Worming: “Yeah, baby! Lick my eyeballs!”

When Japanzine was still a young buck there was nothing we enjoyed more than hitting the clubs, getting on the dance floor, and shaking our thang (and back in those days, ‘thang’ was still considered an acceptable phrase to use, giving you, dear reader, an accurate insight into just how pathetically ancient we are). Those were innocent days, back when the internet was nothing more than a means to download excruciatingly slow jpegs of naked women, and for Nigerian bankers to request assistance of naïve, grasping entrepreneurs (and there isn’t a night that Japanzine doesn’t go to bed without sending out a prayer for poor old Obafemi Okpara of the Nigerian Presidential Bank, who risked his career and life to unleash untold millions upon us, before mysteriously disappearing after we had given him our account details).

As such, these were the times before Internet dance memes. There was no Gangnam style, no Harlem Shake, and no Rick Rolling. This meant that when we wished to garner appreciative looks from the fairer sex on the dance floor, we were left to our own inventions. For Japanzine, our particular thang was worming.

Back in those halcyon days, worming was something of an acrobatic dance move in which you dropped to your chest and rolled your body across the dance floor, propelling yourself forwards and backwards in the style of – yes, you guessed it – a worm. Admittedly, as more of a sidestep shuffle kind of dancer; Japanzine wasn’t particularly accomplished as a wormer. And, thanks to a naturally poor hand-eye coordination and the copious amounts of high-strength Belgian lager we had to imbibe to adequately loosen our inhibitions, worming often resulted in a chin being cracked on the ground and hands being ripped to shreds due to the shards of glass littering the floors of the less than salubrious clubs in which Japanzine used to plough its furrow.

However, mention worming to your average Japanese high schooler and some very different injuries will spring to their mind’s eye. Indeed, if you ask a young female Japanese (particularly a student if you happen to be an ALT) if they want to see you worming, expect a worrying look at the least, a trip to a prison’s beast wing at worst.

Worming, you see, is a craze that has swept Japanese high schools and, rather than Japanzine’s dance move which was a (frankly pathetic) peacockish attempt to attract a mate, this type of worming is something to be done once you’ve actually conned another human into intimacy. But what is it you ask? For those of you with a delicate stomach or a nervous disposition, it’s time to look away now.

Worming, or oculolinctus as it is more scientifically termed, is the act of sweeping one’s tongue across your partner’s cornea for sexual titillation. That’s right, licking someone’s eye to get your rocks off. If you are currently cringing at the thought of having someone jab their tongue into one of your peepers, then you have obviously never given it a go.

“My boyfriend started licking my eyeballs years ago and I just loved it,” a student explained to The Huffington Post. “I just love it because it turns me on… It makes me feel all tingly.”

You see, the cornea is perhaps the most sensitive part of the body (excluding the more obvious, often-censored areas, of course). It has to be in order to detect the tiny fragments of dirt and crap that gets caught in our eyes and, like over-zealous onanism, could lead to blindness. This means that having your eyeball licked is, quite frankly, some of the most fun you can have with your clothes on, making it the ideal next step for young lovers tired of snogging, but too coy to whip out their still-developing bits and pieces for each other.

There are of course many opinions on from where the fetish blossomed, the most plausible being a video for , or perhaps the over zealous tonguing in Japanese pornography. But, no matter its origins, worming has unleashed a tidal wave of conjunctivitis and other nasty eye diseases across Japanese adolescence. Because of course, if you huddle away with your loved one in a quiet corner of a classroom at lunch time, fresh from polishing off your bento, the likelihood is that as you sweep your tongue across your paramour’s eye, you are leaving all manner of unhygienic matter and disgusting bacteria on their cornea.

And so, as you stand in your classroom, or walk through town, and see the young girls with their solitary eye patches, you can be pretty sure that (assuming it’s not a result of a botched homemade double eye lid surgery) those are white badges of promiscuity they are displaying.

But now the news is out there, the truth is unleashed, you can be assured that those same girls will now be sharing some particularly uncomfortable conversations with their parents as they come home from the pharmacy looking like an extra from Pirates of the Caribbean. Mind you, as embarrassing as that is, getting the eye clap is still not a patch on having to explain Japanzine’s bruised chin and lacerated hands at work on Monday mornings after our own, equally dangerous, yet infinitely less successful, attempts at worming all those years ago.