Yes, There’s Also a Queef Fetish Community

What crosses your mind when I say the word “queef”? For my mum, it means absolutely nothing; for my sister, it induces uncomfortable silence. For a gay male friend, it’s a delicate mystery; for a straight female friend, it elicits a knowing smile. On the internet, it seems to cause embarrassment, or bring up relentless references to a certain South Park episode. And—as with many body parts, objects and bodily functions—queefing can also be a source of sexual arousal.

For the uninitiated, queefing refers to the involuntary emission of air from the vagina (that said, there are some women who can queef on demand). Although the squeezing of air through a small space creates a sound that we most regularly associate with farting, queefing is odorless and entirely unrelated to the butt. In spite of this, other terms for queefing tend to refer to its anal neighbour: there’s vaginal flatulence, vaginal wind, vaginal fart, and the neat contraction vart.

Queefing was first examined by the scientific community in mid-1990s Sri Lanka, where the clinician JA Attapattu coined the rather intimidating phrase “garrulitas vulvae” (which—once we get past the Latin—translates to the much friendlier “chattering vulva”). Since then, there have been general population surveys on Dutch and Iranian women, the latter of which delivers an interesting stat: the most common activity leading to vaginal flatulence was sexual intercourse. This is reflected in the majority of other academic papers that examine queefing. Whether it’s a deep dive into doggy, a fast finger-bang, or some cunnilingus bliss, any penetrative action that lets air into a vagina can also result in that air coming back out. Indeed, it may be the steamy carnality of the queef that leads some people to fetishize it.

Teodora*, a 27-year-old IT specialist, doesn’t describe herself as a queef fetishist. Nonetheless, she can’t escape the feeling that there’s something pretty sexy about a lusty queef. “It doesn't happen very often and in my case it’s mostly after very intense fucking,” she says. The turn-on for Teodora lies in both the mental satisfaction of a passionate fuck and the physical sensation of queefing itself. “My imagination focuses on the idea that so much air came into my pussy,” she says. “When it’s releasing, even if it’s really loud, I don’t really care—it’s still tickling my pussy. So it’s really nice.”

Although fetish porn performer Allison* isn’t aroused by queefing, she’s well aware of the male propensity for a queef between the sheets. A few years back, she was struggling to make ends meet and decided to top-up her income by creating and selling videos online through her studio Thy Fetish Kingdom. After discovering the market for burping clips, Allison decided to give queefing a crack. “It comes naturally to me,” she explains, “and I couldn’t make farting videos due to embarrassment. For some reason queefing seemed less embarrassing.”

Allison tells me that her burping content “sells like hot cakes”, but she still has a steady stream of queef connoisseurs—her videos top the “queefing” category on the Clips4Sale website. When I ask Allison why she thinks that there’s a niche for queef clips, she speculates that it may be connected to childhood experiences, both negative and positive. “A young boy could have been molested by a girl he heard queef during a traumatic moment for him,” she suggests. “Sometimes it could be positive though, like a teacher he liked queefed once. But I’m no Freud.” Either way, Allison isn’t turned on by queefing herself: it’s business rather than pleasure.

Thirty-eight-year-old Jacob* certainly is turned on by queefing and believes his fetish originated during childhood. However, his understanding of his fetish doesn’t quite fit the negative/positive dichotomy. “My first girlfriend queefed a lot. I could hear her vagina taking in air during fingering, and sometimes around the sides of my penis during intercourse,” he says. “We were in our mid-teens, so this imprinted on me. My sexual template was still forming.”

Jacob’s explanation for his queef fetish appears to fit the classical conditioning theory of sexual preferences. This theory suggests that if we repeatedly experience a specific body part, object or bodily function prior to and during sexual arousal, we will eventually start to get turned on by it, even in seemingly non-sexual situations. In Jacob’s case, the pairing of his first sexual encounters with queefing may have had a significant effect. In fact, his first queefing experience still sticks with him decades down the line. “I could hear air slowly gurgling into her,” he recalls. “We thought we heard my mom get home, so we got out of bed quickly. As [my girlfriend] pivoted on her butt on the bed to scoot her feet off, she queefed a lot.”

Of course, the classical conditioning theory doesn’t quite fit everyone, nor does the idea of childhood experiences imprinting on the sexual psyche. The owner of the @WeLuvQueef Twitter page is an African-American man in his late-twenties. A casual lover switched to doggy one night and he found himself incredibly aroused by both her raised ass and her queefing. He was already running a regular porn Twitter account, but started to realize the occasional queef during videos. “I thought to myself, I can’t be the only one who likes this,” he recounts. “That’s when I turned this into a Twitter page for people like me who want to skip the long movies and go straight to the queefing.”

A large part of @WeLuvQueef’s fetish seems to be grounded in the visceral aspects of queefing. He frequently talks about his attraction to loud, wet and noisy queefs. For @WeLuvQueef, queefs are a natural by-product of fucking and therefore add an authenticity to his sexual experiences, something that he bemoans the lack of in conventional porn. “It’s better to hear the noises people actually make, rather than cut them out of scenes,” he says. “It’s much more real….it’s live, raw and uncut.” Jacob feels a similar pull to the link between queefing and sex. Since queefing is often stimulated by a digit, dick, or dildo, it forms part of his broader erotic experience: “I love that it's a sign of penetration. It's part of the atmosphere of sex.”

Benji*, a 30-year-old American man who has experienced queefing solely through porn, finds a specific thrill in the primal nature of noisy, queefy sex. “I never saw it happen in porn in any other position, only face-down, ass-up,” he recalls. “That position in itself is quite animalistic.” When a woman queefs, it suggests to Benji that both sexual partners are hungrily enjoying each other’s bodies. He asks me to imagine a ravenous man visiting a restaurant and being served a big plate of pasta. Once he tucks into the food, he starts to audibly slurp it up. “[The man] may be embarrassed, but the chef may hear it and beam with joy, seeing that his dish caused the man to lose his manners,” Benji explains. “That’s how sex is meant to be enjoyed, with all its sounds and squishy noises.”

Both @WeLuvQueef and Jacob can easily integrate queefing into their sex lives, largely because it takes little extra effort from themselves or their lovers. Jacob doesn’t look specifically for women who queef – he prefers to leave it to luck. He has a range of other kinks, such as group sex, large dildos, and rimming, so women aren’t usually that surprised that he’s into queefing too. “Queefing is just a very nice cherry on top of my kinky ice cream,” Jacob explains.

@WeLuvQueef says he has developed a sort of “queef embarrassment” radar, so doesn’t necessarily discuss or insist on his fetish with all sexual partners. “I don’t completely turn someone away if they don’t queef,” he says. “Some respond saying they hate it, others respond saying ‘hey, she’s talking to you.’” Although he acknowledges that queef fetishism isn’t normalized and is difficult to bring up with others, @WeLuvQueef is quietly confident of the future. “I think it has grown over the past couple of years and I want to see more people come out and say they enjoy it.”

*Names have been changed to protect anonymity.

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