Body worship is the practice of physically revering a part of another person’s body, and is usually done as a submissive act in the context of BDSM. It is often an expression of erotic fetishism, but it can also be used as part of service-oriented submission or sexual roleplay. The dominant’s body is the altar; the submissive’s mouth and hands do the reverence. The through-line is service: touch, tongue, and attention aimed at the parts the top wants adored.
Typical acts include kissing, licking, or sucking parts of a dominant’s body such as the vulva, the penis, the buttocks, the feet, the breasts, or the muscles. In that exchange the dominant’s body sits at the center of the ritual, and the submissive finishes the offering through careful attention and contact. It is not only looking — mouth and hands build the connection.
Dominatrices sometimes fold body worship into dominance and submission. This may involve a submissive stroking, massaging, or bathing the dominatrix, or kissing and licking her buttocks. The submissive may also be required to perform cunnilingus — sometimes called full-body worship — or anilingus. These activities may take place during facesitting, sometimes called queening, in which the dominatrix sits on the submissive’s face. A muscle-worship fetish may be catered for by a dominatrix who is also a bodybuilder. Whatever the form, the main line stays the same: high-intensity attention aimed at the site the top named.
Body worship was included in the introductory classes on BDSM introduced in 2003 by the Society of Janus, the largest BDSM educational organisation in San Francisco. Related topics include boot worship, breast fetishism, buttock fetishism, foot fetishism, hand fetishism, and partialism — the same map of body-part focus that body worship draws on when the submissive’s mouth is assigned to one site. For kink readers the term is a service and fetish label, not a vague compliment: mouth on the chosen body part, often on a dominant, sometimes under a queening seat, and taught as basic D/s vocabulary by a major educational org.
