Before The Sneeze Gods We Are Powerless

The sneeze fetish is about many things, but mostly vulnerability.

The Shoot

Nov 2011: It’s 1am on a drizzly Friday night in east Hollywood, a small film crew of four steals into an empty repertory theater and flicks on the lights.

“Perfect, we’ll shoot it right here,” says Jack, the director.

The stage is set for the premiere, on Saturday, of an Athol Fugard play about tragedy, guilt and the legacies of apartheid. There’s gravel and barbed wire. A backdrop of a moody sky. But that’s all for tomorrow. Tonight the fetish star Ashley Fires (Jack’s wife) and her friend Aaliyah, a webcam model, are tottering across that gravel in their heels, on their way to the dressing room. They set up in front of the mirror while Jack lays out the props in front of them—tweezers, white pepper, Q-tips and a box of tissues.

‘OK, so I want one continuous shoot with you guys talking as you go,’ says Jack. ‘Really candid. Like, ‘when I’m riding my boyfriend and I sneeze, my pussy contracts…’’

‘What about, ‘if I sneeze I get goosebumps’?’ says Ashley.

‘Perfect! And do a little shiver afterwards.’

‘I could say I poop my panties a little bit when I sneeze,’ suggests Aaliyah.

‘Totally hot.’

The goal is to shoot a 10 minute clip of the girls sneezing which Jack can then sell for $15 or so on clips4sale.com, a superstore of fetish snippets. Sneeze clips make Jack about $1000 a month. The sneeze category features such delightful sub categories as ‘pignose’ sneezes, ‘miserable’ sneezes, and Christmas Dinner sneezes and on and on. Sneezing is one of roughly 500 categories on the site, of which Jack’s company has ventured into about 100, including feet, pee, smoking, tickling, balloons, robots and small penis humiliation.

But Jack has never actually met a sneeze fetishist. What he knows, he’s learned through making these clips. And it’s been a trial by fire.

‘I started off making clips that I could enjoy too,’ he says. ‘I did one where Ashley was naked, and a dildo came shooting out of her pussy when she sneezed. But you should have seen the emails. They were like, ‘that’s not realistic, the sneeze was fake, how could you…’ They’re even more vocal than the ticklers. If they don’t like what you’re doing, they’ll let you know.’

Here's what Jack has learned—sneeze fetishists like to keep it real. Fake an orgasm by all means, but not a sneeze. This lot will sniff you out. The Sneeze Fetish Forum is full of voyeuristic comments, blow-by-blow accounts of watching unwitting members of the public succumb to sneezing fits. The man outside the museum who sneezed ten times in a row. The girl at the party who was allergic to cats. The stories dwell on the details—the runny noses and streaming eyes and especially the convulsive, helpless spasm of a sneeze. The bodily reflex, the gooey emission. It’s transparently sexual. But not particularly glamorous—Ashley and Aaliyah are raising the bar a good distance. Many video clips feature seniors in drab apartments unloading into their hands and displaying it to the camera. The ‘spray’ or ‘snot shot’ is a recurrent feature of sneeze porn, as is a good sneeze face, pre-blast, with the nostrils twitching and that teetering look of faint disgust… For the connoisseur, these moments are irresistible.

‘Vulnerability is important,’ says Jack. ‘For that wrinkle in time, she’s not in control, the sneeze takes over, kind of like an orgasm. Sneezing is a moment of weakness. And it’s also an intimate moment, like farting. It’s private and embarrassing, the sort of thing that only your girlfriend would be comfortable doing in front of you. Which I suppose is the fantasy.’

But Jack won’t do fart videos. Or burping. And neither will the girls. In the fetish world, you have to draw the line.

“OK, are you girls ready?”

Vulnerability

November 2024: That’s the opening to a piece I wrote for LA Weekly back in the day. It was just a brief sketch about my introduction to the sneeze fetish community, as part of a fetish film crew (I was operating the lights). I tried to go deeper but the editors thought it too niche and weird, which… OK fine. But I’ve always wanted to return to this world because of what Jack said about vulnerability. It struck a chord. So last month, I came back to the Forum and picked up where I left off 13 years ago. Some itches you just gotta scratch.

Vulnerability has always held an erotic charge. Damsels in distress. Submission bondage. Stuck porn (look it up). Freud talked about this stuff. He’d have had a field day with the sneezers. Especially if the field was full of pollen. (Is that what a field day is? A day in a field? Let me know in the comments.)

In sneeze world, vulnerability is two pronged. There’s the sickness part, with its mortal connotations – we say “bless you” is because you might die of the plague. Some fetishists, women—especially, like the maternal, caretaking aspect. Florence Nightingale with a box of Kleenex. And for men, who seem to be a minority among sneeze fetishists (though there’s no actual data), it can a protective instinct gone awry.

But then there’s the other prong—the helplessness of the sneeze itself, that startling moment of rupture and nakedness. We put on our clothes and shoes and faces for the world and we go around like we’ve got it all together. But then a sneeze blows our cover. It reveals us for what we are—gross and germy animals. Bodies, not minds, operated by hidden forces beyond our control. Before the Sneeze Gods we are powerless. Doesn’t matter if we’re on the subway, at work, or on bended knee in a candle lit restaurant, there’s nothing we can do once it starts. We try, of course, to control what can’t be controlled and this is the comedy and tragedy of life. It’s also what gets the sneeze fetishist all worked up.

As “Deuce” writes on the Forum, it’s the “hitchy, itchy holdbacks ❤️ Stuck sneezes and the finger under the nose trope, talking through the buildup, lots of vocal, stuttery gasps and wildly flaring nostrils.”

Meet Jessie & Samantha

“It’s kind of like watching people have orgasms in the street, but only I can see it,” says Jessie, a 28 year old musician I met on the Forum. “That’s part of the thrill. It’s almost the exhibitionism of experiencing this highly sexual erotic thing in these very normal circumstances.”

This isn’t just some passing observation, like “that’s hot”, or whatever. For Jessie, sneezing elicits a much more visceral, physical response. It’s directly linked to her sexual function. In other words, it makes her wet. Just the sound of it, that’s all she needs. And this makes life complicated, as you might imagine. “It’s amazing in some ways, but so difficult in others,” she says. “I have a love-hate relationship with it.”

Here’s a flipside: She works at a restaurant by day, a fancy spot in New York where they have an in-house florist, and naturally, that’s where her office is. It might sound dreamy for a sneeze type, with all that pollen floating around. But no.

“One of the florists is this older man who's creepy with the women there,” she says. “And he’s allergic to the flowers, so he sneezes all the time. And it’s really hard to hear. Because hearing someone that you don't want to hear sneeze feels like an assault. It makes your skin crawl.”

Needless to say no one at work knows. Nor in her family, God forbid. It’s bad enough seeing her parents in this sexual context when they sneeze. The thought of them wondering if she’s getting turned on is just… *shudder*. As with many on the Forum, her fetish is her deepest secret and the anxiety is intense. She can’t believe that people don’t already suspect because her reaction can be so physical and flustered sometimes. And she’s terrified of being found out—not because she’ll be judged necessarily, but that people simply won’t understand, and they’ll feel uncomfortable around her. So they’ll avoid her. And she’ll be alone. So she does her best to avoid any sneeze scenarios. She almost never sneezes herself, “it’s like flashing someone”, she says. And she won’t say “bless you” either, because to even acknowledge a sneeze feels dangerous.

“I did recently tell my boyfriend,” she says. They’ve been together for five years. “He’s fine with it, but it’s still not part of our sex life. So we’re talking about opening up our relationship so that I can find someone with the fetish, but I don’t know…”

I met others on the Forum who’ve had more luck on that front. Samantha, a 20 year old student from Ontario, realized she couldn’t have sex with her boyfriend at all without some sneezing involved. So one night she confessed, practically in tears. And he got on board. Today, they bring sneeze aids to bed with them. He snorts this powder manufactured in India called Chhinkni, which is meant to clear congestion. In the sneeze fetish world it’s all the rage. Apparently it can prompt a flurry of sneezes in rapid succession. They make sure to take a little bottle when they travel, and Samantha braces herself for the day when TSA pulls this jar out of her bag: “What’s this?” If only she could tell them: It’s for her boyfriend who sneezes all over her during sex. Wet sneezes, that’s how she likes it. Otherwise she can’t climax.

For Jessie, however, it’s still a private thing. Which is fine. She’s used to it. Maybe some things aren’t for sharing. So, late at night, she’ll be on the Forum listening to sound files and masturbating. Not every sneeze does it for her. It needs to be odd, the kind of sneeze that turns heads and causes embarrassment. She’s not into germs or “mess” as it’s known. And contagion is a turn off, she’s actually a hypochondriac. The Forum is full of these idiosyncratic preferences. Explosive vs pinched. One-and-done vs rapid fire. There are some who find nose rubbing hot. And my favorite: the word “boucherie” (French for “butcher”).

The Mystery

One of the great mysteries of the sneeze fetish is its link to the fear of vomit, or emetophobia. Both Samantha and Jessie have it, as do many others. And no one knows why. For Jessie, the fear of vomit is so intense, it’s debilitating. She carries plastic bags everywhere, just in case. She sits at the end of the row in movie theaters. Flying is hard. She doesn’t drink. And the mere sight of vomit, some sidewalk splatter-touille, can prompt a panic attack. Bear in mind she lives in New York.

“I think it’s about control,” she says. “Both vomiting and sneezing involve an involuntary loss of control over my body. I don’t know why my brain picked one as terrifying, and the other as the hottest possible thing. But isn’t that what happens, we eroticise our fears?”

The greatest mystery, however, is how the fetish starts in the first place. The Forum is full of people wondering why they turned out this way. Jessie can’t remember a before-time. Even as a 3-year-old she was obsessed with sneezing, she found it hilarious, to the great amusement of her parents. Then as she approached puberty, she realized that for her, it was sexual, and therefore secret and filled with shame. Today, she cringes when she remembers how she laughed so freely as a toddler, and she wonders—did she give herself away? Does her family suspect her of having a sneeze fetish now? She knows she’s not being rational, but still.

For Samantha, it also started with giggling as toddler, only it was yawning that tickled her, another involuntary reflex. As she got older, her fascination migrated to sneezing and the sexual connection became apparent. Now she thinks maybe it’s because of a particular uncle whose loud shotgun sneeze used to frighten her when she was little. It could well be. The link between fear and eroticism is nothing new. In “The Other Side of Desire” Daniel Bergner describes how a child being scolded and looking down at his shoes later led to a foot fetish. “What we fear,” he says, “we take control of”.

This is the theory of “early childhood imprinting”, probably the best explanation yet for the sneeze fetish. It’s the idea that unlikely neural connections are made in our infancy during emotionally charged moments. If that emotion is fear or shame or something similarly traumatic, then we have already within us a mysterious protective mechanism that may—in some cases—alchemize that fear or shame into sexual desire. But it might be even simpler than that in some cases. Linda De Villers, a sex therapist and psychologist, reckons all it takes is a coincidence. "If a child’s playing with him or herself and at the same time they hear someone sneeze next door,” she says, “then a connection is made.” Just like that.

Can it really be that straightforward? I spent plenty of time fiddling with myself as a toddler—not trying to brag, I’m just saying—so according to De Villers I should have a mighty scroll of fetishes, including the sound of Bengali parents fighting. But nope, nothing doing. This is the trouble with the childhood imprinting theory, it doesn’t always apply, and we can’t replicate it. What it does though, is inspire sympathy for the children we were.

Think of our child brains for a moment. I picture a sea anemone, soft and pulsing with Medusa-like tendrils reaching up and grasping for connection. Only these tendrils are wires and their ends are nodes. And in that moment of high emotion a spark leaps from one node to another like a Van de Graaf generator. Just one happenstance, a slammed door, a raised voice, and our sexual function is transformed forever.

Talk about vulnerable.

Thanks for all your support. Before you go, check out this excellent new piece by my friend Michael Holden.

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