Historical cases of male submissive sexual fantasies: Swallowing saliva
Reports of submissive kinks in men from the early literature on human sexuality. In this entry, two cases, reported by Dimitry Stefanowsky and Magnus Hirschfeld, of the kink for swallowing spit.
This is part of a series of essays on historical cases of male submissive kinks. Find the Table of contents here.
When Richard von Krafft-Ebing first described the phenomenon of submissive sexual fantasies in an 1890 update to his Psychopathia Sexualis, for which occasion he coined the word “masochism”, a certain Dimitry Stefanowsky, Assistant Imperial Prosecutor in the Russian city of Yaroslavl and amateur psychologist, was also taking interest in the same subject. He preferred to call the phenomenon “passivism” to avoid the connection with the Austrian novelist, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, from whom Krafft-Ebing derived his coinage.
In an 1892 paper on the subject, Stefanowsky briefly outlined his thoughts.1 He reported, in passing, a curious case of a Russian merchant who derived great sexual pleasure from drinking the spit of prostitutes. This Russian man would often go to a brothel and pay the women to spit into a glass, the contents of which he would then drink.
I know an old Russian merchant who often came to a public house2 and lavishly treated the girls, who had to spit into a glass, after which he swallowed the spit with great pleasure.3
Unfortunately, Stefanowsky offers no detail as to what went on in the erotic imagination of the old Russian merchant. Nonetheless, the peculiar predilection of this man from more than a century ago—that is, the erotic desire to swallow women’s spit—is found in many men today. It is one of the submissive kinks in the category of soiling, more specifically soiling with the woman’s bodily secretions.
Perhaps the old merchant, in his erotic fancy, thought himself unworthy of beautiful women and imagined that they would reject him. Perhaps he reveled in the idea that the only thing he could hope to get from them was their spit, which they would readily give to humiliate him and laugh at him.
The sight of the women when they spat into the glass and produced their glistening nectar must have seemed divine to the old merchant. Every time the saliva poured down from the women’s mouths, he probably felt a surge of sexual pleasure wash over him as he anticipated the moment he would swallow the contents of the glass.
Perhaps the man, if he was romantically inclined, found some poetic beauty in swallowing the spit of the beautiful women he desired. The ingestion of their saliva, which is a humiliating act, could also have been performed as a sign of devotion and adoration. Perhaps when his sexual fantasies took the reins of his imagination, the woman’s spit lost its repulsive nature to him, and his erotic fancy imbued it instead with a delicious character.
Perhaps if the Russian merchant were a conversationalist, he would have attempted to defend his unusual preference with some clever arguments. After all, when lovers kiss, they inevitably exchange saliva and swallow each other’s spit. Of course, most people do not like to think about this uncomfortable fact, and it is only their sexual urges in the heat of the moment that diminish their inhibitions to the point where they allow themselves to engage in such a transfer of secretions in the mouth. The matter in the case of the Russian merchant is only different in that the transfer of saliva is unidirectional and premeditated.
This Russian man, reported by Stefanowsky, shared his passion for women’s saliva with many others. These spit lovers were well known to the early researchers of submissive sexual interests, including the German physician Magnus Hirschfeld. From the many cases of which Hirschfeld seems to have been aware, he chose to mention only one in his Sexualpathologie to illustrate the myriad ways in which sexually submissive men desire to be humiliated by being soiled with the secretions of the women they desire.
The case in question was a gentleman who was excited by the idea of having his food chewed by a woman before he ate it. To inflict this humiliation on himself, this man also resorted to the services of a prostitute:
The [masochist], however, does not shy away from any of these humiliations. He not only likes to lick the saliva of his lover, he also asks her to spit in his mouth so that he can swallow the juice. I had one case—and this is not an isolated one—in which a man had a prostitute chew the food he was eating and mix it with her saliva.4
Unfortunately, Hirschfeld was very terse on the details of this case. Perhaps both he and Stefanowsky wished to spare the reader the possible disgust that further elaboration could inspire. We do not know which foods the gentleman gave to the prostitute for mastication or how exactly she obliged him in the exercise. Nevertheless, we can safely speculate that, in all likelihood, this gentleman gave detailed instructions to the prostitute in what she had to do to stimulate his erotic fancy.
Perhaps he sat at the table with knife and fork in hand, eager to start dining, while the prostitute positioned herself above him. Such a superior position would have afforded him the best angle for the spectacle to come. He must have been practically salivating in anticipation of the decisive scene where the woman was to spit the food out after chewing it. The sight of his food, thoroughly mixed with her saliva, must have excited this gentleman greatly.
It was probably not easy for him to find a prostitute willing to indulge in these activities. It is not every woman who can suppress the instinctual nauseating disgust felt at the sight of her own ejected food. Or perhaps the establishment he frequented had prostitutes who specialized in this type of play and were accustomed to such atypical proclivities.
Even though we do not know what went on in the erotic imagination of these two men who shared the common love for women’s spit, we can safely deduce that the submissive kink of swallowing women’s saliva existed in the men of 19th-century Europe just as it exists in men today.
→ Go back to the Table of contents.
The line art in this essay’s card is by Georgian artist Dorian Chelios.
Stefanowsky, Dimitry. (1892). Le passivisme. Archives de l'anthropologie criminelle, 7, 294–298.
A brothel.
Stefanowsky, op. cit., p. 295. My translation.
Hirschfeld, Magnus. (1918). Sexualpathologie: Ein Lehrbuch für Ärzte und Studierende. Erster Teil: Geschlechtliche Entwicklungsstörungen mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Onanie. A. Marcus & E. Webers Verlag, p. 248. My translation.