FLUIDS ACCORDING TO MAÏA

Let's face it: Sex is an activity (and an organ) that gets wet. This summer, Maïa Mazaurette introduced us to these fluids. In this latest episode, we end up with an amuse-bouche – an encounter with saliva.

Characteristics: Saliva, a clear liquid produced by the salivary glands, allows us to chew, swallow, talk, protect ourselves from a good number of bacteria... and have sexual practices outside the sacrosanct vaginal penetration. In France, nine out of 10 people have already sucked or licked their partner's genitals (French Institute Of Public Opinion, 2017).

Figures: According to Norwegian author Asmund Eikenes, who has a Ph.D. in cell biology, each day, the salivary glands produce up to one and a half liters of spit, more than a carton of milk! (From The Curious Science of Bodily Fluids: Discover What's Floating Around Inside of You!, 2022.) This milk carton comes in two forms: viscous resting saliva and stimulated saliva.

Deliciousness: By transforming solid into liquid, saliva makes us feel the taste of food. It even makes us anticipate pleasure, hence the expression "to salivate" (in front of profiteroles). Of course, we can also salivate metaphorically: at the prospect of an erotic rendezvous, for example.

A kiss: Kissing with tongues makes teenagers fantasize... but it does so to experts in bacterial transmission as well. In 2012, a group of Dutch researchers led by microbiology professor Remco Kort collected saliva samples from 21 couples before and after a wet kiss lasting around 10 seconds. They found that a couple who kissed with such intensity more than nine times a day would share enough bacteria to mark their respective tongues for life. Secondly (and a little more reassuringly), the saliva flowing into the stomach after such a kiss would prevent new bacteria from settling in the oral cavity and on the tongue of both lovers.

Symbolic: Sorry to those of you who are eating breakfast, but saliva sends us back to the infernal acts of drooling and spitting. When it comes to drooling, of course, we think of childhood and babies. Adults, however, continue to drool, in the flowing plenitude of sleep (watch out for morning breath!). As for spitting on other people, it sends us back to the world of dirtiness... and even disease, as Covid-19 reminds us.

And it has a much more negative connotation. Psychoanalyst and sex therapist Guy Lesœurs writes in an article entitled "Psychanalyse du postillon" ("The Psychoanalysis of Gobbing Spit," 2022) that "spitting or hawking is a missile more or less charged with contempt and salivary substance, whose parts are gathered in the mouth and compressed to come out violently and nastily." It's clearly uncivil violence: Spitting in the street is an offense against the rules of polite society, even if a loogie has a liberating function.

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