Sex advice with Suzi Godson: Her playful biting during sex hurts

My wonderful girlfriend sometimes bites me playfully when we’re having sex. Sometimes, however, she bites hard and it really hurts. I have asked her to stop, but when she’s in the moment she gets carried away and does it again.

Biting can be a strangely pleasurable experience. It’s hard to explain why, but there is a certain bite/don’t bite conflict that exists, which can elicit a certain type of pleasure. The reason why is difficult to describe, but biting is actually an important part of our evolutionary heritage. In the animal world biting, mouthing, nuzzling and nipping is a social exchange, and capuchin monkeys apparently bite one another’s fingers as a way of testing trust.

In their fascinating 1951 book Patterns of Sexual Behaviour the anthropologist Clellan S Ford and the ethologist Frank A Beach suggested that sexual biting is common in a number of societies, but it appears to be something women enjoy more than men. Your girlfriend clearly loves the sensation of biting your skin, but when she is sexually aroused she loses her capacity to recognise how far is too far, and ends up hurting you.

Sexual biting is a passionate and animalistic behaviour that emerges when people are highly aroused. Arousal is not an exclusively sexual experience. Whether the trigger is anger, fear, or the desire to win, any experience that heightens adrenaline puts you into a state of arousal, and biting seems to be an expression of that arousal.

Biting hurts, and that is reason enough to find a way to stop this happening, but it can also be dangerous. Human saliva contains at least 50 species of bacteria, and medical research shows that human bites have higher rates of infection than other injuries.

In 2009 Dr Mark Harrison reviewed four years’ worth of cases of human biting that had required treatment at the James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough, England. Harrison was surprised to note that the hospital was treating one case of human biting every three days, but only two per cent of cases had been injured during sports. Three quarters (75%) of presenting patients were male and although most incidents occurred at the weekend, only 12% involved alcohol and 34% said that they had been the victim of an assault.

The bites occurred all over the body, but there is no way of knowing how many of these injuries were sustained as a result of sexual biting because the review was retrospective and the participants were not specifically asked whether they had acquired their injuries during sex.

Your girlfriend may not be aware that she has a ‘fetish’, but sexual biting is a documented paraphilia that was written about in the Kama Sutra, measured by Alfred Kinsey and included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) under its clinical name, odaxelagnia.

Whether your girlfriend embraces a kinky identity or not, you need to take pointers from the BDSM culture with regard to the importance of “safe” words, whereby couples who engage in BDSM always agree on a ‘stop now — no questions asked’ safe word before they play. The actual word is irrelevant, although I hear that the favourite is ‘Red’ followed by the even more imaginative ‘Stop’.

Whatever word you agree on, your girlfriend has to agree to cease biting as soon as it is uttered. If that doesn’t work, and self-control continues to be an issue, you might want to consider investing in one or two sex accessories that allow her to bite on something other than your skin during sex. A simple scarf should work. As biting a scarf is obviously much less pleasant than a gentle nip on the skin, just once might be enough to convince your girlfriend that you are serious about not wanting to be being bitten during sex.

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