“There’s something about the way a dude eats that’s directly linked to how he fucks — or not,” a woman told me earlier this year.
Her comment surprised me. I hadn’t correlated these two things before. Obviously, I knew food and sex were related beyond the occasional whipped cream on one’s décolletage. After all, a couple of years ago, I had a long conversation with 37-year-old Rich about the sexual pleasure he derives from sitting atop cakes (a fetish he discovered when he accidentally sat on a cake at a birthday party in his mid-teens).
“When I see a cake at the grocery store or a bakery, I think about what it would look like being smashed into the face, groin or butt of the person for whom it was made,” he told me. “The cakes at Costco are my favorite. But honestly, any cake will do. I have found that cakes with pudding in the middle and buttercream frosting on the outside work best. Ice cream cakes are fun, too. They’re way too expensive, though. Round cakes are best for sitting; sheet cakes are best for rolling around on. Fondant is the worst. It’s impossible to smash. My dream cake is a multilayered wedding cake. Something seven layers high. Nothing would turn me on more than seeing a bride lowered down on top of it.”
The actual act of eating, however (cake or anything else), is seemingly something completely different. Like sex, it, too, might be biologically determined and offer humans sensuous pleasure, but can the way someone goes about doing one of these things really influence how they go about doing the other?
According to some people, yes.
“Picky eaters make bad lovers,” a friend explains. We’d just eaten a garlic-y branzino with the skin on, a Greek salad full of pungent olives and tart dressing and my favorite dip full of avocado, tahini and caviar. I hadn’t heard this theory before, but it immediately made sense. While the word “umami” makes me cringe, so does the idea of sharing a meal with a lover who only orders from the kid’s menu.
When it comes to women, of course, phallic foodstuffs — bananas, hot dogs, popsicles, etc. — have long been viewed as a sensual punchline, very on-the-nose evidence of, if not of her fellatio skills, certainly of her sexuality. See: The hot girls scarfing down cheeseburgers in all those old Carl’s Jr. ads. The male version of this, though, is virtually nonexistent. Seriously, what foods suggest a man’s big dick energy — or better put, a good tell that he can really fuck? What snacks evidence their capacity to lick and rim? Mangos? Ribs? Pudding cups?
With my appetite now, um, whet, I endeavored to find out.
Whatever The Dish, It Can’t Be the Same Thing At Every Meal
“Men who are afraid to venture out with food can be that way in bed, too,” says Ariana, a 21-year-old from Chicago. “It’s a general issue of being reserved and close-minded with most things in your life, which reflects in sex. I find that my boyfriend doesn’t like venturing out into a lot of different food like pho, sushi and medium-rare meat (to name just a few), and in the same respect, he’s not fond of venturing out when dealing with sex — such as anal, ass eating and bondage.”
Adds 40-year-old Kate from New Jersey, “In general, the men who aren’t inhibited about food choices and what and how they eat are the best lovers. With them, it’s ‘live, laugh, love’ at meal time and bedtime. I once dated a man who was very restrictive about almost everything that he ate. He had a theory that one should stop eating while they still felt hungry. He was very stingy with oral sex, and he was the lamest vanilla missionary fuck I’d ever dealt with. We didn’t last very long.”
It’s Not How You Eat, It’s What You Sound Like When Doing So
“I find eating very sexual,” a friend of mine explains. “It’s animalistic, and you’re using your mouth. When I watch men eat, I’m like, ‘Okay, are they a fast eater? Are they a slow eater? Are they a sloppy eater?’ Personally, I’m a really, really sloppy eater. For whatever reason, I’m just messy, sloppy and fast. I give zero fucks. It’s wild.
“Additionally, when I have to eat with someone in my family, someone who I would be repulsed to think of in a sexual light, I get grossed out. I can’t tell you how much it bothers me. I’ve told my friends how it can be so hard to eat with my mom because she makes all these noises.
“When people are enjoying their food, they make these disgusting noises. My mom’s very vocal. She will be eating her food like, ‘Mmmmm.’ I don’t know what she was eating last time she moaned during a meal in front of me, but I do know it was at the Inn of the Seventh Ray. It was my worst nightmare.”
A Well-Mannered Man Is the Most Desirable Kind of Man
In the end, though, for all this talk about nasty noises and wild palates leading to wild sex, it might still all come down to good ol’ fashion manners. Or as 29-year-old Chelsea puts it, “I have to assume anyone who chews with their mouth open is a sloppy ass kisser.”
Tierney Finster
Tierney Finster is a journalist, screenwriter, actor and model from Los Angeles, California. She is a contributing writer at MEL, specializing in love, sex, mental health, drugs, queer culture and the cannabis industry. She has written for publications such as Playboy, Purple, Dazed and Confused, Jezebel and Broadly and was the key researcher behind Sex On, HBO’s revival of its iconoclastic docu-series Real Sex.
