spit shine: lucibrations on lubrication

Spit is vastly underappreciated. We take it for granted. We don’t notice it unless it’s embarrassing us. When it, for instance, takes a flying lemming leap from between our lips when we pop our “p”s. When it, for example, dark-shadow stains our pillows or our shoulders as we sleep, or  when it spot shines on our cheeks or chins. When it, essentially, betrays our bodies for being what they are: deeply flawed and incessantly active biological organisms. We like to pretend our bodies aren’t really real, that they aren’t anything buy pretty props for our great noggins; spit—along with farts and snots and other unwanted effusions—exposes us for being the big bags of meat we are.

We show our distaste for others with spit, which is kind of ironic given that we also show our desire by salivating; look at any sophomoric cartoon of a man horndogging after a toothsome chick and dollars to doughnuts it shows perfect teardrops of spit emanating from the guy’s lopping pant-panting tongue. We spit in the faces of others when we want to anger them and when we are powerless to do much else. When we’re young, we shoot spitballs, those little saliva-saturated wadded up balls of wide-lined paper, at those we revile. If we’re really styling, we shoot them blow-dart style through straws. Spit is a handy somatic personification of contempt.

Spit, saliva, drool—none of the terms conjure a positive image. When I want to talk about something being really, truly, unfathomably dumb, I say it’s drooling. When I imagine a person whose stupidity is so excessive as to defy compassion and inspire irritation, I see a slack-jawed yokel, flecks of spittle dotting his or her collar and bodice. There’s no way around it: at first glance no one wants to see spit, show it, or suffer it.

Yet spit is a beautiful thing. Saliva is nature’s lubricant, for one thing, and not merely for eating, though that is a necessary, if uninteresting, function of spit. I know that when I first started masturbating all those decades ago, well before I knew what K-Y was or why I might want to buy some, I would spit on my middle finger before it delved below the equator of my panties to divide the peachy cleft of my barely pubescent pussy. I can’t imagine I was alone in using this most handy lubricant in the long darkling night of my adolescence.

And still today, when I’m fucking my boyfriend, when I’m atop him, astride the flat plain that is his belly, when I’m unthinkingly, rhythmically and willfully impaling myself on his archetypal cock, when I’m finding my own—what do we call it? Pussy juice? Too Julia Child roasty. Vaginal lubrication? Too medical. I admit a loss for words—when I’m finding my own wetness inadequate to the task at hand, I spit on my finger and use my saliva to smooth the friction. Spit is a beautiful thing in the right context.

Which is not to suggest it’s not disconcerting on occasion. Face down and naked ass up, my spread genitals as genial and welcoming as an open bar to the soon-consuming face of my boyfriend, he spits on my ass before licking it. Unseeing, I hear him. A rasping hawk, a pursed-lipped “pttt.” And then the hot-cold splat of his saliva on my split-open plum-dark center. It’s a peculiar fucking sensation, but it passes quickly, quick as the wet-hot heat of my boyfriend’s open pervert’s mouth and  the quick-flicking of his pointy tongue squelch-pressing to my ass. Off-putting, his hawking spit, and a bit humiliating, but undeniably pleasurable.

I have drunk gallons of lover’s spit, to employ the term of alt-rock band Broken Social Scene. Some I can even summon the taste of at will, like an aging gourmand recollecting the ghosts of repasts gone by. Not-Danny Barber’s saliva tasted like a Marlboro tea. The spit of this vegan guy I fucked this one night tasted like green hay. The spit of others tasted like coffee grounds, like cinnamon and mint, like curry. Sometimes when I’ve been kissing someone, a prodigious mouthful of saliva has flooded my mouth, like a spit tsunami. I have swallowed, equally titillated and appalled.

Sex has the improbable effect of making my own spit foreign to me too. Deep-throating has this effect. I find the prodigious and viscous saliva created by swallowing a cock shocking and awe-inspiring. I am like a toddler: I am amazed that my very own body could make something like that. Dense ropy shiny strands of saliva connect my mouth to my lover’s cock when I lift my head; they embarrass me and they swell me with pride. They are my passion for cock-sucking made visible, tangible, and olfactory, for in these strands, I can smell my breath on my lover’s cock. It makes me self-conscious, as much as it makes me proud.

Kissing and sucking my lover’s body, my lips drop invisible physical graffiti on his flesh, as he does on mine. We dot one another with our spit, our DNA, our breath. “I Was Here,” it says. “You Were Loved,” it says. “You Were Eaten,” it says. I  treat my lover’s body like meat with my drooling, and he likes it. In this context, spit is good. It’s better than good; it’s divine.

Spit, spunk, and—what are we calling it? Wetness? Juice? Whatever—those now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t signs of our telltale heats. We may like to pretend their unimportance simply because they are so secret, so necessary, so visceral, and like those fleeting primal moments when we are caught critter-like and lightning-struck in the strobe-light tableau of unresisting passion, so embarrassing. They show us for the animals we are: defenseless, hungry, and driven by forces we don’t understand and can’t exactly recall when, after it’s over, we return to our propriety and ourselves.

Comments

[Lucy Felthouse]

Ooh, I never thought of spit in quite that way before. But I totally agree that in the right context, it's damn sexy. And much more convienient than reaching for the lube!

[Karl Elvis]

God, i find my lover's saliva so appealing. If it's someone whose bodily secretions I want (ie, someone I'm really into, really, really into), I want that as much as I want sweat, vaginal wetness, etc. I want it on me, I want it in my mouth, I want to swallow it. I've sucked on a lover's tongue to get it.

I had a friend who often would gleek accidently when she was talking, and when I figured out she could do it on purpose with some concetration, I used to ask her to do it while we were kissing; it had an ejaculatory quality I loved. She thought I was freaky (but indulged me anyway).

The sexiness of saliva is generally over-looked, I think. I've had a woman riding me drip sweat or spit in my face as she was coming; and I couldn't be happier about it.

[saratoga]

Chelsea-

So true. Exchanging these intimate, though common, fluids, is such a strong, wonderful marker of our love and passion.

I know in my own relationships, it has been turned up a notch or two by including other fluids. However, there's a lot of power in simply mixing saliva and cum, of either gender.

To me, it brings us over a great divide, from sex as somewhat a 'meeting engagement,' to sex as a slow, passionately intimate mixing of ourselves, those parts we don't typically celebrate or think of often.

Thanks for the perspective.

-saratoga

[tom paine]

As one ages, natural juices become more rarified, so we've become connoisseurs of lube. AstroGlide is very dependable, and Wet Lite is good. You can get it in a monster pump size, and we did! Spit is just too transitory for old fucks like us.

[The Provocateur]

that was brilliant. really. playful but insightful. gross and not-so-gross because afterall, yes we are bipedal meat bags. wonderful.