No health professional-or sex advice columnist for that matter-says "just spit on your dick and shove it in." Perhaps it's worth showing to gay men that spit fucking is more fantasy than reality. It's worth pointing out that anal sex with plenty of lube is way more pleasant for everyone involved. Public health messaging should embrace these complexities, as well as the realities of the ways in which gay men have sex. Condoms remain the most effective tool for reducing the spread of all STIs however, Cornelisse's work shows that STIs spread in more complex ways during anal sex without condoms. Urging gay men to use commercial lube for anal sex, rather than spit, will also reduce the spread. First will be frequent and thorough STI tests for at-risk populations, which must include oral swabs for gonorrhea. "We suspect that getting control of throat gonorrhea may be important to prevent the development of antibiotic resistance," Cornelisse says.ĭriving down rates of all gonorrhea will require a multi-pronged approach. When this bacteria receives inadequate or incorrect antibiotic treatment, it can become a resistant to first-line medicines. As gonorrhea goes untreated in the throat, it can swap genetic material with other bacteria lingering back there, such as streptococcus. Gonorrhea of the throat has been linked to antibiotic resistance- super gonorrhea. From an anus, which also often has no symptoms, it can really only spread to a penis, or maybe a throat if someone has a particularly talented tongue." "From a throat, gonorrhea can spread to another throat, to a penis, or to an anus. "Gonorrhea of the penis is usually pretty obvious, with a yellow, milky discharge, but throat gonorrhea often has no symptoms, so people don't know they carry it, and hence they don't know that they need to get treatment," Cornelisse says. Part of the reason for this drastic statistic is that gonorrhea can often go undiagnosed, and thus is easily spread. Their study concludes that almost half of rectal gonorrhea cases may be eliminated if men who sleep with men (MSM) stopped using their partners' saliva for anal sex. In a 2016 study conducted by Melbourne Sexual Health Centre, they found that there was a significant relationship between cases of rectal gonorrhea and using saliva as lube.
"We think that throat gonorrhea is a significant driver of the spread of gonorrhea," Cornelisse says. I think saliva use can be part of that," says Vincent Cornelisse, a general practitioner and sexual health specialist from Australia's Melbourne Sexual Health Centre.Ĭornelisse and his team saw that spitting was central to the sexual experience of many gay men, and they wanted to better understand the risk factors associated with it. You could call it a fetish, but I think that people want a sexual experience that feels real, and during which they have a real physical or perhaps emotional connection. "Some would say that the best sex is unplanned. He says of one scene: "This is how man sex should be: lube free, spit'n'shove, hard fucking action." Spit fucking is a cruder, somehow more authentic form of gay sex in Morris's primal sexual aesthetic. The gay porn mogul Paul Morris glorifies spit in several of his extreme, no-limits (they contain actual blood and bruises) films. When it dries up, you can actually use a bit of spit to recharge the lube.
"Spit on your boy's hole and give it to him deep," goes the tagline.
S Leather, an adult entertainment store, sells a product called Spit Lube H2O that has the look and feel of thick, stringy saliva. Yes, there's a romanticization of spit fucking in the gay community which probably far precedes Brokeback Mountain.