Twenty-Four
In human sexuality the most profound taboos are often counterbalanced by intense longings to transgress the fragile borders between the permitted and the forbidden. In this section we look at the most common activities associated with water sports—the erotic interest in enemas and in urine. Water sports, perhaps more than any other activity, challenge our models of acceptable intimate behavior, for to breach this taboo is to explore a primal pleasure which children are taught, early on, to disavow. Perhaps the discomfort that water sports arouse even in sophisticated researchers explains the comparative rarity of studies of water sports as an erotic phenomenon.
This chapter features an interview with Joseph Bean, who is 44 years old and was raised in the Ozarks. He now lives in San Francisco. At the time of this interview he was the editor of Drummer and Mach magazines, Tough Customer books, and the managing editor of Dungeon Master and Sand-Mutopia Guardian magazines. He is a nationally known S/M spokesperson. Mr. Bean is “very nearly exclusively homosexual” and has a life partner.
Water sports generally include erotic interests in elimination—either artificially induced (as in enemas) or occurring naturally. The euphemistic evocation of clear, life-affirming waters indicates the sensuous and primal pleasure aficionados associate with these somewhat sedentary sports.
Clinically, the acts and practices associated with water sports are classified among several different paraphilias. Klismaphilia is the eroticization of enemas, whether giving or receiving. Urophilia (also known as undinism, urosexuality, golden showers, and piss play) denotes an erotic stimulus from viewing, being showered by, or ingesting urine (also known as urolagnia) or from urinating upon another. Coprophilia (also known as brown showers or scat) involves similar practices, but the erotic substance is human feces. Other related paraphilias include catheterophilia (eroticizing the use of urinary catheters), mysophilia (eroticizing filth), and olfactophilia (stimulation by smell, or smell fetishism). But while grouping golden showers with klismaphilia, coprophilia, and so on may be typologically and clinically convenient, the waters are muddied by the superficial similarity between acts that have inherently dissimilar motivations and rituals, and which serve different erotic purposes for participants.
Of all the types of water sports, golden showers and enemas are the more widely practiced variations. They also present the least-significant health risk.
[Water sports] could be really dirty, really taboo for some people, and I do respect others’ perceptions. But on the other hand, we want to deal with facts rather than perceptions. Urine is sterile, essentially, and when it comes to enemas, it’s [probably] less dirty than anal intercourse, which seems to be a very popular activity.
—KEVIN C.
All water sports entail some degree of risk. Improper administration of an enema, for example, can have fatal consequences. Urine, although an environment hostile to viruses and bacteria, is not infection-proof. Extreme caution is observed among water sports enthusiasts. Still, under optimum conditions, the erotic use of urine can be low-risk, while judicious use of enemas precludes unsafe contact with fecal matter (which teems with harmful bacteria). It is, perhaps, not surprising that the relative safety of golden showers and enemas makes them considerably less taboo than coprophilia, which can be exceptionally hazardous to a partner’s health (none of our interviewees described an interest). Most instances of coprophilia seem to occur outside a specifically D&S context. (One of the earliest literary references, however, is found in de Sade, which may lead some erroneously to infer that there is an inherent link between sadomasochism and coprophilia.)
Nonetheless, one does not need to mention coprophilia to encounter repugnance. The taboos against any contact with body wastes are adequately profound. While urine and feces may be as much a part of ourselves as our hair and our fingernails, most Westerners are taught to feel shame or disgust about contact with body wastes. These taboos persist among even the most sexually adventurous and are instilled as an aspect of one of the fundamental and most necessary social skills we learn: controlling the urges to eliminate. Socializing small children—and instructing them that cleanliness is vital to the health of the human organism—is a requirement in any society that wishes to produce healthy adults. But that children, even after toilet training, naturally take a keen, playful interest in elimination is no secret.
Feces (anal erotism) and urine (urethral erotism—Sadger) often color the child’s imagination. I have heard of two boys flaying a game of ‘Pipi-Man’ and ‘Kaka-man,’ both exalted deities. The first could drown the whole world in his urine; the second could cover the entire universe with his excrement. In endless games, the two deities combatted for supremacy.
—WILHELM STEKEL1
As a group, children are typically enchanted by the body’s intimate functions, but by adulthood, most individuals have successfully learned to suppress or to erase this natural delight. Often early curiosity is replaced by hostility or horror. Many adults completely forget a time when the body’s products were as innocently intriguing as the products of the mind may now be. But eliminatory processes have remained a source of private fascination for the water-sports enthusiast. For this reason some researchers believe that an interest in water sports implies arrested sexual development, as if true adult sexuality severs all links with childhood sexuality. If nothing else, the overwhelming evidence of sexuality research argues that those things which were erotic to us as children continue to hold erotic sway over most adults.
There is little documentation of the erotic interest in urine prior to the 19th Century, when Havelock Ellis—a self-proclaimed urolagniac—and others began intensive clinical investigations and quickly discovered scores of practitioners. Folklore from many continents is rife with stories in which urine plays an important, often magical, role. Urine’s significance in ritual and medicine dates to antiquity.
At certain stages of early culture, when all the emanations of the body are liable to possess mysterious magic properties and become apt for sacred uses, the excretions, and especially the urine, are found to form part of religious ritual and ceremonial function.
—HAVELOCK ELLIS2
Urine is still used as a sterilizing agent in non-Western medicine (it is, for example, used as an effective antidote to jellyfish stings among some residents of the Caribbean), and in some cultures, drinking of urine remains an act symbolic of spiritual devotion (as among devout Hindus, who ritually imbibe cattle urine).
The enema has a long and well-documented history as a purgative and a curative, and enemas were popular aphrodisiacs in centuries past. The belief that enemas possess restorative and curative powers persists.
Despite age-old taboos (and more likely because of them), fascination with urine and the urethra, defecation and the anus is extremely widespread.
I guess my biggest surprise [in running a water sports support group] was the number of people who are actually either interested in or actually participating in [water sports].
—KEVIN C.
Even without eroticization elimination may be pleasant, not only because one is literally relieving the organism of waste, but also because the anus is sensitive to pleasurable sensation. Further, because the urinary tract and the anus lie in intimate conjunction with the genitals, stimulation to one region may create some degree of pleasurable sensation in the other. The proximity of these zones creates numerous anxieties for humanity. Children are not alone in grouping together—and confusing—eliminatory and reproductive functions. The association between elimination and eros may be further ingrained when taboos against free contact with one’s own sexual organs merge with the taboos against the anus and urethra.
The water-sports enthusiast is not necessarily immune from ordinary taboos. On the contrary, he understands the taboo quite clearly but is gratified when he defies it, as long as this is done in a way which he finds personally acceptable. For example, it is typical for a klismaphile to develop fairly complex psychosexual scenarios. He or she may place enormous importance on the particular enema equipment used and on the rituals performed. Such complexities create an atmosphere of permissibility, and any significant departure from the scenario may make the participant deeply uncomfortable. The tension between the desire and taboo can be profoundly challenging.
For some people, just going from the fantasy of water sports to the reality can be a great extreme; for [many], once they’ve established what their water-sports repertoire is and are able to make the right connections to be allowed to fulfill their fantasy precisely, it can be an ecstatic experience. If you get to any of those points, you engage yourself all the way through and are changed by the experience.
—JOSEPH BEAN
When the experience is successful, it may represent a magical return to an idyllic, primal state of abandon.
[The turn-on of golden showers] is abandon. It’s a warm, animal substance that feels very elemental.
—VICTORIA B.
Sensual pleasure is the single most important motivation cited both by our interviewees and sexuality researchers. Still, many individuals who regularly take enemas do not perceive an erotic connection. For example, New Age “colonic irrigation” clinics proliferate nationwide, and their patrons and staff often claim that an enema serves a uniquely health-restoring purpose.
Not only do water sports fall into very distinct categories, but within their own area of interest, participants often have strictly defined limits. Many, and probably the majority, of individuals who may find it acceptable to experiment with golden showers on their skin are uninterested in golden showers in their mouths, and the percentage of enema enthusiasts who wish to have contact with feces seems to be vanishingly small.
A nominal, and probably only a coincidental, overlap exists between people who are aroused by urine and those who enjoy enemas. Those who are interested in both may simply be demonstrating that, having breached one taboo, they may be willing to experiment with other unusual or taboo activities.
Some clinicians link infantilism and water sports; rubber fetishism, too, has been associated with urophilia. In both cases, the link is probably environmental. For infantilists, to be out of control of one’s natural functions is part of the simulation of infancy—the wastes themselves are of less interest. And if the adult water-sport enthusiast’s interest was shaped by childhood experience, as seems usually to be the case, rubber goods (such as sheets and training pants to prevent soiling, or enema hoses and nozzles attached to enema bags) may become associated with elimination and may merge with the erotic interest in water sports. It has also been suggested that rubber fetishists who like shiny clothing are urophiles.
The useful and charming term “undinism” can be used to cover a whole gamut of delightful diversions, from taking prolonged walks in light clothing in summer rain to urinating on a beloved in the bath. From the latest fashionable “wet look” to high colonics, in fact. “Not only,” Ellis reminds us, “may rain be the symbol of urine, but urine the symbol of rain.”
—GERALD AND CAROLINE GREENE3
While such speculations are interesting, these links are neither inevitable nor universal.
Water-sports enthusiasts are frequently interested in D&S. Some degree of power exchange is evident in most aspects of their erotic play, and a significant percentage of D&Sers express at least passing interest in some aspect of water sports. Water sports are particularly appealing to a submissive who perceives contact with the dominant’s urine as an exquisite humiliation. Urinating upon someone is an assertion of great power, while allowing oneself or seeking to be urinated upon is a dramatic abandonment of power.
Enemas are often described as supremely relaxing. Our interviewees say that they feel calmer, more at peace after being purged. Enemas also seem to enhance some D&Sers’ feelings of submission.
The power aspects of water sports are especially powerful when coercion scenarios—somewhat more typical in klismaphilia than in urophilia—are introduced.
I’ve talked to a lot of people who have agreed to do these types of things but [who] tell me that they really don’t like it but are turned on by the fact that they were “forced” to do it. [The] power dynamic is the thing that turns them on.
—KEVIN C.
If the submissive is erotically coerced into engaging in some aspect of water sports, he forfeits responsibility for the act. The submissive with a penchant for anal eroticism, then, can accept a kind of pleasurable stimulation he might not ordinarily permit himself. Force scenarios may also elicit feelings of erotic humiliation. Many individuals, however, neither enjoy coercion scenarios nor find their activities to be humiliating.
I never had a problem [with] coming out about my gay life or S/M. Maybe I’ve been out all my life because I’m too lazy to be in the closet. As for my [S/M] activism, I write for a living. One of the primary rules of writing is to write what you know. One of the things I know is S/M. I generally feel that if I am allowed to be the way I am—which is way outside most people’s definition of acceptable—then I have to let other people be the way they are, even when they are way outside my definition of acceptable, which includes being bigoted, close-minded idiots. If that’s the way they’ve made their lives, then I say let them be like that.
Anything and everything that anyone does has some spiritual component. We don’t escape our spiritual existence any more than we escape being bipeds: You can crawl, but you’re still a biped. When we do anything that is difficult, extreme, anything that is ecstatic—[something which is] really hard for us to achieve or really extreme from our personal point of view, or [which] produces a state of genuine joy—when we do anything that goes to those levels, we engage ourselves very deeply. The key to that is very often connected with our sexuality. If piss is connected with our sexuality, as it is for a lot of people, then it’s going to be, at least sometimes, difficult. I’ve never had an ecstatic experience, an experience that changed my consciousness, even momentarily, in vanilla sex. But I would be very surprised to find that I had fewer than 100 experiences of mind-altering ecstasy in S/M. The fact that this can happen, however rarely, is one of the attractions of S/M.
There’s another important issue: We make our way through childhood bearing the [knowledge] that we have to learn to piss and shit when and where appropriate. And we’re told to give absolutely no attention to the body parts involved: none, ever. There is no appropriate moment to look at your own penis or to touch your own asshole, and yet you have to be in control of their functions, which are only marginally acceptable. So in a way, we establish in childhood that to be involved in any way with piss is frontier territory. I think that may serve as an initial fascination for a lot of people. [But] beyond that, you eventually arrive at pleasure; you sort out your sexual activities on that basis.
I lived on a farm in the Missouri Ozarks when I was little. The bathroom facilities were an outhouse. I was fascinated by the fact that my uncles and other adults who lived on the farm could stop any place and pull it out and piss. That fascination never went away. I always liked the sound of it; I always liked to see it. There was also some thrill for me in the thought of other people hearing or seeing me pissing. The fascination with male urination [was there when I was six or seven], but I had no involvement in any sense. But I imagined being able to see it, having my uncles know that I was seeing it, and [I] imagined that they enjoyed that. I didn’t really think about it again until I discovered that I was homosexual.
I began to hear of people who pissed on each other or [drank] each other’s piss, and I wanted to find such people. When you [heard about this] in the ’60s as I was coming out, it was only in the most derogatory terms. It was some queen saying, “You wouldn’t believe it, he wanted to piss on me!” and they were disgusted and horrified and humiliated. I didn’t know how to find anyone who would not be horrified by it.
In the early ’70s, when there was sexual activity in gay bars, it became easier to sort people out. One day I was in a Los Angeles [bar]. I cupped my hand [over] a guy’s crotch and was kind of squeezing and rubbing, and he started pissing in my hand. I felt like I’d come home. During the next few years I discovered that even in many bars that had no other sexual activities the bathrooms were awesome places to find someone who wanted to play. I quickly discovered that the great majority of the people [shared my] attitude: That it was a pleasure and not some method by which tops could humiliate or degrade bottoms. Eventually I learned to play that way [as well], because you run into bottoms who must think of water sports as humiliating to be involved. I’d rather do that to work them up to the point where they recognize that it can just be joyful, externalized exuberance. Humiliation can be a fun scene, [but] for me, using piss play as humiliation takes the best edge off.
For a lot of people the first turn-on is going to be that they want to submit. We get our hierarchy of categories of sexual turn-on from our early experiences in any area of sex. So if the top says, “You must do this,” and we’re learning to be submissive—that gives it a sexual charge.
One of the things that makes a wide category of S/M more sexual, even hypersexual, is that it assaults multiple senses at the same time. I dislike sounding overly academic about these things, but if you were orchestrating a scene in the way that a composer writes a piece of music, you would see that there are moments when you want to bind together the people in the scene—with all their senses—to make it as solid as possible. With the sight and the smell and taste and the feel all at once, piss [play] can be very effective in that regard.
I don’t particularly think [consensual coercion is part of the attraction], although it often is involved for people who know they’re interested but can’t give themselves permission to do that [because] it’s too disgusting. Labeling it humiliation and instigating consensual coercion covers that base for them. I think that’s true in a lot of S/M. I know that there are other mechanisms involved, but I think at least in water sports, that’s often the mechanism that’s engaged.
The idea of piss play is approached with tremendous circumspection [among S/Mers]. The taboo is so strong it makes any idea of the numbers impossible to get, but the fascination clearly [exists]. Whether the practice is as widespread is another matter. Recently, when QSM [Authors’ note: Quality SM, an educational and support group] called and asked what I would like to do a class about, I said, “We’re not ready to do flogging and whipping again, and I don’t feel up to preparing a mummification class at the moment. [So] maybe nothing, because no one wants to do a water-sports class.” And [the director] said, “I do.” So we scheduled it. Ordinarily when a new how-to fetish class is presented, we get maybe as many as 18 people. For the water-sports class—which was fairly early on the slate, so [there wasn’t much time] for people to register—there were 32 actively interested people. They were all saying, “I have [x number] of friends who wanted to [and] didn’t want to be here.” I discovered that even among people who were willing to spend $15 or $20 to be in the room, there was still a tremendous residual taboo and embarrassment hanging over [everyone], except for [a few] friends of mine who sat in the front row—a couple of women who were very active participants. Most people were very reticent to raise their hands. So while it was a fun class to do, it was still one of the most difficult, because the participation level was so low. At certain points, I did get sudden flurries of tremendous activity from the crowd, which proved that it wasn’t a lack of interest [or] that it wasn’t going well. It was the taboo in effect.
The AIDS epidemic has been really chilling even for activities as safe as water sports. Usually I get clinical and point out the historical stuff about people who, [as] in India, of course, drink their own piss because it’s the only safe fluid to drink, and in the U.S. Army, my father—and I suppose generations of soldiers before—were taught to treat athlete’s foot by pissing on feet. But in the age of AIDS all body fluids were suddenly filthy again, despite the sexual revolution. It was [former Surgeon General C. Everett] Koop who made the first real public statement. He said this is ludicrous—[that] we’ve known for centuries that human urine cannot be infected in [this] way. [But] a lot of people, doctors primarily, who were disgusted by the thought that men, especially gay men, were pissing on or in each other, continued to press for all body fluids, most particularly urine, to be seen as unclean. Some medical studies were undertaken, and it was very firmly determined [that], like almost every other virus and bacterium in the world, HIV breaks down in piss.
I don’t know that [AIDS has] changed the way that serious players play: Serious players tend to look into the safety of what they’re doing and take great pride in knowing what is and isn’t true. I think it’s probably powerfully affected the way that novices, and nervous people who don’t take that responsibility, play.