167: What if you had a fetish for disgust?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. Today we present the second episode in our second volume of happenings called Kinks and Fetishes, in which we explore stories of people who have come into their own through participation in the world of kink.

Our story today, What If You Had a Fetish for Disgust, comes to us thanks to Dick Wound and the Off the Cuffs podcast, who had originally interviewed her for his show. Be advised that this episode deals with a fetish specifically centered around disgust and disgusting behaviors in a sexual context, including scenes with vomit and excrement, so be especially cautious if you're sensitive to these topics. Thank you for listening.

Once I was able to be in control of what I decide is disgusting instead of having that placed on me, that's what helped me become friends with the feeling. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Happenings Volume 2, Kinks and Fetishes. What if you had a fetish for disgust?

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I was raised Christian in a pretty small town in the Midwest. My parents kind of had these great expectations of me to be somebody who, in their eyes, was successful, but was like everything that I didn't really want to be as a person, which made me a bit of a perfectionist. It kind of made me feel like I was always falling short.

I would learn in church that we would always fall short in like the eyes of God and that there's really no way to get around that, which kind of like constantly plagued me knowing that I would never really be good enough.

I knew that I would never be good enough in my parents' eyes. In turn, I was never good enough for myself. And then there was this overarching, like, I would never be good enough in general because there was no way to get around sinning and not being perfect in the eyes of God. My perfectionism mostly manifested in how I thought about my body and my feelings and my thoughts.

This sense of longing to have control over how I acted and presented myself that I could never really find.

I wanted to be this ideal person that my parents wanted me to be or who my church wanted me to be, which was pretty much the opposite of who I wanted to be as a person. And so trying to put on that mask and interact with people in a way that I thought was how you should act with people just ended up making me come off as very awkward and uncomfortable.

I thought a lot about heaven and hell, and I would contemplate burning in hell forever. And I also just contemplated eternity a lot. I would think about how horrible it would be to burn in hell forever. But then I would also think a lot about heaven. And I remember just thinking about worshipping God for eternity and getting like...

very upset having to essentially just be like a good Christian worshiping God for eternity and that was my reward for being good in life. Both heaven and hell seemed kind of like hell to me.

My parents meant well, and they physically provided for me in a lot of ways that their parents weren't able to. But I don't think that they were ever given any sort of emotional validation. So while they were providing me with everything I needed, and they saw that as doing better than their parents did, they didn't really know how to respond to emotions and feelings.

I think because of like their situation growing up poor and having their physical needs be the more urgent issue, it kind of seemed like anytime that I showed any sort of negative emotion, especially if I would cry, I would get told to go to my room that I didn't deserve to be feeling that emotion. It was like ridiculous and that I was being ungrateful for the things that I was given.

I was generally a pretty sensitive and emotional kid. And because of how my parents would react to that, I felt like I didn't deserve to feel that way, that I was disgusting and self-absorbed. I really internalized that that was true.

I was overwhelmed with disgust towards myself because I felt like I was feeling so many emotions I didn't deserve to feel. I was disgusted with myself for being ungrateful and feeling like I wasn't appreciative enough for what I was being provided with and focusing more on these problems going on in my head when it could always be worse.

As I got older, it definitely shifted toward my body. So it definitely dealt with a lot of body image issues. I would strictly try to control my eating and exercising behaviors, even when it was detrimental to me. And even with that, there was never this sense of satisfaction or contentment with myself that I was looking for, along with feeling like I needed to control the way that I looked.

My view of myself always felt very distorted. Like I would look completely different to myself depending on the day. Yeah, and it never reached the sense that I had succeeded. Like it felt like that was something that I would be dealing with for the rest of my life. I always felt like I wanted this sense of control over my situation that I never had before.

During this time as a kid and then as a teen I became my own worst enemy by constantly questioning what was wrong with me. I started getting into like sex and sexuality probably from the time that I was like 9 or 10. I was pretty young. When I started coming into my sexuality I was obsessed with it but it was very secret.

I just discovered one day bathtub faucets. That was a way to get off, which started me on the train of watching pornography and reading erotica.

I discovered that you could use electric toothbrushes as vibrators, essentially. So my dad had this electric toothbrush that he would never really use. And anytime my parents weren't home or anytime that I could be in secret, I would steal his electric toothbrush and use it over my clothes and then feel really disgusting about that because I was stealing my dad's toothbrush. And then I would go put it back and

Try not to think about it. And I also remember just having this intense longing for having sex because it was such a big thing that consumed my thoughts at the time. And I remember just like laying in bed, counting like how many years it might be until I get married so that I could have sex and just feeling like.

overwhelmed by sadness that I'm not going to be able to spend a lot of my life doing this thing that I really care about and that consumes my thoughts because I wanted to go to heaven and that sucks. And at the same time, sort of buried it and didn't talk to anybody about it until I got much older.

I found myself becoming quickly very disinterested by common things that I would see in porn or that I would read about online.

And I found myself becoming more interested in and really only able to get off on things that seemed to be more niche, which in turn made me feel disgusting every time that I would engage in that because it was so atypical, it seemed to me at the time.

I had a lot of boyfriends throughout middle school and high school. Like, I was always in different relationships, and I would basically do everything sexually with my boyfriends at that time except have sex. As long as I wasn't having sex before marriage, then I thought that I was good.

A lot of my experiences exploring sexuality with others when I was a teen were very boring and disinteresting to me. I would always be thinking about like the porn or erotica that I had read the night before. I wasn't really present for a lot of my sexual experiences yet. I thought there was like no way to bring up the things that I wanted to do with other people.

There was a period of time when I was in high school where I was really obsessed with male orgasm torture and ruined orgasms for men. My mom was reading Fifty Shades of Grey, and whenever she wasn't home, I would steal the books and read as much as I possibly could.

That kind of introduced to me the idea of punishment and pain, which I also found attractive because I liked the idea of if I wasn't acting in this ideal way that somebody wanted me to be, that that could be fixed with physical punishment.

rather than just feeling disgusted with myself or just like internalizing those feelings of not being good enough. I like the idea of being able to physically pay for that.

A lot of it centered around being controlled by somebody else, which I think connects to a lot of the perfectionism issues that I struggled with. It was very alluring to me to have somebody else be in control of what I do so I didn't feel as responsible for it.

When I was alone masturbating to the things that I was looking up, those feelings of disgust and shame were on me because I was the person that was choosing to engage with it. Whereas I would fantasize about giving that control to somebody else because then I wouldn't feel as responsible. I was just following orders.

I did self-harm when I was younger, and that was sort of my outlet of physically dealing with the pain when it would become too overwhelming. But there was a sense of playing with my self-control when I would get off when I was younger. I would do a lot of edging or ruining my own orgasms, which is like starting to orgasm but then stopping as soon as you start.

A lot of these behaviors with perfectionism and control kind of came to a head when I was in high school. Like my eating disorders became pretty bad and every day I was experiencing overwhelming depression and it got to a point where I knew that I couldn't deal with it anymore and that I needed help. And so I debated for months bringing up to my parents that I needed help with it.

Eventually, I got up the courage to open up to them about it and tell them what I had been experiencing for years. And it was just very quickly dismissed for money issues. It was treated like, how could you bring this financial burden onto our family?

When I would experience any sort of negative emotions, they thought that it reflected badly on them and the way they were raising me, which didn't make sense to them because they were providing me with everything I needed. So they were like, "We're doing great. There's no reason that you should be feeling these things." And I think that maybe they felt a sense of failure for me opening up to them that this is how I was feeling.

Their reaction just made me feel very defeated, and the issues continued throughout the rest of high school until I moved out.

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So I went to college and things got a lot better after I wasn't living with my parents anymore. So I felt like I could finally start to explore who I really was instead of having these great expectations put onto me. But I was still struggling with all of the same mental health issues that I was struggling with in high school.

When I got this sense of feeling a little bit better, I became really determined to work on my mental health. And so I joined a meditation and mindfulness club.

I met a bunch of hippies and I sort of marveled at all these people who were into meditation because a lot of them seemed genuinely happy and content with themselves and joining this meditation club really gave me this sense of hope that it was possible to be generally content with yourself

But at the same time, it made me feel worse that I wasn't because I was, again, like, what is wrong with me? Why am I not this way? Also, at this point, I had become pretty tired of Christianity. And after I met all these hippies, my idea of God kind of shifted from the Christian idea of God to this idea that God is manifested in, like, nature and life.

It helped me get around a lot of the judgmental aspects of Christianity. It allowed me to engage in a lot of the behaviors that I considered sinful before while still reducing a lot of the guilt that I felt because I still believed in a form of God. It had just shifted completely.

I thought that I was over a lot of these feelings of self-disgust. And instead of feeling this sense of perfectionism toward myself, it really shifted to the external world. I became vegan around that time, which kind of led me to caring about a lot of human and animal rights issues, which led me, of course, to the destruction of the environment.

I developed this obsession with climate change. All I would think about was climate change, and if I wasn't thinking about it, then I was researching it, and I became convinced that society was going to collapse at any moment.

And so my obsession with climate change kind of made me disgusted with everybody in general and just like the way that the world works kind of just gave me the sense of like disgust and hatred toward everybody. I wouldn't go get fast food with my friends because if I consumed any form of plastic that I had to throw away, I would feel disgusted about it for the rest of the day.

What was going to happen to that one piece of plastic because of my selfishness? I would go to the grocery store and I would think about then how many plastic bags just that one grocery store would go through in one day. How many plastic bags all grocery stores have used over time at this point and then how many thousands of years all those plastic bags will be here.

I would look at how much trash was on the side of an expressway and just want to crawl out of my skin, desperately wish that I wasn't a person, that I wasn't a human. Humans have done too much damage and are too far gone to really fix anything because this is just the way that everybody wants to be.

It seemed like the world was burning. And so I couldn't logically leave that train of thought because I could see the physical manifestations of this fear all around me all the time. I lost all hope of ever being content with myself. I didn't want to be stuck in this place of hatred and disgust.

I had a conversation with a friend and he was the first person who put it really bluntly to me that a lot of the disgust that I thought was external was actually a lot of selfishness and disgust with myself kind of masked as caring about these problems in the world. Because in reality, like me being nihilistic and bitter wasn't changing or helping anything. All that it was doing was

making myself miserable and it seems like it was just me finding another way to keep feeling that disgust when I couldn't feel it with myself anymore. It was essentially the same problem that I had been having throughout my entire life. It just seemed out of my control and realizing that my disgust issues weren't as external as I thought and a lot of them were actually in my control, which made it a lot more manageable.

So around the same time I discovered the kink community, I always just thought it was fantasy and I never realized that there's a larger community surrounding it of people who actually partake in it. So similar to the way I became obsessed with like climate change, a more like positive obsession during this time was with kink and BDSM.

I started consuming everything I could just to learn more about BDSM and the lifestyle. And so I started listening to this podcast called Off the Cuffs just to kind of educate myself more about kink and

And through this podcast, I learned that people will often take their negative experiences or negative emotions and sort of turn them into positive ones through playing with them in kink and reclaiming a lot of like fears or reclaiming traumatic experiences through recreating them in a way that they can control.

Probably about a year after I started listening to that podcast, one of the podcast hosts put up a question box on his Instagram story. That was like a flirt with me question box. I didn't know what to say, but I told him that he had a nice voice. And I asked him if he had ever considered making audio porn because I thought that he would have a good voice for it.

He decided to make me an audio porn after I had mentioned that, and I loved it. And so I decided to make a video which was centered around feet and socks and dirty socks and spitting and sent it to him. And that really got us into delving deeper into disgusting things that turn us on.

I wasn't actively at this point trying to work through my feelings of disgust through kink. It was more so for the first time it felt completely non-judgmental.

I feel like a lot of things that are disgusting or considered gross within kink take the form of degradation or humiliation, which wasn't so much my interest or his interest. It was more so a lot of talk about used clothing and dirty socks because I have a big interest in socks and so does he. We

We started getting into other things like food swapping and candy swapping, like chewing up food and then spitting it into the other person's mouth. It goes kind of two ways. We'll do it kind of sweetly like, "Oh, here's this thing that I chewed for you." Or it can be, "This is like your meal for the day is this chewed food." Or like, "I'm going to spit water into your mouth and like that's the only water you can have."

We're also both interested in pretty much every bodily fluid. When we started dating and were long distance, one of the first things I sent him was he asked me for like a jar of my spit. And so I spent two days filling this jar of spit that I ended up mailing to him. We also do a lot with like

smoking and ashes. So he would have me go smoke however many cigarettes over the weekend and I would have to eat candy that I had licked and covered in them, put the ashes in my mouth and spit and rub them on my body. So I would just be disgusting and then have to get off like that.

We do a lot of gagging and vomiting related play. Like when we were long distance, he would have me fuck myself in the face with like used panties. And now that we're in person, we do a lot with gagging with different toys or like forcing me to throw up, which is really nice. Yeah.

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The sexual play surrounding gagging and vomiting can kind of go two ways. When it's more so gagging focused, it's a lot of the time really funny and playful. When it comes to forced vomiting, a lot of that has a completely different tone where it's a lot more serious and

So like I said, we both have this pretty big interest in like dirty socks. So he'll wear socks for like a week or something and then put one of the socks on his dick and I'll have to give him like a sock blow job, which of course makes me gag a lot because it's like a rough sock going down my throat.

That will lead into, I guess, regular like face fucking where like I'm not really in control of like giving oral sex, but he's just kind of doing what he wants to me. And then there's this fun element of I'll think that it's over once the throwing up happens. And then it's like, oh, like you thought that that was going to be the end. And then, yeah, we'll keep going with that.

One like kind of sweet thing is after a scene with vomiting or we've also done things where he's pissed inside of me and every time we do something like that that makes a big mess of bodily fluids after the scene is over we'll both just kind of like lay and cuddle in the mess that we made and it's just this really nice feeling of accepting this thing that we just did.

Of course we clean up, of course, like we're not disgusting all the time, but it's nice to not just try to like hide it immediately after we're done or like we have to like get rid of this like gross thing that we did right now. It's nice to just kind of lay in that for a while instead of feeling like it is this gross weird thing. Well it's definitely weird still but it's like this comforting feeling.

We just enjoy the filth and disgust of doing the thing and doing that thing together. There's no sort of negative emotions or feelings surrounding that. Our main interest more so lies in just enjoying and having fun with how gross it is. It's definitely...

more so a celebration of the disgusting things that we're interested in rather than feeling like we need to be punished or degraded for those things. So I think that the most powerful gross play thing that we do for me is he admitted being interested in doing like human toilet paper play.

where essentially he would be responsible for like cleaning somebody after they piss or cleaning somebody after they shit. And I think that that was something that he's always been interested in, but never thought that he would want to realistically do with another person. But when he told me about that, my response was, that's gross. I would totally do that with you.

So we both decided that we would try out the human toilet paper. I wanted it to be sort of this drawn out like training process, I guess, where he would like move up different levels essentially to eventually like fully being my toilet paper.

Since we were long distance, I would make these piss papers or spit papers for him. And they essentially kind of looked like little like acid tabs, but with like bodily fluids on them. And I would send them to him and just have him periodically suck on them or eat them throughout the day or while we were like having a Skype date.

And then I had plans to visit him for the first time. I started this sort of buildup where every time he would eat the papers with my piss on them, I would kind of tease about how, like, if he kept doing a good job with that, then eventually when I saw him, he would be able to, like, clean my pee after I went to the bathroom when I visited him.

There was always this thing in the background where we both knew that I would want him to lick my asshole clean eventually. And that was, I think, really exciting and a big deal for both of us because we had both done things with pee with other people in the past. But I feel like licking somebody's shit is kind of, even in the kink community, that's something that's often taboo and that people really don't want anything to do with.

And it was a big deal for him because that was something that he always wanted to do, but never really felt right doing with anybody else. So there was a lot of anticipation for that. And so we continued with the papers. And then I kind of teased that like the next time I visited him, if he kept doing a good job with the papers, then I would let him lick my asshole clean after I shit the next time that I saw him.

I visited him again, and we built up to doing that.

It just sounds so weird to describe it as a romantic and very sweet and connective experience. It just seems ridiculous and disgusting. But it was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life and one of the most important experiences of my life because I felt like for the first time I was finally completely embracing this feeling of disgust that's haunted me throughout my entire life.

And for the first time, I was engaging with that feeling in a positive way, a loving and connective way. So I never thought that I would make peace with that feeling for myself, let alone be able to connect with another person on such a deep level. Like I thought that it was going to be my enemy throughout my entire life.

I realize that the things that I'm doing are objectively disgusting, but I don't find them to be disgusting in ways that most people would. For example, like,

I like the feeling of being forced to throw up or like being forced to throw up and having it like put back into my mouth. Whereas when I was younger, something like that would make me feel really fucked up and weird. Now that's kind of what gets me off about it.

I actually think that the objectively disgusting behaviors that I partake in aren't really that at all. I think that they're meaningful and connective and powerful. It's important to me that we both see it as this thing that we're celebrating and something that we are aware is objectively gross but are enjoying anyways.

People who are outside of the kink community often don't understand the appeal of giving up control to somebody else.

I think a lot of people see it as the opposite of empowerment. But for me, negotiating and planning this thing where I'm going to give control to somebody gives me a lot more agency rather than being in a church environment where I have no say in what I can and can't do.

So I used to experience this intense disgust about all of these things that were completely out of my control, like my parents' expectations or climate change or capitalism. Just all these things that I felt like I was going to be stuck with for the rest of my life because there was nothing much that I could do about them.

That emotion is going to be a part of my life no matter what I do, but it's possible for me to decide what's disgusting for myself. That doesn't have to be something that's placed on me by other people. Once I was able to be in control of what I decide is disgusting instead of having that placed on me, that's what helped me become friends with the feeling.

Choosing to trust somebody to have control over you is a lot more empowering than blindly following something with a rigid set of rules or having no say in the control that's being placed on you. I think it's a lot more freeing to willingly give that up to somebody.

The disgust that I felt with both myself and people in the external world felt like an enemy because it was completely out of my control. There was nothing much that I could do about it. But once I was able to decide for myself what I consider disgusting and then ultimately decide that things that I do that objectively seem disgusting are actually meaningful and add a lot of value to my life,

I think that acting out in scenes a lot of the things that I used to find repulsive or disgusting, specifically with like somebody licking my shit, I think being able to find beauty and meaning in that has really shown me that you can find beauty in any negative emotion that you're experiencing.

I think that we're taught that negative emotions are that they're negative emotions. And we're taught that you don't want to have negative emotions or that it's not right to have these feelings.

There are going to be emotions that are going to be there whether you like it or not, and there's not much you can do to just get rid of them. But this whole experience taught me the value of becoming aware of the main emotion that dominates your life. If you're aware that you have this emotion that's dominating you, I think it's really powerful to...

Figure out a method of engaging with that emotion in a way that's beneficial to you instead of rejecting it and making it your enemy. I think that fighting those emotions really drives them in deeper.

For me, I wasn't even aware that that was something that was dominating my life. And once I was able to become aware of that, then I was able to work on accepting it and work on incorporating it into my life in a way

I think you can make friends with any sort of negative feeling that's dominating your life. There's always a way to find the good in it, and I think that kink is a good way to figure that out because a lot of kink is about embracing negativity or finding ways that you can play with negativity in a way that's beneficial.

It's like the older I get, the more I realize the exact opposite of what I grew up learning is what I'm interested in, which I think I kind of knew the entire time, which is why I always felt fake whenever I would have interactions with people trying to be how everybody else was when that wasn't really me.

Today's episode featured Gwen. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram at bydaily underscore. That's B-I-D-A-I-L-Y underscore. She is currently the booking manager for the Off the Cuffs podcast, hosted by Dick Wound and Minimus Maximus. She can also be emailed at bookingoffthecuffs at gmail.com.

From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening. If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the Wondery app, or wherever you're listening right now. You can also join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app to listen ad-free. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our shows for free.

I'm your host, Witt Misseldein. Today's episode was produced by me and Andrew Waits, with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Ellen Westberg. The intro music features the song Illabi by Tipper. You can join the This Is Actually Happening community on the discussion group on Facebook, or at Actually Happening on Instagram. And as always, you can support the show by going to patreon.com slash happening, or by visiting the shop at actuallyhappeningstore.com. WITNESSELDEIN

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