I am a pansexual female in my early 20s, and I have been an emetophile since maybe when I was six. I remember seeing pregnant women on TV dramas throwing up and feeling a weird warm sensation in my crotch area, like I want to pee, but I don't need to pee. In my teenage years I started associating that with sex, and realized this is a fetish. Nowadays, when I want to watch porn, 95% of the time just look at videos of people, mostly girls, vomiting. Things like "the milk challenge" and "bulimia aversion videos" are pretty useful to getting me off. I don't like vomit porn that include scat play or deepthroating very much. It's pretty hard to find new porn for my kink. I've probably seen all the people-vomiting-on-each-other-and-rubbing-vomit-all-over porn searchable by Bing.

My boyfriend and I have been dating for a year, and he's great. I introduced him to Savage Love. He knew about pegging and fantasized about being pegged before he knew about you. I told him about my fetish, and he luckily isn't grossed out by vomit and is capable of pushing stomach contents up just by controlling his muscles when he's fairly full. There has been a few times where he's had a big meal before sex, and he vomited for me to watch. He gets turned on by how turned on I am. I usually get extremely wet and so turned on that I can't think about anything else, so I'm super happy I have such a GGG partner.

The rest of the letter—and it's not for the squeamish—plus responses from two guest experts... after the jump.

Before dating him, I've told people about my fetish and I'm comfortable about it, but no-one has done it for my pleasure. I've made myself throw-up too and it's exciting to an extent, but I didn't want to make it a habit, and I mostly like watching other people vomit.

This Valentine's day, we went to a Chinese all-you-can-eat buffet with the intention of him overeating. It's spring-break here so his housemates are all gone, so we can have fun without worry. I made him drink luke-warm half-OJ-half-water which is pretty gross, until he's bloated enough to easily vomit into a large glass pan. I touched his cock and let him touch my cunt, and we fucked too. Anyway, after he's done vomiting, we fucked for good. When he was cleaning up, I was looking at the glass pan of slime, and I thought about the porn that I watch where people rub vomit all over their bodies. I also remembered a reddit comment where a girl masturbated with her boyfriend's vomit as lube, and I was intrigued.

I didn't know how I felt about the idea of actually touching the vomit. My boyfriend was very encouraging, and I thought I should satisfy my curiosity with this rare opportunity. I hesitantly put my hand in the vomit, and immediately I was intrigued by the slimy texture, even though it was already kind of cold then. I felt my clit get engorged again, but I was still having mixed feelings about putting it near my vulva. What if I get an infection or something?

My boyfriend encouraged me to do it. I finally moved my slimy hand to my clit. Pretty much as soon as I touched my clit, I was squirting like crazy. We moved into the bath tub and I fucked myself with a dildo while I let him put a little bit of the slime on my pubic area. I came so much! It's amazing how as soon as I indulged myself in my fetish I just lost all the inhibition and grossness. I almost couldn't tell if I was mentally turned on or not; I was too busy squirting.

Questions:

1. Are there health risks to vomiting once in a while?

2. Are there health risks to smearing vomit on my body, including near/in my vagina? I'm not worried about UTI's because I squirt so much.

3. Why are fetishes this powerful?

Safety Lesson Informing My Emetophilia

Answers:

1. Take the time to Google vomit and bulimia, SLIME, and you'll quickly learn that lots of potential negative health consequences stem from regular, induced vomiting—from tooth decay to the erosion of the esophagus to mouth sores to rotting gums to broken blood vessels in the eyes. Vomiting once in a great while probably won't do any lasting damage—we evolved to vomit once in a great while—but asking your indulgent-to-fault boyfriend to make vomiting a regular part of your sex life would be both unfair and unhealthy. The hard part is defining "once in a while." Since healthy adults rarely vomit, SLIME, I'd say that your boyfriend shouldn't do this for you more than once a year, tops.

2. I shared your letter with a smart, progressive, sex-positive doctor, a woman who has made other appearances in the column, and she sent this response:

Vomit is not sterile like urine and carries bacteria that are found in our gut. We have bacteria throughout our entire gastrointestinal tract, from mouth to anus. That said, there is also the corrosive nature of vomit to be wary of. People who vomit often risk esophageal tears and bleeding (blood in the vomit requires a trip to the hospital), tooth decay and gum disease caused by the acidity. Electrolyte imbalances may also cause other health problems. The mucosa (or skin) inside of the vagina is the same kind of mucosa we have on the insides of our mouths. Exposing the vagina (which can happen with vulvar exposure) to these acids could cause vaginal irritation and inflammation as well as a change in the pH of the vagina. This could lead to susceptibility to other infections, sexually transmitted or not (as in the case of yeast infections or bacterial vaginosis). I would recommend using good judgement for the frequency of vomiting to reduce health risks as well as avoiding penetrative vaginal play with vomit.

Normally I would credit this smart, progressive, sex-positive doctor by name... but I wasn't sure she would want this particular Q&A popping up every time someone Googled her A. for the rest of her professional life and B. for all of eternity. So I'm keeping her name out of it.

3. I also shared your letter with Jesse Bering, Associate Professor of Science Communication at the University of Otago in New Zealand, a man whose name doesn't need to be kept out of it. Bering is a frequent contributor to Slate, Scientific American, Das Magazin, and (ahem) "Savage Love." Bering is the author of Perv: The Sexual Deviant In All of Us, and this particular question is right up his alley.


You can find “erotic vomiting” easily enough on shock porn sites. Aficionados refer to this kink as Roman Showers (a nod to the feast-until-you-barf potlucks of ancient times). Mercifully, however, emetophilia is exceedingly rare as a full-blown sexual paraphilia because disgust, for obvious evolutionary reasons, tends to be a natural libido killer for most people. But SLIME isn’t alone in her sensual yearnings for the most intimate innards of her partners. Back in 1982, the psychiatrist Robert Stoller conducted a series of interviews with three female emetophiles and, just like SLIME’s reminiscences of genital excitement upon seeing women with morning sickness, each of these ladies could similarly trace their unusually visceral arousal to an early childhood experience. One believed that it stemmed from her grandmother innocently rubbing her back while she vomited as a six-year-old, her privates being unwittingly stimulated on the old woman’s knee. Another woman believed that her emetophilia was rooted in being sexually abused by her stepfather as an eleven-year-old after he’d caught her masturbating. She was so disgusted by the incident that she vomited, but the two sensations (climaxing in response to the abuse, and then vomiting in response to the man’s actions) became inextricably linked. But the jury is still out on the “causes” of fetishes and kinks, but these anecdotal accounts on the origins of emetophilia, along with countless other such retrospective stories of adults with paraphilias, suggest a sexual imprinting process during childhood development.

Follow Jesse Bering on Twitter.