.
• Be stricter the shorter you have known someone, because trust takes time.
• Arrange the aftercare beforehand: warm water, washing together, and time belong with the appointment, not with the clean-up.

More on scat

Within this glossary, watersports carries the broader field around urine, pee play is the same in Dutch, and hard limit explains why this subject is not negotiable for most people.

Where this fits on this site

Scat is not on my list of possibilities, and I do not quietly add it. What is possible is the conversation: what draws you to this, and whether there is something next to it that does fit. The page about the BDSM date sets out how a talk like that beforehand goes.

Sources

• Coprophilia. Wikipedia. Gives the description of coprophilia as the paraphilia in which arousal and pleasure are tied to feces, with scatophilia and scat as other names, the Greek origin of the word, and the placement under the residual category for paraphilias that are not named separately.

Related terms

• Toilet service. The service around urine and feces that scat is often part of.
• Toilet slave. The role in which someone literally offers themselves as a toilet.
• Watersports. The same kind of play, but with urine.
• Pee play. The Dutch word for the urine field.
• Hard limit. Why scat belongs in that category for most people.
• Degradation. The frame this play is often placed in, though humiliation is not always the motive.