‘The experience is amazing and helps fulfil something inside that I wanted for a long time,’ says one person with oculolinctus
When you think of someone you’re attracted to, what is your favourite thing about them? Many people would say their eyes. But would you ever consider involving those eyes in sex? Specifically, licking them or letting someone lick yours? For some, this is actually at the forefront of their sexual desires.
Eyes as a tool for sexual gratification can be found throughout literature. “In Simone’s hairy vagina, I saw the wan blue eye of Marcelle, gazing at me through tears of urine. Streaks of come in the steaming hair helped give that dreamy vision a disastrous sadness,” writes Georges Bataille from the perspective of his unnamed protagonist in Story of the Eye. In the 1928 novella, the character Simone finds sexual pleasure in cutting out the eye of a priest and placing it into her vagina before engaging in sex with the book’s narrator, her distant cousin.
Similarly, in Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Hubert Hubert removes a piece of dirt from Lolita’s eye using his tongue (“Gently I pressed my quivering tongue along her rolling salty eyeball”). The moment leaves Hubert experiencing what he describes as the “agony” of sexual desire. Many people may question how such a thing might be considered erotic, but others might be able to relate.
Oculolinctus, also known as worming (or more simply, eyeball licking), is a sexual act that lends itself to eye fetishism. The phenomenon first came to the mainstream in the early 2010s, when stories coming out of Japan reported a surge in eyeball licking among young adults. Many of these stories were deleted or redacted, allegedly triggered by a hoax from a Japanese tabloid, but there was at least some truth behind them. Oculolinctus was then – and is now – a real phenomenon.
36-year-old Ella Rose from San Jose in California has known she’s had a particular affinity to eyes since she was a child. When she was 12, a scene from the film Prophecy, in which Christopher Walken interacts with the eye of a dead body, was arousing to her, and the attraction has stuck with her ever since.
“It’s not that I am more or less attracted to people because of their eyes. I don’t even think a certain eye colour is more attractive than another,” she tells Dazed. “But for example, in high school, a biology teacher that I didn’t find attractive brought in a video of his laser eye surgery and I could barely contain myself. After that, I could hardly talk to him without thinking about his eyeball. Another instance was on a cop show. They found a victim’s body in the ocean and they couldn’t identify this person except for extracting their ocular fluid. I’m not sure why it was so exciting for me, but it was.”
Rose has experienced both having her eyeballs licked and licking other people’s eyeballs, but admits that finding people who are entirely aligned with her eye-specific fantasies are few and far between. “I’ve yet to meet someone who actually gets off on any sort of eye play. The closest is a partner who enjoyed licking tears from my face. That was pretty exciting but he never went into the eye, which was a disappointment.” But the little lick alone does provide Rosa with heightened sexual satisfaction. She describes it as “full body sexual excitement, with electricity pulsing through your body.” Before adding: “It’s not the explosion of orgasm but the tense building of pleasure. It’s pretty wild.”
Sex acts involving the eyes obviously come with some risks. The eyes are vulnerable to some sexually transmitted infections, and eye specialists also warn that the actual act of eye licking can present particular problems since native bacteria of the mouth are mostly foreign to the eye. “The act of licking another’s open eye, or oculolinctus, involves a transfer of mucus and fluid between two people,” says Sean McCafferty, MD, FACS, an eye specialist for Arizona Eye Consultants and associate clinical professor at the University of Arizona. “STDs can be transferred such as HIV, gonorrhoea, chlamydia, syphilis, warts and probably most likely herpes simplex or HSV.” HSV to the ocular surface can even cause a recurrent debilitating disease and possible blindness.
For people thinking about engaging in eye-licking or other sexual acts involving the eyes, he warns that it’s a relatively new phenomenon and we’re unsure of the long-term impacts. “Please take care, know your partner, don’t do it if you suspect any of the problems previously mentioned. As always, realise and assess the risk you take with any sexual contact and act appropriately.”
A 43-year-old from Toronto, Canada, who asked to be identified as DNA, isn’t too worried about the risks. He has had eye partialism since his youth. When asked to pinpoint his infatuation, he says: “Something to do with their beauty, mystery, intrigue, being the ‘window to one’s soul’. Have you ever really taken the time to stare into someone’s eye? To just think about nothing else and look deeply into their eyeballs? You would be shocked at what that does to you, and to them. It can be a life-changing experience. How could you not be interested in something that powerful?”
‘Ultimately, I’d like to use my tongue to explore the eye more – tongue fuck an eyeball, if you will’ – Ella Rose
For DNA, he has always found eyes an attractive feature, although he has no actual preference to a particular eye type or colour. But he admits that he was slower in understanding fetish and kinks and believed his sexual appetites were a normal part of sensuality, not realising it could be considered a deviation. He credits his vast sexual experiences to his partners, who have been open-minded enough to allow him to explore and experiment. He’s had sex acts performed on him while being forced to stare in his partners’ eyes without breaking eye contact, and he’s spent time exploring a partners’ eyes with a flashlight or a macro camera. “These occurrences did add to the connection between [the partner and I]. I found the experiences intensely arousing.”
Eye-licking is still on the menu though. “While it is enjoyable and can lead to, or be part of something sexual, the act itself is more about connecting parts of ourselves that isn’t normally done,” DNA says of his experiences. “The taboo of one’s tongue, a very sexual part of oneself, with a partner’s eyeball, a typically non-sexual part of the anatomy. For me, the experience is amazing and helps fulfil something inside that I wanted for a long time.”
Generally, eye fetishism is one of the rarer kinks. Porn involving the eyes is less prevalent than other more common partialisms, but this could simply be because those drawn to oculolinctus consider the kink too niche to discuss. This also means that people into oculolinctus are often having to rely on experimental partners who are open to trying the act of eyeball licking, rather than easily finding people who share their passion for eyes. But Rose isn’t giving up, and she’ll fulfil her desires whenever the opportunity arises.
“Ultimately, I’d like to use my tongue to explore the eye more – tongue fuck an eyeball, if you will – but no one has been comfortable with more than a lick, either giving or receiving. Although, is it skeezy to admit that if I’m giving a guy a blow job and he asks me to run his dick over my face, I’m most definitely rubbing it over my eyes?”
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