Why food fetish videos are appearing on your TikTok for you page

If you’ve been on TikTok recently, you might have seen a viral, bizarre video of a woman making a real mess of decorating a cake while wearing a wedding dress and veil. You’ve probably gone back and replayed a few times in disbelief as she needlessly caresses each tier and prolongs squishing icing out of a pint glass, elongating words like ‘ooze’ and ‘explode’ as she narrates, in a way that makes you think ‘Is that really necessary?’

Or maybe you’ve seen the video from Five Minute Crafts showing an eyebrow-raising food hack, this time with the makers’ hands replicating the actions of a handjob as they… butter up some corn.

It seems like the platform is currently overrun with these strange food videos, leaving people to wonder: What are these videos for? Who are they for? Why are they doing this? Surely this doesn’t taste good?

Likely, tasting good is not the aim of these videos, as a lot of social media users believe these videos point to a sexual fetish known as ‘sploshing’, meaning an attraction to food.

It’s hard to imagine why the likes of Five Minute Crafts - a channel centred around (albeit usually terrible) crafts and hacks - would be interested in producing disguised fetish videos. It may just be that these food videos are strange because it gets people watching, talking, and ultimately increasing revenue for the creators.

But many TikTok users have pointed out that the messy food videos spreading across the platform seems just a little too odd to be innocent, and could be sploshing fetish content disguised as food tutorials. And a lot of TikTokers have a problem with it.

Lena Rae is one user who regularly analyses these videos, pointing out the ‘evidence’ pointing to a disguised fetish and sharing her concerns. In one video, she claims many of these videos are fetish content because they use a “porn format” which she describes as “lots of zooming in on holes, off-camera narrating, gasping, moaning, and POV-style cinematography.”

“This is so f*cking disgusting, why are they involving everyone else in their kinks,” writes one TikTok user in her replies. “I’m reporting these pages for spreading fetish content,” another replies.

To understand the fetish a bit better, we took a class with kink educator and sploshing expert Darla Delour. Delour tells GLAMOUR: “To understand what sploshing is, we need to understand what it’s not. It does not involve bodily fluids. It’s not about using vegetables as dildos, nor is it adding a splash of whipped cream to your body to spice things up in the bedroom.”

She tells us that sploshing has a clinical term, ‘sitophilia’, and, at its most basic level, refers to people involving food in their sex lives in some way or another. This fetish, which is sometimes just a kink (a fetish is something an individual needs for gratification whereas a kink is something an individual is very interested in) can take a lot of forms.

But usually, it involves a person getting excited or aroused by seeing and/or playing with copious amounts of food, in a sexual context.

Delour adds that, for a lot of people, sploshing - along with other wet and messy fetishes - is fun for its participants because of the power play, role play, and sensations that can be involved.

Delour also works as a sex worker creating wet and messy videos and performing as a sploshing cam girl. One of her clients, who will be remaining anonymous, says: “I love the power play present in sploshing scenes. I like to pretend it’s part of a competition or gameshow,” they explain. “That way, opponents start equal but as one starts winning the game, the power creeps from loser to winner. Then, the winner gets to get the loser all wet and messy. They get the relief of avoiding the mess, but the satisfaction of watching it.”

For 29-year-old Poppy*, sploshing is about rebellion. She tells GLAMOUR: “There’s something liberating about doing something you’re not supposed to. We’ve all heard ‘don’t get messy’ and ‘eat like a lady’. There’s something so hot about throwing all of that out of the window and smothering yourself in the stuff.”

It’s easy to see where these users’ concerns have stemmed from. Years of witnessing a war on porn have led us to believe sexual content is inherently dangerous content. And the stealth-like nature (or, at least, attempted stealth) of these videos adds to the concern. No one enjoys the idea that they’ve been tricked into engaging with something they otherwise wouldn’t search for.

But kink educator Lola Jean doesn’t think this is the wet and messy community’s intention, and that these videos are pretty harmless.

“The thing about fetish is it’s completely contextual. Anyone’s video could be a fetish video,” she . “Everyone’s into a lot of different things. I could watch the Great British Bake Off and jerk off. And so when you start policing certain things and naming things ‘fetish content’, that’s not necessarily true. It depends on who is watching it.” Essentially, if a wet and messy fetishist is watching the video, then sure, it’s a fetish video. If it’s being watched by a random bystander scrolling through their ‘for you page’ before going to sleep, it’s just a choice food video.

“Exposing people to fetish videos also isn’t necessarily going to make the audience into it either,” she adds. “And I don’t think that’s what the creators are trying to do.

Jean also points out that, despite the moral panic across TikTok over these videos, sploshing and wet and messy play in general, isn’t always about sex. “For some people, wet and messy play isn’t a horny thing and it’s more about releasing your inner child. Getting all messy and covered in gunge can be freeing. There’s also a satisfying element to watching people mix food and decorate it. People enjoy that stuff in a non-sexual way but it is gratifying.”

So, if it’s harmless, why disguise them at all?

Jean says TikTok’s notoriously sex-suppressing algorithm could have something to do with this. “I can't post anything on TikTok without getting banned. So, whether these videos are fetish content or not, there are things you need to do to get your content seen by anyone on the app,” she explains. “If this was labelled as fetish content, it would get deleted immediately.”

As Lola Jean says, fetishes are in the eye of the beholder. The beauty of fetish is that something seemingly normal and run-of-the-mill could be somebody’s thing. So we can’t censor fetish, nor should we. I could post a video of me plucking my eyebrows and that could be someone’s fetish, but that doesn’t mean the content automatically becomes harmful.

It’s easy to scroll away from TikTok videos we don’t like and allow the platform’s infamous algorithm to realise you don’t fancy them on your page. In the meantime, let the fetishists eat (or, rather, smash up) cake.

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