Saliva marking
Social convention surrounds saliva with prohibitions that are among those most reflexively maintained: the idea of receiving someone's spit is associated, in the ordinary social world, with contempt and aggression. Spitting Play works with exactly this weight, the charge that social meaning carries, and deliberately uses it to produce a specific psychological experience.
The practice is intimate in a way disproportionate to its physical simplicity. Saliva is a fluid that is both entirely ordinary and, in this context, loaded with meaning.
Receiving it on the face, in the mouth, on the skin is an experience that the body processes partly through its actual physical qualities and partly through the constructed meaning it carries: warmth, the specificity of origin, the impossibility of the social distance that usually separates people's bodies in this way.
For the recipient, the experience typically includes a brief moment of social reflex, the automatic response to something the culture has marked as transgressive, and then, when that response is held rather than acted upon, a transition to something else. Transgression, directly experienced, is revealed as a construction.
The actual physical experience is warm, intimate, specific. What culture has said about it and what it actually is are not the same thing.
The clarity that comes from discovering this, from finding that the social charge around something dissolves when directly encountered, is one of the most interesting gifts that practices like this offer. The prohibitions that govern our physical interactions are not inherent to the body; they are learned. Encountering them directly, choosing to go through them within a framework of genuine consent, produces a specific form of knowledge about where those prohibitions actually reside.
