SPITTING

Hawk tuah...boy? My'Kayle Pugh investigates.

He invited you out to the usual haunt for local twentysomethings with something to prove to their friends or followers or, in this case, crushes. You think he has a crush on you, though you cringe a bit at your use of the word since it made you feel juvenile and naive. You’re nothing of the sort; you’re picky, sure, and maybe a little inexperienced, but you know enough to know that the way he kept his thigh pressed against yours and the lip licking thing he did when there was a lull in the otherwise polite conversation is anything other than casual.

The dinner was lovely, albeit trite. He paid for your drinks and a dry slice of carrot cake; the icing tasted more like sour cream than cream cheese and was topped with a blueberry puree. You took maybe five bites before you put the fork down and smiled. You suggested taking a walk to wind down your night.

After a few minutes of errant rambling, your date is retelling a story involving a friend, a sword, and narcolepsy. You know it’s a story you should be giggling at despite the lack of context, so you do. You giggle and you walk. The air is romantically oppressive, humid and sticky with the newly blooming flowers throwing a cloyingly sweet scent into the mix. He says something earnest and funny. You’re actually giggling now. His smile finally reaches his eyes. And as your date reaches the crescendo, where the sword slices through the air, he pauses, turns his head to the side, and spits in a nearby flower bed.

You feel each step you take now. The film in your head replays the moment when his spit hit the petals of what you think was a marigold over and over. But for some reason, you’re not alarmed by the spitting, mostly because men do it everywhere. In public, in parking lots, out car windows, on astroturf, in the bedroom; giving everyone a front row seat to watch as their mucus flies, arcs, and SPLATS! on the ground. But why, you question on the drive back home. 

If you google this particular phenomena, you’ll come up with a handful of results. A few of them edge on the fascinating, but most are asinine and bioessentialist in nature. Look up the culture of spitting and you’ll unearth less yawn-worthy finds. For instance, the Greeks believe that spitting is a spiritual duty; an act that prevents the evil eye from latching onto loved ones after being paid compliments from strangers, or teachers, or uncle and aunties. The Romans were convinced that saliva contained medicinal properties. Vespasian, an emperor, spat directly into the eyes of a blind man and rubbed it onto the lame appendage of a disabled man. If Jesus could heal, why not a politician?

The British had no cultural superstitions or custom to explain their behavior; their spitting can be (and has been) pathologized as a more primitive urge. It wasn’t until tuberculosis wiped out half of the great poets that the Brits (and most of the West) decided it was time to start shaming people from spreading germs in public spaces. Of course, the French rebelled as they usually do. (You remember that you’ve been meaning to refresh your adolescent understanding of the language as you wipe off your makeup. A chunk of glitter falls into your eye. You take it as a sign– the French are getting alt-righty anyways.)

In Africa, many countries consider the spit of a religious man an opportunity to bestow blessings from the divine upon others. You think back to your childhood and conjure up memories of visiting your uncles on the farmland they tended to. You remember the wet-clicking sound of their tongues rubbing the roof of their mouths. Did you take your Allegra this morning, your mother prodded until you nodded– the bobbles on the ends of your twists knocking together. They’d scratch and then spit on the ground before them. And they were religious; as religious as any good, southern black man could be. Sunday mornings were spent sitting on white, peeling pews. Sermons filled with promises and spittle. Maybe your uncles were blessing their crops, communing with what was deemed a punishment–a hindrance–to unveil a harvest for you and yours. Even still, they probably needed Allegra.

In Asia, spitting is still a daily facet of life. Western tourists have since decided to criticize China for its spittle ridden city streets. COVID has only exacerbated the disdain for the practice, and has left many “free-thinking-wanders” groaning about the disgusting ritual on vacant Blogspot accounts and defunct travel websites. How on earth are they to balance their energies in the technological mecca of East Asia in these wet, slippery, and uncivilized conditions?

You get angry, so you reverse back to your original search: why do men spit? The NIH hosts an article which cites a paper suggesting that spitting is psychologically linked to pleasurable behaviors, like ejaculating or urinating. These scholars nod towards Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the phallic stage, where a toddler begins to exhibit jealousy and desire, as well as a hyperfixation on the presence or absence of a penis. The NIH article also states the obvious, that spitting can be a form of hostility or marking one’s territory. Wow, super intimidating.

Men on Reddit believe they produce more saliva than women, forcing them to expel their DNA onto curbs and into bottles. Others cite old western movies and witnessing baseball players spit chewing tobacco on mounds as their reasoning. It’s cool to them, to be crass.

And it’s at this point, as you wind down in your bed, that you realize you haven’t seen anyone reference women spitting. You run back through an article, and find a mention of women chewing and spitting in relation to eating disorders. But that’s not very public. Do women only spit in the pursuit of whittling themselves down?

Google women spitting, and you’ll find stock images of saliva dribbling out of pursed red lips. Specify your search, and you’ll find medical articles explaining how hypersalivation is linked to pregnancy. Your eyes grow heavy. Male spitting is philosophical, culturally relative, psychosexual, and natural. Women spitting is a headline shouting: “HOSTILE WOMAN SPITS ON INNOCENT BYSTANDER.” Or a porn video featuring BUSTY BLONDES slobbering on JAWBREAKER!!!

You put the phone down. You tumble into sleep.

In your dream, you’re on a street corner. You watch a man shove a microphone in the face of a pretty blonde with a southern twang; she giddily exclaims that the best way to pleasure a man is to spit on his penis. But you know when you wake up that the popular school of thought will remain. The sexiest thing you can do as a girl is to consume his cum after doing such a good job. 

And it’s as you walk down a familiar street, where the air is blanketed around your shoulders and the smell of petunias or roses or, goddamnit, marigolds fill your nose, that a lamp in the corner of your mind flickers. Hostility, sexuality, possessiveness, there’s an undercurrent of insecurity prevalent in all of these concepts. How icky it is to be outwardly jealous in our culture. How humiliating it is to posture in the face of an assailant. How gross, how crass to reveal your inner-workings in front of a mother of three, or on national television, or in front of a romantic prospect. How shameful it is to show us your humanity.

And yet we excuse spitting when it comes to men. We allow men to express their rage, their perversion, their fear, their pleasure; we allow men the ability to show the cruelest parts of themselves with the subconscious knowledge that they will be met with, at the very least, toleration and, at most, celebration. You stop in your tracks. In that way, is spitting another marker of men’s transcendence? Women are hotter if they commit, if they swallow instead of spit. If they keep their humanity private, inward. In our Western society, women are expected to consume, while men are made to expel.

So, after all of your research, you couldn’t help but wonder, would Beauvoir have ever spit on Satre’s thang?

Spitting: 4/10

This is the second installment of "boys," a column dedicated to investigating "the domain of the masculine" (categorically boy things). Subscribe to Kayle’s Substack.