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So You Want to Bang a Cake: Inside the Messy World of Hardcore Food Fetishists

It’s Friday. 10pm. You’re lying on the couch in your underwear watching Entrapment. It’s that scene where Catherine Zeta-Jones pulls a Nicki Minaj under some lasers, and the imperative that you get laid tonight is becoming as clear as Zeta-Jones’ gratuitous ass cleavage. You are single, as is obvious from both your predicament and the number of crushed Tecate cans functioning as combination iPhone holders/ashtrays littering your coffee table. Staying in is not an option.

Well, alright. You’ll have to shower. Shave. Buy condoms. Clothe yourself in an unembarrassing garment and transport yourself to a public space of the sort that potential partners of the sex/age/social subgenre you prefer to bang frequent. You could hop on Tinder or Grindr, but then half the time you’ll open the door to a swamp creature whom you will screw anyway because, hey, the swamp creature is already in your apartment, and then you’ll have to breathe through your shirt the whole time to mask the scent of (WTF?) the banana-flavored lube that this dubious person brought here in their pocket.

So you’re going to a bar. Great! Tonight’s objective: locate a person who is breathing, sane, and sexually available, who also meets basic physical and psychological requirements for getting you off. Without getting too tipsy, you’ll need to say and do things that turn them on, and not say or do anything that turns them off. Good luck! 

Okay, now imagine that one of your basic physical requirements to get off -- or, if not a requirement, at least an extreme preference -- is that a beautiful woman must punch you in the face, knocking you into a cake, and then laugh at you while you masturbate. You’re still turned on and alone. What do you do now?

If you’re B.W., a 38-year-old North Virginia man who has been getting off to this very idea since he saw it in a movie (not Entrapment) at the age of 11, you probably will need to find a fetish-friendly prostitute. He’s booked about 50 appointments with women he found advertised on BackPage. 

That, or you’ll have to buy a cake and try to piss a lady off enough that she’ll slap you into it. 

“I’ve actually sabotaged relationships to make this happen,” he says. “I don’t believe in cheating, but when I wanted this to happen, I have purchased cakes or pies with ‘I’m sorry’ on them and come up with this elaborate story of how I cheated,” B.W. says. “Only one time did I ever get caked or pied. Everyone else was just upset.”

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Okay, so how should you ask someone to punch you into a cake?

Asking a potential sex partner if they’re into your food fetish should be approached carefully, like a skittish pony. It’s not dissimilar to asking your long-time vanilla wife or husband to stick a finger in your ass, or for the occasional spanking. If your chosen partner is a decent, accepting person, they’ll politely tell you whether they’ll indulge you or not, but if you’ve accidentally chosen a judgmental asshole, he or she might just shame you for kicks. Better to leave yourself an out. 

“I have a go-to lie I tell,” B.W. says. “I say I had this dream: we’re in a restaurant and I smacked my girl on her ass or something, and she punches me and I go face-first into the dessert cart. I roll down the aisle in front of these business ladies who have real short skirts on, and I look up at them and my face is all covered and they start giggling at me. But then the girl [who punched me] just rolls me back to the table and keeps eating while I’m unconscious in a cake at the table.

“If a girl is really shocked by that, then I know not to say anything more," B.W. says. "But if they say, ‘That’s pretty funny, I could see myself doing something like that,’ then I’m like: okay, alright.” 

“I’ve had some difficulties finding someone who’ll try it,” says a man who goes by MessyMadMan on the fetish website FetLife.com. MessyMadMan gets turned on by taking a pie to the face, like B.W., but he also likes wet and messy sex, which people in the know call WAM, splosh, or gunge. He likes to be covered in frosting, mud, custard, or whipped cream. He also likes pre-sex food fights, and being turned into a human birthday cake, which is exactly what it sounds like. 

“I will often describe it as a sexy food or mud fight. That usually gets them to try it once,” he says. “After the first time, you can usually tell if they like it. They often find it too weird to try, but once you show them that it’s both silly and sexy, they usually give it a chance.”

“I’m more the WAMer of the two of us,” says B.L., one half of a food play-loving couple based in Indianapolis. “I’ve been into it since I was a teenager, but I’ve never really done it outside of a relationship. When I met my girlfriend, she knew about it already. She’d never done it, but she was intrigued. We started doing it together and it blossomed into something that was beyond what I’d ever done before. In prior relationships, it wasn’t forced, exactly, but you could tell it was my thing. With my current girlfriend, it’s our thing.”

Okay, you’ve found a food play partner. Now what?

“When I was in college, I had a boyfriend who worked completely opposite hours than I did. We only had a certain amount of time, so we combined the food and the sex. We started having clothing-optional indoor picnics, where we would put down a picnic blanket,” says MerryVice, a female fetishist in Chicago who hosts food play events several times a year. “We had a lot of fun with gyros one time, and I was like, you know, I really like this.” 
 

Wait, what did you do with a gyro?

“If it’s room temperature, just imagine putting that on intimate parts of your body," MerryVice says. "The tzatziki sauce is kind of cool, and the gyro meat is kind of warm and slightly oily. And then you can put onion rings on penises. You’re ripping off pieces of the pita, and using the tzatziki as kind of body paint. Anything sexy that you can do with chocolate, you can do with regular food.” 
 

Understood. Anything else?

“I am a food play top, so I like people being objects. Like, you are a table, you are a plate, you are an inanimate thing that I can manipulate because you have negotiated to have no free will,” MerryVice says. “You can’t move. A plate can’t move. And I’m totally in control of you. I can cover you with what I want. I can lick you if I want to. The people I’ve had be plates for me, when I’ve hosted events, they just say that the gaze of everyone who is trying to decide which piece of food they’re going to eat off of them is very scrutinizing, which can be very titillating.” 

“One of my biggest fantasies is to find a couple,” B.W. says. “And we do this role play where the girl and I are fake dating, and her real boyfriend is a fake repairman. The guy and I get into an altercation, and he’ll punch me so I go face-first into a three-tiered cake or something. Then the two of them start going at it. And then I come up and am like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ and then she punches me out and they keep going at it. That’s something I’m trying to find. I’m not finding a lot of people who are into that, but maybe sooner or later.”

“What we usually do,” B.L. says, “is we’ll get dressed up in costumes, do makeup, stuff like that. Then we’ll usually do oral, rim play, actual intercourse in a variety of positions -- always me fucking her, not necessarily always her fucking me, but that’s just because getting pegged isn’t something I crave on a daily basis. And then after she cums a couple of times, we’ll do the food play session for 45 minutes to an hour. We may fuck at the end. And then after that is cleanup, because you can’t just run around the house covered in food.”

Obviously. Next question: Am I correct in assuming that the more particular my sexual peccadillos, the harder my sex life will be?

“It’s very upsetting, as a matter of fact,” says B.W, the guy who wants to be punched into a cake. “Because sometimes you’re dating a girl that you really like, but then you start to lose interest. One girl I dated, she really got into it. I felt like I won the lottery or something. And then she moved away. Once you get that and it goes away, you’re back to bread and water. It does get kind of shitty.”

“It’s like that scene in the movie Secretary, when Maggie Gyllenhaal's character is looking for a play partner, there’s that guy who wants to be tied to the oven while someone is throwing tomatoes at him. That’s a really specific fetish,” MerryVice says. “Some people who are fetishists are like, 'this is what I need, this is what I’m looking for,' and of course, for them it’s much more difficult. For other people, it’s more playful.”

Do I need to be concerned about anything else?

“A few times a year, I like to go to really nice restaurants,” MerryVice says. “And I’m one of those people who, my eyes will roll back in my head and I will moan if I eat really good food. So getting turned on in public does happen, and it is food-inspired. I try to go to really nice places on off-hours, like right when they just open, so I can have the place to myself and my husband can tease and taunt me. I have another friend who is a clown-player, who likes messy things, and he and I will go out, and I’ll be like, 'Awww, there’s barbecue sauce on my arm.' And he’ll lean over and lick it off."

“The biggest hurdle is prep,” MessyMadMan says. “Its hard to get in the mood while taking time to shop, prep, mix, etc. It interrupts the sexual mood sometimes. Also, food can cause itching, smell, and potentially yeast infections, too. So you need to clean up well.”

“We try to limit the number of colored substances or really runny substances, because more often than not, we’re doing it in my bedroom,” B.L. says. “We use clear shower curtains, and we’ll put one over the floor and one over the wall and tape them together. We also have a blow-up kiddie pool that we put a mat down inside to make the cleanup easier. But yeah, I’ve got a roommate, and he definitely knows. We’ve had an instance where it’s three or four in the morning and we’re at home playing and all of a sudden, the roommate and a bunch of people will get back from the bar. It’s like, ‘Oh shit.’ They’re obviously looking for us because they know we’re here. So we’re locked in our room waiting for everyone to go to sleep.”

Can you explain food play to someone who’s maybe not that into it?

“I’d say it’s kind of like a submission-bondage thing, but with a silly feel to it,” B.L. says. “I’m actually glad I said that. It’s a dirty, submissive, humiliating way of having an intimate relationship. But at the same time, it’s pretty hilarious.”

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Jacqueline Detwiler is a senior editor at Popular Mechanics who writes about science, travel, sex, and food. She has never had sex as a plate, but would consider being a fork if anyone can figure out how that would work. Follow her @jacquidetwiler.