A cat drools on Reddit. A strapping young lad drools on YouTube. A hot new pop artist croons about it: “I see them drool/ They could fill a whole pool,” sings Cobrah. Drool is even for sale online—literally, in vials, but also figuratively, in the form of spitty OnlyFans stars. Slip into your wellies and prepare your ponchos, folks: Drool—sticky, gooey, sloppy drool—is having a moment, and I’m here to tell you why.
Nowhere is this more apparent than on #SpitTok, a growing TikTok community entirely dedicated to salivary delights. With almost 169 million views, it’s frequently suggestive, mostly featuring cross-eyed, scantily clad performers lathering up their tongues for a lustful audience. Some SpitTokers even pull you into it, spitting aggressively at the camera as if they were standing over you, hocking a loogie in your (presumably) blissed-out face. Within this world, there’s even a tiny legion of drooling microinfluencers who make custom videos for their spit-starved fans.
A more wholesome sect of #SpitTok is in it for the goofs. Take the Tortilla Slap Challenge, a TikTok trend that involves standing across from a friend, filling your mouths with water, and slapping each other in the face with tortillas until one or both of you bursts out laughing, spewing the water from your quivering cheeks and sending long strands of drool creeping toward the floor.
Then there are drool’s extended family members—semifluid seepages that originate from far beyond the salivary glands. Slime is a growing favorite: Slime Daddy videos, an ASMR offshoot, involve coating a Slime Daddy sponge in goo and then squeezing it until it oozes. Gen Z is also leaning back into the slippery appeal of Slime Time Live, as evidenced by the cartoonish, mucosal hues in Urban Outfitters’ recent Mía Lee capsule collection. Meanwhile, viral sculpture artist Dan Lam creates all manner of delicious-looking blobs, drips, and squishes that seep from shelves, frozen in time as they ooze toward the floor.
Clearly, humanity has entered an Age of Ooze, and the splash zone is only getting bigger. The only question is: Why?
Modern Drool Mania has no inciting incident. After all, spit is timeless, with varying levels of significance across the globe. Take the Maasai tribe of Kenya and northern Tanzania, where spitting is seen as a respectful greeting. In ancient Peru, tastemakers used human saliva as a key ingredient in masato, a fruity fermented beverage. The Met’s permanent Asian art collection showcases a decorative floral spittoon dating back to China’s Qing dynasty. Per MIT Press, Middle Ages theologian Albert the Great “extolled the medicinal properties of human saliva.” (Truth be told, spit contains a natural painkiller called opiorphin—a compound potentially more powerful than morphine.)
Albert the Great’s feelings aside, drool is also undeniable comedy fodder. Since 1989, Homer Simpson has slovenly gurgled and produced waterfalls of drool, both of which expertly communicate his dopey, gluttonous nature. In the early aughts, Ed, Edd n Eddy saw its titular trio slurping jawbreakers with viscous pools of spittle forming around their feet. Long before the inception of the Tortilla Slap Challenge, netizens enjoyed viral videos centering on salivary humiliation.
At the same time, drooling is an unmistakable hallmark of horniness. A decades-old study suggests that men may, in fact, produce excess saliva when faced with a spicy dame. (See 2005’s Just Friends, in which a dorky Ryan Reynolds openly salivates at the thought of kissing his longtime crush.) More recently, there’s the growing Western popularity of ahegao, an orgasm face inspired by Japanese adult performers and popularized alongside hentai fetish content. To achieve ahegao, the performer often goes cross-eyed, sticks their tongue out, and releases a requisite dribble of drool. The expression communicates a sense of sexual euphoria—a kind of un-self-conscious bliss that accompanies, say, a delicious hot dog or a jumbo orgasm. It’s helpless. It’s smooth-brained. It says, “Hey, my mouth is wet.”
These forces have combined to create drool’s current moment—and it’s a very lucrative one, said 19-year-old OnlyFans creator Chelsea (who declined to give her last name). A full-time creator, Chelsea was inspired by South African creator and ahegao expert Belle Delphine to start experimenting with her own ahegao and drool posts. “My ahegao posts on my Instagram are always my most-liked pics and bring in the most traffic to my OnlyFans,” she told me. “It’s the face anime characters make when they come. So seeing actual girls doing it is super hot—it’s anime, but IRL.” (When it comes to generating huge pools of drool, Chelsea said, she didn’t require extraordinary measures beyond standard hydration, although other performers often use Gatorade or special mints.)
For Mark, a 28-year-old who spoke to me anonymously, drool porn is less about novelty and more about intimacy. “I just like seeing girls drool/spit,” he said after I tracked him down on the r/DroolFetish subreddit. “I fantasize about getting it in my mouth, swapping it back and forth, and swallowing it. It’s dirty enough to be exciting, but not so dirty that it grosses me out, if that makes sense.” He added, “I think I may be a little unique in that it’s really just about passion for me—the idea of doing something dirty with your partner. You already swap spit when you kiss. This is just more focused on the spit. It’s not about dominance or helplessness but about connecting with your partner and doing something naughty.”
That may partially explain why performers like Chelsea see such a strong response to drool content, and why drool is seemingly everywhere today. My own theory is that it was a natural response to the antiseptic pandemic landscape. We’ve spent three years clad in sanitary masks, wiping down every surface with strong-smelling chemicals, dodging one anothers’ droplets. In a (necessarily!) sterilized world, maybe it makes sense that we’d crave a little spitty mischief.
Viktor Zafirovski, a staff writer for the Porn Dude (a porn-ranking site), disagreed with my theory. He argued that adult drool videos are a natural response to the demand for hardcore fetish content.
“Consider that the mainstream porn sites are under the pressure of payment gateways, which ban or encourage against certain bodily fluids being present on-screen,” Zafirovski told me. “Advertisers who use them don’t want to be associated with that.” (By that, he means hardcore content, scatological or otherwise.) The solution? Bodily excrement that’s not quite as taboo but scratches a similar itch: spit. That could also explain why solo performers like Chelsea see drool content as a gateway to a larger audience—it’s less invasive and more innocent than other bodily fluids. Plus, you can plaster it all over TikTok, YouTube, and beyond, without fear of it being banned for obscenity. It’s just spit!
Zafirovski added that while solo drool content may be experiencing a renaissance—cue SpitTok—spit porn is nothing new. Unlike drool porn, which tends to be submissive and vegetative in nature, spit porn tends to skew toward a BDSM audience. “A lot of solo performers will do porn on their own,” he said. “On the other hand, you’ve got spit porn, where performers straight-up projectile spit onto people. And that’s a power play.” In short: Drool porn = I’m yours; spit porn = you’re mine. Obviously, there are PG-rated iterations of this on TikTok.
Pandemic-era bodily function mania aside, performative drooling is a highly stylized form of expression, like a Viagra Boys music video or professional puppet theater. It’s outrageous, imaginative, and gross in the best way. It automatically communicates laziness, horniness, or delight—often all three at once. Of course, drooling excessively can feel a little silly, especially when you’re trying to ooze sexuality. But to Chelsea, that’s a plus—when it comes to drool, there’s nothing worse than taking yourself too seriously: “You just have to have fun with it and genuinely enjoy what you’re doing and not force things,” she explained.
If drool content is any indication, some viewers are rejecting the robotic Instagram Face phenomenon, replacing it with sloppy, drooling grins. Whether it’s airbrushed studio porn or one-size-fits-all influencers, the message seems to be the same: Perfection is out. Humanity is in, along with all its oozing accouterments.
