All I want for Christmas is… to not be triggered. The festive season is full of fun, friends and family—big or small, in the same room or on Zoom. But there’s a fourth ‘f’ that I, like many others, absolutely dread around this time of year: food. You can’t celebrate Christmas without a hefty Christmas dinner. Food, be it rows of mince pies, crispy roast potatoes drowned in delicious gravy or sticky figgy pudding, is as much part of the festive cheer as the carols and binge-watching Home Alone. But the Christmas season comes with its own dark side, one that contains a myriad of issues some of us seem to be unaware of. It’s time we discuss harmful diet talk around the holidays, and, more importantly, how to avoid it.

‘Tis the season to be jolly, but some people have a hard time finding their inner cheer when they are continuously triggered by talk about weight and diets. Much like being more considerate of sober people, we need to be careful of the ones that may be dealing with an eating disorder. We all know how toxic body standards like the bikini bridge and the thigh gap trickle their way into our insecurities via social media. Between BBLs becoming all the rage and slimming drugs like Apetamin being peddled by influencers, there’s almost nowhere to turn in order to feel comfortable and confident in our own skin.

What’s more insidious is what happens when we think we can switch our phones off and head into the no man’s land of the real world. Declawing the internet’s hold on us is already hard as it is, so it’s even harder to accept that the offscreen world isn’t that much different from its digital counterpart.

You probably already know it too, which is why so many of us dread the family gatherings around the dinner table—the perfect segway to triggering talk around food and weight. Face to face, the festive season can bring up a lot of comments about weight loss, weight gain as well as sly comments suggesting to skip dessert. It’s not even just others we have to be cautious of, but ourselves too. Self-deprecating jokes—like rushing to the Turkey Trot to shave off the added pounds of the festive feast—are not uncommon either. For most of us, a comment on someone ‘looking good’ is genuine and a way to compliment them. However, there’s a thin line between picking up on the effects of someone’s newfound gym regimen and making people and those around them focus on physical appearance, especially weight.

For Mic, writer Melissa Pandika wrote about the “palm-sized portions” she found herself limited to in accordance with the glowing praise she received for losing weight. Spotting the harm in encouraging disordered eating usually surrounds conditions like anorexia and bulimia. However, there are also issues surrounding fitness and wellness culture pushing orthorexia—a condition that has an ironically unhealthy obsession with ‘health’ foods. ‘Clean eating’ and other terms have simply put a mask on the same problematic ideas about weight—which are entirely focused on the outside rather than what’s within.

This headed-hydra of diet culture has reappeared in conversations on body image, and it only seems to culminate around Christmas time. Lockdown hasn’t made any of this easier, in fact, there appears to be more pressure—now, more than ever—to speedily achieve our ‘glow ups’ and show off the end result around a roast turkey. Not only that but almost two years of social isolation and distancing is bound to take a toll on our body image—the long-term impact of which has yet to be seen.

Coming from a non-white background can also make it even trickier to avoid conversations on food. It’s an integral part of life for me as a black person from an incredibly culturally rich Caribbean background and family. Food is everywhere! In my own experience, growing up on the skinnier side, food has always been a sore spot in conversations that were often cutting and direct. Comments like “you need to put on weight” or “you must be anorexic”—accompanied with a deadpan tone—are unfortunately delivered far too often. Such concern is also built on unfounded beliefs surrounding eating disorders and how they can first be noticed within someone’s habits.

Now that we’ve understood what many of us go through during the holidays, it’s time to address the culprits of such conversations and how they can do better. How we can all do better to make our loved ones feel safe and comfortable. Here are some dos and don’ts of dinner table etiquette around diet talk.

Erring on the side of caution doesn’t mean you have to avoid talking about health altogether. If someone is excited about sharing their weight journey with you, congratulate them on their progress and ask them about how it’s going. Let them guide the conversation and share only what they are willing to and comfortable with.

We pick up on changes in appearance, and naturally, we want to say something about them. Sometimes, this can come across as concern and a genuine want to help, but that isn’t necessarily the way to go. Especially in front of those nearest and dearest to whom you’re questioning. Learn to be careful when having these conversations and be considerate of the comments you make out loud. Some people may not be as comfortable talking in public about their bodies. It’s a common perception that asking about a person’s finances is impolite, maybe it’s time we follow that very same thinking when it comes to the weight conversation—let’s just keep the word ‘pounds’ out of our mouths, shall we? Scale or sterling.

We know that body image can be greatly shaped by those around us, be it intentional or not, they stick with us. And now we know that even the small act of sucking in your stomach can turn into a habit with dire consequences—I think it’s best to avoid pointing out changes in someone’s body so loudly that aliens in space can hear you.

If you do spot changes that concern you (ones based on health and not just appearance) maybe take the person to the side and offer them an ear to really get a better sense of what might be going on.

On the receiving end of such commentary, it can be easy to blow up or retreat into your safety shell of silence, praying for the night to be over—trust me, we’ve all been there. It can be incredibly overwhelming to even try and steer the conversation to something else. In an interview with Pandika for Mic, Chicago-based psychologist Christy Querol explained how to navigate the harmful food and diet talk that can emerge during the holidays. Querol specialises in challenges related to body image. In the interview, she touched on how these conversations can look different in communities of colour than they do in white communities. Her own experience as a member of the Latinx community informed her take that “the talk is more direct.”

“It’s not as sugar-coated,” she said. It’s certainly not uncommon to hear questions like ‘Are you sure you want to eat that?’ or to seek gratification and validation by sharing updates about your weight loss or gain journey. Querol even pointed out that family members and friends may even talk about changes in another family member’s weight before or after a get-together—something I always feel guilty for being privy to and unable to ignore.

Although it would be daft of me to make assumptions about all people of colour, as a black person who, like I previously mentioned, is rather on the skinnier side, I can definitely relate. And while it is nowhere near the same depths as the fatphobia those bigger than me experience, there is still the archaic notion that defines anyone on the skinnier end of the spectrum as being ‘sickly’. I have shed my share of real tears at such comments, regardless of whether they were well-intentioned ones from people who are worried about me or my weight. I’ve even had ‘jokes’ from family members at my expense asking if I should be hospitalised for my weight and appearance.

For those on the other end of the spectrum—particularly for those who fall prey to fatphobia rampant in their homes and families—there are added layers of complexity to their emotional abuse. Sadly, body shaming is all too common in a lot of minority households, especially for those who do not fit the exact beauty standard that is often eurocentric and revolves around white thin women. Though the petite feminine ideal exists, it is a particular kind of vision peddled by the Kardashian-Jenner family which exacts its harshest glare on black women.

Querol believes that the conversations exerting this sense of ownership might be due to a misunderstanding of boundaries. They might also see talking about family members’ bodies as normal. Being kind to yourself means you have a right to defend your space as well as your inner peace. Establishing healthy boundaries and firmly saying you don’t wish to talk about your body can be affirming and incredibly helpful to keeping you happy.

It can be tough, but actively choosing to love yourself is showing up for yourself even when you don’t want to. Take opportunities to love your body and feel confident in it—sport that outfit you hesitantly bought for the occasion. Feeling good about yourself internally may not happen overnight but feeling comfortable is surely not far away if you wear what you want to.

You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. That is the biggest takeaway of all. At no point do you have to stomach anything other than dessert. If you find yourself backed into a corner conversation-wise, go grab some water, take a walk or even help yourself to a second serving. Even if it’s for two seconds, people will most likely move on if you cut things short. It can be a quick, easy way to come up for some air and come back more collected and calm. It might even give you the chance to flip the script and talk about something else.

One final thing for good luck: be kind, to everyone. That could be the little cousin that’s slowly retreating inwards under fire, the aunt who just wanted to feel confident in her fabulous festive fit, or, here’s a shocker—yourself. Self-talk and kind words in these scenarios are crucial. Learning how to speak nicely to yourself and others and refusing to regurgitate all the negatives is hard, but it’s definitely worth it. Maybe interject a compliment during dinner and uplift someone else. For yourself, try by practising in the mirror (or your head if you can’t get to one, just make it look like you’re thinking real hard about what to eat) and switch the negative words for more positive ones.

And remember, if you tend to struggle with the holiday season for this very reason, you are much more than just your physical appearance and shouldn’t be made to feel like that’s the only thing that matters when it comes to celebrating your time with family and friends.

“I like to get it inside the holes,” was the last anyone heard from Jason Derulo as he poured condensed milk onto a stack of sugar-glazed doughnuts and topped it off with several bars of Hershey’s Cookies ‘n’ Creme, Snickers and Kit Kat. More condensed milk follows, filmed from an ant’s eye view of the entire crime scene. A whole box of ‘Super moist French vanilla’ cake mix is then sifted with bricks of butter, before the dessert—also synonymous with ‘diabetes on a platter’—makes its way into the oven.

By the time Derulo cools his creation by squeezing generous amounts of chocolate and caramel syrup on top of it, eyebrows are raised—not only about the man’s blood sugar levels but a plethora of messy food videos that involve mixing questionable ingredients in the gooiest way possible, always on pristine-white kitchen counters.

@bananalovesyoutoo

wait...wut? #fyp #foryou #foryourpage #mayo #food #gross #ifound #viral #tiktok #unexpected

♬ original sound - Anna Rothfuss

The videos are all similar. A perfectly manicured woman in her early 30s stands in an upscale kitchen, housing everything from cake frostings and ground beef to power drills and shaving razors. Filmed by an impatient camera person who occasionally bursts out comments of approval and curiosity, the supposed ‘chef’ illustrates food hacks crazy enough to scare Troom Troom out of its wits. ‘But how?’ I hear you ask. Well, by mixing everything I just mentioned—plus constant narration, minus the spoons.

Prego sauce is slathered onto kitchen countertops, mac ‘n’ cheese is mixed with bare hands, bread slices are frosted with ice cream—again with bare hands on a kitchen countertop to amplify the mess—before they’re topped with breakfast cereal. On another side of TikTok, hotdogs are being filled with mayonnaise narrated with “shove it in the hole and fill it up,” Oreo towers are doused in peanut butter and Nutella coupled with questionable lip biting and ‘oh yeah’-s while Zebra cakes are mounted on a waffle iron with dripping caramel syrup and breathy moans of “almost there.” Oh, and let’s not forget staged cake smashes and bare hands stuck into peanut butter jars.

At this point, people are too confused by what they’re looking at to scroll away. Deep inside, you know why they’re doing it but find it hard to understand exactly why.

@taylormakesvideos

Wellp 🤦🏻‍♀️😭 #simplerecipes #foodtiktok #candy #fyp

♬ original sound - Taylor Watson

Originating on Facebook, such videos typically appear on TikTok and Twitter before going viral on every subsequent platform it visits. Days after the trend gripped our FYPs, several TikTok users called out these ‘food hacks’ for their sexual undertones. “You guys know these weird Facebook videos, right? Where the girl is always nicely manicured and she’s always playing with food and it gets everywhere?” TikToker Alli Baggett voiced our collective suspicions in a video, currently standing at 1.9 million views. “I’ve seen some where they are literally sticking their whole hand in a jar of frosting to ice a cake. I’m fully convinced—and you cannot convince me otherwise—that these videos fulfill a very specific fetish.”

Months later, Insider concluded Derulo’s videos as the classic example of a specific food kink. Enter the wet and messy world of ‘sploshing’, an erotic food play where participants “spray, drip, rub, mush, consume or cover each other in foods of different flavours and textures.” In a bid to break down the community behind this TikTok trend and get their perspective on it, Screen Shot sat down with several enthusiasts and interviewed Dr. Susan Block, also known as Dr. Suzy, a Los Angeles-based sex therapist and author of Splosh ‘n’ Art Magazine, who used to host sploshing parties before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Coined and popularised by British fetish magazine Splosh!, sploshing is a form of erotic food play wherein participants seek arousal by slathering various substances onto naked skin, face or clothing. Interchangeable with the Wet And Messy fetish (WAM), the term ‘sploshing’ is majorly preferred in the UK and exclusively includes the use of food—compared to other substances like water, mud or baby oil in the former.

The mere presence of food, however, does not make it a sploshing activity. “Sploshing is not using vegetables as dildos,” writes author Wamlanta, who was kind enough to send me a digital copy of his book SPLAT! An Introduction to Sploshing and Food Play. “Perhaps looking seductive while shopping for produce is a good way to communicate your desires to your fellow shoppers, but it certainly doesn’t encourage any wet and messy activity.” Wamlanta additionally noted how bodily fluids are generally not welcome under the WAM umbrella. The fetish is also not about using a bit of whipped cream and chocolate to ‘spice up’ the bedroom. It’s about using these same treats, but in copious amounts.

In my chat with Dr. Suzy, the sex therapist highlighted how sploshing can involve different types of BDSM—a concept she terms ‘50 Shades of Splosh’—wherein sploshers dominate sploshees with their consent of course. This spin-off includes “play-forcing their partners to eat unappetising combos like hot peppers and ice cream or raw eggs and granola, pouring buckets of spaghetti on their heads, sticking cucumbers (nature’s own dildos!) or even handfuls of Hershey’s kisses into their orifices, allowing sploshees to safely feel weird, tickled, humiliated and turned on.”

Other spin-offs are synonymous with free-for-all splosh parties, “a food and sex orgy where people smear food all over each other and lick it off lingams or out of yonis.” Dr. Suzy summed up this concept as ‘eating while eating’. “It could be dignified and elegant, like eating sushi off of a naked body in a fancy restaurant, or sweetly silly like giving a candy-coated blowjob,” she explained, adding how a birthday sploshing party might involve sitting on your own birthday cake and letting your partner(s) gobble it up off your butt.

According to the therapist, some splosh lovers also create ‘splosh art’, enjoying the somewhat exhibitionistic performance of sploshing for their ‘audience’. This is often done by documenting, videotaping and photographing their explorations for the benefit of splosh art connoisseurs, voyeurs, fetishists and just everyday people that go both “Wow! I want to do that” or “Yuck! I’d never do that.” Dr. Suzy links the latter reaction to the fact that one person’s idea of ‘erotic’ is another’s idea of ‘disgusting’. “The ‘yuck factor’ is an important aspect of sploshing, even for those of us who love it,” she added. “Sometimes, things that gross us out also arouses us. In the right context, of course.”

In addition to parties and art, the therapist also broke down the concept of a ‘sploshgasm’, which, you guessed it, refers to having an orgasm while sploshing. Varying in degrees, a sploshgasm can be achieved with a partner’s hand, tongue or even with the food used in the process. In the latter case, whipped cream or peanut butter—the smooth kind, please—often acts as a lubricant or stimulant while oblong fruits and vegetables, such as squash and bananas, may be used as sex toys. “Though you can use a regular vibrator—or just have sex or masturbate while sploshing—and have yourself a sploshgasm, just make sure you don’t get molasses in your battery pack,” Dr. Suzy advised.

At times, however, a sploshgasm isn’t a real physical orgasm for the sploshee as much as it’s a visual metaphor for the entire concept. “As in spraying cream in someone’s mouth or all over his or her chest (with the right boob-splosh it could even look like lactation or a pearl-necklace, depending on your pleasure), or dribbling coconut milk over a nice round bottom,” the therapist added, explaining how this is especially satisfying for a splosh voyeur because the milk looks like a ‘fantasy ejaculation’—which, in turn, has the potential of stimulating a real ejaculation in the viewer.

Be it ovaphilia or eproctophilia, niche fetishes mostly have a trigger that can be traced back in time to events that are often overlooked. In order to answer the burning question of ‘why sploshing?’ I visited r/WetAndMessy, a subreddit dedicated to the umbrella fetish which sploshing is a major part of. When asked about the members’ initiation into the fetish through an open call, I unearthed a common thread running throughout the answers: messy scenarios depicted in children’s television shows.

“It started with Nickelodeon shows when I was younger,” a user admitted. “And at some point, I started to get aroused by the thought of being the victim of the sliming or pieing—which escalated to dreams and fantasies about incorporating that desire into sex.” Another user credited her initiation to Double Dare, an 80s’ game show for kids, along with anything live-action on Nickelodeon which always had girls getting slimed. “I wanted to be one of those girls!” she exclaimed. “When some teenagers have the house to themselves, they sneak into their parents’ liquor cabinet. I’d raid the refrigerator and spray chocolate sauce or whipped cream into my panties or down my shirt. Once I got naked and poured a whole jar of spaghetti sauce over my head! I was hooked early.”

Other television programmes mentioned by splosh lovers included the BBC entertainment series Noel’s House Party and British children’s game show Get Your Own Back. An Axe body spray commercial on YouTube is also among the mix. In his book based on the community, Wamlanta noted how at some point in our youth, when our perverted brain either sees or even recalls these shows again, a subconscious switch is flipped. “Anecdotally, in the same way it’s awkward when nudity pops up on TV when your parents are in the room, I recall being embarrassed when someone was slimed. I didn’t realise it back then, but hindsight can reveal lots of things,” the author wrote.

Among the splosh enthusiasts was a Redditor who highlighted their arousal upon hearing about people swimming in clothes or falling in mud, later scrolling through Wikipedia’s list of paraphilias to find the haven. “Back in 1996, when I was 11 years old, I started having sexual fantasies about a girl I liked. But the fantasies were always me covering her—or being covered by her—in things such as yogurt, custard, strawberry jam and more,” another Reddit user mentioned. Although nothing ever came of the fantasies, it wasn’t until the user was 18 that they started an online quest to find others interested in the same.

“After looking for the sort of food stuff I was into for days, I found nothing. So I gave up searching for the things that specifically piqued my interest and instead looked up ‘mud wrestling’,” the enthusiast continued. It was then that they discovered websites like Messy Fun. “It was so hard to find the community, especially before I knew it had names such as WAM and sploshing. But once I discovered all of this, I realised I wasn’t alone!”

Now that we’ve traced the forms, degrees and initiations of sploshing, it’s time to hop onto the scientific side of things. What makes this fetish so appealing to its enthusiasts? Is it the physical factors of the food involved—such as taste, colour, texture and temperature—or is it coupled with psychological factors looping back to their childhood? Additionally, does the food involved have to be ‘messy’ for its appeal? And if so, what are the typical edibles preferred by members of the community?

A once-over of all the responses concludes that the fetish’s appeal majorly lies in its physical aspects, ranging from texture and smell to deprivations. “It just feels nice to have something wet and smooth against your skin, particularly when it runs down your body,” one user admitted, while another explained the visual appeal in terms of substances soaking or staining the clothes. “I also think about the tactile element of the clothes becoming heavier, clingier and stickier,” they added. Others highlighted how this physical appeal falls on a huge spectrum with its participants having specific tastes.

“Many people are into synthetic gunge or slime, so it doesn’t even have to be food,” a splosher explained. “For me, it has to be food and ideally not raw ingredients that ‘maximise’ the messiness like cake batter.” According to the Redditor, part of the appeal also lies in the naughtiness of wasting food and destroying prepared desserts like cakes. However, much of it is based on how these substances look on someone they find attractive. Colour of the treats also plays an important role in the fetish for some. “Contrast in colours are important,” an enthusiast said, outlining how custard should go on brunettes while chocolate sauce is preferred for blondes.

On a psychological note, the community agrees on the fact that sex is messy. “We all produce some kind of warm, sticky fluid when we get off—and being covered head to toe in warm, sticky fluid is just an extreme version of that feeling.”

When asked about her sexpert take on these terms, Dr. Suzy reminded me of the ‘don’t play with your food!’ phase of our childhood. “To a great degree, splosh psychology all goes back to mom, dad or whatever authority figure who almost undoubtedly reprimanded you as soon as you were old enough to eat,” she said. The therapist explained how babies and toddlers love to play with food, at times more than eating it. But it does make a mess which someone other than you has to clean up, so parents teach you not to play with your food—every day at breakfast and every evening at dinner.

“You learn that if you continue to play with your food and make a mess, you will never be invited to dine at the distinguished table of adulthood. Thus, you are trained to use forks, spoons, plates and napkins for the good of both your long-suffering parents and human civilization,” she continued, describing how you then learn to repress this basic desire to play with your food. This is how the activity eventually evolves into a taboo. “That’s what makes sploshing so deliciously transgressive. So naughty and so nice. You are not supposed to play with your food, but you do when you splosh, and it’s awesome.”

When it comes to preferred edibles, most of the sploshers came up at a loss of words to define a ‘clean’ food. “It’s not a mess fetish if you’re not messy,” one reminded me. The lengthy shopping list of sploshers thereby includes everything from marshmallow fluff, custard, pies, peanut butter, jelly and syrup. This list, however, is subjective—with the spectrum including some who don’t put much thought into this specific element unless it concerns their partner.

Now, it’s finally time to address the elephant in the room: TikTok’s recent obsession with manicured women and messy food hacks. In previous investigations conducted by Insider and InsideHook, the publications deemed such videos as “fetish content hiding in plain sight.” Considering all the knowledge we’ve gathered on the entire community so far, it’s easy to see how certain videos—like the one with the staged cake smashes and bare hands being stuck into peanut butter or mayonnaise jars when the creator could have conveniently used spoons—appeal to the fetish.

To get Dr. Suzy’s views on these claims, I subjected her to a few of these videos (one where a lady oils a hotdog before blowing into a hole drilled inside a pickle, the infamous taco-making video on a marbled counter and, obviously, the dripping Zebra cake one). “You don’t have to be a sexologist or splosh enthusiast to know that a hot dog is phallically shaped—especially looking like a penis when you rub it like that—and that messiness is sexy when someone you find sexy makes a mess!” Dr. Suzy started.

You thought the spaghetti prego video was bad? Wait until you see the taco vid: pic.twitter.com/jArTIS7gNN

— ZaxPrefersTV (@zaxptv) May 11, 2021

She also opened up a new perspective into the similarities between two of our most basic animal drives: food and sex. “Isn’t it funny how the moans of gastronomic enjoyment can be so similar to the moans of sex?” According to the therapist, almost everyone likes both food and sex, usually separately, but they are still common pleasures. “In a very controlled and civilised way, we combine food and sex when we share a romantic dinner with kisses in between courses, when we feed each other grapes, or when we use a little whipped cream or honey to make oral sex tastier,” she said, adding how such TikTokers are playing on all of these juxtapositions, partly because showing sex itself is forbidden on the platform, given its gen Z-centric userbase. “But food videos of all kinds are no problem. So, lots of people are getting sexy with food in a bouillabaisse of ways.”

In order to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, I asked several sploshers about their thoughts on this side of TikTok. The responses were mixed, looping back to the ‘spectrum’ aspect of the entire fetish. For some, messy kitchen counters, peanut butter hands and dripping salted caramel syrups are a huge turn on. “The sounds and moans help things,” one enthusiast admitted. While some blatantly disagreed with being aroused by such content—highlighting how the creator isn’t really getting themselves messy apart from their hands—some quickly noted Rule 34 of the internet coming into play with the trend, while others speculated that celebrities like Katy Perry are churning such fetishistic content in plain sight.

“There are lots of [videos] of her getting messy in various ways online,” a user noted. “Everything from a paint party she had for a birthday, jumping into a giant cake on a live show, taking a self-pie in the face in one of her music videos and behind the scenes to recently posting a pie fight she had with many people on Instagram.”

Apart from the ‘Bon Appétit’ artist, another splosher diverted my attention to the gratuitous mud-wrestling scene in the 1999 film adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream—categorising it as WAM in plain sight. Although some of the members agreed to see how these TikToks appeal to certain participants, they highlighted how their appeal is also subjective and more explicitly tied to porn. “If a woman receives a pie to the face on TV and I’m aroused by it, has she sploshed? No. If she did this while filming porn, then yes,” a Redditor said, while another added how these videos seem like a waste of good food for the most part—instead focusing more on the coverage and views they can gather.

This brings us to the next burning question, do these TikTokers create such videos despite knowing their fetishistic undertones? If so, do they purposely—I know, who are we kidding?—enhance their yummy moans and eye rolls of delight? “All of the videos in question here indicate that these TikTokers are aware they are being sexier, whether or not they know the word ‘splosh’,” Dr. Suzy said. However, she acknowledged the presence of some cooking videos that aren’t as intentional, but also arouse splosh fetishists. “It might be just because they’re sexy people handling food or they might inadvertently get messy. It’s all out there.”

Before labelling the trend’s appeal to sploshers as ‘in the eye of the beholder’, it’s important to note how such videos are here to stay, whether you like them a bit too much or not. So stay tuned for more cake batter being wiped off counters, cheese holes being filled with breathy ‘fill it up, yeah’s and hamburger buns stuffed into underwear to whip up make-shift diapers.

And if all of this has piqued your curiosity and you’re looking to dip your toes into the messy waters, here’s what Dr. Suzy had to say. “Spontaneity is the spice of sploshing, but try to have all necessary ingredients and equipment (including cleanups so you don’t run around your house dripping chocolate sauce while looking for a mop) ready before you start making a mess.” And if you’re looking to experiment with one partner or thirty, make sure all participants are consenting adults on the same page.

“The most important ingredient, of course, is the food. I tend to go for sweet, creamy and saucy stuff but I know sploshers who have a marvellous time dumping pots of spaghetti or bowls of guacamole on each other’s heads,” Dr. Suzy continued. She further issued cautions about hot sauce getting into a sploshee’s eye. This is where clear plastic wraparound goggles come in handy. A blindfold can also double up as a shield while fostering an air of visual mystery.

The therapist also listed other accessories to incorporate into sploshing sessions—including squeezy bottles, tarp, saran wrap, cameras (unless you’re a closeted sploshing fetishist), water and garbage pail. As for the advice from the community itself, shouting from the welcoming gates to their haven, “Go for it! Get one of those squeezy bottles of chocolate syrup and spray it all over your face. Pour a jar of strawberry jam down your pants and leave it there all afternoon. Bake a cake with a ton of frosting, just so you can smoosh your face on it and grind your bare booty into it.” And if you’re not horny after all that, then maybe sploshing isn’t for you. But like with anything you are introduced to, you won’t know until you try it…