Historical cases of masochism: Swallowing saliva
Reports of submissive sexual fantasies in men from the early literature on human sexual psychology. In this entry, two cases of the kink for swallowing spit, reported by Stefanowsky and Hirschfeld.
When the German psychiatrist 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 an interest in the 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 essay 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 details 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 is found in many men today. These men share the same basic interest in swallowing women’s spit, but they may differ among themselves in their motivations for this erotic desire.
Perhaps the old merchant, in his erotic fancy, thought himself unworthy of beautiful women and liked to imagine their rejection of 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 offer to humiliate and laugh at him.
The sight of the women when they spat into the glass and produced the 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.
The Russian merchant might have been one to derive pleasure from the idea of being soiled by a woman’s bodily secretions, in which case he probably also enjoyed being spat on and verbally humiliated by the women he hired in the public house for the occasion. Perhaps he also liked it when the women ordered him to drink from the glass into which they spat.
If the merchant was romantically inclined, he might have found some poetic beauty in swallowing the spit of the beautiful women he desired. The ingestion of their saliva, which would normally have been a humiliating act, could have been performed instead as a sign of devotion and adoration. In this case, when his sexual fantasies took the reins of his imagination, the women’s spit must have lost its repulsive nature to him, and his erotic fancy must have imbued it with a delicious character instead.
If the Russian merchant was a conversationalist, I can imagine him attempting to defend his unusual preference with a clever justification with whomever he happened to converse at the public house. After all, when lovers kiss, they inevitably exchange saliva and swallow small quantities of each other’s spit, so why would the merchant’s desire be deemed any more bizarre?
Of course, most people do not like to think about this uncomfortable fact. It is only in the heat of the moment, when their sexual urges diminish their inhibitions, that they allow themselves to engage in such a transfer of secretions in the mouth. The matter in the case of the old Russian merchant is only different in that the transfer of saliva is unidirectional, premeditated, and involves a different mode of transmission.
This Russian man, whose sexual interest was reported by Stefanowsky, shared his passion for women’s saliva with many other men. These spit lovers were well known to the early researchers of masochism, including the German physician Magnus Hirschfeld, who claimed to have known many cases. From these, he chose to mention only one in his Sexualpathologie to illustrate the myriad ways in which sexually submissive men like 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 satisfy his kink, he—much like the Russian merchant—also resorted to the services of a prostitute who could inflict this humiliation on him.
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
Hirschfeld was unfortunately very terse on the details of this case. In relating these cases, both he and Stefanowsky probably 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, but we can safely speculate that, in all likelihood, this gentleman gave her detailed instructions in what she had to do in order 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 salivating in anticipation of the decisive scene in which the woman was to spit the food out after chewing it. The sight of this food, thoroughly mixed with her saliva, must have excited him 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 no strangers to men’s 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 the men of today.
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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.
Picture a world where women's spit has been commodified and every woman's spit has a price tag.
Hope they brushed their teeth back then before spitting