TikTok: What Is Urophilia? Gen Z Fetish Humor About Getting Peed On

As a Millennial who spends an inordinate amount of time scrolling through TikTok, I am often approached by my colleagues in muted, slightly embarrassed tones to explain or comment on various Gen Z ephemera. Usually there is a minimum of sociocultural context that I can provide, which mainly boils down to explaining who Addison Rae is or why they shouldn’t be offended by jokes about skinny jeans and side parts or whatever bullying Lin-Manuel Miranda is like makes fun. But recently one of my best friends texted me with a question that left me speechless.

“I got a lot of TikToks from girls talking / joking about wanting to be peed,” he asked me. “Is that a thing?” He then added a number of TikToks of various attractive young women, all united by their fervent desire to micturate themselves. There was a POV video in which a girl smiled mischievously after losing a star contest that the loser peed on. There was a video titled, “If you take your boyfriend to the beach and” accidentally “gets stung by a jellyfish,” said one woman, dramatically lip-synching, “I won. Exactly as planned ”(in fact, the vast majority of the videos under this audio are pee geared).

It seemed like my friend accidentally came across PissTok, a segment of TikTok in which zoomers pretend to have an angry piss fetish. (The technical term is “urophilia,” but that’s a lot less fun than “piss kink.”) While there are many variations on the #pisstok content genre (which, despite TikTok’s strict content guidelines, has around 22.4 million views). The general theme is pretty consistent: a person, usually a woman, makes up a fictional scenario in which they accidentally purposely play themselves on piss and like it. (It goes without saying that there are no real golden showers in front of the camera.)

@ comme.baby

Don’t tell me what to love πŸ˜€πŸ’› #pisstok #peebaby #tinkletime

♬ Original sound – unknown

Before some mad Ben Shapiro guy reads about it and devotes a podcast episode to deciphering the deterioration of Western culture, I should probably say what goes with virtually every explanation of a meme: It’s a joke; it’s not that serious.

“HAHAHA NO WAY,” said Kira Fields, aka precum.baby, on TikTok when I asked her to speak about PissTok (a message preceded by a detailed apology). I DM’ed Kira because I came across one of her videos where she crossed her eyes with the caption, “Look me right in the eyes and tell me you don’t have an angry piss kink.” β€œI have to tell you, though, that the video was a joke. I just thought it was funny. “When asked to analyze it further (which is known to be a tried and tested method to make a joke even funnier), Kira replied thoughtfully and said,” I think we are a very open generation when it comes to sex no longer a taboo subject and in a way desensitized to most things that people like sexually. “

While she thought a piss kink was still nervous enough to grab attention – “it’s one of those things that still makes you unusually and uncomfortably funny” – she was surprised after posting her video to the Seeing comments that a lot of people thought they meant business and estimated that a third of their commentators were appalled and a third were “thrilled”. “[That] tells me there are a lot more people with the actual kink than I thought, ”she says. (She’s right: an Australian poll shows roughly four percent of men share the kink, a small but not entirely negligible number.)

Interestingly, although the term “kink shame” is used so much in contemporary discourse that it becomes a meme to itself, there is nothing in videos like Kiras that comes out as shame or anti-kink. In that sense, she didn’t particularly bother that people thought she actually had a piss fetish because the punch line wasn’t really the kink itself, but her detour way of confessing it. “A lot of Gen Z humor gets you the butt of the joke,” she says.

While PissTok is mostly kidding, there is one aspect that is worth noting: how feminine the meme is. For perhaps obvious reasons, little cultural space has generally been reserved for pee conversations, but the little-discussed discussions have largely centered on men who have the fetish. Think the episode of Sex and the City in which Carrie Bradshaw – who allegedly makes a living as a sex positive columnist – is simply shocked and shocked when she asks her politician friend (played by perennial silver fox John Slattery) to ask him to pee.

But PissTok is largely dominated by young women who use the joke to express their passionate sexual desire for their partners or for celebrities like Sebastian Stan or Timothee Chalamet or Elizabeth Olson. As overwhelming as their horniness is for the individual in question, do they seem to be saying that they would like to allow them – no, they would go to great lengths to care for them – to pee on them. (One consequence of this is the TikTok trend, where women passionately complain that they would never let a man spit in their mouths just for palpitations like Adam Driver or Harry Styles or the sexy, mentally damaged fish, the Willem Dafoe in Finding Nemo.) “I think it might have something to do with women becoming more comfortable about their sexuality,” says Kira of the trend. And while none of this is to say that zoomers making silly pee jokes are an empowering feminist #girlboss trend, it may be an indication that we’ve come a long way since Carrie Bradshaw came across the prospect of the Guy pissed off mad men.

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