not sure what to title this but it's to do with ejaculation

Beachcomber, I agree with all of what you have said, and I am with you!

I find sex the hardest area to broach, though. it is always problematic for me, especially when discussing it with other feminists.

I can analyse the porn industry from a feminist POV until the cows come home (and I wholeheartedly believe that the porn industry is vile and damaging to women), but when it comes to my own sexual desires and sex life as is, I struggle.

I see myself as on the radical end of the liberal feminist spectrum. I am not one of these who thinks that Jordan getting her tits out empowers women, honestly.

But I do like 'deviant' sex, for want of a better word. I don't really understand how we can take 'power' out of sex. It is absolutely part of it, for me. Which is problematic for a feminist. And I would like to discuss that priblem, rather than be told I am a shit feminist, iyswim?

beachcomber - so basically you're just shouting "down with this sort of thing" but don't actually have any idea what you would like to replace it with?

What an odd kind of revolution.

jericho - fwiw - cum in my face doesn't really do much for me - but that doesn't mean that those who find it great do something wrong. Who are you to judge what is a legitimate turn on and what isn't?

So what please is the unpatriarchal/oppression free/neutral zone sex without any political problems?

So far I've read BDSM is problematic, face-jizzing is problematic, anal is problematic, vaginal is problematic, the only thing I haven't heard yet which kind of sex isn't problematic from a political point of view.

Sorry WidowWadman to have typed your name incorrectly above.

I dunno what a neutral space would be like. I just know that it sure 'ain't patriarchy.

Shoopaloop the whole 'personal is political' thing poses me a whole bunch of problems.

Firstly, I don't always walk the walk even if I talk the talk (perso).

Secondly, women do what they have to to survive in the patriarchy.

Thirdly, I won't let either of the above stop me from analysing the whole deal. (political).

Do you know what? I really, really like a little bit of S&M. I like being, by turns, submissive during sex (jizz on face etc etc) and dominant (vice versa and more...).

Not because I am oppressed, but because I am so in control of my own life that, actually, I quite like my entertainment to involve complete obliviion - just lying back and being pleasured and, yes, a little bit voyeuristic.

Who can tell me that that is wrong? Or not 'feminist"? Bollocks.

TBE - I don't find anything wrong per se with finding dominance or submission arousing in a sexual roleplay context - and don't think it neccessarily hurts anyone - (and yes, I've read that link which says BDSM is corny and stupid, but think it's completely missing the point) - dominance/domineering outside that context, and when the person in the submissive position is not there by choice but coercion is a different problem.

The idea that society can get rid of people striving for dominance (by which I don't mean male dominance over women, but some people's dominance over other people) is - in my view - naive. Humans are social animals after all.

I think the imbalance which needs to be addressed is that men in most situations are advantaged simply by being men regardless of individual skills and capability.

beachcomber what would a neutral space in which to be sexual be? I guess you don't mean beige bedding and wallpaper

I find this really difficult. because we keep being told the personal is political. Yet there is never any space for us to give our personal account without being told by other feminists (and I am a feminist!) that our own personal experiences don't count. I find it quite extraordinary! There is no other 'cause of the oppressed' where this is the case.

Seriously? You think women who prefer something else to having a man come on their face, don't like sex?

I would suggest, gently, if someone else orgasming over you is the peak of your sex life, sister woman, you're doing it wrong.

Actually I find it very repressive to be told that I'm a prude or claiming women don't like sex just because I analyse/find wanting how women are socialized to be sexual by male supremacy.

As I said earlier on this thread;

"Being liberated is not embracing what you are being socialized to do. It is having the freedom to explore what you really want to do."

Gosh, giant leaps there WidowWoman.

I'm not saying that women don't like sex .

I would imagine that most of us do - we have g spots and clitorises which are immensely pleasurable zones (plus a whole bunch of other areas that feel good) after all.

I'm saying patriarchy does not accord us neutral space in which to be sexual.

That we are sexual, goes without saying.

If you think about it, feminism is advocating liberty, not repression. But many think otherwise.

I still struggle with this whole concept of sexual likes conditioned by the patriarchy. To me it sounds like the presumption is that it's a male thing to like sex, whilst women are only conditioned to do it (or like it) - that simply doesn't make sense to me.

And yes, of course, sex can also be a dominance tool - the approach that it first and foremost is one seems reductionist to me.

YuleingFango.

Thanks for this thread - it has made me think (and not about jizz).

I think it is a shame that there are so many posters who seem to conflate 'but I like it ' with 'but I'm a feminist' and think the two have anything much to do with each other.

'twas ever thus. Big obstacle for feminism/women's liberation though unfortunately.

I say this, you understand, because this is a supposed feminist discussion board and therefore the sort of place where such things should be said.

I canvassed four different women on this today. Close friends, btw - I didn't just randomly start asking people at work what they thought about men spunking on them from a feminist perspective

One friend thought it was gross and demeaning, and had never done it or had a man suggest it to her. She thought it must be something perpetuated as enjoyable / aceptable by porn. She couldnt imagine any other reason for it. She is a born again Christian, though, so perhaps we can discount her .

One friend had dabbled with it in her younger days, but has never done it with her husband, with whom she has a good sex life and relationship generally. In retrospect, feels she was coerced in to it and didn't actually want to do it or enjoy it. She felt very strongly that it this is something porn has made acceptable, when in reality she can't imagine many women enjoying it. She was aghast at the idea that any decent man would do this - and she ain't a prude, this friend. That was interesting for me.

The other two have been 'round the block' like my good self (in a former, younger life) and thought it was a totally normal, almost vanilla thing to do. However, they did also agree that it 'comes from porn' and felt that a lot of men want to do it because they have seen it in porn and think it is one of those 'dirty little tricks you can tick off and say you have done'. Very juvenile, if that's true.

3/4 regularly have oral sex in a female-dominant position (use imagination!), so I think what goes on in people's private lives is generally a lot more than lie-back-and-think-of-England.

None of them watch porn - 2 of them have watched it with a man. None of them find most porn a turn on, although one of my friends is bisexual and says she has seen lesbian porn that was 'beautifully done', whatever that means.

Anyhoo, thought that might be of interest.

I like to discuss things from a feminist perspective. Obviously, being a woman, quite a lot of things I do as an individual are the subject of wider political analysis. And that's fine.

Just a thought.

Can I suggest posting this somewhere other than 'feminism' to try and get a broader opinion of what is and isn't 'the norm' sexually.

It seems that most of the posters on this section have a very strong feminist stance on porn and sexual politics and are using this to inform their opinions on other people's sex life. I wouldn't consider myself a feminist as such - I only happened across this thread as it was in the 'last 15 mins' section and it caught my eye - no pun intended!

Perhaps by getting a wider cross section of the MN community to state whether it is 'the norm' or whether it is indeed a niche sexual practice you might get a more balanced viewpoint? I'd love to see it in 'discussions of the day'!

Yes, strange isn't it Fuzzpig, I was the only one pointing out that most women were only too happy to receive oral sex but people were too busy telling me that of course women masturbate over their men's faces in the way men do over women, to contradict that odd statement
Given that only a fairly small minority of women do ejaculate anyway, I don't think I was unreasonable, or "sheltered" to say what I said.

Most men will only ever see a woman ejaculate in porn ( when it's doubtful it's even real) every heterosexual women who has sex will see a man ejaculate in real life.

Most women are not comfy with having a face near to their vagina's because they have been conditioned to think they they are not clean or that is not a normal part of sex. (sorry that was a few pages back, only just seem this thread)

Most? Really? Not IME, thankfully, it's a really sad thought. That said, I have heard of men refusing to give oral to women, despite expecting BJs.

As for the OP topic I quite like it, as does DH, and he hates porn, always has. He had never considered it before I suggested it. So while neither of us have ever used porn, I had probably heard of the idea because of porn - I only heard of it because my friends were talking about it, and at that time I wanted to experiment. So in my case it wasn't about degradation for DH - it was "hey, wanna try this?" "um... Ok then..."

OTOH when I was with someone else and they wanted to do it, it was horrible. He used a lot of porn (and thought it wonderful to show me his collection) and everything he wanted to do was because of seeing it in porn. Totally different experience. Awful.

Sinical/ TBE - I said the face, not the eye! That HURTS!

And yes, there was a lot of misinformation and fear and people did (in my peer group anyway) behave as cautiously as the available information allowed them to.

So, it was always use a condom (still is, until you know your partner's status, obv) for penetrative sex but coming on someone is safest if you can't keep it in the bag.

When I read Gail Dines, so many of the conversations I'd been having with the women in my life, fell into place.

A couple of posters have said 'How do you know it comes from porn and that people weren't doing this anyway?'

We can't know about everyone's private lives, but what we can do is to discuss and share our experiences, to gain a picture of what is for some people a 'norm'.

I have always had an open dialogue about sex with my mother, who is nearing 80. Oral sex had always been an important part of her sex life but when she divorced in the mid-seventies, she noticed that a minority of new partners seemed obsessed with deep-throat and only later realised the link with it and the porn film of the same name. A wise woman, when I became sexually active she was able to give me the esteem to enjoy experimental sex but refuse to do things that caused me pain or discomfort - and to see the difference between fellatio and throat-fucking.

I came of age in the eighties and like my peers, enjoyed lots of sex with different partners. Many of those years were in the pre-Aids era and the pill had been around for 20 or so years. There was no real fear attached to sex, or at least that was my perception. Throughout those years, not one partner requested anal sex, ejaculating on my face or hitting me during sex. I've spoken about this now to approximately 50 women of my generation, from different racial and socio-economic backgrounds and all have similar testimonies.

Many of those women have become single again over the past 5 years and are dating again. They report an entirely different experience now and say it is common for a male partner to want to penetrate them anally and ejaculate on their faces. A thread on here a while ago prompted another discussion and one friend disclosed that she had recently met two men on a dating site who were heavily into strangulation and auto-erotic asphyxiation. One of her acquaintances had reported the same and admitted that she was going along with it because 'that's obviously what's expected these days'.

This is of course anecdotal evidence, as is much social research about attitudes and experiences, but it's left me in no doubt that porn, with its obsession with the male sexual experience and the degradation of women, is responsible for these new norms. Whereas for my Mum, porn was influencing a minority of men post-1972, my children, nieces and nephews are all meeting partners who grew up in the internet porn era. I'm giving them the same messages as my Mum gave me, but I think they face much more pressure to be 'cool' about consent than my Mum or I ever did. It is one of many reasons why I detest the pornification of women's sexuality.

I'm generally anti-porn because I just can't get past the fact that 75% of it features women who are forced, coerced, exploited or desperate. For me, I don't want any involvement with an industry that has such a high casualty rate. It's the same reason I don't socialise with drug users - most recreational drug users, for example are usually lovely, chilled out people IME, but by buying those drugs they are contributing to serious, organised crime and ensuring it continues (even if they themselves would never dream of doing anything else cruel or criminal).

However, having had several really thought-proviking debates on here, I've changed the way that I view porn. I find some porn acceptable and concede that it has a place, because ultimately there is nothing intrinsically wrong about watching other people perform one of the most basic human acts. How can there be? Sex is fine. Watching TV is fine. Why are the two together a problem? It's what porn represents that's the
em - objectification, brutalisation and exploitation. Most porn isn't sex, it's a form of violence. Porn can be produced that doesn't do that, but it is rare and it requires effort to source it. The sad fact is that the vast majority of porn freely available to people is the sort that coerces and exploits.

One thing I've come to believe is that porn is a symptom not a cause. This is really difficult to explain, and I have a tendency to waffle so please bear with me.

I will be the first to argue that the pornification of popular culture is having a negative influence, particularly on the young, so how can I say that porn is an effect rather than a cause? Well I think about how such a backstreet, minor industry could have possibly become so powerful. Until the internet porn was relatively difficult to access and in most countries it has been considered so taboo that advertising is not allowed. So how has it become so influential? IMO it's because of the wider media and unchecked consumerism and so we can't look at porn in isolation, it HAS to be looked at in its cultural context.

We live in a disposable society and we have a background where women have traditionally been considered property. The logical extension of that is that women are a saleable commodity - not just in the flesh (though that happens all too often ) but also in terms of ideas. I think the acceptability of porn is the dark side of female representation as much as 'lose weight', 'how to keep your man', 'buy this foundation to look 10 years younger' is the light side. The light side sells millions of magazines and newspapers and they all create a culture where women are increasingly portrayed in terms of their sexual appeal. At some point it was inevitable that sexual appeal becomes debased to fuckability, opening up porn to the mainstream. A few music video directors try something a little risque, a 'landmark' documentary' tries to explore changing sexuality, the newspaper editor adds in just a few more salacious details about the latest scandal than he might have considered appropriate a few years ago. And so it goes on. The debasement of women apparent in a lot of porn further feeds into the 'lighter' side of misogyny, making women more concerned about their appearance, adopting brazilian waxes, etc and so making what was once fetishised appear normal, encouraging people to push the boundaries further. It becomes a vicious circle.

IMO porn definitely affects what is considered normal in terms of sexual activity, just as advertising affects what is considered 'essential' and 'desirable'. However, porn and pornification cannot survive without a media that loves misogyny and sensationalism and will use both, without restrain, to make vast sums of money, shoring up patriarchal values as it does so. THAT is where I think the war against exploitation of women should be targeted, but that would require massive institutional change. In some ways, targetting porn is easier; I just don't think it goes to the heart of the problem.

I don't know what the answer is, other than on a personal level to refuse to line the pockets of Murdoch and his ilk and to boycott porn myself.

Not read thread but I'm going to put my two pence in.

Back in the days (10/15 years ago) I went to bed with not far off 100 guys. Not one of them EVER suggested this.

Porn has changed sex and not for the better.