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

[YuleingFanjo]

and in particular a man ejaculating on a woman's face. Sorry - I feel awful writing it down.

I was talking to a friend last night, she is much nore sexually adventurous than I am and she was saying that she thought it was part of normal sexual behaviour, that most men found it a turn on and most people she knew thought it was normal.

I argued that it was something that came from porn, was not what I would call normal and there was no equivilant sexual 'thing' for a woman to do to a man. She said that women can 'gush' (I have never done this, maybe I am abnormal) or piss or poo (!) which I pointed out was a totally different thing. But is it?

I was trying to discuss it with her and point out that her sexual encounters are out of the norm, definitely aren't encounters within a loving relationship, and that ejaculating in someones's face is surely more about disrespect than anything else?

or am I wrong. I just find it really horrible and if anyone asked me to let them do so I would show them the door.

Soory - I hope I don't sound like some hairy trucker trying to get off on the whole thing, and I am not asking for personal experiences (I would prefer not to read them thanks) but more to discuss if I am right about the power/porn/disrespect thing...

I have no idea if you're saying that that is what you're saying or if you're suggesting that I am somehow misrepresenting you.

Either way I am out of here, feminist bunfights are a bit too common round here these days.

I'm not talking about your bloke, yellowraincoat. Have you ever seen/heard reference to face jizz outside your relationship?

So am I wrong? Are most people doing this and i am in the minority of people who don't? In your opinion?

"feminist bunfights are a bit too common round here these days"

in the feminism section of mumsnet?

yellowraincoat the WfW porn I have seen is definitely not just softly softly nice sex!

I tend to agree with your views on this topic, as it goes.

This is getting stupid.

The OP and others are allowed to 'make a feminist analysis' based on their own experiences, but when other feminists raise their own, contradictory experiences they are not 'proper feminists'.

How many ways can I say this? It is possible to be a feminist and enjoy sexual practices which are portrayed in porn as demeaning, without being demeaned.

Its not that hard to get, surely?

The feminist board should be a place for all feminist voices. Not just the ones deemed acceptable by a minority of regular posters.

OP, I think you are well within your rights to raise this subject, and it is a valid and interesting debate to have, but why are those of us with differing opinions subjected to patronising 'this is the feminist board' shout-downs?

I am a feminist and I like my husband coming in my face. End of.

As far as I am concerned this has been an interesting conversation between people with different views, some of whom I agree with more than others.

I am still not clear on if this is something most people do but I guess that question is unanswerable. I still think my friend is wrong to think it's the norm.

NB 'the norm' not 'normal', I hope I have explained the difference?

Fair enough, Yule, but something not being 'the norm' doesnt mean it is wrong. Homosexuality isnt the norm. It was seen as deviant behaviour until very recently in history. Now we understand that it is just another part of the sexuality spectrum.

It's getting really stupid when no-one is considering whether men think it's degrading or not.

Feminist analysis is not about whether you love the man who comes on your face and you love it and he loves that you love it. What about the "painter's radio"? What about the territory marking? What about the "love my spunk?" What about the "arse, tits, face?"

WHAT ABOUT THE MEN?

MyNameIsNotSusan you should get a t-shirt made up with that slogan

TBE that's an interesting article, and puts my point across much more eloquently:

"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"

But it is a space for everybody! You don't get 250 posts of argy bargy when everyone just says yes dear

Would they have known that in the 80's though, there was a lot of misinformation about at that time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'!

I wanted to post it here so I did.

maybe if you want to post it elsewhere you can, but asking your own question with your own example rather than using mine?

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.