He Wants to Jizz on Your Face, but Not Why You Think

hardwarequestions · 2012-01-17T04:45:55+00:00

i get female ejaculate/fluid on my face anytime i eat a woman out. you don't see me bitching about it or trying to make anything of it.

EvilPundit · 2012-01-17T05:40:14+00:00

Dude. Hugo Schwyzer and Jezebel.

Way to ask for downvotes! In these situations, screencaps are best - accompanied by a toxic content warning. :)

2012-01-17T04:49:40+00:00

"So you're saying that when a man comes on a woman's face, it's not about making her dirty — it's about making him feel clean?" The young man blushed, the class tittered. "Yes," he said, "that's it. And that's what makes it so hot."

What?

Huh?

That shit is totally made up. Never happened or that guy is the odd duck.

CedMon · 2012-01-17T04:41:42+00:00

A little old but:

He Wants to Jizz on Your Face, but Not Why You Think

"Facials are degrading — and that's why they're so hot." So says America's leading sex columnist Dan Savage about the act of ejaculating semen on to someone's face. But the appeal of the facial can't be summed up with that single term. Rather, this act that's become the standard coda in porn is about much more than the longing to dominate or humiliate a sex partner. Understanding what makes it such a ubiquitous trope in adult movies (and in people's private sexual lives) means understanding a particularly male longing for acceptance.

Anti-pornography activists like Gail Dines and Robert Jensen agree with at least Savage's first three words; in recent works, both have cited the growing popularity of the "facial" as proof of the misogyny of mainstream pornography. On the other end of the ideological spectrum, sex-positive feminist Clarisse Thorn wrote for Jezebel in May that "facials feel really degrading to me." Despite their divergent politics, Savage, Dines, Jensen and Thorn all use the same word — "degrading" –- for facials, providing a strikingly rare example of consensus in contemporary sex writing.

The facial has a relatively recent history. In an interview, sex educator Charlie Glickman told me that early stag movies never showed ejaculation; if men ejaculated at all, they did so inside women's bodies. (It's remarkable that the porn that still features ejaculation in the vagina is now a relatively small niche known as "creampie.") That changed in the 1970s, when porn movies became longer, scripted features with bigger budgets. Since there would be more than one sex romp in the film, external ejaculation was the mark that a specific scene had ended. Porn historian Linda Williams compares this to the way that songs were spaced out in Hollywood musicals, with kitschy dialogue in between the showcase numbers that were the centerpieces of the films. But in the ‘70s and ‘80s, most of these ejaculations were onto backs, butts, or breasts — hardly ever onto faces.

Glickman suggests that the AIDS crisis and the concern with safer sex was what made the facial popular. "Cum on me, not in me" was a popular sex educator slogan as far back as the late 1980s. Ejaculating on a woman's stomach, however, usually meant that the camera wouldn't let the audience see the actress' expression. But if the male actor came on her face, the viewer could see two things at once: evidence of male pleasure (symbolized by the ejaculation) and the equally important sign that a woman's reaction to that pleasure mattered. With sex now so dangerous — and HIV particularly likely to be spread through semen — facials were relatively "safe." But in the era of AIDS, they were also compelling visual evidence that a woman wasn't threatened by a man's semen. In that sense facials were, almost from the start, more about women's acceptance of men's bodies than about women's degradation.

The sheer amount of porn featuring facial cumshots is so vast that it's impossible to imagine an exhaustive analysis of all of it. But two things seem clear. First, as Megan Andelloux (founder and director of Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health) noted in an interview with me, questions from college students about facials have risen dramatically in recent years. This isn't something people are just watching porn stars do; it's something a lot of young men (and some young women) want to try themselves. Second, as Glickman — a former adult film reviewer —pointed out, a lot more straight porn features women happily accepting facials than reacting with disgust and evident humiliation. That acceptance may be feigned, but it suggests that the primary turn-on about facials for men isn't the desire to degrade women. (Glickman further suggested that the fact that facials are also so common in gay male pornography – where the sexual politics are radically different – argues against the assumption that coming on someone's face is rooted in men's misogyny.)

A few years ago, in a humanities course on the body, my class was discussing one of the most famous selections from the now-iconic Vagina Monologues, "Because He Liked to Look at It". The monologue tells the story of a woman who thought her vagina was "incredibly ugly" until she meets a man named Bob, who loves to stare at —and taste — her vulva with delight and wonder. Bob's embrace of her body is the key to her self-acceptance. During our discussion of the monologue, a male student noted bravely that he thought many men felt the same way about their penises. Perhaps, he suggested, the intense appeal of facials in porn (and real life) was about men's desire for that same experience of being validated as desirable, as good, as "not dirty." For a young man raised with the sense that his body – and especially his penis – is "disgusting", a woman's willingness to accept a facial is an intensely powerful source of affirmation.

In my conversations with Glickman and Andelloux, I shared this anecdote. Both agreed that rather than seeing the facial as rooted in the impulse to denigrate, it might indeed be better to view it as longing for approval. Andelloux pointed out that in her experience, many women (often with good reason) have a difficult time believing that degradation isn't at the root of straight men's fascination with facials. In any case, humiliation and affirmation aren't incompatible reactions to the same act; a feeling of indignity when your partner ejaculates on your face isn't contingent on his intending to demean you. No one should be obligated to endure humiliation for the sake of someone else's longing for validation.

At the same time (as perhaps with anal sex), many people struggle to believe that receiving a facial is something a woman could enjoy. Andelloux told me a story about a seminar she ran recently on a college campus during which a young woman shared that she experienced her first orgasm when her boyfriend came on her face. "Nothing else that was said that day shocked the audience so much. I could tell a lot of people didn't believe her. But I did." Andelloux remarked that some other women reacted with hostility, "as if by admitting a liking for facials, she was committing an act of violence against other women." In the era of porn wars, perhaps not even anal sex is as politicized as the question of where the ejaculate lands.

That classroom discussion about facials and the Vagina Monologues had an unforgettable finish. A female student turned to the guy who'd brought up the topic of semen and validation and asked him, "So you're saying that when a man comes on a woman's face, it's not about making her dirty — it's about making him feel clean?" The young man blushed, the class tittered. "Yes," he said, "that's it. And that's what makes it so hot." Hugo Schwyzer is a professor of gender studies and history at Pasadena City College and a nationally-known speaker on sex, relationships, and masculinity. You can see more of his work at his eponymous site.

hardwarequestions · 2012-01-17T06:00:05+00:00

Yeah, those girls yelling "DO IT ON MY FACE" are just doing that to help the man "feel clean" right? God, this guy is a moron. Some people just like the concept of a girl covered in semen, just as women have fantasies about getting it on them. I'm sick of people like Hugo saying "It is wrong to like this thing! You should only have the same sexual preferences as me, and your woman's preferences don't matter! She only says those things because men make her think she wants that!" Saying pedofilia or bestiality is wrong is one thing, but to tell me that it's wrong for me to like something like giving a girl a facial, with a consenting girl who is of appropriate age, is just stupid.

drinkthebleach · 2012-01-17T07:19:49+00:00

People have to turn every fetish into a 'You secretly hate your wife' thing.

Torquemada1970 · 2012-01-23T15:02:46+00:00

TIL that I don't always agree with Dan Savage/ blanket statements.

It's never even ocurred to me that a facial could even be interpreted as degrading, unless (I suppose) you're the kind who thinks the purpose of sex is to degrade. For example, it's not as if I feel degraded when the lower half of my face gets covered in a similar kind female of mess when returning the favour.

Here's one example comment after the article -

WTF? I would beat the shit out of some guy who came on my face without asking me.

EvilPundit · 2012-01-17T05:49:40+00:00

Trollking - You are doing it again.

Please don't spam the subreddit with separate links to every feminist post you find. Collect them together and putt hem in one post.

Octagonecologyst · 2012-01-17T10:11:56+00:00

Troll King, I thought you learned that you shouldn't post shit from Jezebel.

PierceHarlan · 2012-01-17T13:52:54+00:00

I went to read the article until I saw who wrote it. I will not read that earnest, self-satisfied jackass.

Title	He Wants to Jizz on Your Face, but Not Why You Think
Author	thetrollking
Upvotes	0
Comments	17
Date	January 17, 2012 4:35 AM UTC (14 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/oke11/he_wants_to_jizz_on_your_face_but_not_why_you/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/he-wants-to-jizz-on-your-face-but-not-why-you.1029109 https://theredarchive.com/post/1029109

Comments