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.

   

Stonewalled II

Early feminists had railed against pornography and the objectification of women, but feminism was evolving and succeeding generations began to reevaluate the role of the women in the context of  Enlightenment notions of freedom and liberty. It would be hard to consider the famous Italian porn star and politician la Cicciolina, who was the wife of the sculptor Jeff Koons, to be an example of a woman who was exploited by men even though she might, in fact, be the object of their fantasies. Entrepreneurial personalities like la Cicciolina and Madonna marketed their own bodies without the need of exploitative male pimps and were in control of their own destinies. By the 1980's Vagina envy replaced penis envy as the manifestation of covetousness between the sexes. As Camille Paglia would point out in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nerfertiti to Emily Dickinson women had superior powers, both physically (genitally) and metaphysically, of which men were in awe. Men’s need to compensate with increasingly violent pornography centering around the notion of submission, in particular gagging (deep throating) and defiling (facials), were signs of male jealousy rather than male desire (and ultimately exemplified the higher regard in which females were held by their male counterparts). Within the short period of time from 1969, in which the Stonewall riots occurred and gays had begun to assert their rights, heterosexual men and women had begun a journey of their own, characterized by a new dialectic in which self-realization and self-expression challenged both classical feminist and male chauvinist ideals.