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...

Nah, was just me being an eejit. And an insult to my university...

Have not read the whole thread as it is a bit long, but I enjoy it, I think it is submissive but I enjoy that within the relationship I have which is very safe and secure, and yes I think porn has made it more popular but I dont think it "came from" porn IYSWIM

So I see we've gone full circle and back to making sneery comments about people enjoying it?

How the hell would I get chlamydia in my eye? My partner doesn't HAVE chlamydia.

I can't take any sort of hormonal contraception, so we use condoms. Honestly, I miss him coming inside me and him coming ON me makes me feel close to him. We're in a long term relationship and he doesn't disrespect me in other ways, so why would he ejaculate on my face if he found it a disrespectful thing to do? In fact, I feel more respected by him than my ex who found sex dirty. If I told my partner I didn't want him to come on me, he'd respect that completely and we wouldn't do it any more.

Part of it might be a submissive thing. Part of it for him (I asked him during this thread) is a feeling of acceptance - I'm not disgusted by him. Maybe for some men it is linked to degradation - but you could say that for a lot of sex acts, from doing it doggy style to the man always going on top.

Maybe there's no specific physical pleasure for women in it, but there's none for men either.

I think the equivalent would be to push a dildo into your lover's mouth and then squirt him with his earlier ejaculate. Also you could shove the dildo into his ass and then get him to suck on it.

Personally I couldn't do that to a person I loved as I would just be objectifying them. I would get no pleasure from it and I would presume he would get no pleasure from it either. But if he did find it pleasurable then I would leave - I'm not into BDSM.

But then sex is messy stuff. I don't know the answer from a RadFem point of view.

And AnyFucker, there was plenty of talk about female ejaculation up thread so it wasn't like we were exclusively focused on jizz. It was just that no one seemed up for answering if it was ok for women to ejaculate on men. We just got a lot of balls about how it's not that common and how it's men making women ejaculate anyway which is total BS.

Dworkin erm surely the equivalent is to ejaculate onto your partners face?

Which DH likes more than when he does it to me.

But for some women that's NOT objectifying, Dworkin. Totally respect that for you it would feel like that, but it doesn't for everyone.

I don't think the dildo analogy works. I think that blow jobs are, in part, about accepting your partner's body - so the equivalent is him going down on you. Of course oral sex on a woman is not represented in the same way culturally - and yet most people I know are in relationships where the sex is very equal. I don't know anyone who gives their partner oral but doesn't receive it.

What yellowraincoat says.

The joking and joshing and sneering about sexual acts that take place between two people who enjoy them is juvenile and very, very odd.

You sound like a bunch of puritans, some of you, blimey.

Apologies if this has been asked up thread, but is it objectifying when a woman ejaculates on a mans face?

I dont think it is either way round. In that , I do not think any mutually consensual act within a loving and equal relationship is objectifying.

You see I don't get this stuff about posters being puritanical. It seems to be the counter-attack that feminists receive though, when ever they want to discuss sex or porn through a feminist lens. It's just such an absurd conflation and is frankly, unintelligent.

And there really does seem to be some cognitive dissidence going on here with posters trying to claim equivalence with women 'squirting' on men. Do you really think there's an equivalence when there is a complete absence of women on forums jeering about 'plasterers radios' or when mainstream porn concentrates so heavily on men ejaculating on women's faces, but not on women doing this to men? The latter is featured in some porn, but it's a niche market and not something that appeals to the mass market of male consumers. Why do you think that is?

And if it's not about degradation of women, why do so many men on male forums speak in terms that suggest it is? Why do porn producers do the same, in their advertising material?

Just because your partners feel differently and you don't feel degraded, can you at least see the bigger picture here?

And those of you who don't think this 'came from porn'. What evidence is there behind that opinion? Have you talked to many women who were sexually active before this became a staple of mainstream porn, porn that became available to the masses under 20 years ago?

Why do you think so many women in their forties and fifties who were sexually active before the nineties, tell a different story about their sexual experiences?

Yes, Charbon and any woman who disagrees with the radical feminists on here is sneered at as unintelligent and ridiculous and in thrall to men and focusing too much on the personal. What's the point? Both sides are equally capable of being horrible to each other and I really think we don't need to be.

Does mainstream porn focus heavily on men ejaculating on women? I don't know that it always does. Sometimes men come on women, sometimes not. I wouldn't say female ejaculation is niche either, there is a lot of it about. You're still not answering why one is considered objectifying and the other not.

The sort of man who thinks it's degrading and wants to do it because he thinks I'm a disgusting whorebag isn't the sort of man I'd sleep with. Why not? Because I have self confidence. Of course I can see that some women don't have that confidence and that they will sleep with men who want to degrade them. I can't change how men think, and I do think that a lot of men are awful about women. We can change how we react to them though, and for me, I think the only way we can react it to them is to help young women to be more confident.

I just don't think it matters if it came from porn or not. At least part of it probably does, a large part of it comes from the fact that we're all more open about sex now and people would have been embarrassed to ask their partners if they were interested til quite recently. And whether it comes from porn doesn't really matter - if people enjoy it, so what?

'And those of you who don't think this 'came from porn'. What evidence is there behind that opinion?'

What evidence is there it didn't happen pre-porn?

the people who came of age sexually before mass internet porn are still only 40something plus. We can ask them. And a lot of them say, no, it wasn't very common 20 years ago.

Of course it did happen. People just didn't discuss it openly and there was not internet. I've heard some ..erm interesting details from my aunts.

'And a lot of them say, no, it wasn't very common 20 years ago.'

I hear what you're saying but there are a fair few 40 year olds around, hundreds of thousands of them. I'm not saying porn hasn't made it more popular, I would even say it's probably true. But we'll never get a full picture of how popular it was pre-porn, simply because it's not possible to ask large enough numbers IYKWIM.

Yes, mainstream porn does feature this. As has already been explained, it's what porn producers and punters call 'the money shot'. Mainstream porn is also full of sex that is packaged as being degrading to women - it's actually used as a selling point. That's what I mean about cognitive dissidence. If the porn producers include it because they think it's degrading and that consumers will get a kick out of it, why would you not see that? Female ejaculation is niche. You'd have to use it in a search term to find it, whereas male ejaculation will be found just by using 'porn'.

For me (and this is personal) it is not individual sexual acts in and of themselves that are objectifying of women, it is the context in which they operate. This is the difference between the personal and the political. I said upthread that it is not about prurience about people's private sex lives and what they enjoy, but about asking ourselves questions about the origins of a sexual act and whether it has entered the repertoire simply because many individuals enjoy its erotic benefit or whether they feel pressurised to consume.

This is also why many posters have queried what it is about this act that makes it enjoyable to some men, pointing out that this is the question we ought to be asking. Men on forums are quite clear about why - and write about how much they enjoy humiliating women. So the question is, what do 'other men' who do this, enjoy about it? Why do they want to do it? Do they feel pressure to do it and where does that pressure come from? Why have men been socialised to normalise this as something men as a group ought to enjoy? Where did that socialisation come from?

I also don't understand why you have this idea that people have only 'recently' become comfortable talking about sex and what turns them on. If this was 1970, I might agree with you but my generation-as-a-group has never felt uncomfortable talking about sex. I think my mother (previous post) was quite avante-garde for her generation having been born in the thirties, but I think this must be yet another urban myth that people born before the eighties or nineties were repressed about sex.

Sigmunda, the 'evidence' of the origins of this comes from analysis of what was featured in mainstream porn pre-1990 and also from the testimonies of people who were sexually active before the internet. This is common methodology in all social research. Do you have research or anecdotal evidence that contradicts this?

'Yes, Charbon and any woman who disagrees with the radical feminists on here is sneered at as unintelligent and ridiculous and in thrall to men and focusing too much on the personal. What's the point? Both sides are equally capable of being horrible to each other and I really think we don't need to be.'

Exactly.

Re: did it happen before porn. Is the Pope Catholic? And in fact, Catholics have been doing this shit for centuries

The question remains. Why?

Which is a tangled one, evidently, because you can't say 'it stimulates the erogenous zones'. Physical explanations are easy, psychological ones more tricky

Yes and it's the psychology of why men want to do it that is interesting.

I really think there is a massive difference between how we talk about sex now and how we used to talk about sex. I am only 29 but sex certainly was never discussed in my house or the house of anyone I knew at school. Maybe it depends where/how you grew up, but we were definitely not talking about it.

Men on forums might find it degrading - these are not all men though. Men who DON'T find it degrading probably don't go on forums saying "I like coming on my partner's face because it makes me feel close to her". So you're really only seeing the side of men who are into discussing the degradation of women.

It's also not true that female ejaculation doesn't come up in general porn searches. The vast majority of men go to free porn clip sites like pornhub or youporn and on the front page right now there were two videos of women ejaculating. I'm not arguing that male ejaculation is not the bigger thing in porn, it definitely is, but neither is female ejaculation that niche.

When it comes right down to it, we can sit and analyse why or how or if it's ok that this is happening. It IS happening. I am not too into ivory tower feminism - I'd rather do something in the real world to help women make better choices that are right for them. I think that's the only way we're ever going to have true equality.

Oh and the term you're looking for is "cognitive dissonance" not "dissidence".

'Sigmunda, the 'evidence' of the origins of this comes from analysis of what was featured in mainstream porn pre-1990 and also from the testimonies of people who were sexually active before the internet. This is common methodology in all social research. Do you have research or anecdotal evidence that contradicts this'

No I don't Charbon. It may be common methodology, but for me personally, I feel that the groups asked are too small and don't give a broad enough view. I appreciate it would be difficult to ask huge volumes of society.

Any shot showing ejaculation is refered to as the money shot - it doesn't matter where it "lands".

I think any action can be degrading to someone but it isn't the action that degrades it is the person, and what may be degrading in one situation may not be so in another. A kiss can be degrading in an abusive relationship, but you wouldn't say kissing is degrading. I suppose its a bit "guns dont kill people" but you see what I am trying to say.

I do think porn has made it more popular. But it has also been repsonsible for making female ejaculation more popular as this is now a large staple of mainstream porn (Although of course not as much as the male orgasm which yes is the most important thing) but I suppose it is no bad thing the female orgasm (or a part of it) has begun to be more important in sexual culture.

For me the "why" is that I do think it is a dominance thing which works in our relationship. It is an occasional thing, not a regular event. I wouldn't like to say it is the same in every ones elses.

Also, it's not just ejaculation on a face that's talked about between men as something degrading. EVERY sexual act can be talked about in a degrading way, and is. From female orgasm to cunnilingus to blow jobs and everything else. There are men who see sex as a way to degrade women.

Thanks for the typo check! I must have written the word 'disonnance' a thousand times in my lifetime

I really find it laughable and a bit insulting that there's this belief that it's only become acceptable to be open in discussions about sex in recent years, or that people found it difficult before the nineties to be open with their partners about their needs and desires. That's just not my experience within my peer group of women, or in people I've interviewed within my age group.

I don't think it's enough if you're a political person with a concern for greater society to say 'It is happening, let's not ask why'. If that maxim were applied to the 2004-2008 boom in lapdancing clubs for example, activists I engage with would never have successfully campaigned for the licensing laws of 2009 that have seen the boom's demise. I'm not into Ivory Tower feminism either, hence I ask questions, campaign and get out there, listening to how society is shaping people's choices and doing something with that information, but like I said on a thread the other day, debating those questions on an internet site that is popular with millions of parents concerned about their lives and those of their children, is an unnecessarily derided activity. It all helps.