Pornosophy: The Strong Silent Type

Wyatt Earp

A reader of this blog recently wrote in to ask why in the old days, at the turn of the last century men were so quiet and women so garrulous (and serious)? Talk about emotions, back in them days men never talked about their emotions. But there was a reason for it and it was not because it made them more vulnerable or less masculine. Back in the year l900 families were much larger and it was not unusual to have a brood of nine or more children. Most of the discussion of family life in that era centers around how hard this was for women. However, it was an even larger burden for the men. The turn of the last century was approximately a hundred years before the advent of internet pornography and in the days of the horse and buggy sex was real work. Men were more quiet because they had to spend much of their day conjuring up fantasies which would facilitate all the sex that was necessary to produce nine or more children. Today your average millennial just hangs out on a site for a few minutes, indulging his favorite fetish (whether it’s exhibitionism, voyeurism, lingerie, flagellation, bukkake, bestiality, forced feminization, gagging, suffocation, humiliation, coprophilia, Greek or golden showers) and he's ready to rock. And the same goes for his or her female counterpart. More importantly no social stigma is attached to having a family with just one two children. Yet before the miracle of modern cyberporn, men were forced to think up all manner of sexy scenarios just to make sure they could keep up with the Joneses. Take out one of your old family albums, the ones with the yellowing black and white photos held onto the page with little corner stickers. If you look into the eyes of your forebears, you'll see that behind these strong silent types was depravity. Most of the men stare out from these pictures like desperate trapped animals. They know that once the festivity, at which all the picture taking occurred, was over, they would be chased around their bedrooms by demanding wives, whose fecundity was on the line.

Sperm Come Out of the Closet

spermatozoon

If you go on porn sites one of the most popular forms of sex these days is the facial. It  doesn’t refer to a cosmetic treatment in which the face is painted with a white mask. And it doesn’t refer to the kind of surgery that was being done on the lead character in a famous Twilight Zone, “The Eye of the Beholder.” “Here’s mud in your eye,” is a drinking man’s expression that may have been a precursor to the idea of the facial. The Japanese call the facial, bukkake and there are bukkake sites in which seemingly happy and willing models are given lots of facials at the same time. But deconstructing the activity, one wonders where the source of eroticism lies. Plain old missionary sex is the last thing you will find on a XXX site. It would be tantamount to displaying pictures of granny in her rocking chair. There’s an old expression “if it’s been done, it’s been said,” whose converse “if it’s been said, it’s been done,” is often brought out like a weapon by “lay” researchers in the subject of human sexuality.  But what’s the turn on in this fellatio outlier? There was a time when swallowing semen was considered an extreme form of sex, with the ignoring of a partner’s plea “don’t come in my mouth,” as the finale to a porn loop. But now apparently swallowing is no longer a river which has to be crossed by sexual adventurers. For instance the provenance  of “gagging” another popular form of pleasure, which employs the mouth and penis, obviously lies in censorship. The gagger uses his organ to stop his lover from talking, which is reasonable in an age when people are being inundated with information. However, though gagging precedes some facials, the root impetus behind the facial seems to be pathological in the good sense of the word. Sperm are coming out of the closet, even if it means they may sometimes end up being a little too much in your face.