Watersports

What is watersports?

Watersports is the umbrella jargon word for anything sexual that involves urine. It covers giving, receiving, watching and holding, which reaches further than a golden shower, a word that names just one act. You mostly meet it where people tick their preferences: on profiles, in club rules, and in researchers’ questionnaires.

What watersports means on a profile

A box you tick without having to write the sentence.

That is not meant figuratively. Chris Haywood gathered for International Journal of the Sociology of Leisure the data of 41 British sex clubs and 6,837 profiles of people who had been there and left a review about it. On that site watersports simply sits in the list of preferences, between blindfolds, spanking and toys. Fifteen percent of those 6,837 profiles had ticked the box.

The breakdown within it is the interesting part. Among single men it stands at 26 percent, among single women at 13 percent and among couples at 9 percent. Haywood notes that couples distance themselves from the preferences that count as hardcore, and names anal, fisting, gangbangs and watersports in one breath. For comparison: safe sex stood at 90 percent in the same list and spanking at 52.

So the word is not a description but a label, and a label you tick without explaining yourself. That is why this is the form in which the preference usually gets named first.

Why it is called watersports of all things

Because a euphemism has to be sayable with other people around.

Watersports does not name the fluid, does not name the act and sounds like something you do on holiday. That is the same trick Havelock Ellis pulled with undinism, only without the classical overtone: where he pointed to a water spirit, this word points to a surfboard. A word that can drop in a public space without anyone looking up is more usable than a word that is precise.

The double meaning is right there in English, since watersports already means sailing, surfing and diving. So the word does two jobs at once. It names the preference for those in the know, and it stays a holiday activity to everyone else.

Why people use this word

Because it lowers the bar to naming the subject at all.

• For you the gain is that you can tick it or drop it without having to explain yourself, and only afterward say which form you mean.
• For the other person it is useful because it covers a whole field and so rules out nothing that later turns out to fit.
• For the two of you it is an opening move and no more than that; the conversation that follows is about the form.

Exactly that vagueness makes the word unreliable. Two people who have both ticked watersports can mean four different things, and you find that out at the worst moment. The word opens a conversation, it does not replace one.

How the word is used outside profiles

As soon as someone has to measure something with it, it gets narrowed down.

Christine Khosropour, David Coomes and Lindley Barbee studied in Archives of Sexual Behavior which acts 210 participants had done at their last sexual contact and in what order. For each act they wrote a plain-language explanation, which they tested in interviews beforehand to be sure it was understood. For watersports it reads: “This is when someone urinates (pees) in your butt.”

That is one act, and it is not even the best-known one. So the researchers did not adopt the word but nailed it shut, because a questionnaire cannot use an umbrella. One participant of the 210 ticked it. So check at every use whether a definition comes with it, because it differs from place to place.

What watersports is not

“Watersports and golden shower are the same.” No. A golden shower is one act; watersports is the field around it, watching and holding included.

“It’s just the word for the aquatic sport.” It looks that way and it is not. As a holiday activity watersports means sailing, surfing and diving; the sexual sense borrows the same word for something else entirely.

“Everyone means the same thing by it.” Demonstrably not. A research team that had to measure it rewrote it to one act in the rectum, and that is narrower than what the scene understands by it.

“It is humiliation by definition.” That is one of the frames, not the meaning. Marking, surrender and plain arousal fall under it just as well; humiliation describes what happens when someone chooses that frame on purpose.

What I make of it

I’m Victor, a gigolo, twenty-five years into BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. This word I come across more often than I hear it. It sits on lists and in messages, and it is almost never said out loud.

Women who tick it almost always mean the watching version; men who read it almost always assume it is about the act. That difference sits exactly in the room the word leaves open, and it is the reason I always ask further before anything is agreed.

What you can do

• Add one sentence when you tick it somewhere, because watersports on its own leaves four forms open and the other person fills in the wrong one.
• Ask further the moment someone uses the word, and ask about the form, not about the experience.
• With a club or party rulebook, read how they define the word, because that definition decides what is allowed, not what you understand by it.
• Look up the health question on the page that carries it, golden shower for the hygiene side, before you agree to anything.

More about watersports

On this site, golden shower describes the single act that gets searched for most. Beyond that, Chris Haywood’s article on British sex clubs is free to read and the only study that shows how preferences like this get ticked on profiles.

Where this fits on this site

Watersports is not on my list of what is possible. What is possible is the conversation about it: what exactly you mean by it, and whether there is something next to it that does work. How that preliminary conversation goes is on the page about the BDSM date.

Sources

• Sex Clubs in the UK. Recreational Sex, Erotic Diversity and Geographies of Desire. Chris Haywood, International Journal of the Sociology of Leisure 5(3), 297-320, 2022 (DOI 10.1007/s41978-022-00108-8; author, volume, issue and pagination checked against Crossref, full text read via PMC9178535). Gives the design with 41 British sex clubs in operation between 2018 and 2019 and a hand-collected sample of 6,837 public profiles of people who had left a club review. From that, it gives the table of preferences in which watersports appears as a tickable category alongside blindfolds, spanking, toys and safe sex, with 15 percent overall, 26 percent among men, 13 percent among women and 9 percent among couples, and the author’s finding that couples distance themselves from the practices that count as hardcore: anal, fisting, gangbangs and watersports.
• Frequency and Combination of Sequential Sexual Acts That May Lead to Sexually Transmitted Infections at Different Anatomic Sites Within the Same Person. Khosropour, Coomes & Barbee, Archives of Sexual Behavior 52(2), 823-831, 2023 (PMID 36459349, DOI 10.1007/s10508-022-02486-2; author names, volume, issue and pagination checked against Crossref, full text read via PMC9717570). Gives the questionnaire design with 210 participants recruited in Seattle between December 2019 and September 2021, the note that the descriptions were tested for comprehension in interviews beforehand, the literal description the researchers gave participants for watersports (“This is when someone urinates (pees) in your butt”), and the outcome that one of the 210 participants ticked that act at their last sexual contact.

Related terms

Watersports is a label, and what sits around it either narrows it down or widens it out.

• Golden shower. The single act this word is often wrongly equated with.
• Humiliation. One of the frames a urine scene can sit in, not the meaning of the word.
• Fetish. The broader box preferences like this land in, in the professional literature.