Maschalagnia The ArmPit Fetish

There is a subset of people who have been having a difficult time in silence during the winter, but the arrival of summer, with so many people out there walking around in a tank top, they are become very happy and panic over being publicly for there Maschalagnia. Hairy or clean-shaven, some people get off to armpits. But is armpit fetishism any weirder than all of the other freaky stuff out there?

Armpit (Maschalagnia) fetishism

It’s real, yet not really talked about. We live in an age where porn is everywhere, but there aren’t many people who are gonna own up to licking someone’s pit to get off. Is an armpit fetish really so different from all the other freaky stuff out there?

First, I’ll clarify that there is a difference between having a fetish, and just being turned on by something. A fetish in the true sense of the word implies an obsession.

As the Kinsey Institute defines it, “fetish specifically refers to a strong sexual preoccupation with an object, material, or body part.”

Basically, if you prefer armpit sex to regular sex, that’s a fetish. If you have traditional sex, but like to lick and smell armpits while it’s happening, that’s less a fetish and more just a thing that turns you on. Fetishes aren’t considered a problem unless they cause distress to the individual or others, though sometimes people just have a hard time understanding how someone could be turned on by something so “weird.”

Thanks to Urban Dictionary  I learned that the colloquial term for armpit sex is “bagpiping.”

Dr. Anil Aggrawal’s 2009 book Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices defines maschalagnia as a fetish for armpits, and also defines maschalophilous (slightly differently) as arousal from armpits – although a quick internet search will highlight that most sources use these two words interchangeably to mean the same thing. According one fetish website, the attraction to armpits can be based on a number of factors and senses, but claims it is the olfactory and visual components are the most common sensory factors involved when it comes to armpit sexual arousal.

Other armpit related sexual practices include hircusophilism (a sexual preference for underarm hair), and axillism (the use of the armpit for sex). There are a surprising number of fetishistic websites purely devoted to the sexual allure of armpits. Most of these people enjoy kissing, tasting, smelling their partner’s armpits during sexual foreplay. Sometimes they ask their sexual partners not to shower, bathe or wash their armpits, so that the smell is as strong as possible.

Brenda Love in her Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices claims that sexual arousal from armpits:

“…is more common in Europe where women allow their armpit hair to grow. This area is very sensitive to the flicker the tongue or the warmth of a penis. Unshaven hair is also said to retain pheremones, the sex hormones that cause arousal when inhaled. The advantages of axillism for men are that of a tight fit, friction against the penis, close proximity to the breasts, and no risk of pregnancy or disease. Axillism, when engaged in within a day of shaving, produces more sensation but later underarm stubble can cause irritation of the penile skin”.

“The odour of the body, like its beauty, in so far as it can be regarded as a possible sexual allurement, has in the course of development been transferred to the upper parts. The careful concealment of the sexual region has doubtless favoured this transfer. It has thus happened that when personal odour acts as a sexual allurement it is the armpit, in any case normally the chief focus of odour in the body, which mainly comes into play, together with the skin and the hair”.

Some claim that some men can detect menstruating women from the smell of their armpits. Although this is not sexual in and of itself, more those men who engage in menophilia (a sexual paraphilia where individuals derive sexual arousal from menstruating females), the armpits may be an indirect sexual stimulus.

The Armpit odour is an aphrodisiac for some people. The smell acts as a muscular stimulant, naturally encouraging arousal, reminding armpit lovers of their favourite part of the opposite sex’s body. Compared to other fetishes, it’s not that weird.

Personally I think the act of licking another person’s armpit or breathing in their odour are a means of striving for intimacy, on a very base level. A person’s musk is very distinctive; very much a product of that individual and how their body processes various consumables…Or it could be a physical reaction having to do with the taste and smell of a man’s underarms, in their natural form: minus cologne, antiperspirant, and the like. Pheromones, commonly believed to trigger a social response in members of the same species, are produced by the skin’s apocrine sebaceous glands, secreted via armpits and found in sweat

As with many of the paraphilias and fetishes that we have examined on this site, there is little empirical research on maschalagnia or armpit sexual practices more generally. Reference to sexual aspects of armpits sometimes crop up in the academic literature on gay sexual preferences. For instance, in a 1987 issue of the journal Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity, Dr. David  Moskowitz and Dr. Michael Roloff examined sexual practices in relation to ‘bug chasing’. They noted that among gay BDSM practitioners, a small but significant minority were into dominant and/or submissive ‘armpit play’.

Maybe the area is just too trivial for academic and/or clinical study as it’s not a condition that requires medical, psychiatric and/or psychological intervention.