Sugar on My Tongue

How flavoured orgasms taught me I don’t need permission to feel good

When food writer Giulia Alvarez-Katz realized her orgasms triggered flavours, she began to reconsider her relationship with gluttony, desire, and shame.

By Giulia Alvarez-Katz for our BODY issue | Guest edited by Austin Romeo

When I come, it’s like there’s sugar on my tongue. I taste dense sweetness, like overripe plums or the jammy interior of an expensive date. It’s not a memory or a daydream. My taste buds feel far too active for an absent stimulus. The flavour rises with the orgasm itself — like a sneeze you can feel building deep in your core. At first, it’s subtle, like licking a few sugar crystals off your thumb after pouring them into coffee. The sweetness intensifies as I near climax, melting on my tongue like hard candy. At the peak, it’s almost unpleasant— erotically so — before retreating as my body softens. When it’s over, my mouth returns to blank.

Illustration by Zoë Johnson.

The first time it happened, I ignored it. The second time, I worried I was having a stroke. The third time, I blamed my overactive imagination. Then I left it alone.

I’ve always had a habit of filing away my more mysterious physical experiences as flights of fancy — psychosomatic, emotional, or just plain weird. My fruit-flavoured climaxes were no exception. I enjoyed hundreds— maybe thousands — without ever probing their origins. But adulthood brought a shift. I became better at noticing what I was feeling, at naming it in the aftermath. Eventually (and not without a recurring fear that I had a brain tumour), I got curious.

The flavours feel too real to be imagined — like they have weight, memory, and intention. They always taste the same, like mature fruit. And they always take place under the same conditions.¹ That uncanny consistency made me hesitate. What if it wasn’t my imagination? What if this were a real phenomenon, something with a name, something outside my control?

***

My journey began the obvious way: a Google search of “orgasms flavour.” Big mistake. So much porn. And none of it was helpful in terms of understanding my predicament. Eventually, I added “synesthesia” to the mix, hoping for something scientific. Or at least PG-13.

Synesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon where one sensory input “awakens” another. In grapheme-colour synesthesia — the most common form — letters and numbers elicit colour perception. I have this kind; I’d never thought of it as much more than a neat party trick, the weird brain equivalent of being double-jointed — useless and oddly satisfying. But now I wondered: could it help explain my plum-flavoured orgasms?

I dug into rarer forms like lexical-gustatory synesthesia, where words or emotions trigger taste. Still, nothing quite fit. Gustatory synesthesia is rare to begin with. The idea that it would show up in the middle of sex? The research — in language that was dry, sexless, and scrubbed of anything sticky or strange — was too sparse to confirm. It felt like trying to Google a fever dream. So I turned inward instead. Why was I so obsessed with naming this experience? Why did I need to understand it so badly?

Perhaps it’s because, deep down, I felt guilty. The idea that I might be the only person alive tasting ripe fruit mid-orgasm? It felt wrong. Like I was dipping my hand in too many pots, taking too much from life, enjoying my body to an unacceptable degree. If I could prove this was a brain quirk — neurological, not moral — maybe I could call it science instead of sin.

***

Sex and shame entered my life like a ton of bricks during puberty. I remember the exact day it happened: I was eleven, new to a school, when a boy in my class grabbed his crotch in my direction. I burst into tears. That morning, I was blissfully unaware of sex. By evening, it felt like a threat — something I needed to protect myself from. And for some reason, I felt that was my fault.

Food and I had a similarly fraught relationship. I inhabited a body larger than society liked, and I was already taught that pleasure was something I should suffer for. But food? It still tasted good. Bread, ice cream, and chocolate chips eaten in secret — I never stopped wanting them. Sex, though? Sex was less dependable. It was riskier and messier. If both food and sex could kill me, I figured I’d rather go out having eaten something decent. But in spite of their differences, food and sex became sources of shame that fed off each other in their call for me to restrict myself, to make myself small. The message I took from both: pleasure equals bad.

Then as a teenager, I found “tumblr feminism”, replete with SlutWalks, Audre Lorde quotes and Pussy Riot. Suddenly, there was a digestible framework to understand my sexuality as a woman and its corresponding shame. In college, I even had a brief moment of sexual liberation, emboldened by my nascent feminism to chase casual hookups and one-night stands without worrying about shame or rejection. But culture doesn’t stay still. Eventually, tumblr feminism died, and uglier things came to replace it — tradwife aesthetics, the algorithmic return of purity culture, and a sexual predator for a president. My country’s politics careened rightwards.

***

Today, we’re at a precarious cultural moment when it comes to pleasure. The fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022 exposed the raw truth that our bodies were never truly ours. When it was overturned, it felt like confirmation that my brief moment of sexual freedom in college was just that — brief. Something I — or any woman, for that matter — might never experience in the same way again.

The Supreme Court’s ruling didn’t stand alone. Its fall has been flanked by other challenges to seemingly immovable structures that empowered me to fuck freely: birth control, divorce, access to healthcare. What once felt like the scaffolding of my sexual liberty suddenly looked flimsy.

In response, my sexuality began to shrink. I learned to keep it to myself. I stopped taking thirst traps and selfies, or really any photos of myself at all. I retrained myself for sexual anonymity, to publicly operate my body as un-sexually as possible. I told myself it was about dignity. But deep down, I knew it was about fear.

And sex wasn’t the only liberation that felt like it was receding. After decades of cultural trends towards body positivity — buffeted, still, by societal contempt for fat bodies — the thin ideal came back in a big way. This time not through diets, but drugs. GLP-1 medications like Ozempic have swept through American culture, dulling both hunger and libido. One in eight Americans, studies say, have tried them. Some users report experiencing apathy: cherished activities no longer bring joy, and any kind of craving — including for sex — is muted.

The popularity of these drugs — and the ease with which they were embraced — created the sense that now, perhaps, there’s no longer an excuse not to be thin. This message has reawakened an old voice within me. The urge to restrict came back. My carefully patched relationship with food began to fray.

Today’s United States is a context in which desire is stifled and pleasure is dangerous. Acting on what you want feels subversive — like a small betrayal of the system. What happens when your pleasures are framed as excess, your appetite as pathology? In that landscape, the mere act of wanting becomes fraught. Enjoying what you get? Borderline criminal. And flavoured orgasms — my ability to experience taste and climax simultaneously — felt like a step too far towards pure gluttony. An orgasm is one thing. A good flavour is another, but both at once? Excess. Bad.

Part of my drive to find a scientific explanation² for my flavoured orgasms was to relieve my culpability for experiencing such self-indulgent pleasure all at once. If I could prove it was my brain’s fault — some glitch of synesthesia, totally out of my control — then I might be spared the judgment. Maybe even my own. Deep down, I knew this kind of pleasure was my birthright, radical even. But it’s hard not to feel worn down by the endlessly whirring machines that would rather sculpt us into lean, obedient female vessels than let us feel good for too long.

Illustration by Zoë Johnson.

***

Even when I try to lean into hedonism — good food, good sex— I often finish feeling ashamed and guilty. Like I’ve raided the pantry for a chocolate bar at midnight and now wait to be caught and scolded.

Flavoured orgasms make it worse. No one is scolding me, but I still feel I must navigate desire in code — in subtleties, in metaphors, in acceptable forms. I can eat and drink and climax to my heart’s desire, but to keep my dignity intact, I must be silent. I do not speak my wants aloud, because somehow saying them feels worse than having them. Be greedy and lustful, sure — but only in the privacy of your own home, with the volume turned down. That’s how you preserve the illusion of femininity.

Of course, this silence isn’t enforced equally. Years of disordered eating and an Adderall prescription have put me in a much smaller body than the one I grew up in. When I was bigger, I was expected to manage my appetite more strictly. That management was gendered, racialized, classed. It extended to food, sex, and how I moved through the world. People treat this thinner version of me differently. They assume I’ve figured it out.

Sociologist Samantha Kwan calls this “body management.” In Navigating Public Spaces: Gender, Race, and Body Privilege in Everyday Life, she writes:

“the thin body is such a coveted cultural standard that it is an unchallenged norm…those without privilege must negotiate daily interactions, sometimes feeling shame, guilt, and anger because of their bodies.”

In this smaller body, I do less managing than I did in a larger one, not that it resolves the core conflict: the tension between appetite and acceptability, between wanting and being punished for wanting. Without the weight loss, I might have never felt free enough to seek this kind of pleasure — even if secretly.

***

Writing this essay has forced me to trace the contours of my shame. To ask: why was I so hell-bent on making my flavoured orgasms make sense? Why was I so eager to file them under science, to drag them out of the realm of sensation and into something peer-reviewed?

Eventually, I saw it. The drive to explain was itself a form of self-inflicted misogyny — a defence mechanism dressed up as inquiry. A quiet, conditioned belief that this kind of embodied pleasure required a permission slip.

By insisting I couldn’t be responsible for my pleasure, I bought into the same logic that says women shouldn’t feel anything to begin with. I wanted to believe I hadn’t chosen this pleasure, that it had happened to me. That I was still innocent. That I could still be pure. But the desire to be seen as innocent wasn’t neutral. It was part of the heteropatriarchal machinery, which is a machinery of whiteness, too.

As a white Latin American woman, I’ve often felt pulled to distance myself from my own Latinidad. To chase the purity associated with whiteness. Maybe that’s what I was doing: trying not to seem gluttonous, deviant, too much — traits so often projected onto racialized bodies.

***

The real work begins when we stop asking pleasure to explain itself — when we can create distance between shame and our bodies’ sensory experiences of joy, whether epicurean or lustful. When we can live in the moment, not the apology. That’s when pleasure becomes power.

I found guidance in adrienne maree brown’s collection, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, which offered an alternative to my grasping need for absolution. brown defines pleasure activism as “the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy.”

For brown, seeking and enjoying pleasure is not indulgent but radical — especially for those of us who fall outside the norms of whiteness, thinness, and able-bodiedness. She writes: “In this moment, we must prioritize the pleasure of those most impacted by oppression… Pleasure activists seek to understand and learn from the politics and power dynamics inside of everything that makes us feel good.”

brown reminds us how capitalist systems rely on dissatisfaction — on people spending endlessly in search of satiety that never arrives. As she said in an interview with the ACLU:

“There's something there [in an orgasm] that gives you a power that no one else can touch.”

As a fat woman, says brown, orgasms are the way that her body communicates that she is worthy of pleasure, even if the world tells her that she is undesirable and undeserving of it. In her view, collectively assuming pleasure as our birthright is a key step toward building a more joyful and liberated world.

Reframing my sugar-coated orgasms as part of pleasure activism is helping me enjoy them without flinching. No apology, no justification — just the thrill of being in my body, and believing that’s enough. In a world bent on policing what women’s and trans people's bodies should feel, pleasure becomes a kind of defiance. All bodies deserve it.

Maybe the first step towards a life of pleasure activism is a quiet decision to stop feeling bad. Maybe it’s a conversation. Maybe it’s a riot. For me, the first step was writing a novel-length Grand Theft Auto fan fiction complete with thirty fruit-flavoured orgasms described in loving, gastronomic detail, which I started working on while I was writing this piece.

After all, power has many forms. Mine just happens to taste like figs.

Giulia Alvarez-Katz is a writer and content creator living in Queens, New York. Find her at giulia-ak.com

Austin Romeo is a contributing editor with FFJ. Austin edits essays where appetite tangles with nature and desire. He hones every line until it earns its place and always keeps the door open for gloriously unhinged pitches. Learn more about Austin here, or get in touch with him at austinromeo@gmail.com or on LinkedIn.

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Further reading

Brown, A. M. (2019). Pleasure activism. AK Press.

Buerkle, C. Wesley. (2009). “Metrosexuality can Stuff it: Beef Consumption as (Heteromasculine) Fortification.” Text and Performance Quarterly, 29:1, 77–93.

Brang, D., & Ramachandran, V. S. (2011). “Survival of the Synesthesia Gene: Why Do People Hear Colours and Taste Words?” PLoS Biology, 9:1, p. e1001205. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001205

Davidauskis, A. (2015). “‘How Beautiful Women Eat’: Feminine Hunger in American Popular Culture.” Feminist Formations, 27(1), 167–189. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43860782

DeLaet, D. L., & Mills, E. (2018). “Discursive Silence as a Global Response to Sexual Violence: From Title IX to Truth Commissions.” Global Society, 32(4), 496–519. https://doi.org/10.1080/13600826.2018.1516200

Dennis, A. (2008). “‘The Spectacle of Her Gluttony’: The Performance of Female Appetite and the Bakhtinian Grotesque in Angela Carter’s ‘Nights at the Circus.’” Journal of Modern Literature, 31(4), 116–130. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25167573

Douglas, E.R. (2013). “Eat or Be Eaten: A Feminist Phenomenology of Women as Food.” PhaenEx, 8(2):243.

English, D., Hollibaugh, A., & Rubin, G. (1982). “Talking Sex: A Conversation on Sexuality and Feminism.” Feminist Review, 11, 40–52. https://doi.org/10.2307/1394826

Jovanovski, N. (2022). “Feminine Hunger: A Brief History of Women’s Food Restriction Practices in the West.” In The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences (pp. 1877–1895). Springer Nature Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7255-2_29

Kwan, S. (2010). “Navigating Public Spaces: Gender, Race, and Body Privilege in Everyday Life.” Feminist Formations, 22(2), 144–166. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40835375

Richer, F., Beaufils, G.-A., & Poirier, S. (2011). “Bidirectional lexical–gustatory synesthesia.” Consciousness and Cognition, 20(4), 1738–1743. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2010.12.015

Simner, J. (2007). “Beyond perception: synaesthesia as a psycholinguistic phenomenon.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11:1, 23–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2006.10.010

Sobal, J. (2004). “Sociological Analysis of the Stigmatisation of Obesity.” In A Sociology of Food and Nutrition: The Social Appetite, ed. John Germov and Lauren Williams, 187-204. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Vance, C. S., & Snitow, A. B. (1984). “Toward a Conversation about Sex in Feminism: A Modest Proposal.” Signs, 10(1), 126–135. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174243

1. Not put too fine a point on it, I only experience flavoured orgasms when sexually active with another person, and almost always when they’re going down on me. Not sure what, if anything, that indicates, but for science’s sake, I thought it prudent to be exact.

2. I’d like to note that while science itself as a form of study is an effective and proven tool for measuring and assessing those parts of the universe that we have the means and capability to measure and assess, those means, especially in the so-called Global North where “science” as we know it was largely developed, were created by and for white men and in service of capitalism. They have also ignored or sidelined forms of knowledge that exist outside of their narrow scope. There is a wealth of knowledge that exists in the margins (see here, for example). While the scientific method has its utility, it may not yet have the means to account for every experience — especially for those that science didn't always prioritize or consider.