Ok, having said all that, I still want to join in with the 'what's the psychology of WAM' discussion! :ohbruther:

It is my favourite fucking parlour game. I've been exploring my own motivations extensively over the last couple of years. I should say for context I like my WAM very dirty; real food and mud and paint, applied in a funny and sensual and naughty way. My kink is essentially subversive.

Recently I recognised some cultural messages (things I just learned from the world growing up, not things that someone explained to me) which I feel shaped the psychology of my fetish a bit:

Up until about the age of twelve I was troubled by the message that girls don't enjoy getting dirty; playing hard; going wild. Boys do; it's more natural for them.

After about the age of twelve I started to be troubled by the message that women don't enjoy sex; playing hard; going wild. Men do, it's more natural for them.

Both of these messages hit me in the same place, so I link them. I don't think that rebelling against or worrying about these messages 'caused' my fetish, but they shaped my ideas about dirtiness and sex, so they feel naggingly relevant. Does this strike a chord with anyone? Is confronting these sorts of ideas part of the psychology of anyone else's fetish?

Marion

Well Marion, based on the quality of your response, I'd still be inclined to support the theory that we're in all intelligent people!!! I'm not aware of whether YOU have a psychology degree from Cambridge, but if you told me you did I'd believe it without question!

It's difficult for me to comment on your personal observations as, being male, I was one of the boys for whom it was more natural. I did play in the mud when I was little, and was punished for it, although my mother now remembers it fondly. I do enjoy the feeling of getting messy, as well as the sight of others getting messy. For me I find it hard to understand why getting messy is deemed by the mainstream to be something unpleasant. That said, I love the look on a girls face when she suspects or anticipates that she is going to be gunged or pied. The helplessness and permissive comical humiliation creates something attractive inthe girl that's endearing, fun, sexy and flirtatious. It's magnetic. I just want to be there. I want them to realise that they love it, even though they thought that they would hate it. And there's an attraction to staying messy for a while afterwards.

What this discussion hasn't yet addressed is my personal favourite, cake sitting. Why this? It doesn't quite fit the mould of the appeal mentioned so far of why gunge and pies are so popular. I think cake sitting might be loosely related to a subset of the crush fetish (I sometimes quite like to see a girl stepping on a pie or cake too). I have theories on why this turns me on but no solid facts.

As for the general day to day psychological traits, Bill Shipton once hypothesised that WAM might be enjoyed more by those in very prim and proper job roles such as nurses or police, as they could get away from that and go bonkers outside of work to relax. For the last 7 years I've worked in finance, so perhaps, but I've also landed a new job recently in a totally different field, but I don't suspect my fetish will disappear. I'm not OCD, I do have an above average IQ, but most of all I just like getting messy, and the sensuality of the physical sensation of slimy and sticky substances on my skin. If a girl enjoys that too, it creates a degree of common ground that can (in the right context) be immensely attractive.

Not sure I fully made sense in all that, but you get the idea.

I wonder if most of the men who would find resonance with my thoughts linking gender stereotypes, sex and mess are unlikely to read them because of the split forums here. I'm a bisexual woman who likes to see a feminine look trashed on both women and cross dressed men. [No I don't personally find the filters here that helpful or comfortable but hey-ho, I'm hardly representative of a large audience section, am I?] My point about psychological themes is that something at the core of my kink was shaped by the discomfort I felt growing up when forced to choose which parts of my nature I could acceptably embody. I was categorically an outdoor girl, but I didn't identify with the concept of 'tomboy' at all. I wanted to keep my feminine gender-identity and go and climb trees and jump in puddles anyway. That wasn't an option. As an adult it still fascinates me that in our society it's preferable to move girls like 'younger-me' into a category of pseudo-boys, tomboys, rather than allow feminine appearance and 'masculine behaviour' to coexist. As an eight year old I struggled with the logic that it was NOT COOL for me to want to play in the mud because I was a girl but it would be JUST FINE if I wanted to cross dress and then play in the mud because there was an established category for that. Seriously guys, how weird is that? I'm sure I'm not the only person reading these forums who has been influenced by these social rules. Dear Average Straight Male Wammer: did you hear both of those messages too and conclude that the woman who enjoys getting literally dirty might enjoy getting down-and-dirty more than most?

Anyway, hello Labyrinth, you both flatter and appal me! I cheer for the darker shade of blue.

I loved your description of what reactions are hot for you and I've been happily musing over cake-sitting this morning.

I'm turned on a lot by cake-sitting, but it isn't my Main Attraction. I like it, I do it, but it isn't the lynchpin of my favourite fantasies by itself. Your profile pic does rather suggest cake-sitting is close to your heart. It's the thing you kink about again and again in wonderfully nerdy detail, no? I don't know whether this is interesting in terms of 'underlying WAM psychology' but I'd offer you quite a mundane explanation for what I myself like about cake-sitting. I simply generally prefer my WAM experiences to begin by rolling-in or sitting-in or lying-in the messy substance rather than having it poured or splattered over my head. I'm also a bath rather than shower person; perhaps it's the same preference reflected in both contexts. I think there must be almost as many reasons to like a particular act as the act has fans.

For my thoughts on job roles, see 'confirmation bias' above. Much as I hate to disagree with Bill Shipton.

Marion you are just brilliant! I must say, the concept of a girl with feminine appearance and masculine behaviour ought not to be too hard to grasp - in fact I'd go so far as to say for many men, it describes their ideal woman. Take Lara Croft for example... How many guys have fantasised about Angelina Jolie in those movies or asked their girlfriend to do a bit of Tombraider cosplay in the bedroom? Or look at Jessica Biel who plays a variety of similar roles and gains the attention of perhaps even more men...

Ask most guys if they'd prefer a prissy girl who spends all day in hair and makeup and can't go in the rain in case she disintegrates, or a rock-climbing rollercoasting drag-racing mudwrestler 'with a feminine appearance', then I'd bet 99.9% would prefer the latter!

Whatever the truth is behind the psychology of our fetish, and the reasoning for your passion for relaxing in tubs of goo, I hope you're at least on your way to putting those childhood concerns to bed, if you haven't already accomplished that (you sound like you have!).

As for wonderfully nerdy, that's me through and through. I study the things I love in life, and I'm on an eternal quest to find ever better messy experiences and learn about my kinks!

I'm going to be really weaselly and suggest that the fact that the combination of hyper-feminine appearance and masculine behaviour is a popular pin-up fantasy trope supports my idea that it's considered exotic, not normal. You need a bit of taboo to lend power to a fetish-item like Lara Croft.

At the risk of going completely off topic, a girl I know is really into snowboarding, hiking, shooting, and archery, and she listens to heavy metal and although she's not 'one of us' she's been gunged and claims that she'd like the idea of a big messy food fight. But whether she's on the ski slopes, rocking out to loud music or shooting an arrow, she always has perfect hair, gorgeous eye makeup, and clothing that flatters her curves. (Before anyone asks, I'm already married, she's a lot younger than me and has a boyfriend who is my friend, so it's really not happening!) The point is, she's seriously hot stuff. Why? Because she's exciting... She's a hot adrenaline junkie with a great smile who loves to party. And she's real. Girls like that exist. And her boyfriend loves her because she's beautiful and she's fun.
She's no tomboy - she's into her spa treatments and makeup, wears skirts and has long locks, but she has hobbies often associated with men. I think that quality is something to be desired in a girl.
Whoops, have we hijacked this thread?! Sorry.....

Oh Jeeeze have-we-ever hijacked this thread. Never mind, we're probably amusing someone. After this one I'm getting my coat-

Labyrinth, I'm also going to hijack the fact that you think it's worth telling a story about the combination of traits apparent in your kick-ass friend on this forum, as evidence of some gender-strangeness in the psychology of the WAM world. Of course women like that exist. But there's something about the gender ratios of the WAM community that makes Labyrinth's description of his friend more newsworthy and interesting here than it would be anywhere else I can think of. Doesn't the meta-theme among wammers seem to be 'getting women to do this with us is neigh-on impossible'? I think anyone who believes that's actually true is a victim of my old friend Confirmation Bias. Giving more attentional weight to the voices of the other poor smucks 'in the same boat' than to all the daily posts that describe male kinksters and their female partners getting it on very nicely. (In my opinion the 'women don't like this as much as us' theme is ironically reinforced by the segregation of co-ed photographs. I digress.)

Across the WAM fetish the high-stakes target for trashing is femininity. I think it's fair to say most of us like the participants to look feminine and wear feminine clothes. I think there's something in the broader psychology of WAM that links my 'I don't want to be a tomboy' feelings of long ago with Average Wammer's complaint he's 'never going to meet a girl who'll let him do that to her hair'. It's sexism, but not typical misogyny. It's a different type of sexism known as Oppositional Sexism (Serano, 2007). Oppositional Sexism is the cultural phenomenon whereby we view masculinity and femininity as groups of non-overlapping traits in absurdly literal opposition to each other. The tendency to think this way is pernicious because it masquerades as an extension of some sort of 'biological' logic. Men are tall: women are short. Men are strong: women are weak. Men are hard: women are soft. Men are hairy: women are hairless (Stop! Stop Marion! We know these statements aren't true of everyone and loads of people don't fit these stereotypes!). Well my point is our culture has historically classified much more abstract traits using the same binary logic. My oppositional sexism list would include such couplets as: Men are active: women are passive. Men have high sex drives: women have low sex drives. Men are vulgar; women are demure. Women are groomed; men are natural.

Everyone in society has been exposed to the 'men like getting dirty: women do not like getting dirty' and 'men are sexually adventurous: women are not sexually adventurous' dichotomies. Vanilla majority and WAM niche alike. Now, remember above when I mentioned 'Selective Attention'? Attaching greater importance to things that are most relevant to you? (even automatically and subconsciously, like Clinton's 'pies'). Well I think people who kink over women getting dirty and doing sexy things while dirty would attach more than average importance to cultural messages about femininity and dirtiness. I theorise that people who have kinks that are similar to my own will also have been shaped in response to the same rules. The nature of those responses will be as different as the individuals. However, a confusion of irreconcilably individual responses might become comparable when you uncover the cultural rule that set everyone off. I think it's by examining our negotiations with culture rules that affect everyone that we'd find patterns in the psychology of wammers, rather than examining traits like self-control or creativity or rebelliousness. We've all been exposed to the notion that the things we desire are strange or wicked or simply 'not for girls'.

That's genuinely a fascinating response. You make your point very clearly and I'm inclined to agree with your line of thinking to a broad extent (tempered by my opinion that girls who prefer to do adrenaline packed hobbies are still probably more appealing to men than girls who don't, but what you're saying is who's to say they don't enjoy it right? Just challenge the stereotypes and mental conditioning.....)

What's more, in the last four lines you brought it all back on topic, so well done!

Hello all,

It seems my old account was wiped, probably due to inactivity. I've actually thought a lot about this concept, and it helped me formalize a biochemical theory that got me some attention a while ago, most notably from HBO's show "Sex Bytes". However, I've always been pretty depressed, and in fact suffer from clinical depression, so I declined to be on their show.

My theory is this: The same part of the brain that controls fear also controls arousal. Therefore, with some obvious exceptions, what we fear arouses us.

This could be due to a lot of factors, and this will affect our view of WaM as well. Humiliation people could be due to lack of confidence or speaking fear or others. Orderly people could be into the chaos that ensues.

This also branches to other fields, such as S&M or domsub. Just my $0.02.

I think that could possibly be true for some individuals, however as my kink is based more or less entirely on physical sensation and the pleasure of being messy, I struggle to see where the "fear" factor is in that. I'm not afraid to get messy - I love it.

I guess there are (as has already been said in this thread) as many potential reasons for our kinks as there are kinksters themselves.

I'm always interested in the dynamic of conflict. My interest in WAM stems from all those "mean girls" type shows...not just the movies, but teen sitcoms many years before. The beautiful bully is both gorgeous and deserving of some comeuppance. Since it's not a violent show, the comeuppance tended to happen in a socially humiliating way. For my part, I abhor violent acts against women, but WAM seems like it mainly hurts the bully's ego. When the bully uses WAM to humiliate her victims, I sympathize with the victim, while finding it hot at the same time. When she finally gets her comeuppance (necessarily at the hands of another female...my distaste for violence against women extends to the point that only another woman can give her what she deserves), I am both pleased in a moral sense, and still, find the situation both hot and worthy of sympathy (although enough less that the bully's comeuppance is not morally ambiguous in any way).

For me, it's about:
1) Nonviolence
2) humiliation as a non violent tool
3) while having nonviolence, the excitement of conflict can still be there.

When I say nonviolence, I have no problem with a slapstick style catfight. But I'm not interested in seeing women bleeding or bruised, or some kind of damage that you wouldn't see in a g-rated cartoon...

This is true even of some (read 'me') US WAMers...

BTW; The BBC needs to get over itself and bring back Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond...

https://www.change.org/p/bbc-reinstate-jeremy-clarkson