I have never understood the ubiquity of facial cum shots.
Yes, I know:
“[E]jaculating into blank space is not much fun, [whereas] ejaculating over a person who responds with enjoyment sustains a lighthearted mood as a well as a degree of realism.”[i]
There is little better illustration of the first point than Andres Serrano exceedingly dull Ejaculate in Trajectory series
However, the veracity of the first point does not extend to the second automatically.
I suspect Faust wishes “degree of realism” to reference concern over what happens to ejaculate when intercourse involves at least one male bodied individual. But, realistically, this is a foregone conclusion in most scenarios involving participants practicing responsible sex. It only becomes when the participants becomes irresponsible—and the majority of porn falls in this latter category.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not a prude by quite a stretch. I want my porn to be gloriously irresponsible. The issue I have is when porn is blatantly irresponsible and then points to the tradition of facial cum shots as evidence of its responsibility.
I don’t mind seeing come. In fact, I rather like it. But it has always been a turn off for me to watch a man squeezing seed from his shaft onto a smiling female face like someone trying to get the last of the toothpaste from an already empty tube onto a toothbrush. But that isn’t even what really bothers me, it’s the fact that the man gets off and the woman settles with having her pleasure merely encoded into her semen besotted Mona Lisa smile.
As Wikipedia’s blurb on Cindy Patton’s criticism of the cum shot summarizes nicely:
“[I]n western culture male sexual fulfillment is synonymous with orgasm and that male orgasm is an essential punctuation of the sexual narrative. No orgasm, no sexual pleasure. No cum shot, no narrative closure. In other words, the cum shot is the period at the end of the sentence.”[ii]
Pornographers most certainly do view the male orgasm as “the period at the end of the sentence.” But just because I think that is bullshit—the male orgasm should be a comma in a fucking German paragraph running for fifteen pages.
Still, my own bias aside, there are absolutely more aesthetically interesting means of displaying the requisite thick, milk white discharge while also facilitating mutual pleasure.
Take the above picture as an example:
First, note that in keeping with the usual the pornographic modus operandi the camera is a foot too close to the action. Although, to the image makers credit it does not rely on the usual visually bankrupt knee-jerk overuse of extreme close-up to titillate. As such, excepting her amputated shin/ankles, the woman’s entire body is within the frame.
Taken perhaps a full minute after orgasm, we see the aftermath of the stud pulling out after filling the woman with his seed; it slowly seeps from her, pooling on his abdomen.
Look at the expression on their faces—if it is not exactly pleasure it is still both intense and compellingly arousing.
Though for me this is moment the scene begins, not where it ends.
Acetylene Eyes 