Also known in personal ads and internet profiles as:

• brown
• dirty (as in 'into dirty')
• scatology.

Hanky code

Brown worn:

• on the left (wants to dump on you)
• on the right (wants to be dumped on).

What is scat?

Scat involves playing with shit, smearing it on your or his body, and sometimes eating it. It can also mean just getting off on seeing another guy dump his load.

'Farming' is taking shit from public toilets to play with.

What's the attraction?

Taboos around cleanliness couldn't be more powerfully broken by shit play: it's everything we've been told not to do since childhood.

Men can be drawn to scat precisely because it provokes such a strong negative reaction in others. Lovers of scat might get a kick from stepping over what for most people is the line between what's OK and what's too extreme. Scat is perhaps the ultimate in sex without limits or inhibitions.

Privately we're often fascinated by our own bowel movements and excrement. Scat lets men explore and share this interest and enjoy a special bond with other lovers of shit.

For scat fans shit can excite all the senses with its warmth, texture, smell, colour and possibly taste. Just like contact with the intimate body fluids of cum, spit or piss, sex involving shit can be a sign of intense closeness as someone is offering something that's come from deep inside them. And in an intense power play scene, nothing is more symbolic of degradation, humiliation and control than exposure to faeces.

A 1993 survey of gay men in the UK found 1.5% of men said they'd done scat in the previous year, with 3% saying they'd tried it at least once in the past.