His face hovered above mine, just inches away. I returned his eye contact—sustained, deliberate, almost too much—with a vulnerability betrayed by the wrinkle on my forehead. My mouth opened slightly, unsure why, or whether I meant to at all. A pause. Then: zchhhh-gtuuuu. Soft, sudden, warm, wet.
He spat in my mouth.
Color me vanilla, but in the decade I’ve been sexually active—and I have been quite active—this was new territory. Not shocking, exactly. Not unwelcome, either. Just… unfamiliar. And, I think, I liked it.
What surprised me most wasn’t the act itself, but its recurrence. It happened again, not long after the first time, with someone else. And then again. Three separate encounters, unprompted, unrequested—as if I’d stumbled into a new sexual vernacular I hadn’t yet learned to speak. Which raises the question: is this actually new, or am I simply late to the party?
The semantics of saliva
Spitting, outside of sex, is rarely neutral. It carries cultural weight: disrespect, dismissal, even aggression. To spit at someone is to degrade them. To spit near someone is to offend. So what happens when that same gesture is relocated into a sexual context—and not just accepted, but invited?
Part of the answer lies in taboo. Sex has always had a complicated relationship with what we’re “not supposed” to do. Desire, as many sex therapists will tell you, thrives on tension. Dr Jack Morin founded an equation for this: attraction plus obstacle equals excitement. When something feels transgressive—crossing a social boundary, violating a norm—it can heighten arousal simply by virtue of that crossing.
Spitting is legible in this way. It’s immediate, visceral, unmistakable. It reads as raw, animalistic, almost primitive. In an era where so much of sex is mediated, filtered, or aestheticised, there’s something about it that feels stripped back—unvarnished. But meaning, here, is slippery. Slobbery. Because spitting during sex doesn’t mean just one thing.
For some, it can be understood within the framework of dominance and submission. Spitting can signal control, hierarchy, even humiliation—particularly in BDSM contexts where power dynamics are consciously explored. But as sex and intimacy coach, Oli Lipski, explains to me, even within that framework, the intention can vary wildly. “Spitting in your mouth could be about [consensual] humiliation,” she says, “or it could be about care—about giving something, and the other person receiving.” The same gesture, two entirely different emotional registers.
For others, it’s less about power and more about proximity. Saliva, after all, is already central to sex: we kiss, we share breath, we exchange bodily fluids without thinking twice. In this framing, spitting becomes an extension of that—an intensification. A merging. “There’s something very animalistic about it,” Lipski adds. “When you kiss someone, your body is actually exchanging data—testing for compatibility through taste and smell. Spitting amplifies that.”
This might explain why, in my own experience, it didn’t feel degrading. If anything, it felt… intimate. Not in a soft, romantic sense, but in a heightened, almost clandestine way—like we were briefly operating in our own language.
Why here? Why now?
It’s difficult to talk about the rise of spitting without talking about porn. Over the past 15–20 years, behaviors once confined to niche BDSM spaces have become increasingly visible in mainstream pornography. Choking, slapping, spitting—these are no longer outliers, but often presented as standard components of sex. According to Pornhub’s annual insights report from 2023, searches related to “rough sex” and dominance dynamics have consistently ranked among the most popular categories globally, particularly among younger users.
Spitting itself is harder to quantify—there’s no long-term dataset tracking it specifically—but its presence within broader “rough” or “domination” categories is undeniable. The effect of this visibility is complex. On the one hand, it normalizes the practice. Acts that might once have seemed extreme or inaccessible become familiar, even expected. On the other, it risks flattening meaning—turning something potentially nuanced into something performative.
“Porn is for entertainment,” Lipski pointed out. “It’s visual. It’s about what looks pleasurable, not necessarily what feels [pleasurable].” Spitting, in this sense, is highly “readable” on camera. It communicates immediacy, intensity, transgression—all things that translate well visually. But when that visual language migrates into real-life encounters, it doesn’t always come with the same context or communication. Which might explain why, in my case, it happened without discussion.
This lack of explicit communication is, perhaps, where things get complicated. Sex should be a conversation—not always verbal, but communicative and consenting nonetheless. Bodies respond, adjust, signal, and exchange cues. But when new behaviors enter that conversation—particularly ones loaded with cultural meaning—the question becomes: how do we negotiate them?
Interestingly, my own reaction wasn’t one of shock or discomfort, but rather of curiosity. A kind of internal pause—what is this?—followed, almost immediately, by: Do I like it? Yes. Why do I like it?
Part of it, I suspect, was novelty. Newness has its own erotic charge. But there was something else, too—a sense of surrender, perhaps. Not submission in a reductive sense, but a willingness to be present, as connected as possible, to receive in that moment, rather than try to control it.
“There’s a misconception that being the ‘submissive’ partner is easier,” Lipski told me. “But it actually requires a lot of trust—and a kind of skill, in being able to let go.” That resonated. Because what I felt wasn’t humiliation. It wasn’t even particularly about dominance. It was more like… permission. To step outside of my usual framework, however briefly. And yet, that experience won’t translate universally. For someone else, the same act might feel uncomfortable, even offensive—particularly if it leans more toward disrespect than intimacy. Context, as ever, is everything.
Spitting on the face, for instance, feels categorically different to me than spitting in the mouth. One reads as disregard; the other, strangely, as closeness. For someone else, it might be the opposite. Or there might be no difference. We each have our own “pleasure palette.”
So, does this mean that sex is becoming more experimental? Or are we simply more willing to talk about it? Probably both.
The mainstreamification of BDSM—often traced back to cultural moments like Fifty Shades of Grey—has undoubtedly expanded the boundaries of what’s considered “normal.” At the same time, social media, despite its censorship of explicit sexual content, has made conversations around desire, kink, and consent more possible and widespread in ways that were previously inaccessible.
There’s also a broader cultural context to consider. We’re living in an era of constant stimulation—visually, digitally, erotically. What once felt exceptional becomes ordinary, quickly. The “shock cycle” shortens. Intensity escalates.
Even the pandemic may have played a role. At a time when physical contact in general became taboo, behaviors involving bodily fluids—kissing, sharing saliva—specifically took on a heightened transgressive quality. Though the risk of transmission is not central to the act today, recent memory may still inform our perception of it.
The language of connection
But beyond recent history and trends, there’s a more personal question: how do you navigate something like this, especially for the first time? The answer is communication. Not necessarily a formal negotiation, but an awareness—of yourself, of your partner, of what feels good and what doesn’t—and a dialogue, whether internal or with people you’re intimate with. Before anything, consider: what do you actually want? Something soft, something rough, something exploratory? Desire isn’t static; it shifts with mood, context, even time of the month for people who have a menstrual cycle. During the act: are you able to respond, adjust, pause? For some, pleasure relies on a balance of safety and risk—enough security to feel grounded, enough uncertainty to feel excited. Afterward: what worked? What didn’t? These considerations and conversations can feel awkward, but they’re also generative; sometimes redirection is the way forward.
As for me: would I do it again? Yeah. Yes. Absolutely. Why not? Not because it’s trendy, or expected, or even particularly meaningful to me in any fixed sense. But because, in that moment, it felt like something —a flicker of connection, of novelty, of stepping just slightly outside myself. And maybe that’s all sex ever really is: a series of small negotiations between what we think we want, what we’re told we should want, and what, unexpectedly, we discover we actually do.
Curious about uncovering more of your own desires? Find what’s waiting for you on Feeld.
