Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

In upstate New York last month, Dr. Phillip Riback, a pediatric neurologist, was sentenced to 48 years for 28 counts of molesting male patients. Cases of doctors abusing patients are not uncommon. But it was the details of these alleged encounters that raised eyebrows among locals.

More than a dozen boys testified that after their parents left the room, Riback would lie on the floor and ask the boys to spit on his chest or into his mouth. It was not clear from newspaper accounts that there was any overt sexual behavior apart from this.

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Riback's defense claimed that this was a technique to gain the boys' confidence and relax them through non-sexual horseplay. But it was quite damning to his case that Riback never engaged in such 'horseplay' with any female patients, and that he had the parents leave before asking the boys to spit on him.

Left unanswered is the question-- Why would someone be turned on by spitting? To understand this, we need to think about what it means to be dirty.

The anthropologist Mary Douglas studied the topic and suggested that a concept of dirty/dangerous/polluted is a human universal. However, there is a wide range of variation in what different cultures consider to be dirty-- foreskins and pigs are well-known examples of things that are dirty in some places but not others. Hindus consider cut hair to be polluting, while many Ethiopians would not consider touching a fish. It may very well be that piss and shit are universally considered dirty. (Though not everything that comes from the body is necessarily dirty-- consider tears and mother's milk.)

Although Miss Poubelle is not sure whether every culture would view spit to be dirty, that's definitely the association we have in Western culture. To make another person dirty by putting them in contact with a polluting substance to humiliate them.

So in Western culture, spitting is usually viewed as an act of contempt and humiliation. This view of spitting must be very ancient. In the Bible, for example, Jesus predicts his own humiliation and death at the hands of the Romans and says "And they shall mock him, and shall scourge him, and shall spit upon him, and shall kill him: and the third day he shall rise again."

In this respect spitting on someone is like other actions that involve the body's fluids and wastes. To piss on something is an English idiom meaning 'to show contempt for' that dates back several centuries. One characteristic 1720 quote, for example, says 'They cannot impose upon their Prince, nor piss upon the laws'. To shit on something means essentially the same thing-- to express contempt for or to humiliate.

In Rod Evan's clever book, Sexicon, the term automysophilia is proposed as a general word that describes sexual arousal based on being dirty. (In Greek, auto- means 'self', myso- is 'dirty' and philia is 'liking, loving;.) Automysophilia might, of course, be further subdivided into arousal due to different polluting substances-- the fetishist can be quite specific about whether it's pollution by spit, piss, mud, earwax, or Fox News that turns him on. It seems, however, that we also need a term for the fetish of being aroused by making another person dirty. Maybe allomysophilia, using the Greek root allos 'another') fits the bill.

Does arousal from being dirty go along with the Western religious system that treats sex itself as dirty? It seems like a reasonable speculation that if sex is dirty, then dirt might become sexy. Or perhaps automysophilia is essentially about the power exchange in letting another person pollute you?

Whatever the psychological roots of a fetish for being spit on, it is ill-advised for a doctor to trick patients into sex games masquerading as horseplay. And more the pity since Riback could certainly have found some other willing non-patient to swap spit with. For one of the essential truths of sexuality is captured in the Yiddish proverb-- there's a lid for every pot. For every automysophile who wants to get filthy, there is another allomysophile who would gladly oblige....