Everything You Need To Know About Golden Showers

So why would a person be interested in this? “How people arrive at what turns them on remains a comparative mystery,” says Russel Stambaugh, Ph.D., a psychotherapist who specializes in kinky behavior. 

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As part of the BDSM family, one of the main turn-ons of the pee shower is the power dynamic. “In regular social life there are so many constraints,” says Stambaugh. “People like to role play experiences that they can’t so easily have in real life—people want to feel free to do [what] they usually feel constrained doing.”

Others might get pleasure out of degrading or humiliating their partner or being degraded themselves. “The person being peed on likes being dominated and being controlled—and sometimes also likes the warmth and even the taste of the pee,” says sex therapist Ian Kerner, Ph.D.

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For others, it just feels really damn good. “It can be purely sexual—it feels good to release yourself,” Stambaugh explains. “All of us have had the experience of urinating after holding it for a long time—you could potentially sexualize that feeling of intense relief.”

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Bringing urination into the boudoir is a little more complicated than other fetishes (consider those logistics…). But Kerner says some people get into the golden shower without really meaning to. “People who are into it sometimes say that their partner peed in the shower with them and they found it sexy and taboo to watch,” he says. “It’s a chance to be part of the dirtiness and messiness of sex, which is also a turn on.” 

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While it may seem unusual to some, we should be cautious before stigmatizing this fetish, says Stambaugh. “Shaming people for private consensual behavior is the wrong way to go.”