Tag: semen

Source unknown – Title Unknown (201X)

I guess this technically qualifies as post-orgasm torture.

I’m not super fond of the term. It’s not that I object to so-aggressive-it-could-be-deemed-brutal stimulation after orgasm–it can be a damn near transcendent experience.

This is less vigorous, more focused stimulation which acknowledges the fact that after the initial forceful spasms of pleasure, the genitals become hyper-sensitive. The body is hard wired to interpret continued stimulation as pain even though it’s not.

The way I describe it is image a medium sized river with levees on either side to handle flood tides. Orgasm swells the river to it’s edges. Continued stimulation causes the water to rise over the banks and fill the levee. Too much pleasure, at first, is experienced like pain. But it’s not. And if you don’t always have to be in control and trust your partner(s), you can let go and drift in the waves of something unspeakably blissful.

For example: in that last frame, those shaking legs and abdominal contractions are completely involuntary. If you’ve ever experienced that feeling, you’ll understand why I’m obsessed with it. It’s amazing and I crave it.

Alas, just as being tickled isn’t something you can do to yourself, this is the same. And I remain broken and irrevocably unwanted and alone.

I guess at least I can experience a fleeting tinge of it via this gif set.

Source: homobeing

Source unknown – Title unknown (20XX)

Even though I suspect this is a composite–the dust scratches are not on the wall and they would necessarily move if that part of the frame were not a single repeating still frame; the wall and mirror are a mask, the mirror is transparent and footage of the masturbating boy has been strategically placed in such a way so as to appear as if reflected–it’s gorgeous.

Try an experiment: using both hands block your view of everything but the boy. Watch for a moment; then remove your hands. Note how the sense of vague exhibitionism disappears and a sense of voyeurism permeates as you consider the scene in totality.

Also, I like that he’s already orgasmed (you can see traces of semen on his abdomen), but he’s still stroking vigorously.

Source: gaydanishpleasure

Source unknown – Title Unknown (XXXX)

I’ve mentioned a few times already about my interested in the potential for depicting ejaculation in a fine art context.

A sharp eyed follower pointed out that I was completely off base with my initial post. The shot is underwater. Something I can’t believe I overlooked. (Apologies for the fuck up.)

Usual ejaculation is presented with a slow-ish shutter speed. Something like 1/60 of a second in a video. Maybe slower under poor light for a DSLR still This creates a sense of ejaculation as a continuous stream.

The shutter speed here is much faster–1/2000 of a second or faster would be my guess. Notice how it changes from a single string to something closer to a shotgun-esque discharge. It looks less like liquid and closer to scratches on negatives or smoke.

Further, I’m reasonable sure this isn’t post processed. The tones and shadows would be very difficult to match and you can see the shadows created by globules of semen caught in the strobe.

I think my favorite part of this image is although you can’t tell whether it’s an up or downstroke, her white knuckles and the force she’s exerting are clearly visible.

Source: explicitavalon

Zachary Ayotte – Untitled (2014)

This is really kind of great.

I’m not sure whether I think so due to the way the hand is positioned in the frame, the way the position of the hand corresponds to the tile and sink and the ever so slightly soft focus that comes from trying to focus with hold the camera and focus one-handed or that it recalls a series of photos Traci Matlock made employing her hands, water and objects in or around her kitchen sink.

Most likely, it’s both.

Source unknown – Title Unknown (19XX)

By Marie Howe
I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade,
a song for what we did on the floor in the basement
 
of somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought:
That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each other’s mouths
 
how to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it practicing, and
one was the boy, and we paired off—maybe six or eight girls—and turned out
 
the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and lifted our
nightgowns or let the straps drop, and, Now you be the boy:
 
concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry.
Linda’s basement was like a boat with booths and portholes
 
instead of windows. Gloria’s father had a bar downstairs with stools that spun,
plush carpeting. We kissed each other’s throats.
 
We sucked each other’s breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it upstairs
outdoors, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it was
 
practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still lost
in someone’s hair … and we grew up and hardly mentioned who
 
the first kiss really was—a girl like us, still sticky with moisturizer we’d
shared in the bathroom. I want to write a song
 
for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire,
just before we’d made ourselves stop.
Source: musorka

Source unknown – Title Unknown (201X)

I suspect the image maker intended to nominate a single image to represent the entire sequence. (Or, perhaps, the context whereby I initially encountered them was individual and not collective.)

Each frame features both compelling and distracting features. For example:

  • (top left) This features the best composition including her nostril in a way that allows the sudden shift to black to operate in a thoroughly flattering fashion. The down side is that while my brain immediately makes the connection that it’s cum spilling over her lower lip, the artsy chiaroscuro could also mean it’s spit or one of those ostentatiously sexual popped bubble gum photos.
  • (top right) If this image had the entirety of her nostril in the frame, it would easily would’ve been the one to rule them all; except for that oversight, it’s a better frame in the way it uses space more interestingly by cutting out the distracting flyaway hair above her ear from the previous frame disappears. Plus, it’s clear that the substance in her mouth can only be semen. Zoom in close and check out the texture in the highlight that contributes dimensionality to the greyer air bubble area.
  • (bottom left) You could argue that the upper right frame has the best skin tone. I’d say that this one is better because the highlights blow out just a little more evenly and although I haven’t dragged it into Photoshop, I’m prett sure this one features the most detail in her lips. The composition is a little wonky, tho. She’s tilting her head slightly into the light and the upper margin makes it seem as if she’s uncomfortable. (I’d also argue that the focus is a tad bit sharper her, probably due to the additional light.)
  • (lower right) I want this one to be so much better than it is. I think it suffers from the worst skin tone, composition, color but there’s also something perverse about it the fact that you can see a little ways into the darkness; see that she’s wearing what is–to my untrained eye–a nice sweater and that this is either a bathroom or a kitchen. (There’s a sink behind her, unless I’m mistaken…) This uses light in a way that I try and with which I am subsequently always disappointed in the results.)

Yet, when they are re-collected and presented as a series… the continuity between the frames bridges the gaps in each of the individual images. In that way it’s clever. And it shows a certain inspired instinct in that this isn’t the sort of image I’d normally be interested in, much less turned on by.

Ashkan Sahihi – [ ↖] O; [ ↑] S; [↗] C; [←] C; [+] N; [→] J; [↙] C; [↓] T; [↘] K (2003)

Taken together, the nine images above constitute Sahihi’s series Cum.

On the surface, what they are is obvious: carefully crafted head and shoulders portraits featuring an assortment of men and women with semen on their faces.

I am admittedly exactly the opposite of a fan of facial cumshots in pornography; however, the immediacy in the confrontation of the viewer by the subjects’ gaze is compelling in a manner reminiscent the obviously exposed nerve as raison d’etre that contributes such vitality to the cinema–birth by poetry–that became the Iranian New Wave.

However, upon researching Sahihi’s work, I find his conceptual framing frequently emerges from both sides of his mouth. For example, to make the images in the Cum series, he “asked his male and female sitters to bring along a male partner to ejaculate on their face just before the photo was taken.”¹ Whereas, when it comes time to courting the art world, he refers to his impetus as addressing the “pornification of everyday culture;” and just in case that isn’t specific enough:

I wanted to do a series on how I feel popular culture is getting more and more saturated with pornographic imagery whenever something needs to be sold — any product, any TV program. The pimp-and-whore look is everyday fashion. But as people get more and more sexed up, they don’t necessarily have a happier or healthier sex life. They don’t have a better relationship with their sexuality. My point was not to claim that pornography or sexual self-empowerment were “bad” or “immoral,” just to say it’s everywhere, and our acceptance of it is a pose. If you told some of the same people who wore pimp-and-ho clothing that you support gay marriages or gay adoption, they’d be up in arms.²

In other words it seems doubtful that Sahihi informed his sitters of the aim of his project beyond him wanting to take classy photos of folks with jizz covering their faces. But in subsequently packaging this as a critique of consumerist culture, he enacts the same sort of transaction he claims to be criticizing.

The additional art speak rationalization is fucking patently unnecessary–analogous to seeing a monkey sitting in a recliner in a room and having the narrator explain that you are seeing a monkey sitting in recliner in a room.

And as much as I like these images, seeing the way Sahihi uses people as props in so much of his work, is as deeply problematic as it is disturbing.

Ultimately, he does share in the provocateur tradition of the Iranian New Wave. Unlike it–the Iranian New Wave was provocative because of the perspective it espoused, Sahihi seeks to suggest provocation as a means of selling his work. 

Source: ashkansahihi.com

Mr. H – 浪奔 [Ben Lang] (2011)

Originally, this was supposed to follow up my post on close-ups and the notion of the foreign-in-the-familiar.

A series of unfortunate events–bad weather, illness, intoxication and the Internet at my accommodations crashing–made that impossible. Maybe it’s better that way.

I don’t necessarily dispute what I suggested. I just think the foreign-in-the-familiar indicates something more in line with those puzzles in children’s media where they a extreme close up that’s been all reoriented to be wawker-jawed and one has to recognize the original object.  (And one of them is always a goddamn manhole cover–WTF is that about?)

I would have been much better served by suggesting a metaphor with detail insets. For example: here’s the absolutely fucking brilliant Ghent Altarpiece; and here’s a detail inset of Eve holding some type of citrus.

In photography/digital imaging (which really need to be treated mutual exclusive disciplines that share a common lineage but suffered a irrevocable schism and are roughly as non-interchangeable as the Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodoxy), the close-up is comparable to the detail inset de-linked from the original contextual totality. In other words: in art you see the big picture first and then a small detail of the big picture is brought into sharper focus–by focusing on a part of the whole the whole gains further specificity of meaning; in photography/digital imaging, it’s the other way around– one focuses on the detail and from the detail has to intuit the broader context. That’s great if a broader context has been exists, has been established, is explicit. The problem is when the close-up relies upon the interest generated by an atypical manner of seeing to sell the frame independent of broader detail.

(It occurs to me that this detail inset metaphor functions exquisitely when applied to cinema before–and I’m guesstimating here–the late 70s/early 80s with the exception of Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc; however, even that used close-up is an exceedingly well-reasoned and above all consistently applied manner.)

There is a great deal of contextual information that can be sussed out from The Frenzy of the Visible’s masturbatory Self-Portrait–things about the space occupied by the subject, that the light is daylight coming through a window, etc.. Mr. H, on the other hand–although clever in his framing which implies the explicit instead of showing it–removes any sort of contextual cue to focus attention on the ejaculatory aftermath of a male bodied individual masturbating to orgasm. I won’t lie: this makes my brain run 200 km/h in the wrong lane* about potential applications for the wonderfully surreal textures semen exhibits under the light pushing overexposure. Still, such detail would have been equally visible and more compelling–although also more explicit and therefore more challengingto present artfully–with more context.

Lastly, although its soft-core coyly pushing up against hard-core is hardly my cup of tea, Mr. H seems–after a cursory scan–to have a good bit more instinctive talent than any image maker I can think of making similar work targeted at heteronormative types.,

Source: moremoremoreee

Source Unknown

The customary context for depicting ejaculation–i.e. the pornographic money shot–thoroughly pisses me off.

What upsets me is not so much behavior–any goings on between consenting parties are awesome my book–it’s the ubiquity of the presentation.

(Cindy Gallop’s TEDTak outlines the trouble with such ubiquity better than I can.)

Beyond that, the fact that the woman is expected to wait passively, looking up, making eye contact with her lover–getting semen in your eyes is worse than nosing tequila, FYI. If she really wants cum all over her face, why can’t she exercise some agency and lend a hand. 

Bringing me to the other thing–and I can only speak from my own experience here–but the best self-induced orgasm ever is only marginally better than the shabbiest orgasm contributed by a lover. Why drive cross country in a Maserati only to stop and walk the last furlong to the driveway of the destination?

Lastly, the act of ejaculation–when there’s some force behind it, is both really fucking visceral and with the projectile trajectory taking on endlessly fascinating, liquified globular forms, goddamn visually dynamic.

My own failed efforts not withstanding, I am obsessively convinced of the possibility of depicting ejaculation in ‘fine art’ context.

This .gif is equally a failure In terms of artfulness. But from the standpoint of pornography, it’s an interesting a departure.

Not to mention as far as cum shots go, the distance and arc are not only impressive but also quite lovely.