Spitting

What is spitting?

Spitting is spitting on or into someone else’s mouth, with consent, because the gesture humiliates. The Dutch word is spugen, but the scene uses the English one. Spitting belongs to humiliation and not to pain: almost nothing happens physically, the charge sits entirely in what it means.

What spitting looks like in practice

Like one second, usually in the middle of something else.

The usual picture: she is kneeling, he lifts her chin, says nothing, and spits into her mouth. Then the scene simply goes on. The gesture is almost never the subject of the evening, but an accent within something already running.

What makes the gesture sharp is that it takes no strength and needs no tools. No whip, no rope, no preparation. That makes it feel more immediate than things that land far harder: someone who hits you took time for it, someone who spits on you did not. On checklists, spitting therefore almost always gets its own line. People who tick every other form of humiliation sometimes draw the line here, and the other way around.

Where the word spugen comes from

From an imitation of sound, and the gesture is at least six centuries old.

The Etymological Dictionary of Dutch records spuwen with a Middle Dutch source from 1240, then still meaning “to vomit, to spew”. What matters for this page is the source from 1409, where the word first refers to a person: Doe spogen si op hem. Then they spat on him.

The root is probably imitative of sound, with Latin spuere, Greek ptúein, and Sanskrit ṣṭhīvati as relatives. So the word imitates what it describes.

The two Dutch forms are unevenly spread. Spuwen is the form true to the sound laws, spugen came later by analogy and became the ordinary spoken word. In the scene you hear neither: there it is spitting, because the English word does not immediately bring vomiting to mind.

Why people find spitting arousing

Because it is the clearest “I’m allowed to do this to you” there is without anything hurting.

• For the one on the receiving end, the pull is in how irreversible it is. A blow you can take; here there is nothing to take, you can only accept it. For many women that is the most surrender-like gesture they know.
• For the one doing it, it is more uncomfortable than it looks. Almost everyone hesitates the first time, and that hesitation is exactly what the other person wants to see disappear.
• For both, it works because outside the scene it is unmistakably an insult. There is no context in which spitting is kind, and that is the whole charge you borrow.

This goes wrong more often than heavier things, and rarely because of the gesture itself. It happens because it comes unannounced. A blow you see coming, a sentence you hear building; spit is there in one go.

How people do spitting

The spot sets the weight, and most people pick one.

1. In the mouth. The most common, and for most the heaviest: it is about swallowing, not about spitting.
2. On the face. The most clearly visible, and the only one that leaves traces you see afterward.
3. On the body, usually on the chest or the back. The lightest form, often used as an opener.
4. As lubricant, where the gesture disappears into the act. Many people do not count that as spitting.

What nearly everyone who does this often has in common is that the eyes stay out of it. Not because of an exciting taboo, but because spit in an eye costs you the rest of the evening.

What spitting is not

“You can get HIV from it.” No. Fiona Cresswell and colleagues went through 742 abstracts for HIV Medicine and found not a single reported case of HIV transmission through spitting. Their conclusion is literally that there is no risk of HIV transmission through spitting and that the risk from biting is negligible. That study was about the spit hoods of British police, not about BDSM, but the biology is the same.

“So it is completely safe.” Also no, and this is the side that is rarely mentioned. Saliva can pass on gonorrhea. Frances Charleson and colleagues summarized the first systematic review of French kissing in Sexually Transmitted Diseases: all five studies that looked at gonorrhea found a link between kissing and gonorrhea in the throat, and two even found kissing to be an independent risk factor after correcting for other sexual acts. For chlamydia, no such link was found. The six studies were all done in Australia, among men who have sex with men, and that is at once their limitation.

“It belongs with golden shower and scat.” Only in the sense that it involves bodily fluid. Of the three, this is the only one that asks for no preparation and does not interrupt the scene.

What I see in it myself

I’m Victor, a gigolo in Amsterdam, twenty-five years in BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. Spitting is the gesture I get a no on most often, and at the same time the gesture people most often ask for on their own. The same woman, a different evening.

You do not agree on this once and then you know. Someone who wanted it last month may not want it today, and that is not about trust but about how she looks at herself that day.

And one practical thing nobody tells you: when you do it, you look afterward. Do not ask if it was okay, just look. The one who can take it seeks your eyes. The one who cannot looks away, and then that is your answer.

What you agree on before you do it

• Agree beforehand where it lands, because in the mouth and on the body are two different things for most people.
• Keep it away from the eyes and agree that the scene stops if it happens anyway, so it can be rinsed out without fuss.
• Have both of you tested if spitting in the mouth becomes a recurring part, because gonorrhea in the throat is exactly what you pass on this way.
• Skip this on a day when you already feel dirty about yourself; the gesture borrows its charge from an insult, and then it just lands as an insult.
• Bring it into the debrief, and ask about this one gesture separately; otherwise it disappears into “the rest was nice”.

More on spitting

Within this list, humiliation explains how humiliation works, degradation covers the heavier branch, and golden shower describes the same kind of play with a different fluid. On the blog, the power of shame is about what happens when you share something you are ashamed of.

Beyond that, the review by Cresswell and colleagues is free to read: the shortest way to shed the HIV fear.

Where this fits on this site

Spitting is not on my own yes-list in the BDSM profile, but slapping the face and agreed forms of address are. If you want to know how such a list of words and gestures comes about before anything happens, that is on the page about the BDSM date.

Sources

• A systematic review of risk of HIV transmission through biting or spitting: implications for policy. Fiona V. Cresswell, Jayne Ellis, John Hartley, Caroline A. Sabin, Chloe Orkin & Duncan R. Churchill, HIV Medicine 19(8), 532–540, 2018 (DOI 10.1111/hiv.12625, PMID 29687590, PMC6120498, open access). Systematic search in Medline, Embase, and Northern Lights; 742 abstracts assessed, 32 full articles, 13 case reports. Gives that not a single reported case of HIV transmission through spitting exists, that nine cases after a bite have been described of which only four were marked as highly plausible or confirmed, that none of them involved a care worker, and the conclusion that there is no risk of HIV transmission through spitting and that the risk through biting is negligible.
• A Systematic Review of Kissing as a Risk Factor for Oropharyngeal Gonorrhea or Chlamydia. Frances Charleson, Julien Tran, Antonia Kolobaric, Richard Case, Christopher K. Fairley, Jane S. Hocking & Eric P. F. Chow, Sexually Transmitted Diseases 50(7), 395–401, 2023 (PMID 36735907, PMC10259206, open access). Of 8,248 screened studies, six remained. Gives that all five studies that looked at gonorrhea found an uncorrected link between French kissing and gonorrhea in the throat, that two cross-sectional studies named French kissing an independent risk factor even after correcting for other sexual acts, that the one suitable cohort study found no link with chlamydia, and the limitation the authors name themselves: all six studies were carried out in Australia among men who have sex with men. Used on this page for what saliva can pass on, not for a statement about spitting itself.
• spuwen. Collected entry of the Etymologiebank of the Institute for the Dutch Language, with M. Philippa, F. Debrabandere, A. Quak, T. Schoonheim and N. van der Sijs, Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands, Amsterdam 2003-2009. Gives the Middle Dutch source spuwen, spuen “to vomit, to spew” from 1240, the source Doe spogen si op hem from 1409 in which the word refers to a person, the probably sound-imitative Indo-European root with Latin spuere, Greek ptúein, and Sanskrit ṣṭhīvati as relatives, and the rise of the form spugen alongside spuwen by analogy, with spugen becoming the ordinary word in speech.

Related terms

• Humiliation. The umbrella that spitting is one of the shortest forms of.
• Degradation. The heavier branch, where spitting often turns up.
• Golden shower. The same kind of play with a different bodily fluid and much more preparation.
• Objectification. The form of humiliation that accompanies spitting most often.
• Kinklist. The list where spitting almost always gets its own line.
• Debrief. The talk afterward, where this gesture has to be named separately.