Watersports

Piss play: getting turned on by urine, by peeing on a partner, being peed on or watching; often shortened to WS on profiles.

Watersports is the polite name for piss play: getting turned on by urine, by peeing on a partner, being peed on, or watching. It ranges from a playful splash in the shower to whole fetish nights in a rubber-floored club, and the guy who pisses is just as much a part of it as the guy on the receiving end. Profiles shorten it to WS, and the classic phrase for the act is a golden shower.

It has nothing to do with swimming or jet skis, which is the point of the joke, and it is a kink, not a hygiene problem: men who are into it know exactly what they are doing and why.

Where it comes from

The euphemism is a gay American one. Green's Dictionary of Slang finds it first in 1972, in Bruce Rodgers' gay slang dictionary The Queens' Vernacular, defined as "erotic interest given to urine". Through the 1970s and 1980s it turns up in gay magazines, in Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City books and in Toronto's gay paper The Body Politic, and by the early 2000s WS was a standard abbreviation in personal ads. The clinical word is urolagnia.

On the apps and in the scene

On the apps WS, piss or a yellow drop emoji in a profile mean the man is into it, and gay fetish sites have whole categories for it. In the hanky code of the 1970s a yellow hanky signaled the same interest, left pocket for giving, right for receiving. Piss play is especially at home in the leather, rubber and pig scenes, where rubber or leather gear has the practical advantage of being easy to wipe down.

Variants and close relatives

• Golden shower: being pissed on, the classic phrase for the act.
• Piss pig: a man who is very into it, often on the receiving end; a branch of the pig family.
• Toilet or urinal play: a role-play variant, linked in fantasy to the old tearooms and cottages.

Related terms