person holding turkish style tea bag tie

Everything You Need to Know About Teabagging

When you’re a gamer, you get used to all sorts of insulting and demaning behavior. There’s something about the hyper-competitive nature of online gaming that makes people viscious. In fact, gaming is known for having some of the most toxic communities on the planet.

But of all the taunts and insults, teabagging is the most iconic.

There’s zero chance you played a first-person shooter with crouching mechanics for any noticeable amount of time before you got teabagged. But what is teabagging and where did it come from?

Its origins run far deeper than online gaming – in fact, we’re only going to explore recent pop cultural reference to teabagging. But there’s a good chance this is a term as old as time. That’s why it’s even more important to document the storied history of teabagging.

Let’s dive into it to determine why so many gamers feel the need to teabag each other.

What Is Teabagging?

There are two dictionaries to help you understand everything you need to know about our vocabulary: the dictionary and Urban Dictionary. According to the first, teabagging means:

verb (used with object),tea-bagged,tea-bag·ging.Slang.to place one’s scrotum in the mouth of (one’s sexual partner).

From its resemblance to dipping a tea bag in a cup of hot water

Dictionary.com

The latter adds a bit more context around the term. The site’s users have several options to choose from.

1) Repeated insertion of ones testicles in another’s mouth.
2) Continiously crouching on a dead bodyin a video game.

1. A sexual act where a males testicles are dipped in and out of the partners mouth. Similar to how a teabag is used while making a cup of tea.
2. A practical joke, where a male will place his testicles on a friends face and a photo be taken to embarrass the friend. Usually at a party when a friend has fallen asleep.

Urban Dictionary

While both explain the sexual nature of teabagging’s origins, they also acknowledge it is most often used as a prank. So, we established that men derive great joy from dipping their balls in people’s mouths. But is there actual sexual pleasure in the act, or is it simply done for humiliation?

The term isn’t well documented in academic or government writing, but we do have some references to teabagging in popular culture.

Dipping your balls in someone’s face feels unappealing, but people have been doing unappealing things for many generations. Personally, I never teabagged a person, but I have allowed multiple women to “sit on my face,” which is just eating them out while they’re on top so they can grind away on me.

Different folks have different strokes, so I can see why someone would enjoy the teabag. In fact, it seems to be more popular online than I am.

Teabagging in the 20th Century

The movie credited with popularizing teabagging, although professional wrestling did it first.

John Waters is often given credit with popularizing the term teabagging in popular culture. But he’s far from the first person to explore the idea. In fact, the true origins are actually from televised professional wrestling matches in the 1980s and 1990s.

It was a popular wrestling move from many wrestlers throughough that 20-year period. Of course, it wasn’t necessary called that. But thanks to the work of Brandon Stroud at Uproxx, we have several instances of teabagging from the NWA (National Wrestling Alliance) that predate everything so far.

And we can thank Yahoo! News for archiving the article that no longer exists on Uproxx. It was a night of three teabags on November 9, 1985, a full 13 years before the John Waters movie.

Teabagging as a Wrestling Move

Much of the outrageous and competitive behavior from video games could easily be traced back to the over-the-top antics of professional wrestling. While the outcomes are predetermined, the emotions, stories, and rivalries can often get too real.

That’s why it was so exciting to see a wrestler like John Tenta hit his opponents with an Earthquake Splash from 1987 through the 1990s.

Earthquake John Tenta wrestling teabag finisher
Earthquake teabagged opponents as a finishing move in the 1990s. Image copyright WWE

Tenta just sat on people’s faces, much like Yokozuna after him. Both had characters known as big men who dominated the league by sheer force of size. This was emphasized by their ability to just sit on people confidently to pin them and win, easily one of the cockiest pro wrestling pins and taunts.

And it’s not a move that was just used by big men. Little guy X-Pac used the move in the corner as the Bronco Buster.

X Pac Branco Buster X Pac Bronco Buster GIF - X Pac Branco Buster X Pac Bronco Buster Wwe Bronco Buster GIFs
Sean Waltman originating the Bronco Buster finishing move. Courtesy WWE

You’ll see it a lot in modern wrestling, especially from the female wrestlers. One of my favorites is Lacey Evans and her handstand on the top rope into a teabag on her opponent in the corner.

Lacey Evans Wwe GIF - Lacey Evans Wwe Wrestling GIFs
Lacey Evans does what can only be called a super teabag. Courtesy WWE

I don’t currently subscribe to Peacock, so I’m not sure what other teabags the WWE has in its archives, but we do have an entire night of teabags from the NWA in November 1985 to highlight and really drive the point home.

It starts with Arn Anderson teabagging Keith Freeze after his finishing move. He shows his dominance by just resting his balls on his face and looking confidently into the crowd.

Arn Anderson teabag pin
Wrestling legend Arn Anderson’s epic teabag pin

Not one to be outdone, The Barbarian ups the teabagging game in the arena. After hitting his opponent Gerald Finley with a flying headbutt, he straight up humps his face with the pin.

Look at his face – he’s truly enjoying this victory taunt on his fallen opponent. It’s about as sexual and pranky as it gets.

Barbarian teabagging
Sione Havae Vailahi brings the Tongan Teabag

And the last match of the night ended with a third victory teabag, which came from Ron Garvin after knocking out Paul Garner.

NWA teabagging wrestling pin
Hands of Stone with stones on chin

As you can see, long before the internet and Hollywood caught on, teabagging was already a running joke in the blue-collar community. Professional wrestlers innovated the taunt that’s now popular in video games, but there was one more stop along the way.

Teabagging in Hollywood Cinema and TV

The “No Teabagging!” scene from John Water’s Pecker Copyright WarnerMedia

Here’s the scene from Pecker where teabagging is first uttered in Hollywood. Many were already aware of exactly what was being discussed, despite it not being shown on screen. You can thank professional wrestling for that more than even porn.

Even Waters himself says he didn’t invent the term nor act during his interview with Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing. In fact, around the same time, MTV’s “The State” lampooned the idea with a character Louie who showed up to parties to declare “I wanna dip my balls in it!”

MTV’s The State making light of the teabagging situation.

This is a great skit in one of my favorite comedy sketch shows of the era. It was lost for many years because MTV didn’t have the rights to a lot of the original soundtrack anymore. That meant it sat on the shelf and wasn’t easily available when most early articles on teabagging were written in the 2000s.

While he doesn’t directly say he’s teabagging anything, it’s quite obviously a reference to the need of men to rub their balls on everything. If you went to college in the early 2000s, you heard someone declare “I wanna dip my balls in it!”

He’s not talking about vanilla blowjobs but slyly discussing chai teabagging, which also comes up a few years later on HBO’s Sex and the City.

The Teabag Situation from Sex and the City S6E09. Copyright HBO and WarnerMedia

Charlotte (Kristin Davis) wants to talk about a teabag problem with her beau, which Samantha (Kim Cattrall) immediately assumes is sexual. This is the first time Charlotte ever heard of the sexual act, as she’s just complaining about her partner constantly leaving his used teabags in the sink, which she’s not a fan of.

And while it reached peak exposure in Hollywood, teabagging fully permeated video games and esports too.

History of Teabagging in Video Games

Halo teabagging red vs blue
Halo was an early innovator of the teabag taunt. Image copyright Microsoft

I spent most my time tebagging in FPS games like Halo, although Kotaku suggest Quake and Counterstrike are likely culprits as the first teabaggers in gaming. What’s for sure is I wasn’t the only one who got fully immersed in teabag culture by Bungie’s cult hit.

It really just took for video game developers to give players the ability to do it, and we did.

Any time you’re killed by an opponent, what Halo also had was a 5-second delay in which you could still see through your corpse’s eyes. You’re laying helpless on the ground staring at your big-screen TV, and all you can see is the crotch of another player.

That was what really added the insult to injury in Halo – teabagging was akin to blue screening someone by hitting them in the face with a sticky plasma grenade so they’re blinded. You had a few seconds to talk a little trash, and the teabag when their screen cleared was the cherry on top.

Since Halo, teabagging became a staple in gaming and esports.

It’s unrecognizable from its sexual origins other than the fact that one person is showing dominance over another. This is what makes it such a great taunt – it takes so much less skill than, say, a fatality in Mortal Kombat. There’s no long code or button sequence to memorize. You just crouch up and down over your opponent’s corpse’s face.

Simple, right?

You may not even realize that it’s happening to you, but Twitch streamers definitely do. Here’s a daring man looking to teabag every Twitch streamer playing Apex Legends. This is a simple method of viral marketing, and the teabagger has nearly 1 million YouTube subscribers, so he’s clearly popular.

Apex Legends Twitch streamers being teabagged by a player named tbag.

Whether you love or hate it, teabagging is here to stay. It’s part of video games, professional wrestling, and Hollywood. And art is simply illustrating real life. There’s a good chance that people were teabagging each other for dominance for centuries.

For all we know, people rubbed their balls in the bullet holes of their dead opponents after a duel. We are more civilized now that ever before in history, so imagine the many ways we taunted each other when it was real life and not just a video game.

We simply don’t have record of it – the victors wrote history and portrayed themselves as the heroes. So we’ll never hear the tales of George Washington and Jesus Christ teabagging their opponents. Rest assured by the behavior in online gaming that it definitely probably happened though.

Today, teabagging is a part of the culture – just ask anybody who plays first person shooters online…

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