Today, a bombshell new report appeared to affirm the most salacious part of the Steele dossier, which detailed Donald Trump's apparent fetish for sexualized urination.
Since the Steele dossier was published, people have asked whether "the pee tape" is real. A new report from David Corn and Michael Isikoff suggests such a show may not have been a one-off. The report says that in June 2013, Trump visited a Las Vegas nightclub called the Act, which "featured seminude women performing simulated sex acts of bestiality and grotesque sadomasochism." Several acts reportedly included simulated "watersports."
What does it mean if the president has a urination fetish? We talked to a handful of sex therapists about how common this is and whether it says anything else about the most powerful man in the country.
The technical term for this kink is "urophilia" and it's not rare, as fetishes go.
"We can pretty safely say it's not very common, but it's far from unusual," says Lawrence A. Siegel, a clinical sexologist and certified sexuality educator. "You're familiar with internet rule 34? If you can think of it there's already porn of it and somebody's already masturbating to it. If people can think of it, they will do it."
Siegel, who is based in South Florida and hosts show called Sex Talk With the Siegel Brothers, can't say exactly how common Trump's apparent fetish is, but says that it's something people have been into since ancient times. He points to the late author J.D. Salinger as someone who was known to store and ingest his own urine as a homeopathic remedy.
Siegel points to PornHub statistics, which suggest urophilia is far more popular in some places than in others. Japan and Germany, for example, are twice as interested in golden shower porn as Americans.
Stella Harris, a sex coach based in Portland, Oregon, points to the kink lifestyle website Fetlife, where watersports are listed as the 49th most popular fetish—far below spanking, an act which porn star Stormy Daniels has said she was asked to perform on the president.
"Watersports is also one of the more common things people list as a hard limit—meaning a kind of play they never want to engage in," Harris says.
The Steele Dossier describes the president hiring prostitutes to have "a golden showers (urination) show in front of him," on a bed where the Obamas once slept for the purpose of "defiling the bed." It's not clear if the president was also urinated on, or whether he slept in the urine-soaked bed after the show.
"With this particular allegation—hiring someone and watching them do that to themselves could just be the vicarious thrill of seeing someone humiliated," Siegal says. "You can enjoy someone being humiliated but you're not doing the humiliation. It might be on the continuum of the thrill that people sometimes get of watching somebody else run into a tree. You didn't do it, you don't have to feel guilty, you don't have any of those connected dynamics but vicariously you can enjoy somebody else's pain and misery."
Dr. Tammy Nelson, a sex and relationship expert who authored The New Monogamy and who has a practice in Connecticut, agrees there are no hard stats on how common this fetish is. But, she says, urine may just be part of the larger picture.
"I think his interest is less about the urination and more about the humiliation aspect of this paraphilia," she says. "For men like President Trump, their narcissism demands that they are surrounded by people and situations that make them feel powerful, successful and proud. Sexual fantasies are, at their foundation, based on our fears—therefore the fear of being humiliated would actually be a turn on for someone whose deepest fear is being made fun of, or being shamed."
Nelson cautions that the president needs to be careful if he himself is being peed on by prostitutes.
"Urine is not sterile. Some STDs and infections can be passed through urine," she says. "Cleaning up afterward is important. Making sure not to get it in your mouth or open cuts or sores is also important."
Harris says urine is not sterile, but, "is just about the safest body fluid you could interact with," and would likely be fine so long as he does not get a prostitute's urine in an open wound.
Is there any problem with the president wanting to hire prostitutes to pee on each other and possibly on him? All the experts we talked to were careful to avoid kink-shaming the leader of the free world.
"It's only a problem if it causes significant distress or impairs social function, or in this case, impairs occupational function," Nelson says. "In other words, is this sexual behavior interfering with your life? And is this a masochistic desire? Are there other behaviors or out of control sexual behaviors that are interfering with functioning?"
But Harris says that sex workers, including professional dominatrixes need to be careful with men like Trump.
"I wouldn't touch Trump with a 10-foot-pole, no matter how much you paid me. And that has nothing to do with any of his assumed kinks or proclivities," she says. "When I'm engaging in kink play with someone, I always ask about their motivations. The more extreme the play they want to do, the more their motivations matter. And someone being a misogynist is always an absolute deal breaker."
Given all of his alleged interactions with sex workers going back decades, Siegel says urophilia may be just one of many fetishes.
"I would be surprised if this was his only kink," Siegel says. "For Trump in particular, I see this possibly in the context of other things that he may spend more time directing rather than actually involved with."
