Pig

A gay man with a huge, shameless appetite for sex, usually the kinky, sweaty and messy kind, who wears the word with pride.

In gay slang a pig is a man with a huge, shameless appetite for sex, and usually for the dirtier, kinkier, sweatier end of it. A pig wants more: more loads, more partners, more hours, fewer limits. He is proud of it, and he uses the word about himself. "Total pig" in a profile is not a confession, it is a selling point.

Pig is about attitude more than any single act. A pig can be a top or a bottom, butch or not, into leather, rubber, piss, fisting or just a lot of very enthusiastic sex. What makes him a pig is that he does not pretend to be nice and tidy about it.

Where it comes from

Pig has been an insult for greedy, dirty people in English since the 16th century, and for someone with "dirty piggish habits" since at least the early 19th. Gay men took the insult and made it a badge: if you are going to call us dirty and greedy, fine, we will be dirty and greedy on purpose. Green's Dictionary of Slang records the gay pig-boy, "a sexually voracious man", in 1996, and pighole, a very well-used ass, in a Sydney gay personal ad of 1997.

The word feels at home in leather bars and sex clubs, where kink and pride in kink go together, and it spread online with the hookup sites and apps that let men say exactly what they wanted.

The pig family

• Pig bottom, pig top: a pig in a given role.
• Cum pig: wants as many loads as possible; close to cum dump and breeding.
• Piss pig: into watersports.
• Pig sex: sex without squeamishness, sweaty, messy and long.
• Oink: what pigs write to each other online, half joke and half mating call.

The health side

Pig culture overlaps with bareback sex and, in some scenes, with chemsex, so the practical side matters. PrEP taken consistently is about 99% effective at preventing HIV from sex among men who have sex with men, and a partner on treatment with an undetectable viral load does not pass HIV on through sex. Neither protects against gonorrhea, chlamydia or syphilis, so pigs do well to test regularly, every three months is a common rhythm for men with many partners, at a sexual health clinic that will not blink at the details. For anything that bleeds, burns or just does not feel right, see a doctor.

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