How to Do It is Slate’s sex advice column. Have a question? Send it to Stoya and Rich here. It’s anonymous!
Dear How to Do It,
Recently, after my girlfriend performed oral sex on me, I felt a burning sensation that lasted for hours. I had never experienced anything like it before and was horribly worried that it was some kind of STI until she realized what had happened.
Earlier in the evening, she had made nachos with spicy chips and jalapeños (she loves spicy food more than anyone I’ve ever met) and hadn’t brushed her teeth. She was laughing hysterically and told me that this had actually happened before with a previous partner of hers, and even to herself when she masturbated after eating spicy chips and didn’t wash her hands thoroughly. She did apologize, but was clearly amused by the situation, even though I was shaken. I’m less sexually experienced than she is and have some hang-ups about sex that I’m currently working through in therapy, so things like this upset me more than might be typical.
Because of this, I’ve been asking her before we have sex what she has eaten in the last few hours, so something like that doesn’t happen again. The first time, she didn’t mind, but I’ve been asking her every time, and it upsets her. She says I clearly don’t trust her and is accusing me of judging her for her diet, which is considerably less healthy than mine (she admits this). I genuinely don’t care what she eats; I just want to feel safe with the person I’m having sex with. I do want to trust her more, but I wish she would take this more seriously and accept that it gives me peace of mind to ask her this one question. Additionally, is there ANYTHING I can do on my end that might prevent this kind of sensation if she does eat spicy food? I know there are cooling lubes and condoms, but I doubt this would somehow prevent me from feeling that sensation again. Help!
—Too Much Spice in the Bedroom
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Jessica Stoya: You almost certainly have set up a secondary situation in which you are judging her for her diet. That’s on you. The actual question to ask would be, “Have you eaten anything spicy that is going to burn my dick?”
Rich Juzwiak: I agree. That is the question. And I don’t think that that is the wrong question to ask, especially in the current situation. The girlfriend has experienced this before. She laughed about it. She did it to herself. She did it to other people. She can’t necessarily be trusted to disclose this information, so she should have that prompt until she can prove that she’s on board. But “What have you eaten?” is way too general.
Jessica: Also, she’s acting like an asshole by avoiding acknowledging that her partner really does not want this spicy thing to happen again. So that’s another problem. You’re dating someone who doesn’t care that this disturbs you enough for her to say, “I don’t like that question, but I do eat spicy things all the time, and this is obviously not very serious to me. So can you just ask me whether I ate anything spicy, which will prompt me to consider more accurately the thing you want to avoid?”
I think it’s also worth engaging directly with the spicy sensations and how to manage them.
Rich: Yes. Well, I have experience with this because I also love spicy food. I haven’t had this one, but it is my ideal. The company is called PuckerButt Pepper Company, and they make Reaper Squeezins. It’s basically like a Carolina Reaper puree. It’s a very thick hot sauce. I’m aware that as I’m eating it, this is nuts, and nobody would ever eat this with me. Carolina Reaper is really, really high on the pepper scale. The Scovilles are off the charts.
There are a few things more satisfying to me than when I’m eating Indian food, and I start sweating. I love that experience. So I’ve been here. I am in many ways the girlfriend in this case, and I haven’t, as far as I know, done it to anybody else. But I’ve done it to myself when I’ve gone to the bathroom. I won’t be able to see the hot sauce on my hands, but the spiciness—the capsaicin—will still be there. Then I’ll touch my balls and my balls will be on fire. That has also happened while masturbating, although not that frequently, but it just goes to show that very little indirect touch is enough to cause burning.
Jessica: The implication of not that frequently when it comes to hot sauce on genitals while masturbating—amazing.
Rich: Honestly, I have literally dipped my balls in milk. I’ve poured a bowl of milk or just rubbed milk all over my junk. I don’t know the science. They say that you should have dairy if you’re eating something spicy to mitigate the heat. I think it goes for external as well, at least from what I could tell. I don’t know how much of it is a placebo effect, but it did seem to mitigate the immediate oh my God, my balls are on fire feeling. So that’s my tip. Dip your balls in milk.
Jessica: I’m so pleased to hear this.
Rich: If milk isn’t available or really doing the trick, yogurt might help as well, because you can keep your balls in milk in a bowl, but yogurt is easier to apply.
Jessica: Milk, yogurt, soft white cheeses. Not like a Brie or a Gouda, and definitely not Parmesan. Basically, goopy cheese. Feta would probably do it.
Rich: Cottage cheese. Ricotta.
Jessica: I did yesterday say to my boyfriend, “I feel like I need to at least run this past you, but I might need to get a very spicy pepper and apply it to my labia and then apply a couple of different kinds of milk products to test a theory.” He said, “Is it necessary? If it’s necessary, of course, do you want me to go buy the pepper? But are you sure it’s necessary?” And I was like, “Oh, vulvas are different than penises.” And then you told me you’d had some experiences with this, which reminded me, oh, right, Rich loves spicy. No need.
Rich: I love what you were willing to do for journalism. I think that’s amazing. You’re really going above and beyond.
Jessica: It was actually more of a veneration of the importance of facts.
Rich: So, hopefully knowing that will at least give the writer some peace of mind. You have a parachute. There’s a way out.
Jessica: Also, broadly speaking, there are two kinds of people in the world. One that says no to discomfort immediately. And others, and between the letter writer’s girlfriend, Rich, and me, we have three different examples of this kind of person who’s like, “Fuck yeah.”
Personally, I cannot deal with hot sauce. Technically, I can, but it will make everyone else in a restaurant so uncomfortable that they very well may flee. Then I will physically suffer for about 24 hours. So I don’t often engage with very spicy things. Sometimes you’re in a certain culture like Serbia where you’re like, “Oh, and this has been served to me, and I can either consume it and deal with the ramifications or make a whole big scene, and I’m going to consume it.” But generally I’m like, “Maybe not.” I go into an Indian restaurant. I’m like, “Hi, I’m very white. Every stereotype in your head, apply that to the amount of spice in my food.”
But when it comes to my genitals, there is a very narrow amount of bad pain, and otherwise, it’s all sensation. One time in my late teens, my roommate and I had this windowsill where we kept all kinds of things: drinks in bottles, bottles that had previously contained drinks and had been filled halfway with water to be used as an ashtray, lubricant for sex, and Tiger Balm. On multiple occasions, each of us accidentally drank the ashtray water, which was a whole experience on its own, and did not motivate either of us to come up with an ashtray solution that prevented that issue from recurring. So I’m not hiding the ball on the kind of temperament we’re dealing with here.
On one spectacular occasion, I grabbed what I was sure was lube, and it turned out to be Tiger Balm ointment. The guy was protected mostly by the condom, but not his balls. So it got on my pussy and his balls. And I’m lying there shrieking, laughing so much. He’s more like you and me and the letter writer’s girlfriend. So the two of us are just like, “Whoo, that is a sensation. We are done with the sex part, but wow, this is quite an experience.”
One of us did consider whether we should try to do something. And the other one was like, “Well, there’s a very good chance with Tiger Balm ointment we might do something that makes it even more of an adventure and possibly cause chemical burns, so we’re just going to ride it out.” Compared to that, the time someone fingered me after applying red pepper to their food with their fingers and hadn’t gotten around to washing their hands, that was nothing. It tingled a bit.
There’s also just this bridge that problematically the girlfriend doesn’t want to step onto that exists between who the letter writer is with regards to intense genital sensations and who she is. I think it’s completely valid to think it’s hilarious. I don’t think it’s valid to continue subjecting a partner, who very much does not enjoy it, to this. But I’m not entirely certain that the writer’s reaction to this situation has anything to do with a sexual hang-up so much as being the kind of person who’s like, “No, it’s not OK for my genitals to feel like they’re burning.”
Rich: Right. It seems like he’s sensitive in general about sex and maybe needs it to go right. And if it does go wrong, it becomes way more distracting and distressing. But I agree that it doesn’t qualify as a sexual hang-up. I think if that’s a sexual hang-up, then many people have that sexual hang-up, perhaps most. To reiterate, asking the girlfriend for a period of time, “Have you eaten anything spicy?” is a better, more direct question. It doesn’t feel like you’re criticizing her diet, and it’s totally fair, given her history, to at least have that be a thing that you ask for a period of time.
Jessica: I would add—and this was the entire point of the Tiger Balm adventure—that it seems like a big part of the writer’s problem with the sensation is the novelty of it. This is not to say that I believe embracing it will turn into erotic appreciation. But yes, keep in his back pocket, milk, yogurt, and sour cream. Whatever tasty, liquid pale milk product you have on hand. There’s also possibly a way to say, OK, this is no longer an erotic experience. We’re done with the oral sex and all sex for right now. However, I can sit with the feeling and feel this because Rich, you would probably know more than I do, but it seems extremely unlikely that capsaicin that sat in someone’s mouth for a little bit and then got on the genitals is going to cause damage.
Rich: I wouldn’t say so. You might temporarily become a bit red, but I’ve not seen any lasting damage come from it. Sometimes people eat something so spicy that it makes them pass out or worse. That’s not what’s going to happen here. She would have to have the reaper pepper in her mouth and be giving the blow job intentionally to even come close to an experience like that. Also, she was eating jalapeño, which is not as strong as a Reaper.
Jessica: So our letter writer could say to themself, this is not a danger signaling pain. Maybe I’m going to ride this out.
Rich: Ride it out, meditate your way through it. It makes sense to ask your partner to help you in this endeavor of avoiding it. But if it does accidentally happen, I think we can safely say it’s not going to kill you. Sometimes you just have to deal with the peppery balls life throws at you.
Jessica: The real problem is that he’s like, “I don’t like this.” And she’s like, “Well, it’s hilarious.” That’s really not a good sign for the relationship. You’ll want to try to get that back on track, or the problem is actually not the capsaicin. It’s a Carolina Reaper herring.
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