I Have a Rare, Very Specific Fantasy. It Could Send Me to the Hospital.
It’s disgusting, I know. But that’s why I like it.
ADVICE BY RICH JUZWIAK
AUG 13, 202312:00 PM
Dear How to Do It,
This is a gross question, so be prepared! (It’s hot for me because it’s gross).
Here goes: I’m a 50-year-old male bi masochist. In my 20s and 30s, one of the things I’d do to get off was to go to porn stores with video booths in the back. There’s often cum all over the floor in these booths, for obvious reasons, and, since one of my turn-ons is extreme humiliation, I’d get naked and rub this cum all over myself, hump the floor in it, use it to jack off, and desperately want to lick it up—but refrain from doing so, out of a desire not to get a disease. Sometimes I would let guys jack off on me, but more often, it was the disgusting leavings of previous jackers-off that got me going.
I haven’t done this in years, but a new relationship with a domme (on the porn-booth floor I was fantasizing that a woman was making me do it) has rewired some old lines—these booths still exist, though not in their previous abundance. My question is: How dangerous is this? What diseases would I be at risk for, and how likely is contracting them in such a manner? And, just for the hell of it: licking up cum from video-booth floors is a bad idea, right?
–On the Cumming Room Floor
Dear On the Cumming Room Floor,
Well, that’s new. Thanks, OTCRF—I’d never have thought this if weren’t for you. I’m going to circumnavigate the STI question a bit, mostly because there isn’t a lot of great data about the exact threat this poses—most STIs don’t tend to live very long outside of the body (if at all), and anyway, the risk of STIs is implied when you start taking other people’s fluids in your mouth (chlamydia and gonorrhea, for example can be transmitted through semen). I wouldn’t advise you not to suck the dicks that shot this sperm (I have, in fact, on several occasions suggested people seek out and use glory holes), so I’m viewing that concern as immaterial. It’s the other stuff that makes your question novel, thus relevant.
If we think about relatively clean shared public spaces like gym showers (at least, clean in theory and purpose), here’s what we’re looking at in terms of potential infections: athlete’s foot, warts, and MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). It’s rare to get a staph infection in your mouth, but it’s certainly possible. Is it likely? I don’t know—I couldn’t find a study measuring the transmission rates of people who licked public showers or porn booth floors. The most relevant finding here concerns HPV, which can apparently live on surfaces for days.
There was this interesting 2015 item regarding the risks of licking subway poles—Weill Cornell Medical College’s Dr. Chris Mason helped bring to life the PathoMap study by swabbing various public surfaces to get a sense of what’s going on, molecularly. Mason told Gothamist that you’d “probably be fine” if you licked a subway pole (though, the doctor cautioned: “You wouldn’t want to lick all the poles”). I reached out to Mason regarding your request, but he wasn’t willing to speculate in the absence of data. Sounds like an opportunity for further research to me!
So then I turned to my favorite clean person, Jolie Kerr, a cleaning expert, CNN contributor and author of the New York Times bestselling book My Boyfriend Barfed In My Handbag … And Other Things You Can’t Ask Martha. She also wrote the beloved advice column, Ask a Clean Person. In response to my query, she did some research and effectively punched out an AACP-worthy answer. I’m reprinting it in full:
As LW suspects, licking a public floor is indeed a bad idea. (I’m disappointed to have to say so, because I would love to be able to give him a “God made dirt, so dirt can’t hurt” go-ahead to pursue his desires. Alas!)
To define the potential risks involved with licking a video booth floor, we’d want to know what bacteria and viruses might typically be present, and from there, consider the effects of both skin contact and ingesting them. The closest thing we have to analyzing the bacteria one would likely find on a video booth floor are studies of public bathrooms and, fortunately for us, scientists love to study public bathrooms. Would you like some literature? Sure!
This study tells us a few interesting things about bathroom floors that we can apply to video booth floors. The first is what specific types of bacteria might be found, which includes some bad actors that will be familiar to most people:
- E. coli
- Staphylococcus
- Streptococcus
The study found plenty of other fun bacteria, in addition to our friends E. coli, staph and strep, which you can see in this chart called “Microbial Biogeography of Public Restroom Surfaces.”
Another thing this study tells us is, “Floor surfaces were the most diverse of all communities and contained several taxa commonly found in soils.” A rough translation from Science to English is, “The floor is the dirtiest place in a public bathroom.”
While it may defy belief, the fact is that you are more likely to pick up a nasty actor from setting a bag down on a public bathroom floor than you are from sitting on a public toilet seat. We can extrapolate from that, then, that putting your tongue in contact with a public bathroom floor, or similar, would be a very fast way to get yourself very sick.
Do with this information what you will. I’m not trying to yuck your yum, but to point out that if you do what you are thinking of doing with your tongue, you might end up yucking your own yum.
