I don’t know, I hate being demeaned but I enjoy being “showered” with my BF’s juices, on the face or body. To me is like winning a race and shaking the champagne bottle A celebration of getting to the finish line!

Good for you, but for the sake of the sisterhood, I beg you not to downplay what it means. Own it!  There’s no harm in owning it.

But the heart of the matter is that it is irrelevant if I don’t feel demeaned by it. You are perfectly within your rights to feel demeaned by it and refuse to do it. Same thing with anal sex or even not doing it on the missionary position. Whatever rubs you the wrong way and makes you feel bad ? Don’t do it, no matter is “Jane from accounting likes it”. As my mother used to say, “if your all your friends jump from a bridge doesn’t mean you have to jump too”.

What everyone is afraid to talk about, I believe, is that the facial is a visual representation of spitting in someone’s face ... Better just to admit that it’s supposed to be degrading. 

And what, then, of the fact that it’s also common in gay porn?

You could, I guess, say that it’s supposed to be degrading there as well. You could also say that it implies a level of complete acceptance of one’s partner’s body that people could also find arousing. One might feel similarly about, say, face-sitting.

But .... no. I suppose it necessarily means what one blogger decides it means, and the complicated sexual wiring of many others be damned.

Facials are a porn convention and thus essentially masturbatory.

Porn celebrates solitary sex. THe porn watcher has no one’s body to ejaculate into, so it spurts into the air. Having the porn performer spurt into the air enables the porn watcher to imagine himself the participant; it does not remind him he’s alone. This is why so many performers withdraw and stroke themselves to the moment of orgasm—it’s a courtesy to the chickless schmuck. Plus, the emission of semen makes the film “hardcore”—if semen lands in a vagina, did the guy really come? No, in those rare filmic occasions, its presence in an orifice must be shown.

This was a great piece. I think this debate revolves around a theme common to a lot of discussion about the cultural meaning of personal actions. For folks who have an individualist standpoint/attitude, they feel that they can invest any given act with their a meaning of their own choosing—a facial only means what I want it to mean, not what porn directors want it to mean. For people with a more sociological attitude, it seems obvious that no personal action gets meaning outside of a cultural context—a facial means exactly what porn directors want it to mean, because they are the ones controlling the narrative.

If it’s just acceptance, it goes on the stomach, etc. I fail to see why the face specifically is so important, especially when what it brings to mind is spitting. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying degradation. Denying the way a trope works, as I carefully explained, is opening a door to bullying. Lost, I don’t want to rewrite the post in comments. I addressed your claims in the post.

I imagine avoiding STDs also plays a role. Old time porn movies had a lot less squirting going on and a lot more “real sex”. Nowadays it is more ritualized and faked, to prevent risk, I suspect.

Amanda, I really don’t feel degraded, at least not to my conscious knowledge. Still doesn’t make it right for men to force it on a woman that DOES feel degraded. A good partner respects his / her partner’s limitations.

Amanda says -

(I know I’m being repetitive, but I also want it to be 100% clear that I’m disagreeing with the intellectual dishonesty, not trying to shame someone for getting off on degradation.)

Semantics. “I don’t judge your actions, just as long as you call them ‘wrong’.”

I understand navel gazing is the goal, here, and please, understand that I’m completely for navel gazing, just as long as you call it that, and not serious conversation.

Ballast, are you seriously trying to suggest that gay sex isn’t considered dirty in our culture? Because, like I said, the facial and other shaming/degradation is about eroticizing sexual shame. Which is great....if you’re honest about it.

Lost you’re deliberately avoiding the face vs everywhere else point.

John, it’s not semantics. The only people judged here are women who don’t like it. Jessica judged them, and when called out on it, wiggled by denying the connotations that are not a little obvious.

I fail to see why the face specifically is so important, especially when what it brings to mind is spitting.

To me, it was just a way of upping the ante, invigorating the tired formulas of commercial porn. From coming on back or abdomen, to the “pearl necklace,” to the facial. Other porn tropes I would consider degrading are double penetration, and fellatio after anal intercourse.

Lost, I don’t want to rewrite the post in comments. I addressed your claims in the post.

Shrugs. Like I said, any spot is fine by me. I’ve never had a boyfriend insist on face either. It landed where it landed.. We must be talking about different things, then.

Wait, so the facial is now a mainstream sex act? Wow. I’ve been 30 only since a few weeks, I thought I’d have to wait a few more years before my first full blown “Kids get off my lawn” cross-generational culture shocks.

Listen, I’ve done some rather hard BDSM (on both sides of the S/M divide), MMF and FFM threesomes, play parties. We’ve even done some mild golden showers (in the bath, over body not face). I’ve left my spunk over various parts of a woman’s or man’s anatomy. I watch too much porn to be comfortable with my own feminist bona fides. And I’ve NEVER done a facial. I think it’s beyond the pale degrading. I’d do it maybe with a sub if she was hardcore into humiliation.

If it’s just acceptance, it goes on the stomach, etc. I fail to see why the face specifically is so important, especially when what it brings to mind is spitting

The odd thing is that I never saw the slightest connection between the two until your post. I don’t see the same connotations in them at all, and I suspect I’m not alone. And that’s the point, really - it’s not that the association is wrong, it’s that it’s not necessarily universal, or even close to that. I’m sure there are some who actively do enjoy the act in question for its degrading aspects, but there are also others - and not just a fringe few - who really, genuinely don’t make that connection. There’s some belief in a common cultural narrative about sex practices here that I don’t think is nearly as consistent as you seem to think.

Many sex acts are about power. Many sex acts are about degradation. Many sex acts are about intimacy. Most sex acts blur the lines of all of these and more. Shooting your junk on your partners face clearly falls somewhere on the power/degradation scales. The recipient of the facial may not feel degraded or subservient, but for the shooter, well ... that’s why it was hot.

“I love you so much I want to see my spunk on your nose,” is not an expression of intimacy.

I think Amanda has this exactly right.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a (white) friend of mine that grew up in the south. Another acquaintance of ours has a confederate flag (in the upper midwest). My friend argued that it was fine for the acquaintance to fly the flag because in the south, a confederate flag is not necessarily racist; it merely stands for states’ rights. I argued that it is seen as a racist symbol now, and whether or not he acknowledged that, most people who saw the flag were going to assume the flag-bearer was racist. Societal connotations matter.

Just because you don’t find facials degrading, doesn’t mean that your partners or potential partners don’t use it in a degrading way, possibly even unconsciously. And, even if you and your partner both somehow escaped the societal messages (and bully for you, if you did), you can’t really expect onlookers or future partners to view the act without context of degradation.

You can make up your own definitions if you want to, but you should also acknowledge that 95% of society has a different definition.

Other porn tropes I would consider degrading are double penetration, and fellatio after anal intercourse.

Seriously, in porn, even regular fellacio is degrading (or played up as). It’s insidious. All I want is visual aids for masturbation, and I always get served with an extra helping of misogyny. Pointing this out I don’t feel is sex negative. I’d just like an actual sex positive erotica company to start making videos I can wank to without having to suffer through degradation narratives.

Fellatio after anal is just stupid, from a safer sex standpoint. They only get away with it in porn because they get a million enemas prior to shooting an anal scene.

As for DP… are we talking vaginal + anal intercourse, or doubling up in one orifice? The second one is pretty much just degradation, the first one would actually be pleasurable to many women (my gf likes to have a plug during vaginal intercourse… in fact she comes harder from anal than even clitoridal stimulation) except that in porn it’s always two doofuses banging away like they’re trying to rip the woman in two.

My number one problem pron tropes, though, is barebacking. The fact is that it’s so common nobody even bats an eyelash anymore (the only other person I’ve ever known to publicly disapprove was Dan Savage, of all people, in one of his columns). Somebody floated the idea of a law forcing porn productions to have their actors/actresses use condoms in all scenes, and I have to say that even as an anarchist I have a hard time disagreeing with that.

I have a hard time not categorizing “facials” as an inherently demeaning act, but my opinion on it is that if a couple is into that and it’s fully consensual, it’s none of my business.  Personally, I have never done that (at least not intentionally), and I would feel fairly awkward about doing it, even if my partner asked me to.

That said, I’m a little more ambiguous in my opinion about coming in the mouth.  Obviously, if no warning is given to the partner of the impending orgasm, and no consent was given beforehand, it’s pretty fucking degrading, and if I were a female heterosexual and a guy came in my mouth without me first giving him the OK to do that, I’d probably punch him in the balls.

But is it necessarily a degrading act when full consent is given, or even moreso, when the female partner ASKS for you to come in her mouth during fellatio?

I have never asked a female partner if I could, because unless they say otherwise, I just assume that they rather I wouldn’t do that, and I’m not too keen on trying to pressure people into doing something they might not want to do.  However, I have had a couple of partners specifically tell me to come in their mouths, and I was quite content to oblige the request, and I didn’t feel as though I was degrading them…

Am I wrong here?

A facial IS more degrading than coming on a woman’s stomach. Especially if the guy is simultaneously excited by it, and then disgusted at the idea of cleaning it off (my biggest pet peeve). That doesn’t mean that degrading acts are inherently harmful to a relationship or anti-feminist, just as Amanda says in the post. Like DanF says, there’s rarely anything intimate about it - it’s ultimately masturbatory for the guy.

There’s some belief in a common cultural narrative about sex practices here that I don’t think is nearly as consistent as you seem to think.

We can say that about anything, though. We can invalidate the entire field of cultural criticism by pointing out that some people don’t share the same cultural narrative.

Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that the narrative exists.

I really don’t get why ejaculating on someone’s necessarily degrading, you are only forced to take it that way if you are fixated on the idea that semen, human seed essentially, is inherently filthy.

In my experience, most of the time it is guys who find their own semen disgusting or taboo. This isn’t universal, of course, but lots of guys DO sort of subconsciously think they’re defiling a woman when they come on her.

My friend argued that it was fine for the acquaintance to fly the flag because in the south, a confederate flag is not necessarily racist; it merely stands for states’ rights. I argued that it is seen as a racist symbol now, and whether or not he acknowledged that, most people who saw the flag were going to assume the flag-bearer was racist. Societal connotations matter.  ... And, even if you and your partner both somehow escaped the societal messages (and bully for you, if you did), you can’t really expect onlookers or future partners to view the act without context of degradation.

Hopefully you’d be able to acknowledge there is a pretty significant difference between the public act of flying a flag on a government building, and a decidedly more private sex act between two (well, or more, apparently - and perhaps “onlookers”, too?) people.

You can make up your own definitions if you want to

But that’s exactly what this post isn’t saying. It’s saying that you can’t, and if you try, you’re lying.

I once read a debate in the Q and A section of a vegan magazine, the subject of which was weather or not it was permissible for vegans to swallow cum

*Facepalm*.

“It’s okay, as long as it’s human cum. Or you have a reasonable expectation that the non-human animal gave it to you freely.”

Let me guess… the Cons side was mostly made up of vegans who buy into alternative health woo and do it for health reasons, or have a similar justification for veganism that is otherwise based in an infection model of animal products (i.e. the problem is with eating the product itself and how it pollutes you/makes you unclean, rather than the process by which the product came about)?

I mean, from this ex-vegan’s standpoint, the problem with dairy, meat, leather, etc… was that it came about because of coercion of non-human species (the old “Meat is Murder, Dairy is Rape” slogan). It wasn’t because it was ‘animal’. I would have eaten artificial lab-grown steak if it was 100% cruetly-free, for instance…

You know, frankly I do have a problem with the list itself- it’s inherently normalizing, which strikes me to be the real problem here. I’m not happy with is being told I’m universally inadequate because I don’t do any of these things, inherently degrading or not. The piece is presented in the negative rather than the affirmative- you AREN’T doing these things rather than why don’t you try some great things. And it also fundamentally establishes a wedge between one’s partner and one’s self- this is what your partner WOULD tell you if he weren’t so god-damned afraid to confide in you. (I would add, that it’s a hell of an unremarkable list, save for the facial. I’m not at all sure why anyone should feel uncomfortable discussing these things among themselves.)

Comment #7: Amanda Marcotte on 08/25 at 02:30 PM:

If it’s just acceptance, it goes on the stomach, etc. I fail to see why the face specifically is so important, especially when what it brings to mind is spitting. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying degradation. Denying the way a trope works, as I carefully explained, is opening a door to bullying.

Amanda, you’re being obfuscatory about what the participants bring to the act when you talk about these acts as if they have some intrinsic meaning, are intrinsically analogous to something else, or constitute some sort of “trope” in an objective way that fixes their meaning in every possible context.

There’s a “language,” so to speak, of porn, where facials do mean what you’re saying, in the same sense that “dog” means Canis familiaris in English.  I don’t believe anybody in this discussion denies that.  What a number of people object to is the idea that this language is spoken in their own bedrooms.  And if that is so, you can no more tell them that “facial = degradation” than you can tell me that “dog” means Canis familiaris in Spanish.

I understand that the articles you’re discussing are a pretty obvious manipulation of women to put on a porn star act to please their men.  But basically, what is wrong with these articles is that they are demanding that women submit even more than they do today to men’s insistence that the language of Porn be spoken in the bedroom.

We can say that about anything, though. We can invalidate the entire field of cultural criticism by pointing out that some people don’t share the same cultural narrative.

It’s a matter of degree. I’m sure that Amanda’s interpretation is shared by many. I’m also quite certain there are more than a few outliers who don’t share it, which is reason enough to not give it the stamp of The Official, Undeniable Meaning Of Facials That Anyone Who Doesn’t Adhere To Is Simply In Denial.

A “facial” is considered degrading by society at large (some feminists included along with the usual collection of religious prudes), but I think we can agree that society at large has no business in the nation’s bedrooms (or living rooms, or kitchens, or chandeliers...) when it comes to consenting adults.

Now an individual may get off on that degradation aspect of the “facial,” or they might enjoy it for an entirely different reason (e.g. sensation, messiness, etc.). So it’s not always regarded as degrading by either or both consenting parties. Therefore there’s nothing that needs to be “admitted” here beyond the obvious societal viewpoint.

Wait, so the facial is now a mainstream sex act?

I’ve read that a lot of younger and inexperienced people try to model real-life sex based on what they see in porn (see current flowchart). “Facials” only became common in porn in the last generation or so (mainly due to the rise of AIDs in the ‘80s), so that’s what the kids are imitating as “expected” these days.

Generally I agree with Amanda… maybe I’m a bit fastidious, but while being a recipient’s usually great, being a target (especially in the face) really isn’t IMO.  And while I’m both too old and too unimpressed by peer pressure (guilt never really worked wrt sex anyway, because I’ve always made it clear that anything that caused me to detach was going to be the beginning of the end) for the good-girlfriend standard to apply, it’s another one of those pernicious performance obligations that I suspect are as bad for female sexuality as outright repression.  At least forbidden sex is frequently hot for both partners, while peep-show plays are usually pretty dull for the actresses.

From coming on back or abdomen, to the “pearl necklace,” to the facial. Other porn tropes I would consider degrading are double penetration, and fellatio after anal intercourse.

Fellatio after anal - degrading

Double penetration - degrading (assuming the penetrations are performed by two separate men - a dildo in one orifice combined with a penis in the other isn’t necessarily degrading)

“Pearl necklace” - degrading

Coming on the back or the abdomen - not necessarily degrading, assuming consent was non-coercively given.

All IMO, anyway.

I really don’t get why ejaculating on someone’s necessarily degrading, you are only forced to take it that way if you are fixated on the idea that semen, human seed essentially, is inherently filthy.

No, not really. Just like getting slapped in the face or having your face spit in, the whole point is that the *intent* is to degrade and both parties (and all of society) understand that. If someone’s hand ran into my face or vice versa accidentally it would hurt but it wouldn’t offend because there was no intent to offend behind it. If someone spit *at* my face but missed it would still offend because that’s how they meant it (despite nothing “dirty” actually getting on me.)

you are only forced to take it

This choice of wording reminds me of what seems to be the whole premise of a lot of porn—forcing her to take it. It loses its power if the woman in porn has no problem with it, and if the viewer doesn’t see it as degrading. I’m pretty sure the typical male viewer of porn isn’t yelling “oh yeah, shoot it in her face! It’s so good for her skin!”

Comment #31: Bagelsan on 08/25 at 03:13 PM:

Just like getting slapped in the face or having your face spit in, the whole point is that the *intent* is to degrade and both parties (and all of society) understand that.

How can the choice of act determine the intent?  How can society impose one true and only interpretive framework for an act, such that any participate must interpret it in that way and that way only, with no way out?  That’s a recipe for an eternal, unchanging society, where our desire to eliminate institutional oppression of women is simply hopeless.

Double penetration - degrading (assuming the penetrations are performed by two separate men - a dildo in one orifice combined with a penis in the other isn’t necessarily degrading)

Well, since in porn a woman who has sex with a man is a slut, a woman who has sex with two or more men is a mega-slut, and a woman who has sex with two or more men AT THE SAME TIME is Ultra-Slut… yeah, the porn narrative is usually pretty degrading for DP.

OTOH, threesomes (of any gender combos) between consenting, enthusiastic adults IRL are teh HOT. I’ve never tried anal+vaginal (two overweight people are already hell on the logistics of sex, I can’t imagine adding a third in the middle of things) but vaginal + oral is decent and I don’t think any of those involved felt it was inherently degrading (though, to be fair, the second M was a douche and ended up causing drama, so… maybe HE did like it because HE felt it was degrading, not sure since I"m not privy to his inner mind).

Sex is a wild and woolly thing, and I don’t blame anyone who has integrated sexual shaming into their libido and really gets off on being degraded and shamed.  If that’s your thing, go with Jesus.  Seriously.  Get off how you want.  I’m glad you’re having fun.

Aye, there’s the rub.

I suspect that part of what might lie behind the argument that a particular sexual practice is not degrading is the implicit understanding that words like “degrading” carry a very negative connotation.  The prevailing attitude in our culture (or just about any culture, I would imagine) is that emotionally healthy people do not do things that degrade them.  So someone like Amanda might fully support people doing degrading acts, with the appropriate mutual consent of course, but most people would judge such things quite harshly.

Sometimes you see this in a milder form when, during a discussion of sexual practices, someone asks, “but have you examined Sexual Act X?” It can be a sincere question, but it can also be a coded way of saying, “Your sexual behavior is wrong and I think you should stop doing X.”

“I’m not going to be upset by someone saying oral sex is standard...I’ll nod vigorously.”

Why not?  How is sticking a penis in someone’s mouth any less degrading to them?

This an honest question, because the blowjob good / facial bad distinction seems a bit arbitrary to me.

All IMO, anyway.

Once again, the great line “chacun à son goat"(*) applies.

(*) “Each to their own perversion”

And that’s the point, really - it’s not that the association is wrong, it’s that it’s not necessarily universal, or even close to that.

I’m skeptical of that, sorry.  It’s not universal, because admitting that it is brings up a lot of uncomfortable questions that might involve men getting to do it less and think about it more.  We don’t disagree that peeing in someone’s face has a very specific meaning, but mostly because women can do it to men, and so avoiding the issue isn’t an option.

Which, by the way, I think peeing on someone is a fine way to spend your time.  If it gets you off, go for it!  But it’s interesting that people can be honest about the psychosexual issues being brought out by watersports.  The honesty of it makes it a lot better all around, because you can say no with a clear conscience if being degraded isn’t your thing, and if someone asks for it, you’re allowed to acknowledge where they’re coming from.

Double penetration - degrading (assuming the penetrations are performed by two separate men - a dildo in one orifice combined with a penis in the other isn’t necessarily degrading)

OTOH, threesomes (of any gender combos) between consenting, enthusiastic adults IRL are teh HOT.

This an honest question, because the blowjob good / facial bad distinction seems a bit arbitrary to me.

etc. etc.

If the dildo is very large, does it become degrading? What about vibrators? Can we have this all compiled in a book, please - the feminist blog commenter Talmud, if you will - so that I may ensure that all interactions with partners are certifiably non-degrading?

This is a fascinating post Amanda, as it has brought forth a conciousness for me about things related to my own sexuality that had really been lurking unacknowledged in my first 20 odd years of believing that I was exclusively hetero.

Through that period and still up to now I had never even considered facialing my partner and was nonplussed when my partner would clearly indicate a desire to finish me orally, although via coming in her mouth, not her face. Same for anal. Would perform it (gladly) only when specifically requested to do so.

After becoming aware of and accepting my bisexuality (damn those dirty gay recruiters!!), what had formerly been taboo for me has become my preferred method of showing my (primarily) TS/TV partners how much I enjoy their company. I desperately (a telling admission I suppose) want them to shoot their juice right on the kisser as the finale to utterly dominating me. And yet I still have the same, some might call it odd, prudery/deference when with my LTR female partner. Thanks for another great post from a longtime lurker.

“I’m not going to be upset by someone saying oral sex is standard...I’ll nod vigorously.”

Why not?  How is sticking a penis in someone’s mouth any less degrading to them?

This an honest question, because the blowjob good / facial bad distinction seems a bit arbitrary to me.

To put it very simply, it’s that coming in someone’s face is roughly analogous to spitting in someone’s face, as Amanda pointed out in the main post.

Additionally, with fellatio, there is a reciprocal action that a male can perform on a female, cunnilingus.  With facials, ther really isn’t a parallel reciprocal action.

I enjoy receiving fellatio, and I don’t consider it to be degrading to my partner.  At the same time, I also understand that generally if I would like to receive oral sex, I need to be willing to give oral sex.  I have had partners who refuse to give fellatio, who aren’t huge fans of it but still give it, and who absolutely love it.  In general, I enjoy performing cunnilingus regardless of whether or not my partner likes or is willing to give fellatio, and I’ve had partners who enjoy giving fellatio but do not want to receive cunnilingus.

Communication is pretty key with all of it, but I don’t think consensual non-coercive oral sex is in anyway degrading for either party.  I’m still curious as to what the general opinion is on coming in a partner’s mouth is (assuming that it is completely consensual and non-coercive) - degrading or not?

Amanda, comment 11 -

John, it’s not semantics. The only people judged here are women who don’t like it. Jessica judged them, and when called out on it, wiggled by denying the connotations that are not a little obvious.

There are 2 groups here - those who feel they have to act like porn stars, and those who want something for whatever reason. You are assigning a connotative meaning to an act that doesn’t necessarily carry that meaning intrinsically. That act means that to you. I agree with sacundim that between consenting, and perhaps even loving couples, it doesn’t exactly mean, “That’s right, bitch, you take my load in your face”.

So being sexually submissive is degrading/demeaning?

I suppose that to submit to the will of another makes one less than the other.  But we all submit to the will of others daily, sexually or otherwise.

Is it possible that the idea of being degraded has different implications in different situations, with not all of them having implications for whether women are being denied equality?

it all sounds like so much..fun/

Fellatio after anal is just stupid, from a safer sex standpoint.

I think the danger of it is probably what’s supposed to make it exciting.

What bothers me about a lot of these discussions is I think a lot of people are firmly interested in denying the way that sexual women are still constructed as sponges for degradation and abuse in our culture.  But that’s how it is. Is that sticker sex-positive or sex-negative?  I’d say the latter, even though it’s quite pornographic.

I really don’t get why ejaculating on someone’s necessarily degrading, you are only forced to take it that way if you are fixated on the idea that semen, human seed essentially, is inherently filthy.

Read. The. Post.  I don’t think that getting someone’s saliva on your face is gross---it’s a fun part of kissing.  But someone spitting in my face?  Degrading.  Does that mean I think spit is gross?  Does it mean I’m against kissing. 

Please. Intellectual honesty.  That’s all I ask.

to Amanda @ #38: Yes, but you’re still denying the idea that some people simply do not find it degrading. For them, there are no psychosexual issues to be honest about, and it’s absurd to demand that they subscribe into one interpretation of the act just because lots of other people do. Obviously, if you are one such person, it’s good to know that most others find it degrading, so you can avoid putting some future partner in an unpleasant situation. But why insist that everyone treat it as a degrading act in the first place?

I’ve never felt ejaculation in any way is degrading, whether it’s an issue of swallowing, on the face, etc. However. I recognize other people bring a different set of associations to bed. I have been slut-shamed for swallowing as well as for ejaculating myself (which I can’t control), once for supposedly ruining someone’s backseat. It’s one of the reasons I don’t have as much casual sex as I’d like to, because I want to make sure my partners and I share the same basic mentality.

At the same time, sex comes from such a murky place that you never really know all the little triggers going off in your partner’s mind. I was once surprised to find out that my ultra-progressive boyfriend thought doggie style was the dirtiest thing ever and he assumed I, a feminist, wouldn’t want anyone to know we did it. I explained that my entire sexual history as a feminist has been wanting to do things that would get me judged, and having to always choose between my sexual satisfaction and drama/gossip/judgement. And the ever popular armchair analysis. I’m not a lifestyler, but I do a fair amount of BDSM play and there more than anywhere I hear all these rules for what dommes do and don’t do - I’m a bad domme if I like giving head, for instance. It’s just ridiculous. Porn, frat boys and insecure misogynists are not going to define my sexual psychology. at the same time, it behooves me to be aware of the predominant sexual mindset, so it’s always a balancing act.

Why not?  How is sticking a penis in someone’s mouth any less degrading to them?

This an honest question, because the blowjob good / facial bad distinction seems a bit arbitrary to me.

It’s obvious why fellatio feels good to the man. He might think it degrades the woman, but that’s beside the point. You can’t explain why a man would want to give a woman a facial in terms of the nerve endings in any of his erogenous zones - ejaculating onto the woman’s back or stomach doesn’t physically feel different than onto her face the way vaginal, oral and anal sex might deliver different sensations. If there is a difference, it’s in is mind, and Amanda is saying that difference comes from specific cultural narrative that is about the degradation of women.

We don’t disagree that peeing in someone’s face has a very specific meaning

Are you sure? Seriously. I’m quite certain you can round up a nontrivial mob of people who don’t disagree, but why do you assume that random person X must clearly have the same feelings that you do? And then extend this same line of thought to somewhat less “fringey” acts as well? To quote a previous commenter, who summed the problem with this post quite nicely:

There’s a “language,” so to speak, of porn, where facials do mean what you’re saying, in the same sense that “dog” means Canis familiaris in English.  I don’t believe anybody in this discussion denies that.  What a number of people object to is the idea that this language is spoken in their own bedrooms.

Is it possible that the idea of being degraded has different implications in different situations, with not all of them having implications for whether women are being denied equality?

That isn’t being disputed.  The question isn’t whether or not it’s right or wrong to enjoy an activity that’s fairly widely considered degrading, it’s whether or not that act is in fact degrading.

Facials are degrading.  Period.  If both partners enjoy the act and it is entirely consensual without any coercion, there’s nothing wrong with that, and it doesn’t make someone “wrong” or less of a feminist if they enjoy being given a facial, but that doesn’t change the fact that the act itself is inherently degrading, just as spitting on, urinating on, or defecating on someone is inherently degrading.

I imagine avoiding STDs also plays a role. Old time porn movies had a lot less squirting going on and a lot more “real sex”. Nowadays it is more ritualized and faked, to prevent risk, I suspect.

Um, no. Pulling out before ejaculation does not stop the spread of STIs (as the infections are in the bodily fluids, not the sperm), and pre-cum can still transmit disease. Furthermore, as noted in the linked articles, safe-sex porn is probably about as rare as non-degrading porn—maybe rarer. Whether you want to argue this from the degradation standpoint or from the chafing standpoint (marathon stop/start sex while you’re being filmed is not really compatible with condom use), you cannot make the argument that the porn industry is doing facials because they’re “safer.”

I get that it’s important to have the money shot. It’s important to show that the man has gotten off, it’s important to show his manly jets of sperm shooting everywhere because he’s so manly and shit. Having him simply ejaculate inside the woman (or other man) would be anti-climactic. Whether or not it’s aiding the viewer in their own masturbation is up for argument, I would say it’s simply just a necessity of cinematics. Belly- and Back- painting are a perfectly cromulent way to show this without showing the woman getting a cream pie in the face.

But are you guys seriously trying to argue that because gay porn has facials that it can’t possibly be misogynist? SRSLY? Because there have never been top/bottom dom/sub gender roles in gay porn? Because there has never been a misogynist bent to gay porn? Because you have your head up your ass?

And I’m generally in favor of people deluding themselves except when it contributes to an environment that persecutes others. For example, If I believe that the only way I can get off is by missionary-style sex, then that’s a delusion that really doesn’t hurt anyone else, because if my husband and I split and he finds another woman and declares that he won’t have female superior because “MP couldn’t get off any other way” there’s nothing loaded about her saying “that’s great for her, but I’m not built that way and I’m on top dammit.” But to repeat what Amanda has already pointed out, if I sit there and spin some elaborate excuse about how getting sperm shot into my face is like, totally empowerful, and how I love it and it’s not degrading, then that’s going to be used as a weapon against the next woman who might be a little uneasy about the semiotics of hot sperm facials. I know, right? Who knew that something that is degrading and about domination and humiliation could be used as tool to bully and coerce. Weird, huh?

This an honest question, because the blowjob good / facial bad distinction seems a bit arbitrary to me.

I do think the way that blow jobs are constructed in a lot of society is degrading, because it’s about gagging, servicing, and not getting oral in return. But it’s practiced in real life far different than in a lot of porn, where it’s about give and take, where men are also expected to go down. But if a man wanted “blow jobs” like the kind he sees in porn, I’d take a pass.  I’m not gagging on your cock or looking miserable, sorry.

In my own perception of what is degrading I agree with Amanda that facials are degrading.  But IMO it’s a subjective standard, and like ballast, I don’t see that anyone who enjoys receiving them are denying being degraded.  Once upon a time cumming into the mouth was considered degrading and these days it seems less so, although I gather it is still polite to announce impending ejaculation so the receiver can decide whether to take it, spit or swallow, or divert the stream.  Fellatio itself was once considered degrading by many or most of society.  I still don’t get the appeal of anal, though I’ve heard and read some women say and write that they like it. 

Doing something your partner finds distasteful or disgusting is degrading.  Any particular act is not objectively so.

But of course, give and take oral sex is the gold standard of equality in the sack, especially when men are willing to make sure that women get their orgasms just like men get to.

Amanda - #45

What bothers me about a lot of these discussions is I think a lot of people are firmly interested in denying the way that sexual women are still constructed as sponges for degradation and abuse in our culture.  But that’s how it is. Is that sticker sex-positive or sex-negative?  I’d say the latter, even though it’s quite pornographic.

Amanda, all sex is degrading at it’s core. Guys just don’t bite women’s heads during sex to keep them immobile, and their dicks don’t grow a knot in the middle so you can’t get out of it half way through. Work is demeaning, as is getting on your knees and scrubbing the floor. Nobody makes you “admit” that keeping your apartment clean is demeaning.

Any type of oral is a form of submitting, and what does tossing salad or sucking toes look like?

But people will do things for their partner because they derive a satisfaction out of giving joy to their partner.

I read your blog religiously, and want to argue with you on most posts because you have an attitude of “I’m right because I said so.”

so that I may ensure that all interactions with partners are certifiably non-degrading?

Why would you want that, ballast?  There’s nothing wrong with being degraded, if it’s your thing and you are conscientious about finding partners who share your interests.

It’s really hard to believe that rational people seem to be arguing that having your face ejaculated into does *not* involve any sort of dominance, that it doesn’t enact any kind of power dynamic or play off the ideas of submission/degradation. Really? Honestly?

Is it really a value-neutral act like any other in the whole spectrum of possible sex-related actions? Because if that’s the case then ALL sex acts are value-neutral. Slapping, hair-pulling, spitting, bondage, ass to mouth, etc, everything from tepid vanilla to outer space crazy blood-poop-vomit sex is absent dominant/submissive aspects or the appeal of consensual degradation.

*OR*, some things are inherently degrading or are based on submission or domination and THAT’S REALLY OKAY. You know?

if I sit there and spin some elaborate excuse about how getting sperm shot into my face is like, totally empowerful, and how I love it and it’s not degrading, then that’s going to be used as a weapon against the next woman who might be a little uneasy about the semiotics of hot sperm facials.

If you regard heterosexual relationships as basically one never-ending union/management negotiation, where the women who enjoy acts that you don’t are basically the “scabs”, I suppose this might make the slightest amount of sense.

It’s obvious why fellatio feels good to the man. He might think it degrades the woman, but that’s beside the point. You can’t explain why a man would want to give a woman a facial in terms of the nerve endings in any of his erogenous zones - ejaculating onto the woman’s back or stomach doesn’t physically feel different than onto her face the way vaginal, oral and anal sex might deliver different sensations. If there is a difference, it’s in is mind, and Amanda is saying that difference comes from specific cultural narrative that is about the degradation of women.

Ahh.  That makes sense.  Thanks.

Tickling someone is playful in a way that poking them in the face isn’t.  Spanking their butt vs. slapping them on the face, same thing.

I think there might be a bit of spanking/facial hypocrisy (I just made that up) going on here- the spankee has to be in a submissive ass-presenting posture, plus there’s the obvious weird parental or adult/child thing in there. Plus there’s the fact that you’re hitting someone.

There are 2 groups here - those who feel they have to act like porn stars, and those who want something for whatever reason.

Nonsense.  We know why the facial is popular at all, and it’s because of porn.  It’s a very porn-specific bit of visual symbolism.  It’s rather unique in that way, though I suppose the development of shoving as many cocks into a single hole as possible is competing as the sex act that porn basically invented.

So being sexually submissive is degrading/demeaning?

Wow, that might be next level intellectual dishonesty. Next I’m going to be accused of saying that submitting is submissive. 

Nothing. Wrong. With. Consensual. Degradation.  Just own it.  The refusal of people to own it creates a coercive environment for those who aren’t into it.

Is it really a value-neutral act like any other in the whole spectrum of possible sex-related actions? Because if that’s the case then ALL sex acts are value-neutral. Slapping, hair-pulling, spitting, bondage, ass to mouth, etc, everything from tepid vanilla to outer space crazy blood-poop-vomit sex is absent dominant/submissive aspects or the appeal of consensual degradation.

There are easily understood practical arguments for calling some acts degrading - in particular, those which actually can be detrimental to personal health/safety. Some of the acts you describe fall into that category.

Beyond that, though, all I see here is someone else astounded that not everyone feels the same way about a sex act that they do.

Hey, my husband and I have this “thing” where I have to walk five paces behind him at all times, and I’m not allowed to speak in public. It’s totally not degrading! It’s feminist and empowered! I like to think of it as my special quiet time, how cool is it that no one gets to know what I’m thinking but me?

Amanda, all sex is degrading at it’s core.

That’s a sad thing to think.  God, even people who are into degradation during sex don’t necessarily think that’s the core, or that it can’t be built around affection or pleasure.

If a man asks a woman to come on her face; it is to degrade/dominate her.  For her to ask, it’s her context to decide.  Some like to feel degraded/passive.  Some just like to watch that particular human function.  Submissive and receptive aren’t the same thing.  Neither are degradation and dominance or for that matter activism.

If semen on the face is per se degradation, are female emissions on the face of a male performing cunnilingus the same?  There are men who feel giving head to a woman is degrading.
(They’re mildly crazy of course).  There are those men who love doing it both for their woman and the taste/texture and find it not the least degrading.  Everything is context.

But we all submit to the will of others daily, sexually or otherwise.

That’s a bug, not a feature. Come the revolution…

Hey, my husband and I have this “thing” where I have to walk five paces behind him at all times, and I’m not allowed to speak in public. It’s totally not degrading! It’s feminist and empowered! I like to think of it as my special quiet time, how cool is it that no one gets to know what I’m thinking but me?

Are you OK with it?

(And who said anything here about “feminist and empowered”, exactly? Pick up that poor straw man and let him stand again.)

If you regard heterosexual relationships as basically one never-ending union/management negotiation, where the women who enjoy acts that you don’t are basically the “scabs”,

That’s over the top, and you know it.  My point is that men aren’t required to “negotiate” sex acts they have to perform under a myth that serves female egos while keeping male displays of dominance unquestioned.  If someone is into facials and other dominance displays, great!  Great!  Do it!  But if you can be honest about what it is, it makes finding a partner who is happy with it better and more ethical.  If it’s “standard”, then the right to say no without being told you’re a prude disappears.

If semen on the face is per se degradation, are female emissions on the face of a male performing cunnilingus the same?  There are men who feel giving head to a woman is degrading.

Oh, but that’s TOTALLY DIFFERENT, because (insert rationalization for why my view is correct here). That act is all in the beholder. It’s just the ones we don’t like that have a True Meaning.

So… wait, what?  This piece started out with, “Feminists need to sacrifice prudishness for intellectual honesty” and I was waiting for a long-winded diatribe about how it’s ok to talk about facials.  Instead, Amanda hurdles straight over the top and goes for the, “You’ve got to be honest about what getting a facial really means” and I am left a bit confused by how far through the looking glass we’ve chosen to go.  Score one for Amanda in the “Saying shit I did not expect” column.

It’s really hard to believe that rational people seem to be arguing that having your face ejaculated into does *not* involve any sort of dominance, that it doesn’t enact any kind of power dynamic or play off the ideas of submission/degradation. Really? Honestly?

That depends on your point of view.  If your mate decides to cover you in honey and lick it off, are you being “degraded” by getting turned into a dinner plate?  Is he/she getting “degraded” by being forced to eat without silverware?

How about oral sex?  Or hand jobs?  Or being on bottom?  Are these de facto degrading activities?

I would give that a resounding “It Depends”.  Any of these, and a host of other acts can be considered degrading to either one of the recipients or both simultaneously.

But the bottom line is that the person won’t be degraded if he/she doesn’t feel degraded.  If the girl has decided to turn her man into her own private fountain of love, that’s a big difference from the guy roughly jamming his junk in her face before finishing.  So there’s a lot of context and nuance and innuendo going on in this kind of sexual thing.  Simply announcing that sperm on skin is a default humiliating act seems to say more about your personal set of taboos than it does about a generic couple’s love making habits.

ballast, are you serious?  Really?

Look, if it’s an S&M;game, and they admit it, walking behind him in public is their thing.  But if they have to maintain a fiction that it’s not a power display, then there’s a serious problem there.

Any type of oral is a form of submitting

Bull. Shit.

I can construct a whole lot of narratives where oral is a dominant act. I’ve lived through some of them. Facials-receiving as dominant? Not so much.

I really don’t get why ejaculating on someone’s necessarily degrading, you are only forced to take it that way if you are fixated on the idea that semen, human seed essentially, is inherently filthy.

This is key for me, and why it’s not analagous to spitting in someone’s face. Being spit on is disrespectful and degrading no matter which body part it is. Face or otherwise. Unless a very small part of me is on fire there is no logical reason for someone to spit on me.

The same applies to watersports. Urinating on someone is not a natural result of any kind of regular behavior. Urine is also a waste product of the body, semen is not. Spanking as well, since hitting of any sort is not a natural part of the sexual process.

Ejaculation, however, is a natural result of sex. Semen serves no purpose outside of sex. Bringing semen into a sexual situation is not naturally degrading (as opposed to degrading because of society) because it’s supposed to be involved.

If you want to say that the face is what makes semen naturally degrading then you have to say that fellatio and cunnilingus are naturally degrading as well, as is anal sex and even handjobs and fingering. All of the ways you proclaim facials to be naturally degrading are actually society’s rules, and revolve, as I quoted, around male seed being naturally dirty and degrading.

If you and your partner do not see male seed that way, as many do not, then the only degradation involved comes from other people’s beliefs. As others have described, there are pleasurable sensations that many people associate with human seed that have nothing to do with degradation. It is warm and slippery, pleasant to the touch. It feels good on the skin, like a lotion. It can taste good. Its smell can be arousing. It is an indication that the giver of pleasure has brought their partner to climax. It is a physical connection to the other person. All of these and more can mean pleasure to the receiver of a facial and that pleasure has nothing to do with a conscious or subconscious desire to be degraded.

I’m not being intellectually dishonest, I’m just trying to understand.

You have established that coming on someone’s face is degrading them, objectively ("please quit constructing self-serving arguments where you both get to get off on being demeaned while denying that’s what it is. “).  According to what you wrote, it may be okay if they agree to it, but it’s still (in your opinion) an act of degradation.

Similarly, there was a discussion upthread which suggested sexual submission was degrading in the same way that coming on one’s face is.

In contrast, there was also an interesting discussion, upthread, that argued there is no objective meaning to coming on the face by which one could judge it to be demeanin (demeaning for one, but not for another).

The question remains, do you consider being submissive to be demeaning/degrading in the same way that you consider coming on someone’s face?  If spitting on someone’s face is demeaning in the same way that coming on the face is, then is being submissive also similarly demeanin?

mir @ #58:

It’s really hard to believe that rational people seem to be arguing that having your face ejaculated into does *not* involve any sort of dominance, that it doesn’t enact any kind of power dynamic or play off the ideas of submission/degradation. Really? Honestly?

Argh, not this. Submission does not equal degradation. OK? I don’t think you can have degradation without submission, but you can very much have submission without degradation.

ballast, are you serious?  Really?

Of course not, but neither was she. I would be inclined to say that sounds like a power display, yes. I’m also extremely hesitant about declaring my view of it to be the objectively obvious one, which MP/you do not seem to be.

But of course, give and take oral sex is the gold standard of equality in the sack, especially when men are willing to make sure that women get their orgasms just like men get to.

Agreed, but I have been with a female partner who utterly refused cunnilingus, because she thought it was “gross”, which I didn’t fully understand.

It would seem that the only person for whom it could conceivably be “gross” is the giver, and if the giver doesn’t consider it gross, I’m not sure how it could be considered gross.  Sadly, I think the woman that I had that experience with was at some point slut-shamed into thinking that her vagina was inherently disgusting, but at the same time, I made sure to tread very lightly on the subject.  I know that if a woman is already insecure enough about her body that she refuses to receive oral sex, I’m not going to help the situation any by making her feel stupid for having this sense of shame, irrational as I may believe that shame to be.  I felt bothered by it, mainly because it seemed as though she had been victimized by a lot patriarchal bullshit about the female anatomy, but I just didn’t know how to communicate with her about it without potentially making her feel more upset about it than she already did.

I’d just like to congratulate ballast for having made comment number 69 in this thread.

Please, everyone, carry on with the discussion.

You have established that coming on someone’s face is degrading them, objectively

Depends on what you mean by ‘objectively’. Some seem to take the word to mean ‘outside of any specific cultural context’, while the rest of us are using it to mean ‘within the current cultural context, it objectively is’. Because the existing cultural context IS an objectively existing feature of our society.

My point is that men aren’t required to “negotiate” sex acts they have to perform under a myth that serves female egos while keeping male displays of dominance unquestioned.

They’re not?  I know plenty of girls who consider giving head a two way street.  You better be ready to “negotiate” in the bedroom, because otherwise you’ll be “negotiating” which pillow you get to take to the couch.

Guys tend to have a much broader range of acceptable fetishes and kinks, but I think that stems more from the fact that guys get to define the porn market and the porn market defining the degree of kinkiness in polite society.  That might be a societal problem, but I don’t think it’s a couples problem.

Thanks, Amanda. I don’t agree with you on much, but when you’re right, you’re right, and you’re consistently, stunningly right on pornography.

Depends on what you mean by ‘objectively’.

Whoa!  Whoa!  Whoa!  That was a bit too meta for me.

I’m arguing a little bit on the other side of Amanda but some are missing her point.  If you enjoy saying “yes master/mistress,” you should own it.  Some very powerful people are subs when it comes to sex.  If you enjoy degradation but tell someone that the thing isn’t degrading he/she will then do it to someone else and expect them not feel degraded or perhaps shame them for feeling that way.  Maybe I’m misinterpreting Amanda. 

Sex is a very powerful thing.  Fucking is great so long as it isn’t “head fucking.”

Comment #35: robelanator on 08/25 at 03:26 PM:

Why not?  How is sticking a penis in someone’s mouth any less degrading to them?  This an honest question, because the blowjob good / facial bad distinction seems a bit arbitrary to me.

Pretty much every distinction you can make here is arbitrary.  It is instructive to put this into a broader context by considering the sexual rituals of cultures very different to our own.  For example, among the Sambia of New Guinea, pre-pubescent boys fellate pubescent boys and swallow their semen as a sort of secret rite of passage.  The logic behind the ritual seems to be a form of sympathetic magic: in order for the boy to become a man, he must swallow semen.  Semen is seen as a very precious liquid essential for life, but which is also in short supply, and as such must never be wasted—which mandates swallowing during fellatio, and no external ejaculation ever.

Now, I hold no illusions that the Sambia live in some sort of enlightened sexual utopia (judge for yourself), but there are two things to consider from this: (a) they have a set of elaborate stories why they consider sticking a penis in boys’ and girls’ mouth and having them swallow the semen necessary for the survival of the species; (b) looking at examples like these just blows out of the water the notion that some particular sexual act must be seen in a particular light.  The meanings attached to sexual acts are arbitrary, and we can (and do!) change them, because (a) people engage in meaning-making activity all the time, and (b) even large-scale cultural frameworks change all the time.  If this were not so, our desire to build a society where women are treated as persons would be doomed, frankly.

There are men who feel giving head to a woman is degrading.

Yes, and for those demented and deprived men for a woman to hold him down and sit on his face would be degrading to him.  Therefore it would be degrading.  I hold to my comment at #54 that doing something your partner finds distasteful or disgusting is degrading.  No doubt there are and will continue to be for some time ignorant men who don’t know that most people find facials degrading.  They deserve to have their own spunk smeared back into their own faces (in the spirit of fun, of course).

I don’t have a problem with people getting off on shame and degradation.  People who want to get off on it and deny that’s what it is and use euphemisms?  I don’t really understand it.  That’s why I think that’s way sex-negative.  Far more sex-positive is to admit it, talk it out, play with it, but always be scrupulously honest about it.  Who cares if shame, submission, and degradation---and there are admittedly levels to it---gets you off?  Seriously.  I don’t.  What I don’t like is the denial, which functionally creates an atmosphere of coercion.

I really am impressed by how often male desires will be carpeted over as We Do Not Discuss That Honestly.  I’m reminded of how, for instance, countries like Sweden who have effectively and dramatically reduced the amount of sex slavery in their country are still chastised because they reduced the amount of money willing prostitutes make and have made it harder on johns.  I consider stopping sex slavery more important, and if that’s the trade-off, so be it.

In this case, the only trade-off is honesty.  Men get to keep their desires, women get to keep theirs, but in order to lower the amount of coercion, everyone just comes clean, so that women who don’t want to be degraded don’t have to be. 

I promise you that it’s not fun, especially for those recovering from sexual assault, to have a degrading practice sold to you as not-degrading.  The argument is demoralizing, the presentation of the act can be triggering, and it can create serious damage to your self esteem.  All that could be avoided by people just owning their stuff and being honest about it.

How strange. I can certainly understand that there are people who feel this is degrading (both men and women, both as givers and receivers), but I don’t get the insistence that it has to be so.

There are so many other issues that are treated exactly the opposite - that people are completely out of line declaring that their moral interpretation of this or that act has to be the only possible valid experience. Whether it is the morality of non-marital sex, eating meat, finding Jesus, or heck, even marriage.

They all get shot down in flames, and usually burned in effigy. If/when you find anyone claiming that nobody should feel a facial is demeaning, or that porn imagery is a given to be demanded in any relationship, etc, etc, flame on and you’ll have my support.

But to demand that everyone ascribe to your interpretation - for themselves? Sorry. Way out of line.

Nobody gets to tell me what demeans me. They get to tell me that they feel demeaned under the same circumstances. They get to confess their motivations for doing stuff - (I might well be put off by some guy telling me he wants to come on my face specifically because it demeans me and makes him better than me, but I would pitch his ass out the door if he said that about any other behavior, too.)

I won’t for an instant dispute your interpretation of how this works in straight porn. In gay porn, it is a direct response to the need for safer sex and no longer showing guys eating each other’s cum. Heck, in porn ALL ejaculations happen externally, for the visual aspect. They’re called “money shots.” If porn were the standard, nobody would ever come inside someone else.

It begs the question, too - just because something is common in porn doesn’t make it degrading, or non-consensual, or immoral. That’s how people may charge it for themselves, and if so, they should absolutely never be pressured (or ambushed) into it.

Feel free to express amazement that anyone would find something either pleasurable or neutral. Feel free to announce that never in a million years would you engage in it. But you don’t get to claim that anyone who feels differently is either wrong or lying.

I know plenty of girls who consider giving head a two way street. 

And this is why I consider bare minimum standards for being decent in bed a fine thing to list.  For instance, guys who expect head but think it’s gross to give it?  Assholes.

Mir

Amanda does (correctly, I think) link it to acceptance (though I’m fairly sure it can also be connected to dominance), but then goes on to assert that coming on a belly is equivalent without any real argument why.  Compare the difference between how men’ll often feel when oral sex is ended with spitting or swallowing semen, which is again a purely psychological part.  You probably have to come from a “Men’s sexuality is bad/wrong, women’s is redeeming/good/pure” place to think this way, which she’s probably not ascribing to such men, but is certainly pretty common in my experience.

I’ve read that a lot of younger and inexperienced people try to model real-life sex based on what they see in porn (see current flowchart). “Facials” only became common in porn in the last generation or so (mainly due to the rise of AIDs in the ‘80s), so that’s what the kids are imitating as “expected” these days.

I think that’s what’s going on here.  I’m Amanda’s age, and I definitely think of facials as degrading.  Nor have I ever had a partner who showed any interest in them.

But I get the impression that a lot of people in their teens and twenties came of age seeing facials in porn and just think this is how sex works.  They don’t necessarily realize that facials are popular in porn for reasons specific to porn.  It’s the same way shaved or waxed pubes have drifted into the mainstream; people saw it in porn before they had any real-life sexual experience, and they got the impression that it was a crucial part of the deal.

Once my husband mentioned to some male friends that he’d never seen a porn movie, and one of them responded incredulously, “How did you figure out how to have sex?” I’m eternally grateful he didn’t figure it out from porn movies.

And funny that one of those guys is defending the facial as “non-degrading”, neatly proving my point about how the social lie ends up mainly benefiting assholes.

This is key for me, and why it’s not analagous to spitting in someone’s face. Being spit on is disrespectful and degrading no matter which body part it is. Face or otherwise. Unless a very small part of me is on fire there is no logical reason for someone to spit on me.

Well then what about big sloppy kisses?  That’s effectively spitting without the distance.  If a guy licks your finger is that demeaning to you?  If he gives you a big kiss on your neck or your earlobe, have you been degraded?

Again, I think the answer is “Maybe”.  If you consider a bunch of spit on your ear gross and rude and uncomfortable, then that might be totally over the line.  But there’s nothing magical about saliva - at range or in proximity - that defines it as degrading.

We have a set of cultural customs that define getting spit on as being disrespected.  And so, in that context, you could argue that a couple that spits on each other during sex is doing something degrading.  But it’s still all totally subjective and set within context.

. Submission does not equal degradation.
Comment #77: Sargon on 08/25 at 04:08 PM
---------------------------

Really?  It seems to me that by submitting to someone’s will is intrinsically putting me below them--degrading me.

That being said, there are times when it’s a delicious and desired degradation, that comes from probing those dark corners of the sexual psyche.  And there are other times when it’s hurtful and shameful, when one is being devalued in a way that genuinely attacks one’s sense of self worth.

My question is whether the degradation of sexual submission can be differentiated--in kind--from the degradation of being publicly shamed.

but then goes on to assert that coming on a belly is equivalent without any real argument why.

This is dishonest.  I explained why.  Aiming for the face is a culturally loaded thing in our culture.  A belly poke is different than a face poke.  A smack on the butt is different than slapping someone in the face.

You people are insane. I don’t see what possible reason there is for a facial other than it’s a) taboo b) mildly degrading 3) reminiscent of porn.

Having semen on your face doesn’t, in and of itself, feel good. It’s totally different from giving or receiving oral and you all know it. Plus, part of the fun of giving oral is that you are causing your partner to experience pleasure. Receiving a facial might cause your partner to experience pleasure, but the facial-recipient is not the cause of the pleasure, nor in any way an affirmative actor. It’s like lying motionless and getting fucked, except for the part where getting fucked feels good.

And I say this all as someone who enjoys a facial now and then. You can argue that there is no such thing as meaning and associations are irrelevant, but the association of facials with degradation and/or humiliation is about as strong as associations get in the world of sex acts.

You know, it’s find to want a little light degradation every now and then. People are rebelling because apparently participating in degradation makes you a bad person or a fool or something.

I would write more but there’s only so far I feel comfortable discussing my personal sexual practices on the internet.

Amanda @ #70:

If someone is into facials and other dominance displays, great!  Great!  Do it!  But if you can be honest about what it is, it makes finding a partner who is happy with it better and more ethical.  If it’s “standard”, then the right to say no without being told you’re a prude disappears.

I’m repeating myself, but this thread is moving quickly. Anyway, please don’t conflate dominating someone with degrading someone. They’re not the same thing.

Also, giving oral sex is not an inherently submissive act. It has elements of both roles, and you can choose to emphasize one over the other. Context matters. Same goes with facials. It’s not helpful to press people who don’t think the act is degrading to change their minds to conform with society’s view. It is helpful to make sure that everyone is aware of the societal (and, for most people, personal) view, so they don’t bully or harm partners who don’t want to do it. But mandating that everyone subscribe to the predominant societal outlook is a bad idea.

And funny that one of those guys is defending the facial as “non-degrading”, neatly proving my point about how the social lie ends up mainly benefiting assholes.

If Charles Manson, Adolf Hitler, and Jack the Ripper collectively choose to defend facials or otherwise disagree with you, that does not automatically make you right.

If Bill Kristol disagrees with you, there are certain empirical laws that need to be maintained and I’ll concede the point.

It’s only demeaning if you think semen is “icky”. I don’t, so I don’t have a problem with it.

I don’t see what possible reason there is for a facial other than it’s a) taboo b) mildly degrading 3) reminiscent of porn.

Well, bully for you, but I don’t see the urgent need to tell anyone who feels they have discovered their own reason (d) - or is (4)? - that they’re clearly wrong, and could never see anything in it that you don’t.

<i.My question is whether the degradation of sexual submission can be differentiated--in kind--from the degradation of being publicly shamed. </i>

Sure it can!  That has been my point all along, though being trampled by people who are defensive about this.  If everyone is honest and open about their desires, then meaningful consent is possible.  And meaningful consent is the difference.  I don’t consent to being publicly shamed.  But someone can consent to being shamed in sex.  In fact, in a lot of S&M;, there’s strict rules about what is “during” sex and what’s not.  Like if you’re wearing item X, then your partner can and should boss you around and call you names. But if you’re not?  Then you aren’t giving your consent to that humiliation and it’s wrong.

Consent is everything. But for it to be meaningful, then honesty is important. 

That’s why I wrote this post. For someone who doesn’t want to be degraded in bed, redefining degrading acts as not degrading is a way to get their technical consent without actually getting their enthusiastic consent, and it’s unethical.

Having semen on your face doesn’t, in and of itself, feel good.

To you!

And we get back to the whole subjective, relativistic thing again.

I think, first, Jessica Wakeman didn’t say it was the minimum requirement to qualify as a good girlfriend.  She said if you offer it to your guy, you’ll make his day.  She’s right.  Anyone who doubts it should try it.  In response to people who say “leave it for porn stars”, she says “look, it makes you feel hot and naughty, and sometimes feeling hot and naughty is fun”, while also noting “to each her own”.  She’s right about that too.  And she notes that it’s only one sided as a consequence of biology, and that men would probably want women to do it to them if they could.  And she’s right about that.

I guess my two questions are:  Is it degrading if part of what makes it hot is being given permission to do it?  I mean, most guys appreciate it as an act they’re being allowed to do.  And is it degrading if men would eagerly want you to do it to them if you could?

For someone who doesn’t want to be degraded in bed, redefining degrading acts as not degrading is a way to get their technical consent without actually getting their enthusiastic consent, and it’s unethical.

So if a girl gives her enthusiastic consent to facials, is she still being degraded?

I know that if a woman is already insecure enough about her body that she refuses to receive oral sex

Declaring that a woman with different sexual tastes from your own is necessarily “insecure about her body” is not much of a step up from declaring that a woman who doesn’t like facials is a prude. Oral sex is a particular physical sensation that most people like and some people don’t. Maybe she does have a history of internalized body hate; most women do.  But she doesn’t have to be traumatized to prefer fingers to tongue, any more than she’d need to be ‘frigid’ to prefer oral to intercourse, as people used to claim.

If you thought it would have made her uncomfortable to simply ask what she found gross about it, fine, but it isn’t cool to blithely assert that you know the answer to a question you carefully refused to ask.

<blockquotes>Really?  It seems to me that by submitting to someone’s will is intrinsically putting me below them--degrading me.</blockquote>

Perhaps we’re using different definitions.  Degraded means, literally, be made of less value.  If I submit to the advances of my lover, or my lover does submit for me is one party necessarily degraded?  Is every woman who has sex a slut?

She wrote it as part of a “top ten list of things women ‘forget’ to do in bed.” In other words, you totally suck in bed if you don’t tell your boyfriend you’re cool with him coming on your face.

Do you seriously need someone to explain the concept of the Cosmo list to you?

mighty ponygirl and mir, well said.  amanda, great post. 

ballast, are you denying that women are pressured into sex acts they aren’t comfortable with by men who have a porn culture on their side to normalize them and thus shame the women into submitting for fear of being called a prude?

This is dishonest.  I explained why.  Aiming for the face is a culturally loaded thing in our culture.  A belly poke is different than a face poke.  A smack on the butt is different than slapping someone in the face.

Faces are different contexts from other parts of the body, yes.  Slapping a butt if different from slapping a face.  So is kissing a butt and kissing a face.  In fact, if you acknowledge that faces are a different context, I don’t see how you can assert that a belly is equivalent to a face in this context, when you assert generically it’s not.

And we get back to the whole subjective, relativistic thing again.

Give me a break. Just because one person might disagree doesn’t make the whole thing invalid. I mean, seriously? Associations are important. If someone called me a “slutty whore,” I might say “but I don’t think that’s sexist!” That doesn’t make it not sexist.

Sex acts have associations. You might want to pretend that those associations don’t exist, but just because the associations might not obtain for some people doesn’t mean those associations don’t exist.

Having semen on your face doesn’t, in and of itself, feel good. It’s totally different from giving or receiving oral and you all know it.

Who are you to tell me what does and doesn’t feel good to me? The face and head are very sensitive. Kissing feels good. Touching the face, cheeks, jawline, ears, etc with fingers feels good. Why can’t a warm, slippery fluid with a taste and smell that arouses me landing on sensitive skin feel good in and of itself?

I said it’s not. I said that the axis is not in/out of the body, but on/not on the face.  I don’t think that shooting on someone’s stomach or whatever is much more loaded than merely mixing it up.

So if a girl gives her enthusiastic consent to facials, is she still being degraded?

Yep, and getting off on it!  Which is her right, and doesn’t mean that she’s to be degraded outside of the bedroom.  You’re learning!  You might have got that from the post, if you’d read it, since I deal with this in the post.

So being sexually submissive is degrading/demeaning?

Of course it is, and I say this as a fairly hardcore sexual submissive. Duh. I can’t conceive of the intellectual pretzeling required to convince oneself it isn’t.

Or more accurately, as sexual submissives we get all lubed up about acts that are culturally viewed as being degrading or demeaning. If we didn’t, we’d be vanilla. It’s kind of the point.

And it’s OKAY. It’s FINE to be turned on by degrading or demeaning things.

I imagine (I hope) that very few of us have relationships in which we feel degraded or demeaned on a fulltime basis, as people. But as someone else pointed out already, there’s a vitally important distinction between acts that are degrading and acts that are harmful to the relationship (or the individual).

Just ... be real about it, for Gourd’s sake. Call it what it is. Otherwise it all gets awfully silly.

If it’s “standard”, then the right to say no without being told you’re a prude disappears.

This is what sems to be lost on a lot of people.

The elephant in the room here among those who refuse to acknowledge that the act is degrading is the notion that the practice should be thought of as non-degrading by a majority of the populace, and if we don’t agree, we’re unenlightened and prudish.  I don’t care what circles you run in, odds are if you ask 100 women whether or not a facial is degrading, the vast majority of them are going to respond in the affirmative, even among some who may be willing to allow that particular sex act.

If you take the stance that a facial isn’t in any way degrading, it leads to calling those who do find it degrading “prudes”, and it helps to create a cultural narrative that woman should cheerfully accept a facial, and if they don’t they are being bitchy prudes.

Furthermore, Amanda hasn’t once insinuated that willingness to receive a facial in anyway diminishes a woman’s value or takes away her feminist cred, and she’s basically said, “hey, if that’s your thing more power to you, honestly.  Have a blast.”

Yes, there are many sex-negative people for whom “degrading” = “bad” or “wrong”, but AM has placed no moral value judgments on those who participate in the act in a fully consensual, non-coercive manner.

Basically, people need to stop equating “degrading” with “bad” or “wrong”.  Because that argument isn’t being made here.

I don’t happen to like them.  Wont do them as I don’t like anything getting in my eyes. 
But seriously, I’m pretty much with Lymis here.  You feel it’s degrading. You don’t like it.  I don’t like it.  That does not mean everyone thinks it’s degrading.  It does not mean those who like it are lying to themselves if they say they don’t consider it so.

This is dishonest.  I explained why.  Aiming for the face is a culturally loaded thing in our culture.  A belly poke is different than a face poke.  A smack on the butt is different than slapping someone in the face.

But Amanda, it’s so much easier to cum on the face—I mean, it’s right there when you pull out, not like the belly or back, which is so far away. You really have to go out of your way to come on those body parts, which means that cuming on the face has no intrinsic value or meaning.

Not only is it her right, I think it’s great if people who get aroused by shame harness that and ride it for all it’s worth.  Make that shame your vibrator!  I’m a real fan of that. 

But don’t get off on being degraded, then deny that’s what it was.  That’s all I ask. Because the next woman doesn’t need to be told that degradation isn’t degradation, especially since a lot of women really will never enjoy it.

Where I grew up, anal sex was considered degrading to women. If you liked it, you liked being degraded. Was just one of the ways to say gays were degenerate: they loved degrading sex acts.

This sounds just like the same generalization. I have to be told what I enjoy in bed is “degrading” and I am somehow to blame for your discomfort for enjoying degrading sex acts. “Not that there’s anything wrong with it"… just confess that you are degrading yourself so the rest that doesn’t enjoy what you do can live better.

I dunno but seems to me the real problem is people that tell women (or men) that they have to do “so and so” otherwise they are not good lovers.

I don’t give a fuck about what you like in bed, please let me enjoy my sex without labeling it so you feel confortable with your own hangups.

You’re dead on right Amanda.  As most people know it, the facial is a demeaning act and if you like that kind of thing, more power to you, but don’t deny the basis, the reality of it.

kristin @ 115 is saying exactly what I’m saying.  She’s got the right attitude about it, in my opinion, and she’s getting what she wants without creating a toxic situation for women who have a different relationship to submission.

So if a girl gives her enthusiastic consent to facials, is she still being degraded?
Comment #105: Zifnab on 08/25 at 04:27 P
---------------------------

The answer I took from the post is that (1) while the act itself is degrading (the same as being spit upon) (2) it’s not actually degrading when agreed on honestly (perhaps because the parties agree it’s a game?).

My problem with that analysis is that if an act is degrading, it’s degrading even if we both agree that we like it.

Then the question is whether there is anything wrong with our liking having a (consensual) degrading act committed on us (or committing a degrading act on another).

In other words, degrading someone is wrong, as I think we all agree.  If it is wrong, then how can it be okay, just because both parties accept acknowledge the degrading act for what it is (wrong) and still enjoy it anyway, because it tweaks some hidden psychological chord?

lost, I think a lot of its erotic power is that it’s transgressive.  But there’s a good reason that Dan Savage suggests to men who want anal that they offer their butts up first.

Simply announcing that sperm on skin is a default humiliating act seems to say more about your personal set of taboos than it does about a generic couple’s love making habits.

Except she never said anything like that.  Quite the opposite, she clearly stated there’s a connotative difference between coming on the face versus coming on the stomach or back.

The elephant in the room here among those who refuse to acknowledge that the act is degrading is the notion that the practice should be thought of as non-degrading by a majority of the populace

Good thing no one’s said that it should be then.

If it’s already seen as degrading by most - as was the original implied claim - and you see it that way too, why are you so bothered by some people who don’t see it that way? They’re the freaks! Relish your majority status, and tell them how wrong they are, as ... well, as is being done here.

Whereas if it’s already seen as non-degrading by most people, then perhaps you might need to reconsider your notion that it’s obviously inherently degrading.

But don’t get off on being degraded, then deny that’s what it was.  That’s all I ask. Because the next woman doesn’t need to be told that degradation isn’t degradation, especially since a lot of women really will never enjoy it.

You don’t get to tell people that they’re getting off on being degraded and in denial. There are many reasons that a partner might enjoy receiving a facial that have nothing to do with degradation.

Shame and degradation are entirely societal constructs used to control behavior. In the absence of such taboos people will still perform those acts with perfectly valid reasons. If someone were never exposed to the concept of a facial as degradation and still enjoyed the act how could that be?

Great post, A.M., thanks.

My wife does female ejaculations.  I encouraged her to do so on my face once from above.  She asked if I was sure first.  I said yes and enjoyed it somewhat but recognized it as a degradation pleasure, different qualitatively than spanking, tickling, etc, or my coming in her mouth by mutual agreement, or her when I’d been giving her oral sex.  We haven’t done it since.  I think we both realize it’s a difference with a distinction that we don’t need or want for our lives.

We are each dedicated to learning more about positive and respectful ways of living, and there is no room in our lives for any lingering negative reinforcement of esteem-lowering behavior.  I have never ejaculated in her face, by the way, though oral sex both ways continues to be enjoyed when spontaneous and mutual.

But you also say

If it’s just acceptance, it goes on the stomach, etc. I fail to see why the face specifically is so important, especially when what it brings to mind is spitting.

I fail to see isn’t a synonym for there does not exist.  I have little doubt that there’s a degredation component, but I also have little doubt there’s an acceptance component, and that either one, or both, may be present at any given time.  It’s probably not easy for a woman to intuit how much men can get hung-up on the treatment of semen (and we probably fail to grok each other fearsome bad right often.), but it can be long, complex, whatever, and to make universal assertions, or even assertions of commonness is probably a mistake. 

Now, I don’t know for facials (for what it’s worth, I’ve only ever known of gay men practicing them in real life.), but the acceptance dealie is complex and things aren’t equivalent, and if you’re the kind of guy who has these issues,partial rejections are still pretty unpleasant.  In practice, obviously if you find it degrading then that’s how it is, but to assert that everyone must see it this way isn’t very viable.

Nick, you’re being a little silly, don’t you think?  It’s wrong for me to run around in the streets shooting people, but if it’s a video game, then it’s not wrong anymore.  Obviously, context changes everything.  The problem is that dishonesty robs someone of the right to establish context.  If you do something that gets its erotic power from being degrading, but you don’t like it, and you’re being pressured into denying that it’s degrading, it’s not playtime anymore.

Of course it is, and I say this as a fairly hardcore sexual submissive. Duh. I can’t conceive of the intellectual pretzeling required to convince oneself it isn’t.

Or more accurately, as sexual submissives we get all lubed up about acts that are culturally viewed as being degrading or demeaning. If we didn’t, we’d be vanilla. It’s kind of the point.

And it’s OKAY. It’s FINE to be turned on by degrading or demeaning things.

AMEN. It’s the whole fucking point of submitting. Just like the slightly taboo, porntastic, mildly degrading aspect of facials is the whole damn point.

Ok, people seem to be missing a big point because of the emotional weight of “degrading”. Here’s a different word to describe it, BDSM space. It is deliberately an act playing with aspects of dom and sub and the dirtiness of sex. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that. And that’s genuinely meant, but there is a performance and a specifically subservient role. It is getting off on being treated like something lesser, which is frankly not all that rare. And yes, that can be really hot.

And yes, it’s a damnable tightrope because there are as many messages saying privileging female sexuality in all it’s aspects is evil as there are giant pressures to perform outside of comfort levels.

Frankly, the part that I hated in the post is where Amanda threw out the idea that there are acts which are “standard” at all. Nothing should be standard beyond the choices of the partners and if one party can’t accept the other’s boundaries, they can look elsewhere and frankly damn well should for both their sakes. My partner had major issues with people attacking her about what was “standard” and how she was failing them and thus needed to accept abusive relationships as payment. The whole traumatic episode made her gun shy about doing any reciprocal. So yeah, I get what the post was trying to do and I apologize for the crappiness of my typing. I’ve currently only got one hand as I really badly burned the other.

So being sexually submissive is degrading/demeaning?

Of course it is, and I say this as a fairly hardcore sexual submissive. Duh. I can’t conceive of the intellectual pretzeling required to convince oneself it isn’t.

Comment #115: kristin on 08/25 at 04:33 PM
----------------------------------

I agree.  However, if degrading someone is wrong, then it shouldn’t matter if both parties consent to the degrading act.

As others have stated, there is a context to this kind of behavior, and one can’t simply deny that contextual meaning by making it a consensual act.

On the other hand,

ballast, are you denying that women are pressured into sex acts they aren’t comfortable with by men who have a porn culture on their side to normalize them and thus shame the women into submitting for fear of being called a prude?

What I was saying that there’s no reason to tell people who enjoy act X, which you feel degraded by and they don’t, that it is degrading.

If you believe in the relationships-as-union-negotiation theory I previously mentioned, and are specifically looking to shame them for making things tougher you, then it does make sense. But I don’t think most here will sign on to that.

Hey, my husband and I have this “thing” where I have to walk five paces behind him at all times, and I’m not allowed to speak in public. It’s totally not degrading! It’s feminist and empowered! I like to think of it as my special quiet time, how cool is it that no one gets to know what I’m thinking but me?

Might Ponygirl, the really spooky thing is how many BDSM forums and lists I’ve been on where essentially this exact argument is made:

Groveling in the mud expresses the utter uplifted divinity of my delicate, graceful femininity! By putting his boot on my head he expresses his tender desire to care for and nurture me! Does too! DOES TOOOOOOOOO!

Ahem. Anyway, the litmus for whether something is degrading is not whether someone “is okay with it”. That’s the litmus for consent. As MPG says, consenting to something does not make it empowering or feminist. You can consent to something degrading and it is still an act considered degrading by our culture. If that act makes you horny or happy, now you are degraded AND horny or happy. See how that works?

Some feminists argue that even if being degraded makes you horny and/or happy, consenting to it harms society and/or feminism and/or you, individually. Amanda, obviously, is arguing the opposite of that. But that question is a completely separate one from the question of whether or not the acts are degrading. They are, in any reasonable reality.

But there’s a good reason that Dan Savage suggests to men who want anal that they offer their butts up first.

In practice, I imagine that’d be a good way to distinguish when the man involved is interested in the degradation or acceptance.  I have done the same with a woman I used to date with regard to spitting/swallowing semen, and it certainly did impact how she thought I thought about it (or at the very least, that was my impression.), and how she felt about it.

Ahem. Anyway, the litmus for whether something is degrading is not whether someone “is okay with it”. That’s the litmus for consent. As MPG says, consenting to something does not make it empowering or feminist. You can consent to something degrading and it is still an act considered degrading by our culture. If that act makes you horny or happy, now you are degraded AND horny or happy. See how that works?

What makes something degrading? Is there a natural state of “degrading”? Is it a classification that can be found in nature?

Absolutely not. It is entirely a creation of society or a person’s personal value structure. Nothing is naturally degrading, but we live in a society, and in societies a whole lot of things get classified as degrading, but just because society finds something degrading that every person in that society shares that definition.

“but just because society finds something degrading doesn’t mean that every person in that society shares that definition.”

Some feminists argue that even if being degraded makes you horny and/or happy, consenting to it harms society and/or feminism and/or you, individually. Amanda, obviously, is arguing the opposite of that. But that question is a completely separate one from the question of whether or not the acts are degrading. They are, in any reasonable reality.
Comment #135: kristin on 08/25 at 04:48 PM
-------------------------------

“Some feminists argue that even if being degraded makes you horny and/or happy, consenting to it harms society and/or feminism and/or you, individually.”

Yes.

However, it’s almost impossible to enjoy life and not cause some suffering.  I think that’s my takeaway from this discussion.

Ink-

The context of degrading as used by anti-sex forces is obviously not the context used here. If the word bothers you, replace it with “necessarily entering a deliberate sub-space with a complex relationship to various societal standards for the purpose of erotic fulfillment.”

One of the main complications I suspect is due to its history, oral sex on man more regularly enters into sub-dom headspaces in ways that oral sex on women doesn’t. And giving head for the giver can be a sub-thing OR a dom-thing depending on how you do it.

I imagine it can be hard to unpack what exactly got you off if you gave head in a very dom manner and then switched to enjoying the sub-act of the facial for the finish.

And yes the facial is a sub-space, because the man is in assumed control to “aim”. Otherwise it’s just ejaculation that happened to land where it did.

BDSM, it’s a hell of a thing and it’s pretty easy to do a lot of switching when you’re doing a light BDSM act like that.

Cerberus—and if it were something that was limited expressly to the bedroom, and that a male partner wouldn’t take that prior decision that an act that is degrading is not (according to his totally empowerful ex-girlfriend) not degrading, and then use it as a tool to bully and coerce his next sex partner into doing something she doesn’t feel comfortable doing lest she feel like a prude, then I would be fine and dandy with trying to change “degrading” to “submissive.” That’s not what this discussion is about. If you want your boyfriend to pee on you and call you a filthy whore and it gets you hawt, godspeed you. But if you make up some bullshit about how anyone who doesn’t like getting peed on and getting called a filthy whore is just a prude, how it’s one of the ten things women forget to do in bed and it makes them a total snooze to fuck, then there’s a problem.

It does no one any favors to lie to yourself and your partner. If you’re a woman and your partner asks you to get a facial and it’s your thing, just say “hey, awesome, that’s my thing! Let’s go for it… how lucky that we found each other!” not “well, OF COURSE I like getting shot in the eye with your hot cum… what sort of girlfriend would I be if I didn’t?” Do you see the difference there? Not only are you lying to yourself about your sexual worth, but your boyfriend may have been a little “iffy” on the whole enterprise, and when you pull bullshit like that it could turn him into a serious douche by making him think that the facial is a requirement.

Diversity needed:

1.  I think it’s degrading; I won’t allow it.
2.  I think it’s degrading and I love being degraded.
3.  I don’t think it’s degrading at all; I enjoy it.
4.  I don’t think it’s degrading at all; but I don’t enjoy it.

All of these are possible and probably present in the population.  I do agree that #2 needs to own it and not tell her partner she’s actually a #3 so that he gets the idea it’s o.k. for everybody.

It’s probably not easy for a woman to intuit how much men can get hung-up on the treatment of semen (and we probably fail to grok each other fearsome bad right often.), but it can be long, complex, whatever, and to make universal assertions, or even assertions of commonness is probably a mistake.

Can you explain this? Are you trying to argue that facials are empowering to men and therefore not degrading to the receiver? I’m confused as to what sort of hang-ups invalidate Amanda’s arguments.

It is entirely a creation of society or a person’s personal value structure. Nothing is naturally degrading, but we live in a society, and in societies a whole lot of things get classified as degrading, but just because society finds something degrading that every person in that society shares that definition.

The only reasonable way to decide whether something is degrading is to look at the cultural context. Otherwise, that guy who threw his shoes at the Shrub could just as well have been giving him a gift of a nice pair of loafers, no? Try patting someone on the head in Bali and then argue that it’s not really degrading, because you don’t see it that way.

And don’t try to claim that somehow you or your lover is a special snowflake who somehow grew up in this culture without absorbing cultural taboos and perceptions; that’s exactly the same as arguing that you or your lover is a special snowflake who somehow grew up in this culture without absorbing misogynist or racist ideas.

To go back to the facial, the reason it’s a standard of mainstream, misogynist porn is that it’s culturally regarded as degrading. That’s why it’s there. That’s why it’s the piece de resistance that most misogynist guys get off on. It’s not there by accident. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong to get off on it, just that people who do are getting off on an act that is culturally regarded as a degrading one.

As to whether it’s a universal/objective wrong to degrade someone, I’m going to have to weigh in “no”, obviously. It would be wrong for my doctor, my inlaws or a stranger to degrade me, but within the context of a relationship that works for us both, it is not wrong for my sex partner to degrade me, because his doing that makes me feel happy and means I can have good sex. I imagine the feminists who believe that S&M;and degrading sex acts are objectively wrong would disagree with me on that, but then, in my observation most of them have a certain disconnect from reality when it comes to viewing sexual preference through any lens but their own.

kristin @ #115:
I say it’s not always, and I say that as a switch (arguing from authority is silly, but personal experience is useful). Usually, what I’ve done has been tied into degradation to some extent. The only time I’ve been involved with a facial it very much was about degradation. But not all the submitting I’ve done has involved being demeaned or degraded! And at those times, what our culture thinks of the acts had nothing to do with why I was enjoying it.

I don’t think that what I’m saying is anything but being honest. I’m perfectly honest about the degradation that I engage in for sexual reasons, but it would be dishonest to be pressured into treating something as degrading if I don’t think it is. The most honest way I can think of to deal with this issue is to accept both that it’s degrading for most people out there and also that it’s not degrading for me. Probably would be best to assume that it’s degrading for anyone in particular unless they convince you otherwise. That way, you don’t hurt anyone, and you don’t have to modify your personal desires and reactions to fit the mold of society.

Comment #65: Mighty Ponygirl on 08/25 at 04:01 PM:

Hey, my husband and I have this “thing” where I have to walk five paces behind him at all times, and I’m not allowed to speak in public. It’s totally not degrading! It’s feminist and empowered! I like to think of it as my special quiet time, how cool is it that no one gets to know what I’m thinking but me?

There’s a crucial difference of context here.  The strawman you’re setting up involves denying women the ability to participate in the public sphere as equals; this kind of ritual would necessarily involve third party observes judging the man and the woman, and drawing conclusions about how to treat them in future interactions.

What happens in the bedroom in a relationship where the man does not hold undue power over the woman is another story.

Here’s what I find kind of insulting about your piece, though.  You misrepresent what Wakeman actually advised in the piece.  She most expressly does NOT imply “that taking a shot to the face is a minimum entrance requirement to being a good girlfriend.” The actual quote is “Offering to let him come on your face will make his friggin’ day.  If that’s too porn-y for you, let him come on your chest instead.”

As you say, “a belly poke is different than a face poke”

sacundim… nuh UH, because I made this choice and it’s totally my own empowered choice.

One of the main complications I suspect is due to its history, oral sex on man more regularly enters into sub-dom headspaces in ways that oral sex on women doesn’t. And giving head for the giver can be a sub-thing OR a dom-thing depending on how you do it.

And yes the facial is a sub-space, because the man is in assumed control to “aim”. Otherwise it’s just ejaculation that happened to land where it did.

What if the man is restrained while receiving head (dom for the woman) and then the woman “aims” the ejaculation onto her face. How is that sub for the woman and dom for the man? It isn’t.

Heck, in porn ALL ejaculations happen externally, for the visual aspect.

That’s not true.

The vast majority of porn ejaculations are external, but leave it to the porn industry to figure out new ways to demean women.  One such way is called the “creampie” - the male ejaculates in her anus or vagina and then she hovers to allow his semen to drip out.  It is made especially degrading when the male ejaculates inside her seemingly without her permission or foreknowledge, at which point she acts upset and announces angrily that she isn’t on birth control, and the male actor responds by saying something like, “oh well, that’s not my problem,” and laughs at her.

It is almost more disgustingly misogynistic than the extremely vile facial ejaculations which are more commonplace in porn, because it is making fun of women for having to suffer the burden of unintended pregnancy.

“She said if you offer it to your guy, you’ll make his day.  She’s right.  Anyone who doubts it should try it.”

Uh.  No.  (Correct me if I’m wrong, partner dear, if you’re reading this today.) I’m pretty sure if I suggested a facial, he’d look at me funny, ask me if I was serious, and then, even if I said yes, I really did want to, probably not do it anyway cause it squicked him out. 

And this is why we have good sex—our desires compliment each others’, and we tend to come to the table already only wanting what the other is willing to give.

Magis @ #142:

Diversity needed:

1.  I think it’s degrading; I won’t allow it.
2.  I think it’s degrading and I love being degraded.
3.  I don’t think it’s degrading at all; I enjoy it.
4.  I don’t think it’s degrading at all; but I don’t enjoy it.

All of these are possible and probably present in the population.  I do agree that #2 needs to own it and not tell her partner she’s actually a #3 so that he gets the idea it’s o.k. for everybody.

Yay! You are much better at saying this succinctly and clearly than I am.

Okay but you can say “I don’t think it’s degrading” all you want and it won’t change the fact that in the culture you are operating within, it’s regarded as a degrading act.

Well then what about big sloppy kisses?  That’s effectively spitting without the distance.

Are you fucking high?

If an attractive woman walks up to you in a bar and plantsa big sloppy wet kiss on you, I’m quite certain that your reaction is going to be 180 degrees different than if the same woman walked up to you and spit in your face.

“Sloppy wet kiss = spitting in the face” has gotta be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read here.

And don’t try to claim that somehow you or your lover is a special snowflake who somehow grew up in this culture without absorbing cultural taboos and perceptions; that’s exactly the same as arguing that you or your lover is a special snowflake who somehow grew up in this culture without absorbing misogynist or racist ideas.

Yes, people absorb cultural taboos and perceptions, that doesn’t mean I absorb all of them and my sexual enjoyment is controlled by them. Denying that I have the ability to rise above the taboos pushed on me by society and establish my own sexual boundries is insulting. You might as well say that no woman genuinely enjoys casual sex on its own merits but only gets off on the scandal of it.

Just like you can say “I don’t see race!” all you want, and it won’t change the fact that the culture you are operating within has institutionalized racism.

Comment #144: kristin on 08/25 at 05:03 PM:

The only reasonable way to decide whether something is degrading is to look at the cultural context. Otherwise, that guy who threw his shoes at the Shrub could just as well have been giving him a gift of a nice pair of loafers, no? Try patting someone on the head in Bali and then argue that it’s not really degrading, because you don’t see it that way.

But as I say in another post, the fact that we’re talking about a couple in their bedroom makes a crucial difference here.  They get to set standards in there that they don’t get to set in the outside world.

To continue with the “language” analogy: you can’t reasonably go around outside in public expecting people to agree with you that the word “dog” in English means Felis catus.  But on the other hand, people who are intimate can have conversations with each other that nobody else has a hope of understanding, because they are engaged in meaning-making activities that society at large isn’t a party to.  Very public words will take on very private meanings, different from the public ones, because of the very private contexts in which they have been used before.

There’s a big dilemma here: even when we make private choices with somebody else in an intimate context that make facials not have a negative meaning in that context, we’re still parties to a society where they very much tend to mean degradation.  The problem is that what Amanda and others are arguing here is that the second part of that statement invalidates the first one.  To me that is the same thing as denying that people make meaning in their own interactions.

141-

The thing about submission, is well it needs consent and yes, I fully agree about the douchebag problem, which is why I’m vehemently against all “standards” for what to do in the bedroom. As an asexual dating someone recovering from severe sexual abuse, one might say I know better than most that standards are wholly worthless and inherently coercive and the best thing to do is verbalize comfort levels and limits. And that requires an even playing field.

Submission without consent or buy-in from the sub is, frankly, abuse. The point of submission and all forms of “degradation play” in the field of submission is that at the end of the day it’s the sub deciding what they want to experience and in general when so that they can ride it out and enjoy it. Making it about the top is taking the BDSM aspects and making them demonstrations of applied patriarchy.

For wording, I was trying to try out an approach of trying to explain to the “degradation is a vile word” brigade what it means and can mean because the connotation they are imagining (it’s shameful and shameful for me to enjoy) isn’t the real take-home message.

Facials are just one step removed from drunken frat boys dropping their balls on the faces of passed out people and taking pictures.  There aren’t doing this because they hold those passed out in mutual respect and admiration.

“If semen on the face is per se degradation, are female emissions on the face of a male performing cunnilingus the same?”

For real?  You’re refusing to recognize the difference between collateral semen winding up on someone’s face during a blowjob and a load of ejaculate deliberately deposited on someone’s face?  As someone pointed out upthread, to draw a parallel you’d need to bring female ejaculation into the picture. 

This whole thing reminds me of the last time I got to watch people going through the spit/swallow debate, wherein a handful of men were getting really bent out of shape about swallowing making the whole thing way better from a purely physical viewpoint, they swear.  Never mind the fact that you’re generally completely incapable of deriving any physical pleasure from someone swallowing because your dick’s already out of their mouth, it was completely and totally not in their heads.

Ink Asylum, basically you’re arguing that the things you like aren’t degrading because if they were, you couldn’t be having a healthy sex life, and that is a total disconnect from the actual discussion going on.

It’s like all Amanda had to do was say the word “degrading” to trigger a chorus of “NO IT’S NOT DEGRADING I AM HEALTHY AND SANE THEREFORE IT IS NOT DEGRADING NUH UH NUH UH NUH UH.”

Read again. You can have a healthy and happy relationship/sex life including acts that are culturally viewed as degrading. No one is saying you can’t.

78 comments and counting. Sex >> politics every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

What everyone is afraid to talk about, I believe, is that the facial is a visual representation of spitting in someone’s face.

Eh. No. For women who aren’t turned on by them (e.g., nearly all women in existance), sure, that can work. Roughly. Actually, no, I don’t think it does conceptually, but the conclusion that it represents a specific level of humiliation, yes, that DOES work, so I can roll with that.

For men who are turned on by them (which is an artificially increased number due to the fetishes of porn producers, not due to a naturally-occuring fetish in the general population) the humiliation bit need not be a source of arousal. Keep in mind that pornography is a visual medium (well, the porn we’re talking about is) so it has some pretty severe limitations, given its objective. Showing ejaculate anywhere is a way to express completeness, and juxtaposition with one of the more attractive parts of the woman in the scene makes a lot of sense in that regard. (I have to analyze this pretty clinically, though, since watching someone grimace after someone else has an orgasm is the exact fucking opposite of sexy imo.) In other words, if bodily fluids were flying about on the faces of both performers, mostly the same erotic-for-those-who-are-into-it content would be found as in a scene where only one person gets cummed-on.

(Nevertheless, I have absolutely no empathy with the notion of a facial in actual practice. Why take all the risk and go through all the work of sex and then use it as an excuse to masturbate?)

So, facials are humiliating only if they’re designed to be humiliating—which is more often than not in porn. They are not inherently humiliating—that generalization is bullshit since you’d need just one example of a couple doing one where the woman involved had greater control of the sexual activities than the male—and given the volume of BSDM porn available, you’ve probably got a couple thousand of “professional” examples available. And if the term “usually” makes facials humiliating, the concept is even higher on the bullshit meter; by that score, all sex is had by white people since most porn features white people. And that’s a more interesting topic to discuss, btw, but hey, not my blog.

The actual quote is “Offering to let him come on your face will make his friggin’ day.
Comment #147: ohnoyoudidn’t on 08/25 at 05:04 PM
--------------------------------------------------

I’ve never done it, and frankly feel a bit odd about not finding it all that energizing.

It’s probably not easy for a woman to intuit how much men can get hung-up on the treatment of semen (and we probably fail to grok each other fearsome bad right often.), but it can be long, complex, whatever, and to make universal assertions, or even assertions of commonness is probably a mistake.

Can you explain this? Are you trying to argue that facials are empowering to men and therefore not degrading to the receiver? I’m confused as to what sort of hang-ups invalidate Amanda’s arguments.

The short answer is kind of “probably not very well.”, since it’s mostly emotional reactions.  I don’t think I’d say empowering at all, but ... uh ... maybe that we can think it’s not fearsome uncommon for men to see semen as kind of symbolic surrogate for their own ... ?sexuality? ... and taken rejection personally (and feel validated by acceptance/enjoyment).  I’m only saying they might not been seen as degrading by the sender, which is half the picture.  How the receiver takes it is certainly instructive in how we should think about, ditto for the sender (and I’d reject the idea that anyone else gets input.) Amanda (seems to) argue that he’s getting off on degrading the recipient, but I think it’s probably comparably common that he gets off on being accepted by the recipient. 

This may require sending men to have a much more negative view of themselves as sexual entities than of their partner(s).  Such men are a dime a dozen though, so that doesn’t matter much.  (Or maybe just themselves generally, I dunno.  I thinking about it pretty heterosexually, since I can then speak from experience.  But no straight man has ever told me that he’s participated in a facial, only gay men, so I’m probably missing something.)

149-

You know, funny story, as I was writing that sentence, I had a strong suspicion you would respond only to that sentence with that exact question. Almost like you were concern trolling or something.

Oddly enough, I do have an answer, but it’s rather complex because we are taking about not only BDSM, but complex BDSM as any session with switching is apt to be. When a man is restrained and his partner aims it at herself it is subspace for exactly the same reasons it is sub-space when a top has their partner masturbate for them. It is an act designed for the other partner, to demonstrate an aspect of power by the previously sub person.

I used implied aim, because it is the previously top performer acting as the previously sub performer’s hands to switch roles. Another more clear example would be an action where a top enters a session where they begin to act out a sub routine as part of a “look but don’t touch” larger top routine. Ex. Top spanking oneself or describing all the top things the sub could do to them if they weren’t all tied up and helpless. The act is a sub action in a dom performance.

As I said, complex shit.

people who are intimate can have conversations with each other that nobody else has a hope of understanding, because they are engaged in meaning-making activities that society at large isn’t a party to.  Very public words will take on very private meanings, different from the public ones

If “cunt” is a love-word in your relationship, fine, but call someone a “cunt” outside your relationship and they’re liable to deck you, arrest you or fire you. If someone came in here and said that because their partner loves being called “cunt”, it has stopped being an insulting name to call someone, we’d all know they were delusional.

Do what you like in your bedroom but do not deny that your bedroom exists in a community that has a culture that gives cultural meaning to things and that denying those cultural meanings can affect other people’s lives.

“She said if you offer it to your guy, you’ll make his day.  She’s right.  Anyone who doubts it should try it. ”

Speak for yourself, chief

kristin @ #161: And you can both acknowledge that the act is culturally viewed as degrading and not personally feel that it is degrading when you do it in the context of that specific relationship! If someone doesn’t feel degraded by an act that is culturally viewed as degrading, they’re not living a lie, they’re just different from the cultural norms. As long as they know and respect the cultural norms and not use their differentness as a cudgel to pressure other people into acts they’re not comfortable with, what is the problem?

Kristin:

I’m not in bed with the whole culture.  I’m in bed with her.  I will not degrade a woman who deigns to share my bed with me.  However, I will endeavor to do those things which she finds pleasurable.  That makes #2’s [supra] problematical for me.  I’ve done a few things that as ‘rowmyboat’ said squicked me out.  I’d rather avoid subs.  It’s just nice when both people have a healthy lust for experimentation though it must be said that almost everyone has a list of a few things they don’t like.

First, what m leblanc said @ #97.

Second, this is not that complicated.  Facials are less a specific sex act than a role-playing aspect of sex-- after all, the real business is pretty much over at that point and it’s all about the image, which means that the participants are playing roles.  Which is fine; role-play is a fun and valuable part of sex, after all.  But there’s no way that the role the woman (or man) on the receiving end is anything but submissive/degraded by any cultural understanding of human interaction.  As was pointed out above, there’s no physical argument for facials; it’s all psychological, and for the man, it’s launching his wad at a specific and highly personalized (being the face and all) target, presumably because he likes seeing it land.  I suppose one can argue that it’s highly romantic to share one’s manly seed by smearing it lovingly on your partner’s face, and it’s undoubtedly possible for an individual couple to reach agreement on that point or something similar, but it’s virtually impossible to broadly redefine the act that way on a cultural level because of the commonly understood roles in the performance.  That’s why Amanda’s saying to own it; it can be whatever you want at home, but don’t pretend that you are completely divorced from all the broader social and cultural implications just because you made an active choice to personally incorporate and/or redefine them. 

Jeez, this discussion is too much like political conservatism… everything’s staid and traditional and universally understood until it hurts someone’s feelings, then it’s open to complete and universal reinterpretation.

I hope this was bad satire:

“Facials are just one step removed from drunken frat boys dropping their balls on the faces of passed out people and taking pictures.  There aren’t doing this because they hold those passed out in mutual respect and admiration.”

Yes.  That one step being… CONSENT.  Might as well say sex is just one step removed from rape.

Also echoing kristin at 161, sexual degradation and other forms of BDSM are WAY common. In fact, with our fucked up sexual system in America, I wouldn’t be quick to bet against it being by far the dominant way most Americans are getting off.

And frankly it sucks that most of the people who like it are told by society to feel deep shame about it because it’s not only sexually dirty, but extra double bad girl dirty. My partner does this to herself all the time about her various fantasies and it depresses me to see her do it. We like what we like, we don’t what we don’t. Sexuality for the most part is beyond our control.

Hey, my husband and I have this “thing” where I have to walk five paces behind him at all times, and I’m not allowed to speak in public.

Did he ever give you a backpack cooler so you could carry beer on your walks?

Read again. You can have a healthy and happy relationship/sex life including acts that are culturally viewed as degrading. No one is saying you can’t.

But what Amanda is telling me and others is that I MUST be getting off on those things partly or entirely BECAUSE of the degradation aspect. On that I entirely disagree. Believe me, I do plenty of things that society considers degrading and have consier my sex life healthier and happier because of them! That doesn’t automatically mean my pleasure during those acts automatically comes from being degraded. There is no sexual act which is infallibly degrading for all people.

I don’t have a problem with people getting off on shame and degradation.  People who want to get off on it and deny that’s what it is and use euphemisms?  I don’t really understand it.

What you don’t seem to understand is that there are people who both get off on it AND don’t consider it in any way “degrading.” After wading through the mass of confused thought in this thread, I don’t even know what that word means any more.  I would say that an act is degrading if it makes you feel sort of ashamed or guilty.  That can be fun for some, I guess.  But several commenters seem pretty sure that facials don’t make them feel dirty (add me to this number).  We just like semen.  Can you not take us at our word?  Are we lying or are we just deluded?

Obviously the dominant cultural trope is one of degradation.  I believe that it’s because touching a penis or coming into contact with semen is widely considered “dirty.” The sex-positive position, then, is to undermine this trope, not reinforce it.  No-one should be pressured to do anything they don’t want to, but no-one should be ashamed of enjoying themselves, either.  So Jessica Wakeman deserves a rebuke, but Amanda might stop a minute and reconsider her blanket assertion that facials in 21st century America must necessarily be degrading.

And you can both acknowledge that the act is culturally viewed as degrading and not personally feel that it is degrading when you do it in the context of that specific relationship!

Maybe the problem here is the difficulty of divorcing “degrading” from “makes me feel bad”. Sargon, sacundim and Ink Asylum seem to essentially be saying that acts they or their partners enjoy can’t possibly be degrading, in their private context because they don’t make those people feel bad.

Me, I think this is a completely separate distinction. As I’ve said, I enjoy degrading acts; and I don’t see that as meaning the act is magically un-degrading, I see it as meaning that being degraded (in that context) makes me feel good. Still degrading. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be hot.

In a more generally interesting admission, because of the asexuality thing, one could say all of my sexual interactions have BDSM overtones owing to their inherent unilateral nature not just the directly BDSM ones.

In response to comments 37 and 38…

I think it’s interesting that you seem to think there’s a universal view of what watersports are about, even just among practitioners. I’m not sure where that idea comes from, as I assume you aren’t one yourself or you’d have been (intellectually) honest and said so… but as a longtime BDSM player and as someone who enjoys watersports, I gotta tell ya, the narratives through which players understand their play in this realm are incredibly diverse.

For some, piss is degrading and that’s why they like it, with all the “intellectual honesty” you praise them for. But for others, that’s just not what’s going on, and I simply can’t buy that this makes them intellectually dishonest. Here are a few of the narratives I’ve heard: For some, piss is a rich and flavourful bodily fluid and a person can feel intimately connected to their partner when they smell it, drink it or feel it on their bodies - like feeling the cooling of wet saliva on the skin, like tasting someone’s come or even menstrual blood, like smelling the sweat in someone’s armpit. (People even play with the types of food and drink they ingest before piss play to make the taste sweeter and more enjoyable for their play partner. Pineapple good, asparagus bad.) For some, it’s about age play, returning to an emotional state that’s reminiscent of childhood or infancy and peeing in their diapers - and this is often psychological play that’s not sexual, but rather, about trust and care and vulnerability. For some, it’s a way of mutually breaking social taboo in a “public but secret” way (potentially an extension of the “intimacy” paradigm but combined with the thrill of getting caught) - such as someone I know who took her date to a restaurant, took a wine glass into the bathroom and filled it with piss, and then brought it back to table for her lover to enjoy without anyone else nearby knowing. For some, it’s a solo pursuit that’s purely a sensual pleasure - an act that’s about natural body curiosity and self-love, much like basic masturbation.

Beyond that, your justification in tossing out the piss comparison as un-useful is that with piss, girls can do it to guys too, which equalizes the playing field. But this implies that women can’t come on men’s faces - which just isn’t true. The amount of ejaculate a woman can produce is staggering and the act of ejaculating can be scripted with any number of meanings.

With this whole facials argument, it sounds to me like you’re really invested in a paradigm in which facials mean only one thing - and you can choose to enjoy that thing if you want, but you have no option to script different meanings on it. I’d agree with many commenters here in saying it’s just not that simple. I definitely agree that porn scripts one really specific set of meanings onto the act, and that porn has far-reaching effects on everyday heterosexual sex scripts, but it’s awfully depressing to think that you believe our only options for cultural scripts come from porn, and that if we choose to refuse that model and explore other ones it’s necessarily oppressive to the next gal that comes along. (You could also argue that it’s the other way around - rather than shaping people’s desires, porn shows us what people already want to see, which is why people buy it - which in this case is even more depressing.)

Either way, seems to me that way of universalizing the meanings of sex acts went out of style when mainstream feminists stopped believing that all penetration is rape à la Andrea Dworkin, or that dildos were a tool of the patriarchy and made one “male-identified” (Adrienne Rich’s 1980s lesbian separatist wisdom there). Universalizing the meanings of sex acts is dangerous. Sure, it’s easy to say that when feminists do it, it’s okay, but in truth that same logic is used by people and governments all over the place to oppress people who engage in “non-normative” acts that, by their outside logic, cannot be interpreted in any way other than “bad.” This is the same logic that has teens thrown in jail for “sexting” because obviously that’s bad and should be punished, even when the teens do it *for their own fun* and, while it’s not wise IMHO, doesn’t exploit anyone else at all. It’s the same logic that has gay men sitting in jail in England, right now, for the crime of assault - in some cases *against themselves* - for engaging in BDSM (the famous Spanner case) - even though they vehemently argued they fully consented.

In this case, you’re saying that you think both options, good and bad, are fine as long as honestly stated, so there’s no question of punishment - but that’s about the only difference here. There’s still a false binary being created, and the narrow and value-laden judgement of one option still remains.

I know that if a woman is already insecure enough about her body that she refuses to receive oral sex

Declaring that a woman with different sexual tastes from your own is necessarily “insecure about her body” is not much of a step up from declaring that a woman who doesn’t like facials is a prude. Oral sex is a particular physical sensation that most people like and some people don’t. Maybe she does have a history of internalized body hate; most women do.  But she doesn’t have to be traumatized to prefer fingers to tongue, any more than she’d need to be ‘frigid’ to prefer oral to intercourse, as people used to claim.

If you thought it would have made her uncomfortable to simply ask what she found gross about it, fine, but it isn’t cool to blithely assert that you know the answer to a question you carefully refused to ask.

Fair enough point, I should have provided more context.  I believe, but did not know for certain, that this woman was the victim of childhood sexual molestation.  As a victim myself, there were a lot of telltale signs, though perhaps my perception was wrong.  In any case, I didn’t feel comfortable asking her “were you molested?” even though I suspected she had been, because I know based on my own personal experience that that isn’t the sort of question a victim likes to hear if they aren’t yet comfortable enough with a particular person to open up about it.

Anyway, I may have been drawing totally baseless conclusions, but my impression was that her reaction to my one attempt to perform cunnilingus on her was based on some sort of sexual trauma in her past.  She didn’t want to be fingered either, nor did she want me to even see her vagina, but she absolutely wanted to have vaginal intercourse.  Like I said, I could have been completely wrong about my suspicions, but as someone who was molested myself, I have sometimes been able to intuitively guess that someone was themselves a molestation victim before they told me, and when they did tell me, I wasn’t surprised by the revelation.

Anyway, whatever the case was for her, you are right, I shouldn’t make assumptions when I don’t know for sure.

You know, I’m just going to say: I use the word “fuck” all the time, to the point where I often forget I’m using it. But I wouldn’t say it’s not a curse word.

But what Amanda is telling me and others is that I MUST be getting off on those things partly or entirely BECAUSE of the degradation aspect.

Why do you have a problem with this?  Are you judging people who like to be degraded during sex?  Seriously, there’s nothing wrong with it.

Ink @174-

Damnitt, the context is damn obvious. The way she’s using degradation does not contain the correlative connotation of “brings about shame” or “makes me feel bad”. It’s about structural aspects of it, which can include playing around with the idea that one should feel shamed. That’s why I referenced subspace, because it is directly connected with that connotation instead.

And you know what you’ll feel like if you enjoy degradation play?
You’ll feel like you fucking enjoyed it! That’s the definition of enjoys degradation play. If you felt shamed or broken, you wouldn’t be enjoying playing with the cultural context of degradation for sexual fulfillment, you’d be being degraded (the bad partially non-consensual form that Amanda referenced in the post).

Also echoing kristin at 161, sexual degradation and other forms of BDSM are WAY common. In fact, with our fucked up sexual system in America, I wouldn’t be quick to bet against it being by far the dominant way most Americans are getting off.

I don’t know what to think of this, Cerberus. It doesn’t actually sound like you’re echoing me at all. It sounds like you’re suggesting that BDSM is as prevalent as you think it is because our sexual system is “fucked up”, which doesn’t sound like you’re saying something positive about BDSM.

In fact I put healthy sex/relationships with BDSM elements in a totally different basket from mainstream, misogynist, porn-shaped sexual culture, because I put any healthy sex/relationship in a totally different basket from mainstream, misogynist porn-shaped sex culture. Any relationship that involves owning one’s desires, communicating them and going out to get them in a context where everyone in the relationship is provided for is a strike against misogynist sex culture, in my mind; just because both mainstream misogynist sex includes dominance and degradation doesn’t mean it has anything substantial in common with a respectful relationship or sex encounter involving BDSM elements.

Why do you have a problem with this?  Are you judging people who like to be degraded during sex?  Seriously, there’s nothing wrong with it.

In a feminist context (and most others, too), people often get upset when you tell them how they think/feel, especially when it contradicts how they think/feel.  Certainly that’s why I got all bothered.

Comment #170: latts on 08/25 at 05:23 PM

That’s why Amanda’s saying to own it; it can be whatever you want at home, but don’t pretend that you are completely divorced from all the broader social and cultural implications just because you made an active choice to personally incorporate and/or redefine them.

No, that’s not what Amanda is saying.  She is saying that it must be at home what it is in society at large.  And nobody’s pretending (except as a strawman!) that we are “completely divorced from all the broader social and cultural implications”; the point is that those social and cultural implications have no power to enter the bedroom unless we let them.  Because what happens in the bedroom is not supposed to be monitored by society at large.

My problem with that analysis is that if an act is degrading, it’s degrading even if we both agree that we like it.

Except that’s complete bullshit.  Because then you’re running on some Jungian Archtype of degrading that you think all people are supposed to feel.  People are conditioned to feel degradation and different things can be degrading to different people.  Thus, the BJ itself can be empowering or degrading or totally neutral, depending on the guy and the girl and the circumstances.  If we were in a different culture or during a different time period, facials wouldn’t even enter into it.  We’d be having a debate about simple oral sex.

Because it’s all god-damn relative.  And the only way to gauge the relativity is to ask the people performing the acts, “Does this feel degrading to you?” And if the girl feels a thrill of excitement and control and dominance from getting sperm on her face, it falls to pass the test.

I mean, there are certain things you can’t argue are degrading - physical abuse, for instance, or psychological abuse.  And the reason these things are degrading stems from the way they cause a person harm.  Crippling someone, impairing their ability to see or think or walk, or infecting them with disease, or otherwise causing quantifiable damage.  This sort of thing is degrading because they’re the sort of things that no sane person would do to him or her self.  They are harmful and debilitating.

So, unless you splodge in someone’s eye or emit toxic slim, you’re not causing the individual physical harm.  So it’s a question of whether you are causing psychological harm.  And that depends largely on the individual and the context.

You know, I’m just going to say: I use the word “fuck” all the time, to the point where I often forget I’m using it. But I wouldn’t say it’s not a curse word.

If we were you, we’d be telling you that it’s inherently a curse word, even if you happen to only speak French. Seriously, can you not see the difference between “some/many/most people find X to be Y” and “X is inherently Y”?

And because BDSM is extra double bad girl dirty, it’s all the more exciting.

Would it be degrading or just weird if my partner asked me to eat tofu in bed?  It gives me ill to think about.  If I refuse, I take the risk that my partner calls me a picky eater.  That risk increases because people recommend tofu on the interwebs.  Therefore, other people should stop talking about how good tofu is in order to spare me the pain.

Do I have a right to say no to tofu without being called a picky eater?

monkeyshines @19:

From a health perspective, semen is actually very good for the skin, too.

This is, I think, my favorite semen myth, one often tossed out there to try to cajole reluctant partners into submitting to a facial.  Semen is actually pretty neutral for the skin.

Zifnab, I take issue to your implicit argument that the degrading sex acts I enjoy are causing me psychological harm.

The definition of degrade is not “to cause harm”. The definition of degrade includes “to lower in dignity” and “to reduce (someone) to a lower rank, degree, etc.; deprive of office, rank, status, or title”.

You can argue that those things are intrinsically harmful, but it’s a totally different argument to the one Amanda was making.

“Beyond that, your justification in tossing out the piss comparison as un-useful is that with piss, girls can do it to guys too, which equalizes the playing field. But this implies that women can’t come on men’s faces - which just isn’t true.”

Um...last time I checked, the overwhelming majority of dudes out there capable of sex are capable of ejaculating within reasonably predictable parameters.  That’s not even close to true of women.

I don’t give a fuck about what you like in bed, please let me enjoy my sex without labeling it so you feel confortable with your own hangups.

And therein lies the problem, and the entire premise of this post.

You’ve just implied that women who aren’t comfortable with facials suffer from hangups (and to be fair, I stupidly assumed that a woman who didn’t want cunnilingus from me suffered from a hangup upthread, and I was wrong).

Which puts the honus on them to get over their hangups, and gives men permission to carry a sense of entitlement about facials that equates it to any other more vanilla sex act.

You enjoy facials, and that’s fine.  But suggesting that others who don’t enjoy facials suffer from sexual “hangups” is wrong.  Rapists often coerce women into unwanted sex by suggesting that they need to get over their hangups.  And no, I’m not calling you a rapist, just pointing out that disliking facials is not a hangup, and shouldn’t be categorized as such.

“Sloppy wet kiss = spitting in the face” has gotta be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read here.

The argument was that spit is inherently degrading.  And I was arguing that - with kissing - we have a perfect example in which spit is not in any way degrading.  Spitting and kissing are separated by broader social contexts.  But there is nothing automatically derogatory about saliva.  And a person saying, “I like my partner to spit on me during sex” doesn’t automatically mean the person likes being treated in a derogatory manner.

Zifnab, I take issue to your implicit argument that the degrading sex acts I enjoy are causing me psychological harm.

I’m arguing the opposite.  If the sex acts aren’t causing you harm, they aren’t really degrading you.

Those social and cultural implications have no power to enter the bedroom unless we let them.

That’s bullshit. Sorry.

Again, it’s like saying that misogyny has no power in your personal relationships unless you let it.

Your bedroom is not a TARDIS equipped to magically blip you out of the culture that has shaped you and into one with no commonly understood acts of degradation. Nor is your bedroom doorway a sonic hatch that scrubs your brain of the culture that has imprinted on it.

Unless they are, in which case, you can probably stop working your day job and sell tickets.

The definition of degrade includes “to lower in dignity” and “to reduce (someone) to a lower rank, degree, etc.; deprive of office, rank, status, or title”.

Sorry, from where I stand, getting a demotion is psychologically harmful.

Your bedroom is not a TARDIS

That would be hot, though.  You have to admit.

What you don’t seem to understand is that there are people who both get off on it AND don’t consider it in any way “degrading.”

Oh, I get it.  I think that people like getting off on being degraded, but they don’t want to admit that to themselves, so they do a quick rewrite.  Amanda Hess compares it to weddings, and I think that’s a valid point.

Problem is, that rewrite isn’t about just you, your partner, and your ego.  That rewrite where we pretend an act that’s hot because it’s degrading isn’t degrading is used to convince women that either hate or are even triggered by being degraded that they are prudes if they don’t do act X.  Because it’s not degrading. 

That’s fucked up.  This isn’t an airy, academic issue at all.  I personally have suffered by having men get me to watch porn that focused on degrading acts, and when I didn’t like it, they made me feel bad, like “oh the actress is consenting”.  DUH, I KNOW THAT.

The problem is women are routinely told that we must accept that the sky is orange and the grass is purple in order to get around our consent.  Not just in sex, but in all sorts of ways.  To get us to do more household chores and accept less pay, for instance.  Because someone has to quit her job, and the fact that it’s you has NOTHING TO DO WITH GENDER, and it’s just how it shook out.  Bullshit.

Degrading acts are great!  Under complete, full, thorough, educated consent.  If there is bullshit being used to sell them, then it’s not completely consensual anymore.  Then it’s actually degrading, not play-degrading.

The irony here is that the facial isn’t real-life degrading if you admit it’s degrading.  But if you bullshit and use euphemisms or engage in self-denial, you’re creating a context where women can actually real life be degraded by being bullied into sex acts that make them unhappy.

And I was arguing that - with kissing - we have a perfect example in which spit is not in any way degrading.

Actually, if you read the post, you’ll see that you’re stealing my argument.  Because I kiss someone doesn’t mean it’s not degrading if they spit in my face.

The irony here is that the facial isn’t real-life degrading if you admit it’s degrading.

Wait, what?

For some, piss is degrading and that’s why they like it, with all the “intellectual honesty” you praise them for. But for others, that’s just not what’s going on, and I simply can’t buy that this makes them intellectually dishonest. Here are a few of the narratives I’ve heard: For some, piss is a rich and flavourful bodily fluid and a person can feel intimately connected to their partner when they smell it, drink it or feel it on their bodies - like feeling the cooling of wet saliva on the skin, like tasting someone’s come or even menstrual blood, like smelling the sweat in someone’s armpit.

How tedious.  I’d be far happier to agree to watersports if someone was straightforward and said, “That it’s dirty and degrading is hot, and I’d like to play with that,” rather than if they came up with some weird excuse about the way piss smells.  Then I’d be hesitant, for the aforementioned reason---bullshitting about how an act makes you really feel isn’t giving someone the right to full consent.

“Your bedroom is not a TARDIS”

That would be hot, though.  You have to admit.

It is the #1 reason people in the UK fuck in phone booths.

But what Amanda is telling me and others is that I MUST be getting off on those things partly or entirely BECAUSE of the degradation aspect

I am a lot older than Amanda. In my time facials weren’t common on porn. When I get hit by sperm, I like it, don’t really care if it is on the stomach or face. My partner doesn’t really aim at the face either. I’ve had a few partners where we shared this enjoyment of coming “outside” and some others that didn’t and we had it “the normal way”. But if my partner wanted to aim at my face, I’d be fine with it.

What I don’t really get is why do I have to confess to like degradation, when I don’t do BDSM and don’t like feeling humiliated by my partner. Do I have to do it solely because Amanda and others tell me is degrading ? Because they don’t like it with their partners I have to use their values ? Otherwise they can’t say no ?

How is this my problem ? I mean, seriously, are you blaming me for you having a douche bag partner that dictates stuff to you ? You shouldn’t be debating if something “IS” or “ISN"T" degrading with your partner. You should tell him / her that it is not fun for you. End of story. Leave me out of it.

Yep, Zif.  Trying to get around someone’s full consent is not just playing with degradation in the bedroom, it’s actually assaulting their dignity as a full human being.

It’s simple:

If I shoot zombies in a video game, it’s not really killing.  If I do it in real life, it is.

If I play degrade someone with their full, educated consent in the bedroom, that’s a game.  If I bullshit and tell them that X isn’t degrading when that’s exactly why it’s hot, then I’m actually degrading them in real life, because I’m getting them to agree to sex acts on false grounds.

kristin @ #176:

Maybe the problem here is the difficulty of divorcing “degrading” from “makes me feel bad”. Sargon, sacundim and Ink Asylum seem to essentially be saying that acts they or their partners enjoy can’t possibly be degrading, in their private context because they don’t make those people feel bad.

Me, I think this is a completely separate distinction. As I’ve said, I enjoy degrading acts; and I don’t see that as meaning the act is magically un-degrading, I see it as meaning that being degraded (in that context) makes me feel good. Still degrading. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be hot.

That’s not quite what I was saying. In the realm of acts I’ve enjoyed that society thinks are degrading, there have been some (almost all, really) where I also felt that the act was degrading, and that was definitely what made it so hot. But I have also done some things that society may consider degrading but I really didn’t, and also enjoyed those. I think I would call the latter “submissive” and the former “submissive and degrading.” So I’m definitely not denying that something is degrading just because I enjoyed it and it didn’t make me feel bad! None of the degrading things ever made me feel bad. I wouldn’t do them if they did.

I honestly am not sure what the word “degrading” means anymore.

Amanda Marcotte @ #180:

You know, I’m just going to say: I use the word “fuck” all the time, to the point where I often forget I’m using it. But I wouldn’t say it’s not a curse word.

Bah, really bad and oversimplistic analogy. Would be better if you bred dogs, and used the word “bitch” all the time, but only to refer to dogs, or something. There are also problems with that analogy, though, and I don’t want to play the pointless dueling-analogies game. It only serves to cloud the issue.

What I don’t really get is why do I have to confess to like degradation

Why is it something to confess to? Do you confess to liking slow massages or being fed strawberries? Do you confess to getting turned on when you see your sex partner in a hot outfit?

Your wording betrays the subtext here: you feel like it’s wrong to enjoy being degraded, and you’re distancing yourself from it. You are assuming that degrading things can’t be fun, despite us saying the contrary.

This is a negative judgement against those of us who enjoy being degraded (and are honest about it), and yet you complain about Amanda making judgments about you.

183-

I often have this problem. I suspect it’s because I suck at nonviolent conversation and don’t fully share the usual sphere of connotations of words as the rest of the planet owing to my inherent freakishness. It can be frustrating sometimes, sucking this badly at it, especially as I do all right with my stories (I suspect it’s because I do more world-building than essay writing or explorations of language).

What I meant in that statement is that BDSM is a wonderful great thing, but that it’s root attraction is strongly suspected to be tied to the notions of taboos and the idea that sex is dirty and shameful. There are historians that argue that it only really started becoming a thing with the onset of Christianity and the idea that you should be ashamed of sexuality in its various permutations, thus subspace was born as a way of channeling that into something really hot, because you weren’t really to blame for cumming.

Now, this history or potential root cause does not make BDSM bad, in the same way as the troubling history of marriage makes all modern marriages bad, or America’s troubled history makes all Americans bad. If it indeed is a coping mechanism to a system that says “this should make you feel bad”. A punk way to say, “oh yeah, we’ll see about that”, well that’s fucking awesome. And regardless of origins, BDSM is pretty much like most every other aspect of sexuality in practice. If it turns you on, it fucking turns you on. People have the fantasies they do and BDSM offers a huge variety of means to explore them as well as deconstruct acts designed to be degrading such as facials, watersports, bondage, forced feminization, etc…

And as many BDSM experts point out, BDSM can help one detangle some nasty psychological blocks in general life. Many people will use BDSM scenes to try and get over or process previous rapes, training the body in the importance of consent and learning to trust. My partner with her other partner ties up said other partner before trying out any “traditional” sex act such as blowjobs or penetrative sex in order to reclaim the aspect of control left out when she was sexually attacked, a way of limiting the feeling that someone could hit or demean her if she “did it wrong” and reclaim safety.

BDSM is complex, because we are messy creatures in a messy psychological world and cthulhu bless it.

So no, I don’t see BDSM as part of the problem or in negative light at all, only that it’s origins and popularity could have origins in how fucked up the so-called “normal” or “standard” is regarding people’s rights to explore, admit, and enjoy their own sexuality.

(And yes, I know there is the question begged by saying that about how much BDSM would remain if we could have a perfect outside culture. Honestly I have no idea and frankly it won’t come up, because we never really will hit a perfect society.)

Comment #176: kristin on 08/25 at 05:34 PM

Maybe the problem here is the difficulty of divorcing “degrading” from “makes me feel bad”. Sargon, sacundim and Ink Asylum seem to essentially be saying that acts they or their partners enjoy can’t possibly be degrading, in their private context because they don’t make those people feel bad.

Me, I think this is a completely separate distinction. As I’ve said, I enjoy degrading acts; and I don’t see that as meaning the act is magically un-degrading, I see it as meaning that being degraded (in that context) makes me feel good. Still degrading. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be hot.

But assuming that’s right, you’re just begging the question.  Why should I or anybody else divorce “degrading” from “makes me feel bad”?  None of us is any more the judge of whether the word has that connotation than any of us is the judge of what things are degrading.

The way I see it, you’re trying to sneak in a norm that everybody should use negative word to describe something that many of us do not automatically regard as negative.  The way I see it, that can only lead to people regarding it as negative because of the negative label.  Language is funny that way.

And there are plenty of things that I think are degrading (and bad) that are enjoyed by the people degraded by them.  What about women who enjoy changing their name to their husband’s when they marry, because they buy into the patriarchal story about how she becomes “his woman”?

We just like semen.  Can you not take us at our word?  Are we lying or are we just deluded?

No-one should be pressured to do anything they don’t want to, but no-one should be ashamed of enjoying themselves, either.  So Jessica Wakeman deserves a rebuke, but Amanda might stop a minute and reconsider her blanket assertion that facials in 21st century America must necessarily be degrading.
Comment #175: BABH

Don’t hold your breath.  I often agree with Amanda, but in more than two years of reading here I can’t remember a time she changed her mind after stating an opinion. 

IMO, it would be just as productive to request women who enjoy facials to remind their partners that most women do not than it would be to insist that the act is degrading to receivers who don’t agree.  I gather the main objection to considering facials non-degrading is the possibility that men would bring it to new relationships considering them the norm, i.e. the “non-prude” thing to do.

I’m surprised no one is arguing that being slapped on the face isn’t necessarily supposed to be a symbolic act of violence.  C’mon!  It’s just accepting someone’s hand in a complete and loving way.

Amanda @ 198: Thanks.  As I suspected, the major disagreement on the thread is a semantic problem with the various senses of “degrading,” and I agree completely about coercing, shaming or bullying people into doing something they don’t want to do, on a personal or societal level. 

You still seem to be calling half the commenters liars or fools.  Is it really impossible for you to believe that we just enjoy facials in and of themselves, without any cultural baggage?

I think that people like getting off on being degraded, but they don’t want to admit that to themselves, so they do a quick rewrite.

Well, if you refuse to believe that anyone could know themselves better than you do, there’s probably no point in going on here, is there?

That’s fucked up.  This isn’t an airy, academic issue at all.  I personally have suffered by having men get me to watch porn that focused on degrading acts, and when I didn’t like it, they made me feel bad, like “oh the actress is consenting” ...

So the problem is that you saw them performing act X, didn’t enjoy it, and felt pressured to perform X. That sucks, indeed. It’s also totally irrelevant to what X is, or the nature of X. You use this, somehow, as evidence that everyone, deep down, really does feel the same way about X. You also imply here that you don’t feel OK about saying “no” to X unless it is seen - and universally experienced and acknowledged by all - as degrading. Why should that matter, exactly?

I keep coming back to the same thing.  I think everyone would agree that letting a guy ejaculate your face is not some baseline for what makes you a decent girlfriend.  Normalizing that as something every woman needs to feel compelled to do if she wants to think of herself as a willing partner is objectionable.  No one should feel like they have to do that, because it’s pretty gross.

But that isn’t what Jessica Wakeman says.  In the same article, she suggests that you stick your finger up your boyfriend’s ass.  We’re not discussing the merits of that as baseline behavior for decent girlfriend material.

Hey, thanks, kristin.  I really want to back you up.  The anger at being told, “You like something degrading” strikes me as a judgment against sexual submissives. 

It’s really freeing admitting that you like certain acts because of their most obvious connotations.  It a) gives you more control and b) clears up cognitive dissonance that can be painful.  The only times I’ve had that nagging feeling of shame after doing something is when I was in bullshit rationalization mode.  Straight up saying, “Hey, I’m in the mood to do something kind of disturbed and disgusting tonight,” means that it’s on the table, you can have a laugh about it, and it’s not haunting you.

Sargon, I think in this context, any act involving submission is degrading, because it temporarily “degrades” the submissive from an egalitarian role to a submissive one.

Any act involving SM or bondage is degrading, because in our culture being free to avoid physical pain or move around reflects a higher status than someone who is in a position of enduring pain or physically being un-free; SM and bondage temporarily degrade the bottom from one status to the other.

Any act involving cultural shame taboos (piss, feces, spit, semen on the face, crawling and kneeling) is degrading because it temporarily degrades the receiver from someone whose status makes it forbidden to shame them to someone whose status permits shaming.

In this context it’s a value-neutral term that reflects social status, and our ideas about social status are deeply imprinted into us by our culture of origin.

The short answer is kind of “probably not very well.”, since it’s mostly emotional reactions.  I don’t think I’d say empowering at all, but ... uh ... maybe that we can think it’s not fearsome uncommon for men to see semen as kind of symbolic surrogate for their own ... ?sexuality? ... and taken rejection personally (and feel validated by acceptance/enjoyment).  I’m only saying they might not been seen as degrading by the sender, which is half the picture.  How the receiver takes it is certainly instructive in how we should think about, ditto for the sender (and I’d reject the idea that anyone else gets input.) Amanda (seems to) argue that he’s getting off on degrading the recipient, but I think it’s probably comparably common that he gets off on being accepted by the recipient.

But Amanda isn’t talking about coming “on the recipient”. She’s talking specifically about aiming and coming on the woman’s face. She has explained several times that she makes a distinction between on/off the face, because a face has connotations in Western Culture that other body parts don’t have. She’s said this in many different ways, several times.

If you are screwing a woman and want to come on her, her stomach or ass is much closer than her face. If she’s giving you a blowjob, it’s a much more visceral acceptance of your “sexuality” if you come in her mouth. I posit that a facial is only seen as “empowering” because of the specific and masturbatory context of porn. You are turning a woman’s face into a bunk sock. You are putting her in her place.

You still seem to be calling half the commenters liars or fools.  Is it really impossible for you to believe that we just enjoy facials in and of themselves, without any cultural baggage?

No, I’d call them “imperfect human beings struggling with cognitive dissonance, as I do all the time, as everyone does all the time”.  I understand the dynamics of rationalization because I’m really good at rationalization.  But it’s very wearying.

“She said if you offer it to your guy, you’ll make his day.  She’s right.  Anyone who doubts it should try it.”

Uh.  No.  (Correct me if I’m wrong, partner dear, if you’re reading this today.) I’m pretty sure if I suggested a facial, he’d look at me funny, ask me if I was serious, and then, even if I said yes, I really did want to, probably not do it anyway cause it squicked him out.

+1.

One of my first sexual partners asked me to ejaculate on her face, and my reaction was “Are you serious?”, but I didn’t do it, because I couldn’t, and didn’t even really want to… it was too “squicky” for me, as you say.

kristin et al may be hitting closer to the point here.

If there is nothing wrong with degrading sex, then Amanda’s post has no point at all.  You can assume facials or degrading or you can assume otherwise.  Why would it come up in Jessica’s initial post?

If there is nothing wrong with degrading sex, there is nothing wrong with Jessica suggesting it.  Yet it clearly touched a nerve, no pun intended.

you’re just begging the question.  Why should I or anybody else divorce “degrading” from “makes me feel bad”?

Ummmmmm because words have meanings, and the “degrade” has other meanings besides “makes me feel bad”?

Cerberus, we’re cool

Thank you too, Amanda. I align myself most closely with the radfem side of things, but I get so friggin tired of hearing radfems tell me I’m sick, broken and ruining feminism!!1! But I also get sick of fun-feminists chirping about how porn culture is all a-okay and empowerful. So it’s really refreshing to see feminist writing that makes neither of those arguments.

214-
More importantly, it also allows you to (dramatic music) deconstruct it easier and thus feel less shame about enjoying it(/dramatic music).

By bullshitting yourself, you can never get at the underlying bullshit making you feel bad for enjoying something on your own terms no matter how weird, bad, or “unempowered” it is superficially.

“In the same article, she suggests that you stick your finger up your boyfriend’s ass.  We’re not discussing the merits of that as baseline behavior for decent girlfriend material.”

Possibly because it was whoa-mama crazypants problematic?  I mean, if you want to initiate anal play and they want to be on the receiving end, that’s great.  More power to everybody.  However, the way to discover and satisfy this desire of theirs is so fucking not to just go for it and see if they tell you no.  Consent, much?

Amanda:

I’m still only half way with you on this one.  Consider if you will:

ALL sex was at one time considered to be degrading to women.  It was supposed to be something they did out of duty but not for enjoyment.  Weren’t there certain Victorian women who shed the cultural baggage and enjoyed sex for the sake of sex?  Proto sex-positive feminists if you will?

I still say one person can enjoy a given act for it’s own self and another the very same act because it’s degrading, naughty, etc.

219-

No.

Seriously, this is painfully missing the point because of an emotional reaction to the connotation of a single word.

The point of the post was just because YOU might enjoy degradation doesn’t make that experience universal and trying to sell it AS universal puts coercive pressure on every woman who doesn’t enjoy degradation.

More importantly it does this to women who enjoy degradation too, because not everyone who enjoys the degradation they enjoy want it to be mean-spirited, without consent, or other degrading actions that other people enjoy (or does every single person on this thread like scat play?).

That’s the point.

Well, I think the point isn’t whether it’s degrading or not.  As Amanda said, it’s okay to be degraded.  Whether you agree with her or not on facials, why be defensive about it unless you think there’s something wrong with getting off on being degraded?

The real question is whether there is some sin in trying to normalize facials as standard relationship behavior.  And I don’t think you can argue Ms. Wakeman is trying to do that, unless you also think she’s trying to make putting fingers in guys’ butts standard.

Amanda:

If I play degrade someone with their full, educated consent in the bedroom, that’s a game. 
If I bullshit and tell them that X isn’t degrading when that’s exactly why it’s hot, then I’m actually degrading them in real life, because I’m getting them to agree to sex acts on false grounds.

I just don’t think you can degrade someone if you don’t actually make them feel degraded.  If tell you I’m going to cover your foot in honey and lick it off and you feel sickened and repulsed, but go along with it anyway, you’re being degraded.  If you feel aroused and excited, there’s no harm and no foul.

If I give you some long winded philosophical explanation about how - in my culture, putting honey on someone’s foot and licking it off is the form of highest respect - that doesn’t really change the degradation.  It’s how you feel.  If at the end of the experience you’re relaxed and happy versus uncomfortable and unhappy, that’s the defining characteristic of what is and is not degrading.

And while there are some things that cause a universal response of discomfort, I don’t think getting splattered with jizz is one of them.

kristin @ #215:

Sargon, I think in this context, any act involving submission is degrading, because it temporarily “degrades” the submissive from an egalitarian role to a submissive one.

Any act involving SM or bondage is degrading, because in our culture being free to avoid physical pain or move around reflects a higher status than someone who is in a position of enduring pain or physically being un-free; SM and bondage temporarily degrade the bottom from one status to the other.

Any act involving cultural shame taboos (piss, feces, spit, semen on the face, crawling and kneeling) is degrading because it temporarily degrades the receiver from someone whose status makes it forbidden to shame them to someone whose status permits shaming.

In this context it’s a value-neutral term that reflects social status, and our ideas about social status are deeply imprinted into us by our culture of origin.

Ah, OK. You gave a (dictionary?) definition of the word a little upthread that also helped me understand where you’re coming from. I tend to think of submission as a separate thing from degradation, but I would agree that SM and bondage are degrading for the reason you give, though I can imagine a scenario with just SM where the recipient of the pain is not the one being degraded. As for shame taboos, sure, but I wouldn’t include semen on the face in general in that. I think that facials as we generally think of them, the porntastic ones, are definitely in that category though. In fact, if you want semen to get on your face in a manner other than the “guy aims at the kneeling/prone girl and masturbates himself to orgasm” way, I think it wouldn’t count as a “facial” per se.

Amanda @ #214: Um, it’s really unnecessarily judgemental to assume that everyone who is adamant that they enjoy something for a reason that is not the most obvious one is suffering from a “nagging feeling of shame” and cognitive dissonance.

We are also totally tripping an old problem. Andrea Dworkin pretty much had the same exact conversation including emotional responses to word choice when she tried to explain the social construction of blowjobs and their inherent BDSM aspects, especially in porn.

I think it’s the problem in general that happens when female sexuality and sexuality in general is treated as crappily as it is in America. We are “supposed to feel shame” when we enjoy something and want to say yes and we feel shame if we’re “too prudish” and want to say no when the whole damn point is that we should be free to decide our notions of yes and no and figure out which yeses correspond with the yeses of your partner(s) and the current mood of the participants.

“And I don’t think you can argue Ms. Wakeman is trying to do that, unless you also think she’s trying to make putting fingers in guys’ butts standard.”

I’m not really seeing a point to putting it on the “women should totes do this” list if not to normalize and encourage the behavior.  What would you hypothesize was the point in including it if not that?

You’ve just implied that women who aren’t comfortable with facials suffer from hangups (and to be fair, I stupidly assumed that a woman who didn’t want cunnilingus from me suffered from a hangup upthread, and I was wrong). <i>
Zifnab
<i>No, I’d call them “imperfect human beings struggling with cognitive dissonance, as I do all the time, as everyone does all the time”
Amanda

Hey if I’m being called as having “cognitive dissonance” for enjoying something, I feel like calling people names too.

I think the real issue here is letting other people’s acts and opinions have power over your sex life. I don’t. Next time me and my partner get on the sack and are in a place were a sticky mess is not bothersome to cleanup, I’ll do what I like, without having to label it.

I suggest you girls do the same. Do what you like, try new things, if it bothers you, don’t do it again. That kind of honesty with yourself is a must. The one about being “honest” about someone else’s labels and judgement ? Pfft! Throw it in the round bin.

kristin @220-
Yay. Though I wasn’t slagging myself because I felt like I angered you, only noting that that’s a common problem I’ve run into especially with my partner (she’s very forgiving). It’s actually really hard sometimes to get across a main point when the words you choose trigger specific negative connotations you didn’t intend.

Basically, talking is hard.

Why do you have a problem with this?  Are you judging people who like to be degraded during sex?  Seriously, there’s nothing wrong with it.

My problem with it is that you’re telling me why something gets me off, essentially you’re telling me how I think and feel about something when you don’t know me. Do you not see how that is insulting and arrogant? Who are you to determine that it is impossible for someone to enjoy the sensation and the act of receiving semen on the face without degradation being involved?

In addition, my saying that my enjoyment of a particular act is not based in degradation is NOT equivalent to me judging people who do get their enjoyment through degradation. If I enjoy a movie because of the acting I’m not judging people who enjoy it because of the direction.

But Amanda isn’t talking about coming “on the recipient”. She’s talking specifically about aiming and coming on the woman’s face. She has explained several times that she makes a distinction between on/off the face, because a face has connotations in Western Culture that other body parts don’t have. She’s said this in many different ways, several times.

If you are screwing a woman and want to come on her, her stomach or ass is much closer than her face. If she’s giving you a blowjob, it’s a much more visceral acceptance of your “sexuality” if you come in her mouth. I posit that a facial is only seen as “empowering” because of the specific and masturbatory context of porn. You are turning a woman’s face into a bunk sock. You are putting her in her place.

Okay.  In principle I don’t see why “no to facials, yes to bellies” is any different from “yes to facials, no to bellies”, though yeah, our face is more intimate than our belly (we’re much more symbolically our face than our belly, anyhow), so maybe it’s a more intimate/personal rejection.

Your first point contradicts your second point.  If you are screwing a woman and want to come on her, her stomach or ass is much closer than her face but a face has connotations in Western Culture that other body parts don’t have should be a contrast, if a stomach or ass isn’t equivalent to a face, why can you equate the two?  If she’s giving you a blowjob, it’s a much more visceral acceptance of your “sexuality” if you come in her mouth. is harder to address.  On a personal level, I probably would react the way you do (though I lack empirical testing, so I can’t swear to it).  But I think it’s unrealistic to expect this to be a generic reaction.  Not all of us have the same viscera, to demand that everyone else have the same emotional/instinctive reaction as you is unrealistic.  Either way, I think being rejected for either is rejection, and being accepted for either is acceptance, and people (well, in this context men) will often react as such emotionally. 

“This occurs” is a much weaker statement than “This is the only thing that occurs”, and it’s only the second that’s being called out.  Yeah, it’s very likely to be influenced by porn.  (Though since faces are often seen as highly symbolic, and semen is often seen as highly symbolic, it probably can crop up otherwise.) The inherently degrading argument, I think, takes a really, really negative view of semen, and if someone enjoys receiving a facial, they’re (probably, anyways) rejecting that negative view.  You really don’t think that could make someone happy?  A gesture that contains a symbolic rejection of the idea that a man’s semen (and thus symbolically, his own sexuality) isn’t harmful/degrading/nasty/gross, but something accepted and enjoyed?  I’m sure that’s not the only way, but to say “That’s unpossible!” seems a little farfetched.

preying mantis.

Be loud in bed, play with his nipples, have sex outside the bedroom.  Seems like a fairly customary “10 things that will drive your guy wild” article.

230-

Cute.

Idiot.

Zif, that play degradation isn’t good enough for you isn’t really my problem.  A lot of people who want real suffering on someone else’s part to get off are SOL, in my opinion. There orgasm is less important than someone’s rights and dignity. 

lost, I don’t think that you should view your right to orgasm as in a struggle with someone else’s absolute right to have her sex partners be up front with her.  Like I said, it’s actually pretty freeing when you admit you like something because it’s degrading and dirty.  So you don’t have to contribute to a coercive atmosphere, and you don’t have to say nasty things about women who give in when a boyfriend says, “Well, my last girlfriend didn’t think so....”

Also, the only “name” you’re calling someone when you say they’re rationalizing is “human being”.

Great post, Amanda, and a lot of great comments, too. I’ve found the discussion really helpful.

Ballast @187:

If we were you, we’d be telling you that it’s inherently a curse word, even if you happen to only speak French. Seriously, can you not see the difference between “some/many/most people find X to be Y” and “X is inherently Y”?

Here and elsewhere, you don’t seem to understand distinction between “X is Y” and “X is inherently Y”. But distinct they are, and it doesn’t follow from the fact that the latter isn’t true (as in the present case) that the former isn’t true either.

I think another problem is how women are trained early on in make it or suffer style sex interactions. You either learn how to excel at the “basics” aka porn style or you’re “not a good girlfriend”.

That sets up the conflict then exploited as women try belatedly to figure out not only what they enjoy but what they enjoy now, because yes, being good at it can be a source of satisfaction even during an act inherently submissive or unilateral, lords know I know that.

Touching someone’s face in almost any way is a very status-loaded interaction. Slapping someone’s face is a more personally insulting assault than punching them in the gut; putting a hand lightly on someone’s cheek while you talk is a far more intimate act than putting your hand lightly on their shoulder or elbow.

If I were a sociologist, I’d say it’s because we have so many vulnerable organs right there on our face and that being touched on the face is biologically more risky. But I’m not a sociologist, so that’s just a guess.

Well, I think the point isn’t whether it’s degrading or not.  As Amanda said, it’s okay to be degraded.  Whether you agree with her or not on facials, why be defensive about it unless you think there’s something wrong with getting off on being degraded?

To go back to the point that I mentioned above (and others touched on here), all of us here might think it’s okay to want to be degraded, but a whole lot of people don’t, and they judge accordingly.  The negative connotation of the term “degradation” might seem like a minor point, but I don’t think it is.  It’s a negative term in the vast majority of the contexts in which it’s used, and the typical cultural judgement of a situation in which someone is being degraded is that it’s a bad thing.

It can be a real problem when communicating about sex with a partner/potential partner when she/he judges you negatively when you admit you like something or would like to try something that’s generally regarded as degrading.

Having said all of that, I get Amanda’s main point, and I agree with the substance of it.  But I don’t think we should overlook the difficulties in getting people comfortable with the idea that others are allowed to like sex acts that are “unusual” and it doesn’t make them screwed up people for doing so.

I’ll point out, lost, that you’re getting offended, and by your own measure, you don’t do facials.  Facials are about making a point of putting it in someone’s face, because that has a very specific meaning that gets the participants off.  (Hopefully, both, but as I’ve noted, I suspect in many and maybe even most cases, a guy is getting off on the humiliation and the girl is telling herself that if she feels degraded, it’s because he was right, and she’s a prude, and she needs to prove! that she isn’t!) It’s not the same as spraying it everywhere and a little gets on your face on accident.  So either this isn’t about you, or you do it, but for some reason you’re minimizing it.

Either way, I must reiterate: There is 100% nothing wrong with facials. I just have a problem with the dodgy language about it, which is inherently coercive.  It’s about making sure that women don’t stop agreeing to do it, on the grounds that honesty about it might make the act dry up. 

My sense is that if women, given full information about an act, say no, then well, too bad.  But as kristin notes, there are plenty of submissive women.  If it’s important to a man to have degradation (for Zif: PLAY degradation) of his partner to get off, there are plenty of women who have the complementary desires.

Also, being fully honest allows more couples with different desires to come up with swaps.  You do this and I’ll do that.  But if we’re in a space where there’s pressure on women to prove that they’re not prudes, then they lose their bargaining power to ask for what they want in exchange for what men want.

“Be loud in bed, play with his nipples, have sex outside the bedroom.  Seems like a fairly customary “10 things that will drive your guy wild” article.”

Okay, so yes, she’s trying to normalize the more outre things on the list, and I imagine we’re discussing facials instead of het-male-butt-play because a) they’re a much more common demand placed on heterosexually-partnered women and b) again, she knocked the latter straight out of bounds for a reasonable discussion in her entry pertaining to it.

235 -

? ? ?

236 -Amanda
I think I’m getting hang up on the word “degrading”. It is pretty annoying to be told how you feel. Again, I hate feeling humiliated and don’t enjoy BDSM, sub or dom play. So it sounds really strange for me that I have to admit to like something I know I don’t like, on other contexts or acts.

Is the fact that I was someone’s “last girlfriend who didn’t think so...” a problem ? Probably. But to me instead of making all true feminists admit to like degrading stuff, we should be encouraging women to not give in when a boyfriend uses other women as models for what good girlfriends are. The problem here is the misogynist boyfriend that thinks all women are alike. Will he put a but plug if your previous boyfriend liked it ? I doubt it.

Just seems whacked that I have to worry for the guy’s next girlfriend. He is the douche for bringing me up, not me for having had good sex with him.

So apparently, I’m in profound self-denial because I think degradation is bad, and therefore, must go to great rhetorical contortions to convince myself that some things that don’t think are bad must not be degrading, because otherwise, well, it would follow that they are bad, and thus I would have contradicted my previous belief that they are not bad.

Not that I believe that dictionaries are arguments, but the closest dictionary (Oxford American Dictionaries on a Mac) has this as the first definition of degrading is “causing a loss of self-respect; humiliating: cruel and degrading treatment.” How is causing a loss of self-respect not a bad thing?

And here’s degrade: “treat or regard (someone) with contempt or disrespect: she thought that many supposedly erotic pictures degraded women.” How is contempt not bad?  And hey, this one’s example opposes degradation to eroticism!

Again, I don’t believe that dictionaries are arguments, but the idea that you folks can just tell me that my use of the word “degradation” is just flat-out wrong is, well, flat-out wrong.  Some of you may be using it differently than I am, but that doesn’t make my use of it unreasonable in any way.

No, that’s not what Amanda is saying.  She is saying that it must be at home what it is in society at large.  And nobody’s pretending (except as a strawman!) that we are “completely divorced from all the broader social and cultural implications”; the point is that those social and cultural implications have no power to enter the bedroom unless we let them.  Because what happens in the bedroom is not supposed to be monitored by society at large.

Well, Amanda has not weighed in on this point, but I take her acceptance of personal enjoyment as meaning that individuals can believe whatever the hell they want to as long as it’s mutually agreeable, and after having read her stuff for several years now, I’m sticking with that.

However, it’s beyond silly to claim that “social and cultural implications have no power to enter the bedroom unless we let them;” we’re the ones that carry them in there, because they’re part of us.  We have the power to banish them, but that generally requires recognizing them and acknowledging them for what they are, instead of pretending that they don’t exist and even if they did, they aren’t valid anyway so never mind.  Bedroom behavior may not be monitored by society, but it damned well has its basic assumptions and expectations laid by society.  And the current argument, as I understand it as a reader who’s reasonably familiar with Amanda’s work & the site, is about the assumptions and expectations as expressed in published relationship/sexual advice.

I think I’m getting hang up on the word “degrading”.

Well, that’s too bad, because a lot of sex acts are hot because degradation is eroticized in our culture.  It’s a lot easier, I think, to get a handle on it if you’re straightforward about it.

Zif, that play degradation isn’t good enough for you isn’t really my problem.

This isn’t about “play not being good enough”, it’s about what is and is not derogatory.  Announcing something as “play” doesn’t make it LESS derogatory.  If one or both partners feels demeaned, it doesn’t matter what you are doing - facials, BJs, missionary, kissing on the cheek in a public place - it boils down to what’s in the person’s head at the time.

A lot of people who want real suffering on someone else’s part to get off are SOL, in my opinion. There orgasm is less important than someone’s rights and dignity.

If you want to cause your partner suffering, it’s not going to begin and end with the last moments of intercourse.  There is going to be a lot more going on in the relationship.  Dignity encompasses anything that makes the other person feel uncomfortable.  So drawing some line in the sand and announcing the Amanda Marcotte List of Approved Non-Degrading Sexual Acts is kinda silly, because there are going to be things on your list that some people don’t find degrading at all and things not on your list that people consider intensely revolting.

I personally have suffered by having men get me to watch porn that focused on degrading acts, and when I didn’t like it, they made me feel bad, like “oh the actress is consenting”.

Isn’t there a much easier way to cut this Gordian knot than to redefine the word “degrading”?  It’s clear to me that the men who did such things to you are raving assholes.  The act is effectively beside the point. 

I arrived to this thread late and saw a whole leitmotif about “bullying,” that saying the act wasn’t degrading was the behavior of selfish men trying to coerce women into doing things they didn’t want to do.  So isn’t the simple solution not to let the word “degrading” enter into the discussion at all—look how it bedevils people—but to say that coerced consent or sexual bullying are themselves the problem?  Bullying someone into a kiss on the cheek is _also_ a problem.  Bullying = bad even when underlying act = not bad.  Right?

I mean, as MiddleageLiberal points out, trying to sort out deep, true, self-aware choice from brainwashed, bullied, faux choice is tremendously complicated and probably impossible.  None of us really knows whether we want what we want because we _really_ want it, or because we’re falling in line with a script we’ve internalized without realizing it. 

Anyway, to the degree that bright lines are possible, IMHO it’s a lot easier to put that line where “bullying” is, rather than saying that people who feel what they feel are doing it for a reason they don’t perceive (or perhaps admit) but you do.

I’ll point out, lost, that you’re getting offended, and by your own measure, you don’t do facials.
Well, it doesn’t seem to be the same thing. Neither of us have a “preferred landing point”. It just ends up in the face sometimes. Same with my previous partners.

Still, I think the the big problem is the boyfriend using his EX or a porn star as model behavior to follow. That is NOT a good boyfriend. Shouldn’t we be going after him instead of going after his ex sex partners ?

...
and it’s not going to serve as any sort of red light / green light for someone to anticipate serious relationship problems in the future.

If you want to cause your partner suffering, it’s not going to begin and end with the last moments of intercourse.

Oh bullshit, Zifnab. All you’re doing here is demonstrating that you haven’t the slightest clue about the experiences of so many people into BDSM and power dynamics.

If I play degrade someone with their full, educated consent in the bedroom, that’s a game.  If I bullshit and tell them that X isn’t degrading when that’s exactly why it’s hot, then I’m actually degrading them in real life, because I’m getting them to agree to sex acts on false grounds.

You mean like if a douchebag were to try to coerce a woman into agreeing to let him come on her face by feeding her some line of bullshit about his semen being so great for her skin complexion?  As someone did earlier in this thread?

Like I said, it’s actually pretty freeing when you admit you like something because it’s degrading and dirty.

But what if that’s not the reason they like it? How is it freeing to admit to something that isn’t true? Can you tell me how you’ve come to the objective determination that a facial is always degrading, therefore anyone who enjoys it enjoys degradation on some level? The reasons you have put out so far are completely subjective.

Still, I think the the big problem is the boyfriend using his EX or a porn star as model behavior to follow.

You beg the question of where a guy is supposed to start.  If you can’t use a previous sexual relationship as a baseline for future sexual relationships, and virgins aren’t allowed to reference televised sex on their first times, you’re really thinning out the course material.

Assuming every girl is going to be just like your last girlfriend (or that the girl next door is going to be a Girl Next Door) is hopelessly naive.  But now you’ve reduced sex education to a game of twenty questions with your current lover.  Does every time have to be like the first time?  I mean, I’m at least allowed to work under the assumption that the plumbing is all the same, right?

You know, in all honesty, I’d say that submissiveness is probably built in our DNA.  Kids like to play cops and robbers, and even my cat thinks it’s a fun time to roll around and play act submission while we dominate her.  That this is part of sex play isn’t particularly unnerving to me. 

What is unnerving is that it’s not constructed as playful in our culture.  There’s a sense that it’s shameful, and gendered.  Which is in turn used to use sex to put women in their place.

Being honest about things like facials is a way to fight back, to put it into a space where it’s negotiated as the rules of tonight’s game.  By being cagey about it, we give its power to demean a lot more strength.

You mean like if a douchebag were to try to coerce a woman into agreeing to let him come on her face by feeding her some line of bullshit about his semen being so great for her skin complexion?  As someone did earlier in this thread?

Then the fellow is already degrading her BY LYING TO HER.  I’m not sure that’s coersion-- if she AGREES him do it (unless her judgement is impaired, but that’s a whole different story) But sure, he’s totally disrespecting her.

245-

But that’s the point, BDSM isn’t one simple thing. It’s not an action like a blowjob, it’s a giant suite of actions usually inherently playing with societal expectations about an interaction. So one can be perfectly put off by bondage, full dom/sub role-play, and all forms of pain play while also being interested in other BDSM or BDSM-esque interactions. Thus one can not be interested in whipping and the like, while liking the performance of power of unilaterally getting your partner off.

And one can interact with this BDSM action, this action of degradation with the complex enjoyment vectors which are part of the confusion. For instance, I pointed out earlier that my sexual interactions are unilateral because I’m asexual, but I feel ok consenting to these spaces that put me often in subservient or dominant position, because that’s intellectually satisfying in understanding sexuality and getting my partner off and seeing them happy.

It all gets rather complex when we are talking about what an action is and the wealth of responses in unpacking that.

And my curt response was due to your dismissive use of “girls” to put us in our place as well as the attempt to ignore the fact that we are in this shit culture and have to deal with the coercive messages inherent in that in figuring out “what we want” versus what is expected of us. As I pointed out upthread, my partner had her brain pretty well fucked over by guys trying to exploit that very “it’s standard” crapola to basically render her sexually sub-functional and guilt-ridden over her own sexuality and what she enjoyed.

What society says is important, because that’s what young women are putting up with while trying to find their sexuality and the “try it first” model already posits that it is the action that should precede the understanding. In other words, consent isn’t the first rule of sexuality, but rather experimentation and being open. That can stunt someone just starting out, because they don’t feel they can delay if they are curious about something, but are scared about trying it and they don’t know how to privilege what they want and what their fantasies are over their partner’s expectations.

In shorter, we live in this fucked up world, we all must cope with that reality in order to be true to ourselves.

You know, in all honesty, I’d say that submissiveness is probably built in our DNA.

And there you have it.  “My sexuality, in which partners dominate and submit, is natural and normal.  Your sexuality, in which partners treat each other as equals, is a perverse product of false consciousness.”

I’m coming to this thread way late and only offering anecdotal evidence and restricting myself from saying too much about my private sex life on the int0r wabs, BUT:

Every time I’ve let a guy do that to me, it’s because he pressured me and cajoled me until I finally gave in. One guy explained it was hot because I would actually let him do that to me (i.e., because it was degrading). With another guy, I happily offered to let him come anywhere else, and he said, “Aww, that’s no fun” (i.e., because anywhere else wasn’t degrading enough). I could keep going, but I’ll spare you the graphic details.

All I’m saying is, in my experience, Amanda’s absolutely right that it doesn’t matter if you don’t personally see something as degrading, there’s a cultural context that makes it so. She’s also absolutely right that when this stuff gets normalized through porn and through articles saying you’ll make your boyfriend’s day if you do it, it’s easier for men to coerce women into it. I was thusly coerced, and I regret it.

Mainstream porn makes me really angry. I got so sick of reciting lines because I knew they’d get a guy off and allowing him to do things I didn’t want him to do because that’s what he expected me to do. And I had to pretend to like it all the while. I am so happy I found feminism and the strength to stop doing all that.

Oh bullshit, Zifnab. All you’re doing here is demonstrating that you haven’t the slightest clue about the experiences of so many people into BDSM and power dynamics.

You got me there.

That said, if you agree with Amanda

A lot of people who want real suffering on someone else’s part to get off are SOL, in my opinion. There orgasm is less important than someone’s rights and dignity.

then I find it hard to believe people walk around with little light switches that go on and off between “I want to cause someone real suffering and my orgasm is way more important that my boy/girlfriend’s dignity” and “I love and respect you”, even in the most wonderfully perfect BDSM relationship.

The term for people go swing like that isn’t BDSM, it’s bipolar.

However, it’s beyond silly to claim that “social and cultural implications have no power to enter the bedroom unless we let them;” we’re the ones that carry them in there, because they’re part of us.  We have the power to banish them, but that generally requires recognizing them and acknowledging them for what they are, instead of pretending that they don’t exist and even if they did, they aren’t valid anyway so never mind.

So we do have the power to banish them from our bedrooms! I never pretended that the cultural implication of a facial as degrading never existed, I am stating that I have recognized it, acknowledged it, and determined that it does not apply to me. I have banished it from my personal belief system.

Comment #247: latts on 08/25 at 06:47 PM

However, it’s beyond silly to claim that “social and cultural implications have no power to enter the bedroom unless we let them;” we’re the ones that carry them in there, because they’re part of us.  We have the power to banish them, but that generally requires recognizing them and acknowledging them for what they are, instead of pretending that they don’t exist and even if they did, they aren’t valid anyway so never mind.  Bedroom behavior may not be monitored by society, but it damned well has its basic assumptions and expectations laid by society.

I actually don’t think we’re disagreeing nearly as much as you make it sound.  You’re emphasizing the society; I’m emphasizing the power to do otherwise.

If you are screwing a woman and want to come on her, her stomach or ass is much closer than her face. If she’s giving you a blowjob, it’s a much more visceral acceptance of your “sexuality” if you come in her mouth. I posit that a facial is only seen as “empowering” because of the specific and masturbatory context of porn. You are turning a woman’s face into a bunk sock. You are putting her in her place.

Precisely, if this is really about the male “feeling accepted”, than having a woman who is willing to let you come in her mouth seems far more satisfying to me than expecting that woman to let you quickly pull out of whatever orifice at the last moment and ejaculate on her face.

Which is why I differentiate the acts of ejaculating in the mouth and ejaculating on the face.

Zifnab @249-

Um, no, not at all as any BDSM practitioner can tell you. It’s a performance, deconstructing societal degradation or performing a scenario of degradation or violence that is fully scripted in advance by the one supposedly robbed of power. Basically, what you’re saying is much closer to saying that because the patriarchy exists, men must inherently be abusive to women. The truth is that all men have to deconstruct and examine all the societal crap. In the bedroom of BDSM people, they deconstruct the notions of power and violence robbing them of their randomness, their mean-spiritedness, and sense of danger sometimes but not always in use to deconstruct those events from the past or in fears.

I doubt many BDSM people would want to date someone genuinely abusive and just because one performs a top role doesn’t make them an abuser outside of that space.

It strikes me that this whole degrade thing is so intertwined with more traditional and less sexually outre treatment of women.

Back in the day, you know, it wasn’t restrictive and controlling for women to not be allowed to speak in public. It was respecting our delicacy, and the sacred and gentle sphere God created us for. It wasn’t depriving women power to deny us the vote; it was protecting us from a political world that would upset and damage them. It wasn’t literally physically shackling us to dictate that we wear girdles, petticoats, white gloves and dainty high heels; it was manifesting our delightful feminine delicacy. It wasn’t refusing our right to self-determination to refuse us birth control; it was protecting us from decisions we would later regret.

If the patriarchy had come right out, at each of those points, and said “We aim to restrict your freedoms because it keeps you as an available underclass of sexual and domestic workers” how many women would have accepted it? How many would have talked themselves into supporting it? How many would have actually fought for it?

Bullshitting stuff has always enabled those in power to talk those with less power into accepting things they would not otherwise accept. As a sexual submissive I am intimately acquainted with the emotional and interpersonal wallop of some of the things I engage in, and I am utterly opposed to allowing women to be bullshitted into accepting them as less of a wallop than they really are.

One meaning of the word “degrade” is to lower someone in status. Pretty much any sex act that plays with social indicators of status involves degradation. These acts are arousing, when they are, because they play with degradation—with the receiver assuming or miming a lower status than the giver. Otherwise they would be neutral acts with no associated thrill.

THAT’S OKAY.

But it’s NOT okay to deny the role of status in these acts and in their appeal, because it ends up, it always ends up, being a way to railroad women into participating in these acts—acts in which somehow, coincidentally, the person who assumes lower status is always the woman—by denying that they involve playing with status.

When we acknowledge that these acts play with status and with someone having a lower status, we empower women to recognize if her partner is trying to do a status headfuck on her. That headfuck is next to impossible to recognize and call out when women are blinkered, willfully or not, to the role status plays in them.

So, if you enjoy degrading acts, call them what they are; it doesn’t hurt those of us who actively enjoy degradation, and it makes it harder for other people to be railroaded into degradation against their will.

Ink Asylum @ 255-

Here, maybe this will help:

The action is inherently degrading.

The response to it, if pleasurable will be anything other than degradation.

Because if it felt genuinely degrading (bad connotation), you wouldn’t like it and thus it wouldn’t be pleasurable.

The reasons for that can vary and can be as simple as “this culturally degrading act really turns my crank”.

There you go again, Amanda.  If it’s NOT shameful, then why pick it out of Jessica’s list?  The whole list is subject to the same critique.

Why yell?  Maybe because it’ll make him feel more of a man that he can make you feel SOOOO good?  How degrading!

Why take care with the neighbors?  Maybe because HE might be embarrassed?  There you go putting his interests ahead of yours-- how degrading!

Etc.  Etc.  The whole list is supposed to be about thinking of HIM and not YOU.  What YOU can do for HIM.  That’s inherently degrading.

I suspect in many and maybe even most cases, a guy is getting off on the humiliation and the girl is telling herself that if she feels degraded, it’s because he was right, and she’s a prude, and she needs to prove! that she isn’t!....Comment #242: Amanda Marcotte

Wow.  Talk about being honest.  How about owning up to projecting your own feelings on the practice onto others and recognizing that’s a B.S. practice? I’m sorry your (temporarily) asshole date “made you feel bad” about watching and rejecting a particular porn depiction.  Pressure or shaming (even in mild form, if that’s what he was doing) is jerkish behavior but don’t blame it on his prior sex partners.

Again, I find the act degrading too, and wouldn’t feel comfortable doing it even if asked.  But I don’t assume everyone feels like I do on it nor do I see them as cognitively dissonant, self-deluded or dishonest.

Precisely, if this is really about the male “feeling accepted”, than having a woman who is willing to let you come in her mouth seems far more satisfying to me than expecting that woman to let you quickly pull out of whatever orifice at the last moment and ejaculate on her face.

I cop to feeling this way too, but it’s ridiculously arrogant to think everyone else must feel the same way, or even that lesser rejections evapourate in the face of greater acceptance.

You know, in all honesty, I’d say that submissiveness is probably built in our DNA.

And there you have it.  “My sexuality, in which partners dominate and submit, is natural and normal.  Your sexuality, in which partners treat each other as equals, is a perverse product of false consciousness.”

If that’s not willfully misinterpreting, I don’t know what is.

“You know, in all honesty, I’d say that gayness is probably built in our DNA.”

“And there you have it.  “My sexuality, in which partners are the same sex, is natural and normal.  Your sexuality, in which partners are the opposite sex, is a perverse product of false consciousness.”

Makes about as much sense.

Obviously, the meaning of that comment is that FOR THOSE OF US WHO ARE SUBMISSIVE, it’s a part of our sexuality built in our DNA. Just as FOR YOU WHO IS NOT SUBMISSIVE, your DNA has your (egalitarian) sexuality built in.

Duh.

The action is inherently degrading.

I’ll stop you right there. How is something inherently degrading? “Degrading” is a creation of society, not some inherent truth, like water being wet.

I have been visitng this site for some time now, but I registered today.  This was an excellent post! The timing is right, too.  After Secretary Cinton talked about the importance of women’s rights in Africa and the NYT magazine cover story saying it is the civil rights battle today.
I, personally, have no interest in giving a facial.  I would do it if my girlfriend asked me to.  The point I want to add is that in porn, the “Money Shot” is when the guy cums.  In most Hetero porn the woman’s role is to get the guy off.  If she has an orgasm who cares.
For my money, scenes where the woman is being pleasured, and cums are the hottest

The real question is whether there is some sin in trying to normalize facials as standard relationship behavior.  And I don’t think you can argue Ms. Wakeman is trying to do that, unless you also think she’s trying to make putting fingers in guys’ butts standard.

But I believe that’s precisely what she was trying to do… normalize both facials and secretly sticking a finger up a male partner’s ass.

And neither one of those things is acceptable without fully informed, non-coercive consent.

As a hetero male who was sodomized as a small child by another male, I can tell you that no, I absolutely do not want a female partner just sticking her finger up my ass without my permission, no matter how cute or hot she might think it is.

when this stuff gets normalized through porn and through articles saying you’ll make your boyfriend’s day if you do it, it’s easier for men to coerce women into it.

I think there’s widespread agreement that this coercive element is a terrible thing.  But there’s another case:  what about a woman who watches porn and genuinely derives pleasure from mimicking things she’s seen in porn?  Is she brainwashed or coerced, or not?  Is it “play” degradation, or “real” degradation, or non-degradation?  I think it gets tricky—

--just like talking about female genital mutilation does.  I’ve heard an anthropologist argue that calling it “mutilation” is begging the question, because there are women who will tell you that they don’t feel mutilated by it, and they felt stunted and adolescent without it.  Ergo, calling it “mutilation” ends the debate, and the practice should be called “cutting” so that the debate can continue.  I have a hard time with that.  I feel like that’s a horrendous kind of brainwashing in action.  But what if women say they don’t think it is, and what if they mean it, yes, even deep down?  What if they’re not falsely conscious, but actually conscious?  I guess this “facial” issue (which I hadn’t thought much about until this piece today) is on that same continuum.

Zifnab @ 256-

Nope, assuming same plumbing is actually one of the worst mistakes. Completely erasing the potential that you fall for a trans-person, each cis-person’s plumbing will look and respond entirely differently to other people. One woman might only be able to get off with clit stimulation, while another might be really sensitive and thus need more delocalized stimulation. People will have different erogenous zones or fetishes that make rote patterns worthless. Some people may like penetration, some may not. Some may have vaginismus thus making penetration exceedingly painful and problematic.

So yeah, each person is a brand new start. You can bring in your skill set and have them on the backburner if needed and be ready to edit them to the needs of your partner, but you’ll still need to go down the list and figure out what they are into, what turns them on, what they’ll consent to, what areas are their most sensitive, what’s no go, what’s open for later. Because fully consensual and informed sex is simply better sex, or would you rather have to stop halfway into a really fun sex act because you followed a pattern that’s making this partner cry or look bored?

Basically, what you’re saying is much closer to saying that because the patriarchy exists, men must inherently be abusive to women.

What?  No!  I didn’t say anything even remotely resembling that.
My whole point is that (with the exception of something that causes serious physical harm), what is “degrading” is in the eye of the beholder.  And that producing a pre-approved list of sex acts that fall into or outside of the “degrading” definition is hopeless, because what you’re really looking to avert - the mental harm brought on by the performance of the act - isn’t tied to the act itself.

To wit, eating bacon in bed with your girlfriend isn’t degrading, until I mention that your girlfriend is a Muslim or Orthodox Jew.  At which point, it’s not “eating bacon” that’s the problem.  It’s making your girlfriend do something that leaves her feeling unhappy.

Even at the end of BDSM or Tantric Sex or whatever your mating ritual of choice is, the goal is to have both people leave the bedroom feeling better than when they went in.  If zipping a guy up in a gimp suit and making him massage your feet makes both of you genuinely happy, then there’s nothing ultimately degrading about it.  If kissing on the cheek leaves your loved one feeling violated and repulsed, then you’ve crossed a line.

We can call bullshit on one another - I can say dressing up in a gimp suit and being forced to submit can’t possibly avoid having a negative impact on someone’s psyche and you can claim that a kiss on the cheek just isn’t ever going to cause anyone “degrading” amounts of discomfort - but we’re still really arguing about the effect on the person, not the act itself.

I might be willing to concede that facials are automatically going to scar someone.  You can perhaps produce studies that gauge psychological health and conclude “Women getting splattered in the face with semen score lower on the Such-and-Such mental welling being scale”.  And then I’ll admit I’m totally wrong, facials are degrading, and we can continue from there.  But I’m not getting that from Amanda.  I’m getting, “Getting a facial would make me feel icky, ergo it is degrading to all women.” And it’s the bit about this homogeny of feeling that I’m really disputing.

kristin @272: Perhaps you missed the part of this thread where Amanda (and you, and MP, and DTG, etc.) insisted that EVERYBODY MUST NECESSARILY FEEL THE WAY I FEEL OR THEY’RE SECRETLY LYING TO THEMSELVES.

See, I can argue in caps, too!

Zifnab @262-

Because BDSM isn’t about the top, it’s about what the bottom wants. The top is a facilitator for that need.

Also, because it’s play-acting, which is like, I dunno, acting. Can you believe that Anthony Hopkins can play a psycho killer and then go on being a regular guy not killing people? It’s the same damn thing.

But there’s another case:  what about a woman who watches porn and genuinely derives pleasure from mimicking things she’s seen in porn?  Is she brainwashed or coerced, or not?  Is it “play” degradation, or “real” degradation, or non-degradation?

But that’s irrelevant to the point of Amanda’s post. Her point was that for whatever reason degrading acts arouse us, we should roll with that. We should just call it what it is.

BABH: Okay then, give me an alternative reason for some commonly accepted degrading (and commonly enjoyed) acts to be arousing if it’s not about status. A facial? Kneeling? Over the knee spanking? Can you construct a reasonable explanation for why these acts are sexually fascinating and arousingl, if you leave status-play out of it?

Because BDSM isn’t about the top, it’s about what the bottom wants.

Which implies that, if the bottom wants it, we’re talking about something that leaves both partners happy.  (I am, of course, assuming the top is an interested participant.  And if the top wasn’t, then it would be degrading to the top.)

But you can call it play-acting or acting-acting or Anthony Hopkins School of Sexual Metaphor or whatever you want.  My point is what defines whether it is “degrading” or not is rooted in whether the couple walks away from the experience feeling better or worse for the experience.

lol my stupid typos. sigh

Comment #267: kristin on 08/25 at 07:10 PM

When we acknowledge that these acts play with status and with someone having a lower status, we empower women to recognize if her partner is trying to do a status headfuck on her. That headfuck is next to impossible to recognize and call out when women are blinkered, willfully or not, to the role status plays in them.

I think there is something here that we can all agree on: to get into a relationship where I would say that the acts are not degrading (and I mean “degrading” in your sense), the partners have to negotiate from a starting point where they don’t know each other very well, and certain acts are commonly understood as degrading, based on a correct perception that men use them to degrade women.  Yes, women do need to know that a convention exists where facials are a status play, and that men will try to get women to enact certain sexual roles by manipulating or coercing them into certain sexual acts.  Recognizing these power plays really are a requirement for dodging them.

The problem I’m still having is that I don’t think you’re acknowledging the power of couples to nullify those conventions in private contexts.  It might be because we’re emphasizing different types of couples: couples where there’s a true partnership vs. couples where the man imposes on the woman.

Zifnab, you’re being deliberately dense. Some of us walk away happy because we’ve engaged in degrading acts.

Stop the spinning No True Scotsman wheel, somebody, so Zifnab can get off.

Ink Asylum @273-

Fine, concern troll, the action exists in a society, that society has imbued that action with the characteristic known as degrading. It has a history of being degrading, it was invented to be degrading, it is widely known today as being degrading. It’s part of a unilateral action of man as dominant, woman as submissive. The action is one of symbolically marking the other and requires great trust to perform. It is culturally indivisible from degradation.

But just as marriage is indivisible from its sexist history, one can reclaim, take back, or pervert that intention and one can find their own pleasure in spite of or because of that degradation.

For instance, if you bothered to read to sentence two, you’d see I point out and agree to your point that one’s interpretation of events can exist outside of the inherent realities of that event and one can gain a satisfaction and thus enact an effect on that action and thus redeem it or turn it into a positive.

Just because something’s socially constructed doesn’t make it fictional. It still exists, we still have to deal with it.

And it’s all in your head is still in your fucking head affecting your ability to process or respond. These things are real to us because they affect us and our interactions. In future though, I’ll refrain from saying the inaccurate inherently and instead repeat this interaction.

The problem I’m still having is that I don’t think you’re acknowledging the power of couples to nullify those conventions in private contexts.

It might be semantics. I don’t believe that couples can nullify social conventions, and the way we’ve had them wired into our brains, just because we’re in a private context.

However, in the right relationship, my partner and I can nullify the ability of this status play to harm me or make me feel bad.

I have a friend who is a makeup artist in Los Angeles, but even though she was being paid big bucks working on porn films, refuses to do them anymore.

It was too depressing: a makeup artist on porn films is even more essential than ordinary films—it wasn’t even redoing makeup after facials that got to her.

It was the tears.

Tanya had to redo makeup all the livelong days because the actresses had invariably cried it off.

There’s a lot of money for porn actresses to make, but take it first hand from someone on the set, it’s a job that involves crying offstage on every shoot.

Women really into the degredation wouldn’t be crying so often as to drive a makeup artist away.

kristin @281: As I said before, I like semen.  In my mouth, on my face, in my ass, on my belly, on my back, on my feet - I like it.  It tastes good, it smells good, it feels good.  The sound my partner makes as he comes, the look on his face (if I can see his face). 

There are people who like pain because it’s degrading, and there are people who like pain because it’s fun and stimulating in and of itself.  Consider e-stim.  You can hardly argue that it’s culturally degrading - mainstream culture doesn’t know it exists. 

There are people who think oral sex is inherently degrading.  They are wrong.  There are people who think gay sex is inherently degrading.  They are wrong.  Is it possible y’all are wrong regarding facials?

Zifnab, you’re being deliberately dense. Some of us walk away happy because we’ve engaged in degrading acts.

The whole concern Amanda has is that you could have a girl who is nominally all for a degrading treatment but personally disgusted and simply feels too ashamed or intimidated to object.  Basically, the girl is forced to lie about her feelings.  Amanda decided all women secretly suffer when they get facial’d but some simply refuse to raise their voices and let their feelings be heard.

If you happily admit you’re being degraded and love it, you’re not what Amanda is worried about.  You are speaking your mind.  Your voice is heard.  We’re not worried about you.

And - to be perfectly honestly - I don’t think the term “degraded” really even applies, since “enjoying being degraded” is like saying “I’m happy when I’m unhappy” in my vocabulary.  But that’s a matter of semantics that I really don’t want to keep dealing with anymore.

Zifnab @278-

But now you’re being an idiot. The point we’ve been making all along is that BDSM takes degrading encounters and pleasure from degradation and makes an egalitarian space to explore and tweak them with full safety nets and the like. A gimp suit’s purpose is to degrade, but the degrading sexual action is put into a context where it is not only consented to, but consented to with fully informed enthusiastic consent in order to explore that and gain a form of sexual satisfaction.

It’s not us who have the good sex/bad sex viewpoint, because we’re trying to explain how a degrading event does not need have the intentional degradation with fully informed enthusiastic consent that fully allows absolute rights to no.

I like semen.  In my mouth, on my face, in my ass, on my belly, on my back, on my feet - I like it. 

OK then, are facial shots more arousing to you than experiencing that semen anywhere else on your body? And if so, then why would that be, if the rich status symbolism of having something done to your face is not part of it?

If facial shots are not more arousing to you than experiencing that semen anywhere else on your body, then you’re not what the original post was about; it was about the facial shot, specifically, as the shorthand for domination, ownership and objectification that it is.

And do you have any explanation for why kneeling/crawling and over the knee spanking are arousing if they are not trading in status markers?

Her point was that for whatever reason degrading acts arouse us, we should roll with that. We should just call it what it is.

How about just leaving it at “for whatever reason any acts arouse us, we should roll with that, and we don’t get in a complexly entangled discussion about ‘what to call it’ because the word ‘degrading’ is loaded and managed to piss off many smart and decent people whose reasons may well be legitimate rather than deluded”?

Doesn’t exactly flow, but you get my point.

Damn and blast, I forgot to add Zifnab to my previous post:

Amanda decided all women secretly suffer when they get facial’d but some simply refuse to raise their voices and let their feelings be heard.

Now you’re just lying. She said absolutely nothing of the kind. You have a pattern of not engaging honestly here, and this is just another instance, so I can’t be bothered anymore.

Thanks for writing this Amanda. Yes, it makes no sense for feminists, no matter how ‘sex positive’, to make women feel like prudes for not wanting guys to cum on their faces. Women (and men) have good reasons for not wanting to engage in certain sexual acts. It is indeed much better to admit that you get off on degrading someone/being degraded than to try and pretend that it’s not really degrading.

In the debate in this thread between those who feel that there is an inherent meaning to a physical act and those who feel that it can mean whatever you want it to, I tend to see more sense in the idea that physical acts have inherent meanings. Yes, its meaning to you is inherently personal, but in general I feel it is foolish to attempt to ignore the social meaning of things.

There is nothing wrong with being a guy that enjoys cum-ing on someone’s face, or with enjoying guys cum-ing on your face. Or with enjoying any other sexual act with an element of domination, either an overt one or an undercurrent. I just want people to think about what this means in the larger sense, and not try to fool themselves.

Zifnab @282-

Oi. Ok, everyone, listen up, because you’re getting hung up on this fucking word like pro-lifers whining about snowflake babies.

BDSM takes degrading inegalitarian actions and creates a space they can be explored with full egalitarian consent. That’s what it does. It is not the same as accepting degradation because it is expected. Furthermore, the action is what it is, that’s why BDSM people play with it. One can take that degrading action and get from it pleasure or satisfaction thus working through the social mess of damned if you do/damned if you don’t. This doesn’t change the inherent action. The action performed isn’t egalitarian, is meant to be degrading, but the response can vary and can be for very complex reasons because we are very complex and can be downright counterintuitive because sexuality isn’t wholly logical.

And we know sexuality isn’t wholly logical or wholly divorced from societal expectations, because well frankly sexuals, I’m sure you can remember an incident in very recent memory that proves my point. And yes, that’s universal.

Fine, concern troll, the action exists in a society, that society has imbued that action with the characteristic known as degrading. It has a history of being degrading, it was invented to be degrading, it is widely known today as being degrading. It’s part of a unilateral action of man as dominant, woman as submissive. The action is one of symbolically marking the other and requires great trust to perform. It is culturally indivisible from degradation.

But what society has imbued is not automatically imprinted upon every member of that society, nor is it permanent even if it is imprinted during someone’s upbringing. Whether a certain act is “inherently degrading” or “degrading because of society” is central to this debate, so I’m hardly a troll for pointing that out.

But just as marriage is indivisible from its sexist history, one can reclaim, take back, or pervert that intention and one can find their own pleasure in spite of or because of that degradation.

Here you seem to say that even if you reclaim something from being degrading that it’s still degrading and your pleasure is in “spite of or because” of that? That is not true. If there is no such thing as “inherently degrading” then someone who overcomes or never buys into society’s definition of an act as degrading doesn’t see that act as degrading, period, and can engage in it without having to do so in spite of anything.

Fine, concern troll, the action exists in a society, that society has imbued that action with the characteristic known as degrading. It has a history of being degrading, it was invented to be degrading, it is widely known today as being degrading. It’s part of a unilateral action of man as dominant, woman as submissive. The action is one of symbolically marking the other and requires great trust to perform. It is culturally indivisible from degradation.

That’s a great answer Cerberus. Social things are as real as material things.

I just want people to think about what this means in the larger sense, and not try to fool themselves.

So there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just that anyone who doesn’t agree with your opinion vis-a-vis their own sexual pleasure is a fool?

OK then, are facial shots more arousing to you than experiencing that semen anywhere else on your body? And if so, then why would that be, if the rich status symbolism of having something done to your face is not part of it?

Because the skin on the face is more sensitive than on other parts of the body. Because it’s close to the mouth, so I can taste the cum after the facial more easily. Because it’s close to the nose, so the smell is more intense. Because it means observing up close and personal the ejaculating penis, something I caused with my hands or mouth.

Why do some people like having their ears nibbled? Or their chin stroked? Or their lips touched? Different parts of the body are more sensitive than others, and the face is one of the most sensitive of all.

But what society has imbued is not automatically imprinted upon every member of that society, nor is it permanent even if it is imprinted during someone’s upbringing. Whether a certain act is “inherently degrading” or “degrading because of society” is central to this debate, so I’m hardly a troll for pointing that out.

If you ever engage in activism you will learn how truly difficult it can be to change the inherent and agreed upon meanings of actions in society. There are judgements and meanings in society that are as real and immoveable as stones, and your personal judgements don’t wipe them away (except maybe in your own mind).

This just all reminds me SO much of discussions where people insist that cultural sexism doesn’t have any power in their relationship.

They just happen to do more housework than their husband um, because, that’s why! And they plan to stay at home with the kids instead of their husband doing it um because, that’s why! And they changed their name to their husband’s um because, that’s why! And cultural expectations had nothing! to! do! with! it!

If you ever engage in activism you will learn how truly difficult it can be to change the inherent and agreed upon meanings of actions in society. There are judgements and meanings in society that are as real and immoveable as stones, and your personal judgements don’t wipe them away (except maybe in your own mind).

Isn’t “in your own mind” exactly what we’re talking about? We’re discussing if it’s possible, in your own mind, to completely wipe away (or avoid altogether) the society induced meaning of a facial between you and your partner. If I can do that, then I can get spunk on my face and enjoy it without the enjoyment hinging on degradation.

Because the skin on the face is more sensitive than on other parts of the body. Because it’s close to the mouth, so I can taste the cum after the facial more easily. Because it’s close to the nose, so the smell is more intense. Because it means observing up close and personal the ejaculating penis, something I caused with my hands or mouth.

Ink Asylum, there is absolutely nothing wrong with you enjoying cum on your face. If you enjoy it, it is nothing but good. No-one is saying that if you enjoy this act you are wrong or bad. What we are saying is that it has a meaning that is agreed upon generally in society. We are also saying it is silly to attempt to ignore this generally agreed upon meaning.

Zifnab @290

No!

That’s not what the fuck she’s saying. Goddamnit, we’re so fucked in this society. No one believes anyone when they say they can enjoy something, that they’re “allowed” to put it in the most elitist form possible.

When she says some people physically enjoy actions that are culturally degrading, she means they actually enjoy them. When she says good on them, she means good on them. They shouldn’t feel ashamed, because feeling ashamed is the cultural expectation (it’s good to fuck with that bad cultural expectation).

What she’s saying is that there are two groups of women. Those who enjoy an action that’s degrading or BDSM or kinky or dirty or any other goddamn word out there. And those who don’t.

And among those who don’t, there is a subset of women who don’t feel they have full consent to opt out of something because it’s become expected that a “good girlfriend” performs. Thus, they have been coerced. Women who enjoy the action wouldn’t give a fuck if it’s expected, because they enjoy it, they’re getting off. It’s a good time for them. Those with the confidence to say fuck off with that and resist the coercion are likewise fine. It’s that subset group who are the fucked ones.

Now, others feel they are part of a subset of enjoying it who feel the other cultural pressure that says that enjoying something like that is wronger than enjoying more “normal” sex acts, that there is a lot of pressure on people defending their right for nontraditional sexuality and to enjoy pseudo-submissive acts. And they respond to how negative framing has been used to try and make them feel guilty about enjoying that action (possibly because a certain subset into that whole degradation thing (in an asshole non-BDSM way) expects their targets to feel I dunno degraded rather than excited) and thus react negatively to that previous point, missing the fact that what was said was a genuinely meant, heart-felt, no really if you like it, you should like it. No one should take that away from you.

And that’s the whole damn debate really and most of her whole damn point.

Ink Asylum, what happens in your own mind is of course extremely important… to you and people who care about you.

What I want you to perceive is that your judgement about what this act, ‘facials’ means to you does not wipe out its meaning in the larger society.

Comment #287: kristin on 08/25 at 07:38 PM

It might be semantics. I don’t believe that couples can nullify social conventions, and the way we’ve had them wired into our brains, just because we’re in a private context.  However, in the right relationship, my partner and I can nullify the ability of this status play to harm me or make me feel bad.

I just don’t see it as a status play at all in the proper context.  To properly call it a status play, I believe it has to form part of a broader pattern of the man trying to establish dominance over the woman in the relationship as a whole—i.e., have the man impose his version of what the relationship should be, without any negotiation.  If the man is not playing that status game, how is it a status play?

Ink Asylum, there is absolutely nothing wrong with you enjoying cum on your face. If you enjoy it, it is nothing but good. No-one is saying that if you enjoy this act you are wrong or bad. What we are saying is that it has a meaning that is agreed upon generally in society. We are also saying it is silly to attempt to ignore this generally agreed upon meaning.

I’m not disputing that it is “agreed upon generally in society.” I’m disputing that it’s like that in MY head.

Ink Asylum, what happens in your own mind is of course extremely important… to you and people who care about you.
What I want you to perceive is that your judgement about what this act, ‘facials’ means to you does not wipe out its meaning in the larger society.

I have never disputed that. Ever. Some people, though, Amanda included, are trying to tell me that my judgment in my mind is wrong. That I’m either lying or deluded.

Isn’t “in your own mind” exactly what we’re talking about?

No, it’s only half of what we are talking about. The other half is all about what society beleives, and we do ourselves no favors by trying to pretend that that other half doesn’t exist.

Some people, though, Amanda included, are trying to tell me that my judgment in my mind is wrong. That I’m either lying or deluded.

No. No one is saying that. What people are saying is that it is not reasonable to expect others to have the same judgement about this in their heads.

I don’t think you’re deluded, just missing something.

297-

Were you born fully formed from Zeus’s head or did you grow up here in America awash in the same cultural messaging as everyone else?

Here, let me tell you a story. I’m asexual, I’m transsexual, I’m introverted and bizarre. I actually missed most of the social brainwashing especially sexual brainwashing of society by virtue of being too out-of-whack with the expected target to be on the radar and I wouldn’t even call myself free from society and social constructs. People still reacted when I had a male body as if I had a male body. My partner still has all the social hangups and I’ve had to figure them out to try and help her solve them and the rest of the world interacts as if I was a sexual of the corresponding gender and sexuality.

We are not free from society, though what I suspect you mean is that we can lessen the crap and dismiss it and not let expected response dictate actual response.

Which would be what I was trying to say.

Yes, its meaning to you is inherently personal, but in general I feel it is foolish to attempt to ignore the social meaning of things.

We’re not ignoring the social meaning. We’re just asserting that there can be a very real difference between that and the personal meaning for many people, and there’s no particularly reason that the social meaning must necessarily be the “real” one. We’re talking about a (generally) very private act here.

The beauty of cum all over your face is a thing with a major attraction to you. That is fine and there is nothing whatever wrong with it. It is great that you enjoy it.

The part I’m focussing on is how others are likely to see it.

OK then, are facial shots more arousing to you than experiencing that semen anywhere else on your body?

No, not really.  Just don’t get any in my eye.

If facial shots are not more arousing to you than experiencing that semen anywhere else on your body, then you’re not what the original post was about; it was about the facial shot, specifically, as the shorthand for domination, ownership and objectification that it is.

I see.  Facials that aren’t degrading aren’t degrading, but facials that are, are.

Look, I’m not into BDSM, but I can understand you, and I believe you when you describe your experience of sexual pleasure in degradation.  But I’ve had relationships both with people who wanted to dominate me, and with people who wanted to be dominated.  They didn’t last, because I was looking for an equal partner.  I found several, including my husband of the last 5 years.  Can you make the imaginative leap to understand that there are people whose sexuality is just plain different from yours?  We may enjoy what seem to be the same sex acts, but for totally different reasons.

Some people get off on mental images, others by concentrating on physical sensations.  Some are turned on by smells, others by sounds or words.  Sex positivity is about recognizing that the spectrum of human sexuality is broad.  We cannot judge others by our own standards.  The only things that matter are consent and the campsite rule - leave your partners in better shape than you found them.

If the man is not playing that status game, how is it a status play?

Status play as in “nativity play”, not “play to gain actual status”. If I may roll with the analogy for a moment, a nativity play gets its specialness from commonly understood cultural cues regarding an old legend. Status play (as in games playing with status) gets its appeal from cultural cues regarding status.

If it didn’t evoke those cues, it wouldn’t be exciting; but in the context of a healthy relationship, it’s status play without actual consequences to my status in the relationship.

No. No one is saying that.

Really?

You still seem to be calling half the commenters liars or fools.  Is it really impossible for you to believe that we just enjoy facials in and of themselves, without any cultural baggage?
No, I’d call them “imperfect human beings struggling with cognitive dissonance, as I do all the time, as everyone does all the time”.  I understand the dynamics of rationalization because I’m really good at rationalization.  But it’s very wearying.
Comment #217: Amanda Marcotte on 08/25 at 06:10 PM

People are saying EXACTLY that.

I have not been one of the ones in this discussion telling OTHER people what is going on in their heads. That’s what the “facials are always degrading” crowd has been telling me, lostthepassword, and others.

It might be semantics. I don’t believe that couples can nullify social conventions, and the way we’ve had them wired into our brains, just because we’re in a private context.

However, in the right relationship, my partner and I can nullify the ability of this status play to harm me or make me feel bad.

QFT. That is a really neat, concise way of putting it.

Also, nullifying social conventions within your own mind is hard-to-impossible, as anyone who’s ever tried to do so will know, and probably not worth all the pyschological work in the case of something like receiving facials, unless you’re REALLY into spunk and really opposed to a sense of degradation. Going into denial, otoh, is very fucking easy. So although a bunch of people are indignant that Amanda attributed the “I, personally, do not experience facials as degrading in any way” stance to denial-- sorry, people, it’s the most parsimonious assumption by far. Maybe you actually are that exceptional and unusual, but you shouldn’t get on your high horse when people are hesitant to believe you.

Also, some of the men arguing so vehemently with Amanda are pretty hilarious, in a tragicomic sort of way.

We’re just asserting that there can be a very real difference between that and the personal meaning for many people, and there’s no particularly reason that the social meaning must necessarily be the “real” one. We’re talking about a (generally) very private act here.

ballast, what I’m saying is that they are both real.. the personal and the social.

Amanda, I woulda thought a face-shot would be more akin to looking into a garden hose than just pure degradation.  I mean, sure, it can be degrading, but I don’t think the mere act of getting something on your face as degrading any more than getting oil on your face while working on the car.

But hopefully more fun.

No. No one is saying that.

Well, they kind of are, in all the statements by various participants about how people who get off how they get off for whatever reason should just “be honest” and stop “fooling themselves” because we all know it’s really degradation.  But that’s OK, degradation is cool too, never mind the customary connotations of the word “degradation,” which are highly variable and personal--unlike the customary connotations of the act of ejaculating in someone’s face, which can only mean one thing, degradation, all the way down.

BABH, if you and your partner don’t find facial shots to be more exciting than shots anywhere else, then you’re not what Amanda was talking about; she was talking about the facial shot as the facial shot, not just generally enjoying your partner’s semen on your skin. Understanding that is crucial to grokking her argument. Right now you’re having a completely different discussion with, like, yourself.

So although a bunch of people are indignant that Amanda attributed the “I, personally, do not experience facials as degrading in any way” stance to denial-- sorry, people, it’s the most parsimonious assumption by far.

Maybe you’re just a jerk.  You’re in denial about it, but, really, it’s OK, jerks are cool.  Just be honest with yourself and own it.

Were you born fully formed from Zeus’s head or did you grow up here in America awash in the same cultural messaging as everyone else?

Does everyone absorb the same exact taboos, attitudes, and stereotypes from society as everyone else?

I have not been one of the ones in this discussion telling OTHER people what is going on in their heads. That’s what the “facials are always degrading” crowd has been telling me, lostthepassword, and others.

Ink Asylum, what you are missing is that I am saying nothing, nothing, about what is happening in your own head. I accept what you say is happening in your head, and it sounds just fine to me. In fact it sounds great!

The only part I want you to realize is that
1. there is not necessarily any connection between what happens in your head and everyone else’s
2. in the mind of society, in the language that we generally understand, facials are quite distinctively a form of humiliation.

I think this here is what the kids today call a “popcorn thread.”

309-

No, we’re saying you enjoy this action that is what it is culturally for your own reasons which are as you say your own and that that is in fact valid. Heck, her point to begin with wasn’t about accepting degradation as your personal response to the action, but universalizing your enjoyment of an action to whitewash its cultural meaning.

In short, we have been having a long and sometimes pointed debate on semantics while essentially agreeing on everything of substance.

Just because something has a certain cultural meaning does not mean that that cultural meaning should dictate your actions. And if you enjoy that facial, if you carve your own damn personal meaning from that action and enjoy the fuck out of the very aspect of it, then you are fucking up that cultural expectation just as much as questioning it. We enjoy what we enjoy and we shouldn’t let society dictate what we feel so long as we don’t then turn around and deny the social bullshit we just reclaimed the fuck out of.

It’s basically like reclaiming queer. Do it, enjoy it, use the fuck out of it, but don’t then write an article like Jessica did essentially trying to deny that queer is used as an insult.

We enjoy what we enjoy and we shouldn’t let society dictate what we feel so long as we don’t then turn around and deny the social bullshit we just reclaimed the fuck out of.

It’s basically like reclaiming queer. Do it, enjoy it, use the fuck out of it, but don’t then write an article like Jessica did essentially trying to deny that queer is used as an insult.

OMG YES. Here, have this shiny and delicious Internet.

Ink Asylum, what you are missing is that I am saying nothing, nothing, about what is happening in your own head. I accept what you say is happening in your head, and it sounds just fine to me. In fact it sounds great!
The only part I want you to realize is that
1. there is not necessarily any connection between what happens in your head and everyone else’s
2. in the mind of society, in the language that we generally understand, facials are quite distinctively a form of humiliation.

I accept all that! I realize all that! I never disputed any of that! We’re in complete agreement!

324-

Hmmm.

How to answer that one without saying, scroll down a paragraph in that comment. Never mind, read comment 327, I think I may have figured out your main resistance.

329-

Yes, we are.

329-

I know, right?

The semantic arguments are always the ones that leave you puzzled at the end. My partner and I get into those all the time.

It’s basically like reclaiming queer. Do it, enjoy it, use the fuck out of it, but don’t then write an article like Jessica did essentially trying to deny that queer is used as an insult.

Cerberus wins a million quadloos… and the intertuubz with frim fram juice & shafafa on the side

No, we’re saying you enjoy this action that is what it is culturally for your own reasons which are as you say your own and that that is in fact valid. Heck, her point to begin with wasn’t about accepting degradation as your personal response to the action, but universalizing your enjoyment of an action to whitewash its cultural meaning.

You might be saying that, but Amanda and others aren’t. Please, scroll through the comments, there are plenty of instances of people telling me that my judgment about what a facial means to me are wrong, invalid, and evidence that I am, to quote Amanda specifically, an “imperfect human being struggling with cognitive dissonance”.

Nah, 323, if I was a jerk, I’d have expressed my suspicion that this thread seems to be dividing along the lines of people with sex lives vs people without. But you see I nobly refrained-- oh, whoops. I guess I am a jerk after all.

But since we’re regressing to the playground here, you started it

Comment #301: atheist on 08/25 at 07:56 PM

If you ever engage in activism you will learn how truly difficult it can be to change the inherent and agreed upon meanings of actions in society. There are judgements and meanings in society that are as real and immoveable as stones, and your personal judgements don’t wipe them away (except maybe in your own mind).

You’re missing the part of the arguments that has to do with private contexts.  Nobody is saying that Ink Asylum or I can go out and change the world so that everybody uses the English word “dog” to mean Felis catus.  What we’re saying is that there are contexts where social norms are incredibly relaxed, and that in those contexts we can choose to contravene those norms.

And also, that those norms cover how to think as much as how to act; we can choose not to think that a certain act is intrinsically degrading.  We can choose to think in such a way that the degradation in the examples derives not from the act, but from context, and that context can be locally overriden (which is relatively easy) or globally changed (which is, as you point out, incredibly hard).

Comment #304: atheist on 08/25 at 08:00 PM

Ink Asylum, there is absolutely nothing wrong with you enjoying cum on your face. If you enjoy it, it is nothing but good. No-one is saying that if you enjoy this act you are wrong or bad. What we are saying is that it has a meaning that is agreed upon generally in society. We are also saying it is silly to attempt to ignore this generally agreed upon meaning.

How’s anybody “ignoring” that meaning of the act?  Everybody involved in this argument has acknowledged it.  To suggest otherwise is to set up a strawman.

Languages are also rules that are generally agreed upon in society.  The USA has English as its language of general communication.  But suppose that contrary to that, I speak Spanish at home.  Am I “silly” for “ignoring” a huge system of generally agreed upon meaning?

kristin: Amanda seemed to be telling me that if I sincerely believe I enjoy getting come on my face, then I am mildly delusional. 

It may well be that we’re talking past each other.  I never really consumed much porn until recently, so while the culture at large believes that facials are degrading (and I recognize that cultural fact), perhaps I was not indoctrinated in this.

daisyparker @ #336: Um, what the fuck? Just as the thread was finally reaching a more amicable point too…

How’s anybody “ignoring” that meaning of the act?  Everybody involved in this argument has acknowledged it.  To suggest otherwise is to set up a strawman.

It seemed to me that Ink Asylum was in fact ignoring it, saying that the meaning was only what IA beleived it was, or something to that effect. Now I see that we were all basically on the same page, just having slightly different takes on the same words.

It’s all good. I think we understand each other.

kristin: Amanda seemed to be telling me that if I sincerely believe I enjoy getting come on my face, then I am mildly delusional.

Where the hell is this coming from? You’re like the 3rd person to say it. She said nothing of the sort. She explicitly said several times that some people DO get off on it and good for them.

Jeez:

on the subject of whether one is a Bad Feminist if you like someone ejaculating in your face, my opinion is close to Amanda Hess’s:  No, of course not.

Spanking is closer to tickling in the real world, and the facial is closer to being slapped in the face.  Again, if being slapped in the face is your thing, go with it.

f you get off on that meaning, go for it.  ... I also want it to be 100% clear that I’m disagreeing with the intellectual dishonesty, not trying to shame someone for getting off on degradation.

We’d tell them that if being degraded is their thing, good for them

And that’s even without going into the comments.

She has said that the enjoyment is based on degradation, and that those who don’t feel degraded by having cum shot on their face are delusional. I’ll quote it again:

You still seem to be calling half the commenters liars or fools.  Is it really impossible for you to believe that we just enjoy facials in and of themselves, without any cultural baggage?

No, I’d call them “imperfect human beings struggling with cognitive dissonance, as I do all the time, as everyone does all the time”.  I understand the dynamics of rationalization because I’m really good at rationalization.  But it’s very wearying.
Comment #217: Amanda Marcotte on 08/25 at 06:10 PM

I actually don’t think we’re disagreeing nearly as much as you make it sound.  You’re emphasizing the society; I’m emphasizing the power to do otherwise.

Well, given that the social/cultural issues-- the assumptions, the roles, the general baggage that we all carry no matter how much we claim we don’t-- is actually what’s being debated here, then I still think we’re pretty far apart.  I don’t deny (and again, I don’t think Amanda does either) that it’s possible to cast off some of our cultural baggage to focus on sexual pleasure, and in fact I think that doing just that is nearly essential.  However, teasing apart the complex, subtextual parts of sexuality that involve power differentials, barter & negotiation, performance vs. genuine feeling, etc. isn’t easy even among the highly self-aware, and I seriously doubt that most of the people complaining about Amanda’s post have even tried… kristin, OTOH, really has thought this stuff out in a serious way, which is why you may notice that Amanda and DTG and I, et al, have no real problems with her take on submission & degradation.

But again, we’re arguing culture, mass-market stuff, ideas that become expectations that too often become burdens and therefore create unhappiness and resentment, not to mention will almost certainly revert on a broader scale to the unfortunate power dynamics from which they originated.  I don’t give a crap about what another couple does or whether they even have a middle-school-level understanding of their own kinks, but I do care if I run into multiple men over a period of a few years who expect that me performing stupid porn-film bullshit will be a routine part of our sex life, who feel entitled to throw their semen into my face because it gives them an extra testosterone thrill.  As with gun nuts and muscle-car types and Republicans, I prefer to avoid people who like those kind of power exercises.

IA, can I ask, did you and your partner grow up in a relatively porn-free cultural context? I don’t find it hard to believe that you enjoy the physical sensation or the aesthetics of getting come on your face for reasons that are unrelated to degradation. But I guess I’m finding it a bit hard to believe that you aren’t also on any level experiencing the cultural meanings most commonly associated with the act on top of that. But if you’re like the commenter above who wasn’t exposed to porn much, maybe that would explain it.
Or maybe your anti-patriarchy antibodies are incredibly efficient and you’re very resistant to common cultural narratives, in which case I would sincerely like to learn how you’re doing it.

kristin: Amanda seemed to be telling me that if I sincerely believe I enjoy getting come on my face, then I am mildly delusional.

Where the hell is this coming from? You’re like the 3rd person to say it. She said nothing of the sort. She explicitly said several times that some people DO get off on it and good for them.

Yes, but… She said that people who enjoy it must enjoy it *because it’s degrading*.  Also that people who enjoy it and deny this are fooling themselves.  That’s just not necessarily true.

I’m with Cerberus, Ink, and all the rest who think we’ve argued this to death and basically all agree.

My first girlfriend was very oral but, oddly enough, did not like to swallow, so i got very familiar with the sight of her either spitting or letting it fall out of her mouth.  The girl she added to our relationship came up with a solution that i, not being conditioned by much in the way of outisde influence to be offended or grossed out by it, thought made perfect sense, if she wouldn’t swallow my cum, i would… whether passed to me in a kiss or licked off of her body. I don’t particularly dig big face-drenching pops, So while i do find the images and scenes and up close and in-person view of women with it in and around their mouths (lips, tongue, chin) arousing, it’s not -for me- exciting in the context of “Take that, you slut” but as more of the (admittedly extremely) fetishized recollections of my earliest experiences and the feelings and sensations i associate with them. Probably makes me something of a useless anomaly in the context of this discussion, but i figured i would put it out there

to add a bit more to that, i was very much the sub and they were usually the doms/tops in that early relationship, so when D. “added” her friend to our relationship, I was more than happy to accept that some nights, my only role in the evenings festivities was to watch

Comment #327: Cerberus on 08/25 at 08:16 PM

It’s basically like reclaiming queer. Do it, enjoy it, use the fuck out of it, but don’t then write an article like Jessica did essentially trying to deny that queer is used as an insult.

Reclaiming “queer” is a case where a set of people act to create a subversive subcontext where the word, which is an insult in broader society, gets its offending connotations inverted or blotted out.  It is a fundamentally ironic use of the term.

When translated to facials, what I see here is a bunch of people insisting that a woman who enjoys them must do so in this ironic manner.  And a number of us disagree, and insist somebody might enjoy them unironically.  Why?  Well, some of us have said that somebody might just enjoy the sensual aspects of it (feel, smell, taste).  Others have pointed at the possibility of elaborating quite different narratives out of the same materials, that can be understood without reference to the dominant “facial = degradation.” And hell yes they can, as proven by the fact that there exist cultures very different to ours where the same basic materials are symbolically elaborated in wildly different manners (read up on the Sambia from New Guinea!).

And also, I object to the analogy with “queer” in other grounds.  “Queer” is just a word; it’s an arbitrary association of sound with meaning.  With rare exceptions (e.g., linguistics proferssors), nobody makes that sound for its own sake; the purpose of making the sound is to invoke the meaning.

The point is that sexual acts are different; they can be done for the sake of invoking a conventional meaning attached to it, but they can also be done for their own sake.  What I see here is a lot of people resisting the latter possibility.

Or the briefest version: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar…

That and it was probably nearly a decade after that before i started buying/watching porn

Are y’all splitting hairs about a practice that is really kind of a last resort to keep your sex life from dying of boredom?  Who does that on a first date?  What is the percentage of johns that ask for that of a prostitute? Guys, what portion of your porn collection includes the facials? 0 for me.

I read this thread and realize I am terribly naive.  Even after years of marriage, the sweetest thing is to just cuddle and see if you wind up with a puddle.  Fuck happens.  Going into to the bedroom with a menu where you checked off two positions and one “old face full” seems more like homework than gittin’ wild.

So wrongside, if a woman tells you that she finds it extremely erotic to defecate in your mouth, would you gladly oblige her in return for her accepting your man-goo to her face?  I’m sure there are some men who are completely turned on by having a woman shit in their mouth, so you really should keep an open mind about it.

Sound like a fair trade?

Is anybody else thoroughly creeped out by wrongside deciding to interject his opinion on this particular topic?

Anyone?  Anyone?

Um, late to the discussion...but if anyone else here has married their first love, I imagine they can describe the “involuntary” face shots. Looking back, it was hilarious. At the time, not so much, and I deserve an Oscar for my subsequent “acting.” He deserves kudos for his determination to make it good for me...practice, practice.

What I’ve read about here is The Problem with Kinks.  All kinks are kinky because they’re fun, but kinks are only fun if they’re voluntary.  And voluntary means admitting why a kink is fun, which can lead to a scary place where someone gets turned on by and admits to all sorts of things that are either embarrassing, socially unacceptable, or just plain wrong if performed by the wrong people under the wrong circumstances and can lead to all sorts of problems if they do.  I have pretty mundane kinks, but I don’t want even a small amount of my friends to know about even some of them.

All sorts of kinks are powerful because people want them.  But not all people.  Acts that are mundane to some can be transgressive to others whether it’s anal sex, facials, shaving, bondage, branding, spanking, wearing a lacy thong, eating your own cum, peeing on others, covering a body in chocolate syrup, masturbating in front of someone, whatever it is that’s said during sex, and an encyclopedia or three more things.  And all of these acts can be wrong if someone is coerced or forced into performing them.  Everyone is different in what turns them off just as they’re different in what turns them on, but porn is a place for exploration and discovery much more than a place to find the new “normal”.  At least that’s how thinking people should approach it.

I’m with you, DTG. If wrongside thinks facials are nifty, that’s enough for me to think not just twice, but about 14 times. Ugh.

And yanno what? When people insist it’s a complete coincidence that their preferences strongly resemble the dominant cultural structure, I *do* think that’s extremely likely to be denial.

I know I already made the comparison to people who deny misogyny affects their personal relationship, but I’ll tell you what this is sounding even more like: discussions where a dozen women insist they shave their legs because they personally just evolved a completely idiosyncratic and personal preference for hairlessness; it has nothing to do with the larger culture, honest! They just like it better because, um, because they do, that’s why!

I mean, I like hairlessness too; I think that smooth feel and look is sexy. But I don’t pretend my feeling that way has nothing to do with a culture that has told me every day of my life that hairless = sexy.

Ok, I realize it’s probably pointless to come in at comment number 353 (or more) and have any sort of relevant point, but here it goes:

Wrongsideofthetracks:

“Amanda, it’s disheartening that you can’t accept that many men may like this act because it is visually hot, not because they are trying to put women in their place. And even more pitiful is that you can’t imagine any woman would like this because it may make her feel extra desirable to her man.”

There are two reasons this doesn’t stand up.

1) WHY is it visually hot? What specifically about seeing sperm on a woman’s face is arousing?

2) Why are you framing this as a woman doing it for the pleasure of the MAN, and not her own pleasure?

THAT’S the unexamined assumption Amanda’s talking about.

Now, it is, indeed possible to set up a scenario where a facial isn’t degrading. If a person truly LIKES the smell/taste/feel of ejaculate, then they may well enjoy having it near the erogenous/sense areas of the face. But that’s an act that the person would then be seeking on their own, not something they do for the pleasure of another.

Perhaps a man does like to see the ejaculate on the face of someone they love. But unless that reason is because they KNOW the recipient enjoys it, then they are doing something _to_ the person, not _for_ the person, and we’re suddenly getting into a dominance act, and all the dominance/submission negotiation applies.

Because let’s face it, unless the recipient actually enjoys the smell, taste and feel of ejaculate, a facial is getting that awfully close to the nose, mouth and cheeks, to say nothing of getting it in the eyes. I’d hazard a guess that most people don’t actually like ejaculate enough to make a facial enjoyable, as opposed to merely acceptable. Even if porn doesn’t emphasize the dominance the facial explicitly, they certainly over-represent the facial as an acceptable sex act, when most people feel it isn’t. In that way, it becomes coercive, as people expect those without a semen fetish to act like porn stars.

And yanno what? When people insist it’s a complete coincidence that their preferences strongly resemble the dominant cultural structure, I *do* think that’s extremely likely to be denial.

I agree with this, although - as I am sure is the case with you as well - I am perfectly happy to find out I was wrong.

Well, bully for you, but I don’t see the urgent need to tell anyone who feels they have discovered their own reason (d) - or is (4)? - that they’re clearly wrong, and could never see anything in it that you don’t.

What reason? Name it, please. Enlighten me.

And I see that now we’re all suddenly ultra-subjectivists about meaning?

Okay, great. Anyone who enjoys facials is a dirty slutty spic whore.

What, you object? Hey, I personally find those terms empowering and utterly non-degrading, and I will continue to use them. In my own little universe, those terms mean “precious flower.” So really, no one should take offense when they hear someone called those terms. Law enforcement shouldn’t assume, when someone’s been beaten repeatedly and called a whore or a nigger or whatever,

Or, you know, I could acknowledge that I’m not a little island of meaning all to my own and that I actually exist in a culture of shared meaning that influences all the semantics inside my head.

Sacundim, your English-Spanish analogy is bogus. If you speak Spanish at home, that’s not changing the fact that you’d have to speak English to interact with the wider society, OR the fact that your Spanish in the home will be influenced by your use of English in the outside world. You’d probably end up with Spanglish, in fact, and I know this from personal experience as a Latino.

, but cumming on partner three’s smiling, beautiful face is degrading? Yeah right! And cunnilingus is degrading because it requires someone to go “down”

Amanda, it’s disheartening that you can’t accept that many men may like this act because it is visually hot

Why is it visually hot to dump a load of fluid that is commonly considered dirty onto the face, which is considered an indicator of personal identity? Why would you want to put stuff all over her beautiful, smiling face, covering it up, especially when coming on her that way would probably mean that you can’t see her face as you jerk off (unless you’re super-flexible or have really good aim and are standing back)? You’d see her face much better if you came on her stomach.

Cunnilingus and fellatio directly stimulate nerve endings, obviously. You don’t need to point to cultural meanings to explain why they’re hot (though cultural meanings do get involved) because there’s a physical sensation there. There’s no difference as far as your dick’s nerve endings are concerned between coming on her face or on her belly, so the difference is in the mind.

Others have pointed at the possibility of elaborating quite different narratives out of the same materials, that can be understood without reference to the dominant “facial = degradation.” And hell yes they can, as proven by the fact that there exist cultures very different to ours where the same basic materials are symbolically elaborated in wildly different manners (read up on the Sambia from New Guinea!).

Oh, PLEASE.

We’re not in those cultures, which are--as you point out--very different from ours. Our system of meaning is very different, and no, we can’t just avoid reference to the dominant “facial = degradation.”

Do some women enjoy the taste and feel of semen? Sure. Do most? NO, for the same reason that people generally don’t find it enjoyable to have anything spurted with force near their eyes, nose and mouth. And for the same reason that people generally don’t like the taste of bitter foods, though there is personal variation. For that minority of women who like the taste and feel of it, their liking for facials probably don’t have anything to do with degradation, though even they can’t just avoid the cultural meaning of it (they can do other things, like talk it out or deliberately ignore it, but not avoid reference to it).

Regardless, most facials are not done for the woman. They are done for the man and were popularized through a market that appeals to men. That’s a big part of the point here that people miss.

@ daisyparker, it wasn’t fair of me to just say “jerk,” and I shouldn’t have snapped.  You didn’t deserve it. 

Personally, I’m easily disgusted by humiliation scenarios in porn, certainly didn’t grow up on it (kids today!), and don’t think I have any kinks either that I’d want to defend or protect.  “Facials” I’ve never given nor received.  But I also know that telling people the _real_ reasons why they like what they like, and telling them that it’s OK, it’s cool, but they should think about it more or call it by its _real_ name—as has happened several times here—is condescending and, frankly, offensive.  It wasn’t that long ago that the prevailing wisdom was that the _real_ reason for gay sexuality was “inversion,” that gay people identified with the opposite sex and thus role-played accordingly.  The “real reason” rhetorical move (or let’s be honest, or let’s call it what it is) is a sketchy one.  I think it was a mistake to take that tack.

@ LR—A lot of people (used to) find fault with anal sex for reasons of squick too.

They are done for the man and were popularized through a market that appeals to men.

I’m sure this act has been popularized via porn.  Still, if someone genuinely gets off on being on the receiving end of a “facial,” even if she likes it because she’s mimicking porn, even if she never would have thought to do it if it weren’t for watching porn, is she _necessarily_ being duped into liking it?  And, frankly, what difference does it make?  Amanda says the difference it makes has to do with bullying, or with being made to feel that your feelings of discomfort are prudish.  So draw the line there.  That’s what isn’t cool.  It doesn’t really have that much to do with owning degradation as degradation.  The much more important proposition is that no one should be coerced _in an immediate and tangible way_ into doing something she’s uncomfortable doing.  Sorting out the degree of the falsity of her consciousness—she doesn’t _really_ like it, even if she tells you she does, even if you have no reason to think she’s embarrassed or lying—is angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin territory.  The kind of honesty that’s important isn’t “admit you like to be degraded or to degrade someone else” but rather “don’t manipulate or browbeat someone into any sexual acts.”

FlipYrWhig, I think a lot of those objections to het anal sex still hold. Not in an absolute universalistic way, but in a “this is a common phenomenon” sort of way: plenty of men do see it as a special conquest to get a reluctant female to submit to anal sex, thereby humiliating her and exalting him, as they see it.

And you’re attacking a straw man by invoking the dread “false consciousness” argument. Sure, she’s been “duped” in the sense that her preferences have been strongly shaped by our culture. That doesn’t make her preferences less real. However, the reality of her preferences don’t take away their cultural meaning.

It’s not “admit you like to be degraded.” It’s “admit that this act has this cultural meaning, and therefore people are perfectly reasonable in refusing to do it because they don’t like the meaning.” It’s “don’t pretend the act doesn’t have this common meaning just because you like it, perhaps for reasons that don’t depend on the cultural meaning.”

If we admitted that the cultural meaning existed, we’d be able to talk about just why porn has popularized facials and just why men in our culture often ask a woman to do it or even pressure her to.

Still, if someone genuinely gets off on being on the receiving end of a “facial,” even if she likes it because she’s mimicking porn, even if she never would have thought to do it if it weren’t for watching porn, is she _necessarily_ being duped into liking it?

Actually, I think where Amanda (and other people in the thread) were going with it was to say that if you acknowledge up front that this act you like is usually constructed as humiliating, you’re going to be able to enjoy it on its own terms and not feel bad because you get off on something that’s demeaning.  It’s removing that extra level of mindfuck of, “I really like being spanked because it’s demeaning ... but I feel bad about liking it because liking it for that reason means I’m a pervert.”

I am still waiting on an explanation of a completely non-status-related (and thus non-degrading) reason for which a facial shot is arousing or exciting.

Not, mind you, “we don’t care where he comes and sometimes it’s my face, sometimes somewhere else”. A facial shot, where the purpose is to aim at the woman’s face, and aiming and ejaculating at her face specifically is arousing, exciting and/or satisfying for one or both partners.

I’m avidly interested to learn about this amazing different paradigm for finding it arousing without any reference to the mainstream culture and its meanings therein.

Bonus points if you can come up with an explanation for kneeling, bondage and/or over the knee spankings being hot without referencing status at all. Cause ... really?

This stream of replies is very long and so I’m not sure if people have already said this all but this whole attitude just seems strange to me. Of course facials have a context which is demeaning, no one’s denying that. But it’s not the only possible context, or even the most obvious one to a lot of people.

Now everyone seems to agree that if it feels good and it’s consensual with no coersion, do it. The sticking point is the idea that if you enjoy it, it has to be because you enjoy degrading your partner or being degraded by your partner, and so have to frame those feelings in that context. That to me seems old fashioned. Sure, ten or twenty years ago it could be seen as a purely degrading act because there was no other context, the fact that it’s being mainstreamed means there’s more space for it to exist as something that’s just plain sexy.

Do people really find it unbelievable that someone might find it sexy in and of itself for their face to be covered in their lover’s hot fresh spunk? Or that the lover in question might find it sexy to cover the other person without that making her ‘dirty’?

Do people really find it unbelievable that someone might find it sexy in and of itself for their face to be covered in their lover’s hot fresh spunk?

Yes we do, in the same sense we find it somewhat unbelievable when many feminist women claim they just happened to evolve an aesthetic desire for shaving their legs that is magically independant of the dominant cultural paradigm.

It’s not “admit you like to be degraded.” It’s “admit that this act has this cultural meaning, and therefore people are perfectly reasonable in refusing to do it because they don’t like the meaning.” It’s “don’t pretend the act doesn’t have this common meaning just because you like it, perhaps for reasons that don’t depend on the cultural meaning.”

Can’t it be both/and?  People are perfectly reasonable in refusing to do _anything_ sexually because they don’t like the meaning, or the feeling, or because they just don’t swing that way. 

The part that starts to bug me is that I just don’t know where “admitting that this act has this cultural meaning” really leads anyone.  Who cares?  It starts to get very close to a corollary:  “admit that this act has this cultural meaning, and that’s the real reason you like it, and if you reflected on it enough you’d see my point.”

I’ve seen a lot of people in a lot of discussions on blogs talking about the things that get them off, and not all them are really for me, but I don’t really think I need to make them confront the real deep-down reasons why they get off the way they do.  It’d be pretty dickish of me to do that.

Of course the cultural meaning exists.  But someone who likes something doesn’t necessarily like it _because_ of its cultural meaning.  And I don’t know how you’d ever be able to sort it out to anyone’s satisfaction, especially when you’re talking about the intimate preferences of people who aren’t you.

I guess I’d diagram it like this.  “Why porn has popularized facials” is an interesting discussion.  “Why a woman who claims to like facials is only kidding herself” isn’t really.  “Why a man who claims to know women who like facials feels like he’s entitled to one from you”—that’s an interesting discussion again.

BlackBloc, unless you’re trying to claim that an act of physical grooming should be judged on the same cultural level as a sex act, you’re setting up a straw man there. If you can’t believe someone would find the feel or smell of their lover’s ejaculate sexy, do you also think oral sex is inherently unpleasant to give?

And actually, isn’t there a dangerous flipside to this whole thing? The idea that any women who enjoy getting facials enjoy being degraded in bed?

People are perfectly reasonable in refusing to do _anything_ sexually because they don’t like the meaning, or the feeling, or because they just don’t swing that way.

And in order to acknowledge the reasonableness of someone refusing to do something because of the meaning, you have to acknowledge the meaning.

FlipYrWhig, you’re debunking a straw man again. Nobody said a woman who likes facials is “only kidding herself,” and nobody’s particularly interested in talking about if/why she’s kidding herself. You yourself admit that why porn popularized facials, and why some men feel entitled to demand them, are interesting topics to discuss. “Admitting the cultural meaning,” which you said you don’t see the point of, is important in order to discuss those topics that you agree are interesting. If we don’t talk about the cultural meaning, we’ll never get a good understanding of why porn popularized facials, or why some men feel entitled to demand them.

And actually, isn’t there a dangerous flipside to this whole thing? The idea that any women who enjoy getting facials enjoy being degraded in bed?

Not really, Stubborn. A woman might enjoy the physical feel of come on her face--she’d be a rare woman, but they exist.

A man who ejaculates on a woman’s face gets no different direct stimulation than if he ejaculates on her stomach, or onto the sheets. So you have to look for the mind’s influence--if a man finds facials specially stimulating, it’s because of his mindset about them. Which leads us to cultural meanings, which leads us to degradation.

So I’d say a woman might enjoy facials for reasons unrelated to degradation, but a man is highly unlikely to get pleasure from giving them for reasons unrelated to degradation.

<blockquote> unless you’re trying to claim that an act of physical grooming should be judged on the same cultural level as a sex act, you’re setting up a straw man</quote>

Uh, no. Social and cultural expectations affect both. Lots.

Wow. Lots to “digest.” I may be the rare pandagonian that took it up the nose while we were trying to avoid intercourse, way back when, but please believe it was a surprise...embarrassing to us both. I didn’t get the “sexiness” of it then.  Don’t get it now.

Hat tip to MPG for saying cromulent!

I have never disputed that. Ever. Some people, though, Amanda included, are trying to tell me that my judgment in my mind is wrong. That I’m either lying or deluded.

Ink Asylum, hon, that’s all well and good.  Honest, it is.  It becomes problematic, and you become a bit of an asshole, if you are having sex with a man and you really want him to cum on your face and he really doesn’t want to cum on your face because he’s not comfortable with it and you try to persuade him that he has “hang ups” and he really should want to cum on your face because all the “sex positive” dudes are into that.  Got it?

I think one of the reasons the type of discussion being had on this thread is important, including taking into consideration the cultural baggage attached to various sex acts, is that the mark of a healthy, respectful relationship is that participants DISCUSS their likes and dislikes BEFORE springing something on their partner.  I’m not saying I’d never allow a man to ejaculate on certain parts of me, but I’d be highly upset if my partner decided to up and do it without finding out if I was okay with it.  I’ve been in situations like that (with other types of things) often enough to realize that some (too many) guys have internalized some pretty effed up ideas about consent from porn.

LR, I think FlipYrWhig isn’t making a strawman argument; Amanda really did say, up in the original post,

Sex is a wild and woolly thing, and I don’t blame anyone who has integrated sexual shaming into their libido and really gets off on being degraded and shamed.  If that’s your thing, go with Jesus.  Seriously.  Get off how you want.  I’m glad you’re having fun.  But for the love of god, please quit constructing self-serving arguments where you both get to get off on being demeaned while denying that’s what it is.

And then, in the VERY FIRST COMMENT, lostmypassword offered a different narrative for construing the same act:

I don’t know, I hate being demeaned but I enjoy being “showered” with my BF’s juices, on the face or body. To me is like winning a race and shaking the champagne bottle raspberry A celebration of getting to the finish line!

I don’t deny that there’s a really strong cultural narrative that paints receiving a facial as demeaning, and the equivalent of getting spit on.  But I think it IS appealing to the “false consciousness” argument to tell lostmypassword that her narrative is invalid EVEN FOR HER.

I hate being tickled. But Amanda seems to put tickling in a category of light and playful. I don’t experience it that way at all; for ME, it feels like assault. Insisting that lostmypassword can’t be experiencing a facial as non-demeaning seems to me to be the same as if she insisted that I can’t actually feel assaulted when someone tickles me, because our cultural narrative about tickling is that it’s loving and playful. I don’t think she’d deny the validity of my experience. Why shouldn’t it work the other way?

Spraying semen on a sex partner’s face.  Hmmm......

Sounds more like a concept for a sardonic folk song I heard once about a woman making commentary about a dude for not being able to aim a certain of his appendage correctly or otherwise knowing his way in her bed.....not something I could ever picture as sexxy…

But I also know that telling people the _real_ reasons why they like what they like, and telling them that it’s OK, it’s cool, but they should think about it more or call it by its _real_ name—as has happened several times here—is condescending and, frankly, offensive.

Bingo. And I’m freaking astonished to see Amanda playing the condescending “oh, it’s okaAAY if you’re a freak and a pervert as long as you don’t try to pretend to us nice people that you’re anything else” card.

But maybe I shouldn’t be. It’s not as though being a feminist insulates us from bourgeoise Nice Girls Don’t narratives.

And then, in the VERY FIRST COMMENT, lostmypassword offered a different narrative for construing the same act:

Not really, no. Lost’s “victory champagne moment” does not describe a facial shot, although it might describe cum just happening to land on someone’s face while happily spraying wherever it might land. If her victory champagne moment were a facial shot, it would be the equivalent of the guy deliberately aiming the spray of champagne full in the woman’s face, while she held still and let him do that.

kristin, I’ve seen my share of victory champagne footage (The Boston Celtics in the 1980s, those were the days) and there were both “champagne goes everywhere” and “aim it at the teammate’s face / dump it on their head” moments. If both she and her partner are construing the money shot as “victory champagne,” then it could be aimed at the face and STILL be light and playful. That’s up to them.

A not insignificant part of my current sex life is spent working up narratives AROUND various activities so that my partner and I can both enjoy them, since our kinks aren’t perfectly congruent. We’ve each got a couple of things we’d like that are hard limits for the other, so we don’t do them; but then there are other things that one of us likes and the other is indifferent about, but if we work it into an overall narrative that pleases both of us, then it becomes mutual fun.  So I am very much of the opinion that you CAN construct individual narratives, even while acknowledging that there’s a broader social narrative at play.

Rikibeth@381, have you considered outsourcing? The extra administration and the need to deal with outside organisations is usually more than made up for in the effeciency and quality gains of engaging a speciality provider for niche functions.

I think it’s fair to say, in America, facials are often construed as demeaning. Absolutely that doesn’t invalidate anyone’s personal experience of them not being demeaning. But your personal experience also doesn’t invalidate the cultural narrative. Both of those ideas can coexist simultaneously.

@361, thanks for the apology. I was really regretting my response to what you said.

The thing is, while I think that telling people what their real reasons are for liking something is rude and counterproductive, discussing the underlying subconscious motivations are for (whatever) meme in a general sense is necessary and important, and something Amanda is rather good at.

So if she makes the point that opposition to health care reform is about racism or anti-choicers are motivated by misogyny, that’s something that needs to be said. But it’s probably not the tack you’d take when talking to an actual anti-health care person or an actual anti-choicer about why they think what they do. And it gets kind of muddled when you’re both talking about a meme and talking to the people who carry it. Sorry for the rather offensive comparisions, I don’t think enjoying facials is in any way morally equivalent to being anti-choice.
It’s just that I think it is actually true that people sometimes have motivations they don’t admit to or aren’t consciously aware of. And it may well be true of any individual person that they don’t have a particular unconscious motivation but I don’t think they should be too surprised if they come into a thread and say so and people doubt them. “I’m not in denial!” isn’t a point that you can expect people to accede to very easily, even if it happens to be true in your particular case. FWIW I do tend to believe the posters who have explained at length why they don’t find facials demeaning.
But the main point I’m making is that I don’t think it’s a good idea to make discussion of unconscious, denied motivations taboo because it’s a useful way of understanding stuff sometimes.

Frankly, I think this whole debate is just a matter of sementics.

And it’s different than just smearing sex juices all over your face, for the same reason that eating messy is different than having someone shove a pie in your face, and kissing heavily isn’t the same thing as having someone spit in your face.

I’d go further than that, and claim that a man ejaculating on a woman’s face is inherently different from a woman ejaculating on a man’s face (you know, if you’re into that sort of thing), simply because the connotations are so damned strong. Same with fellatio being different from cunnilingus. Yes, you can be aware of this and do these things in a way that’s fun for everyone involved (assuming they’re actually into it), and degrading only in the ways that people want it to be, but it takes work, and I think it’s that work that needs to be recognized by the people doing it.

Why is it visually hot to dump a load of fluid that is commonly considered dirty onto the face, which is considered an indicator of personal identity? Why would you want to put stuff all over her beautiful, smiling face, covering it up, especially when coming on her that way would probably mean that you can’t see her face as you jerk off (unless you’re super-flexible or have really good aim and are standing back)?

Well, if you don’t see semen as dirty, and by extension men’s sexuality as dirty and bad, you might think otherwise.  And a partner who does something (in this case, a facial) that contains the underlying message that the man ejaculating isn’t dirty, that his sexuality/sexual impulses/sexual identity isn’t gross, or something to be rejected, but something to be embraced and enjoyed in her personal identity, that such a man might find this really pleasurable, and not see it as him degrading her, but her embracing him and not seeing him as dirty.  This isn’t hard to believe at all, and I’m sure some men and some women feel this way.

The sticking point is that Amanda and quite a few others really, really are saying that a facial is inherently degrading as an objective thing independent of context and regardless of who is involved. Amanda has gone so far as to say, several times, that anyone who thinks otherwise (about their OWN experience) is exhibiting cognitive dissonance or is lying (as in “for god’s sake, just admit it.)

So for these people, the only two choices are 1) don’t do it at all, or 2) do it, but admit that your choice has exactly one possible meaning - that you are being degraded, and are choosing to do so.

A generation ago, this same discussion happened all the time about blow jobs (and still does, in some circles.) Putting a man’s dick in your mouth is inherently degrading, cannot possibly be pleasurable in itself, there is nothing in it for you, and it is purely a construction of porn. If you want to engage in a degrading act, then go for it, but stop pretending to the rest of us that you enjoy it. You slut.

How is this any different? I have not seen a single poster trying to say that there is not a consensus that facials are degrading. I haven’t seen a single poster on this board say they should be standard, or put up with, or that someone should just take for granted that it is acceptable to do without consent in advance.

I applaud Amanda for at least allowing that people should be allowed to engage in dominance/submission play or degradation play if that turns them on, and if they do, they should feel free to be open about it. For that, way to go.

But to demand that everyone share the same interpretation is just wrong. ESPECIALLY on this board. For God’s sake, the argument is that if society has a majority interpretation of something, everyone else has to not only be aware of it, but buy into it and embrace it. And if their experience is different from the paradigm around them, they are suffering from cognitive dissonance or deliberately lying.

How the hell does that fit with every other opinion expressed here? Women’s rights? The dignity and reality of gay people’s experience? Minority rights?

I don’t give a flying crap about who shoots cum where compared to the insistence that cultural norms have to define (and limit) our personal experience, and that everyone else is allowed to define for people what experience they are allowed to have.

I’ve put up with that crap for far too much of my life.  Sure, in some contexts, a polite question about “Have you considered that this cultural norm may be affecting your experience” is fine and necessary, but where the hell did “If you disagree with me you are lying or having cognitive dissonance” come from?

Amanda, it is just as wrong to declare that someone is only allowed to like something for the same reason you do as it is to declare that nobody is allowed to like something you don’t.

You’re not so much wrong here as you are being limiting and dogmatic.

For that matter, going back to the main topic, it is perfectly fine to NOT like facials for whatever reason. Someone is welcome to find them not the least degrading but a pain in the ass to clean up after (you can quick wipe a stomach, but you have a wash your hair, for example).

This is the most boring thread I’ve ever tried to read about sex.

Facials are about dominance.  If you do it, if you like it, know it and own it.  It’s not so hard, you know?

Facials are about dominance.  If you do it, if you like it, know it and own it.

Thanks for defining everyone elses’ experiences from them.  I’m sure they all appreciate it.

Your welcome, Brian.  Well, that’s settled then. 

Can we get back to sex being interesting now?  Because this discussion has really beaten the corpse of the subject to death.

And it’s hard to kill a corpse.

Dukkha @382, I’ve got a general-purpose source as well, but the niche provider is more local, and also very cute. Worth the trouble.

All sex acts can be selfish, or at least performed selfishly, but some acts are just more selfish than others.  Likewise, some sex partner are more selfless than others.

Facials definitely come from the degrading world of porn tropes, though they can be a lot of silly, messy fun if two people care to look at it that way.  It can also be a creepy game, a power play, a degrading display of conquest (the only place I’ve seen “cum-soaked whore” appear is in the kind of fiction I don’t read at work or around the children,) or some sort of initiation into something I wouldn’t care to join.  Anyway, as with all things involving choices, the dogma gets in the way of the freedom for people to live as they choose.

I agree with Amanda that the people who like it are kidding themselves if they don’t see it as somehow degrading, but I don’t agree with her that the categories of “Degrading” and “Not Degrading” can be so easily demarcated (deMarcotted?) Still, what two or more people decide to do when they get naked is up to them and if no one is getting hurt I won’t be bothered.  Also, I’m glad feminists write lots of blogs so that people who aren’t having fulfilling sex lives can see their options and different ways to think and ways to accept their fantasies and all the rest.  Amanda does even straight men like myself a service when she challenges us to think differently, even as I roll my eyes and say “Not this again,” I’m still reading.

If we don’t talk about the cultural meaning, we’ll never get a good understanding of why porn popularized facials, or why some men feel entitled to demand them.

I’d like to think that talking about “the cultural meaning” could be done without hectoring individuals about why they like what they like.  But that hasn’t really happened in this post, or this thread, even though Pandagon really ought to be one of the best judgment-free zones on the planet.  I don’t go into threads and tut-tut people about why they get off on their fetishes.

It’s just that I think it is actually true that people sometimes have motivations they don’t admit to or aren’t consciously aware of.

This thread is dead or at least dying, but for what it’s worth…

I absolutely agree that this is true.  But it’s a difficult thing to try to figure out when your _own_ real motivation is true or false, or how you could even tell (is this the real world or the Matrix?).  And it’s even more difficult, quixotic even, to figure it out for _someone else_, so I’m not sure what the rewards are of trying.  And I know that even distinguishing free will from coercion gets muddy in a hurry once you factor in that we’re all soaking in a soup of expectations and cultural norms.

Editing to add to the end:  Maybe we all come pre-coerced and don’t even know it.  How could you tell?

Hell, we gotta make 400.

So,

What’s interesting here and why we’re arguing past eachother is our relation to symbolism.  Some people always see the symbolism in things.  They actually consider it in making choices.  For some people a thing is what it is, nothing more nothing less.

I see symbolism everywhere—it’s kind of my profession.  But I also try not to dictate to people what they see.  When it comes to sexuality this is hotly contested ground.  I wouldn’t presume to lecture women who use strap-ons about what they _really_ get out of that.  We don’t tend to do that around here.  Thus the discordance.

Maybe we all come pre-coerced and don’t even know it.  How could you tell?

Maybe? We DO all come pre-coerced. Culture is what gets created by those who hold power over us.

And we can tell by examining social trends. “Personal choice” is just the random noise around the global probabilistic distribution that is represented by the ‘default value’ of the culture you live in.

I am interested in Magis’s meta-discussion because it goes on in my film and lit classes all the time.  I would extend that and say that some people look for symbolism in EVERYTHING (either because they’ve been trained to do so or because it interests them) and others only look for symbolism SOMETIMES (because it directly effects them or because it happened to jump out to them in a particular instance or whatever) and then decide that NOTHING other than the things that triggered their symbolism censors have any inherent symbolism but that instead they are “random.” I have yet to hear a satisfying student’s definition of what “random” means, but I think that it means “an object that has unintentionally arrived in its current state.”

What we symbologists always argue is that very few things are “random.” That most cultural productions have a lot of thought put into them before they are released into the world.  A director will agonize over what color dress his actress is wearing or how the lighting looks in a scene or what have you.  A poet will debate for days over what particular word to use.  And we have no way of knowing which decisions were thought over and which were dismissed, so *all* choices are open for reading.

Magis said:

“What’s interesting here and why we’re arguing past each other is our relation to symbolism.  Some people always see the symbolism in things.  They actually consider it in making choices.  For some people a thing is what it is, nothing more nothing less.”

The texts from which we have learned the behavior of the “facial” are painstakingly constructed cultural products meant to demean women.  The act cannot be divorced from that context.  If people want to add on their own interpretations within their own private situations, they can.  But they are merely ADDING a potential symbolism onto the existing, bedrock symbolism that porn has constructed for us over and over and over.  They can never take away the initial symbolism that has been instilled into the act by tons and tons of porn flicks.

When someone makes a list and says that “facials are required for good girl friends” they are not saying “facials can mean nice happy things in addition to degrading things.” They are attempting to erase the original symbolic meaning, to say that “its just an act and it means whatever you want it to mean… or it means nothing at all.” THAT is, I think, what Amanda meant by “they are fooling themselves.” They are divorcing an act from a context that it is pretty much impossible to divorce it from.

-Megan

edit: sensors not censors

Hey wait.
Did blackbloc manage to successfully just link this back to Amanda’s “BSG is actually about the illusion of free will” idea?

Nice trick.
Probably from Montreal.

@ BlackBloc—But if it’s coercion all the way down—and I largely agree; even if we feel like we have autonomous selves and free choices we’re always bounded by parameters—what do you do next?  It just seems futile.  If we’re all coerced or duped at some level, why bother sorting out the duped-and-aware (I like what I like, even though I know it’s the product of factors beyond my control) from the duped-and-unaware (I like what I like, because that’s just me)?

The texts from which we have learned the behavior of the “facial” are painstakingly constructed cultural products meant to demean women.  The act cannot be divorced from that context.

Can’t you say all the same things about straight anal sex, though, or “doggystyle”?  In porn both are/were linked to humiliation and punishment.  And there are plenty of men who get off on them because they’re mimicking porn.  And there are plenty of women who don’t get off on them but go along because they feel pressure to mimic porn.  But there are also plenty of women who do get off on them and are aware of its prevalence in porn but do it anyway.  Are they just not admitting that they’re caught in a script about degradation?  Are they divorcing the act from its context?  Or do they feel what they feel _along with_ being aware of how it has all kinds of associations?

When someone makes a list and says that “facials are required for good girl friends”

@ madavis4—Yes, the inclusion on a list of Hot Things To Do For Him can hardly be divorced from porn fantasies.  That has a lot of problems.  But the discussion here quickly morphed into saying that _as an act_ it is caught up in ideas of degradation _for everyone_, at least if they think about it hard enough and don’t deny the truth.  I don’t think we can really say that so prescriptively.

Imagine if someone said “I think Elvis Costello’s music is cacaphonous and non-melodic.” If while you were boggling they then said “if you like non-melodic, cacaphonous music, I’m not going to judge you for that, just cop to it,” that would ring a little hollow, wouldn’t it?

BlackBloc (18):

I’d just like an actual sex positive erotica company to start making videos I can wank to without having to suffer through degradation narratives.

QFT. I don’t like visual porn, though I don’t know how much of that is not liking it and how much is this.

-390-

You nailed it! I was just about to add my thoughts to this, but I love the way you expressed it. If I had time, I was going to go back and snip all the “semen is dirty” “spunk is disgusting” comments and list them all. And, of course, if someone thinks that semen is disgusting, facials are “inherently” degrading. It’s just common knowledge, right?

kristin asked for a reason why facials appeal so much to men OTHER than degradation. I’ve got an example. Every man who’s had several partners has had at least one who had that “sperm-negative” attitude. As he nears orgasm, they pull their mouth off, point his dick the other direction, dive out of the way of the splooge, etc. All of which sends the very clear message that his ejaculate is disgusting and vile. The partnerwho swallows is much more satisfying because she is not rejecting his “essence.” The partner who revels in it and has fun with it is showing acceptance at a really fundamental level. That’s incredibly erotic.

In a comparison between “Oh damn, you’re coming, keep that nasty shit away from me” and “Shower me with it,” it’s pretty obvious which is more exciting to most men. And I don’t see how enthusiastic acceptance of a man’s ejaculate has to necessarily be “degrading.” I find this assumption incredibly insulting.

That being said, the way it’s done in porn is often degrading...I saw one website where the theme was ejaculating into a girl’s open eyes, meaning she would need some serious Visine. Yecch.

FlipYrWhig:

I thought that I made it clear that, if they saw their own personal contexts as additive, then they were being fair (ie: feeling what they do along with an awareness of the original context) and that only those who DENY that context (those who say that it is a neutral act and that you have to do it to be a good girl friend like the original poster that Amanda is talking about) are being unfair.

Is straight anal sex a “straight out of porn” act like the facial?  Even the *word* “facial” comes from porn, whereas anal sex has a number of other connected contexts (accurate or otherwise) that are just as strong as the straight porn degrading context, ie: gay sex, “the Greeks,” etc.  With the facial, there aren’t really any other strong contenders. 

I would argue that “doggy style” sex *is* linked to humiliation and punishment in the same way that a facial is for the same reason.  The context from which we learned the term “doggy style” is porn.  Even the name is designed to depersonalize.

“But the discussion here quickly morphed into saying that _as an act_ it is caught up in ideas of degradation _for everyone_, at least if they think about it hard enough and don’t deny the truth.  I don’t think we can really say that so prescriptively. “

I think that the act *is* caught up in ideas of degradation.  I don’t really know what “for everyone” means.  If you mean “does everyone experience the act as degrading?” then the answer is obviously “no.” If you mean “should everyone understand that the original context of this act was degradation and that, while some may choose to use the act anyway within new contexts, all should be sensitive to this original connotation and grapple with it before dismissing it as irrelevant to their own experiences?” then, in my opinion, the answer is yes.

I pretty much agree with Amanda here. My wife and I both enjoy this act, as well as other dominant/submissive acts. But there’s definitely at least mild degradation there (that’s what makes it fun).

I should add that when I’m done I usually give her a big kiss

@ madavis4:  I guess my point is a narrow one, really, but it’s mostly this—there’s a difference between denying that a context exists and denying that the context dictates every aspect of your experience.  I don’t think many people would deny that there _is_ a pornariffic context for these acts and other.  What’s being denied is that the context is determinative.  That’s why the word “degrading” became so, ahem, loaded.  “You like it and it is used to degrade in porn” becomes “You like it because it is used to degrade in porn,” and that’s bothersome.  I don’t think we’re really disagreeing all that much.

kristin asked for a reason why facials appeal so much to men OTHER than degradation. I’ve got an example. Every man who’s had several partners has had at least one who had that “sperm-negative” attitude. As he nears orgasm, they pull their mouth off, point his dick the other direction, dive out of the way of the splooge, etc. All of which sends the very clear message that his ejaculate is disgusting and vile. The partnerwho swallows is much more satisfying because she is not rejecting his “essence.” The partner who revels in it and has fun with it is showing acceptance at a really fundamental level. That’s incredibly erotic.

In a comparison between “Oh damn, you’re coming, keep that nasty shit away from me” and “Shower me with it,” it’s pretty obvious which is more exciting to most men. And I don’t see how enthusiastic acceptance of a man’s ejaculate has to necessarily be “degrading.” I find this assumption incredibly insulting.

Yes, that should pretty obvious, but it’s been rejected a bunch of times with the argument that behaving like “semen is not all that bad” and “I love semen” are symbolically equivalent.  It’s probably unreasonable to expect women to grok how hung up men can get about semen, though.  If they’re convinced your wrong about your own feelings ... what is there to discuss?

It’s probably unreasonable to expect women to grok how hung up men can get about semen, though.

No more unreasonable than it is to expect men to grok how women can be a bit sensitive about becoming a sexual object/blow-up doll/fuckhole/whatever-the-highly-entertaining-sock-term-was-many-posts-above by being a passive thing to be marked.  I’m actually even more put off by this glory-of-seed implication because it seems to reinforce the dominance/subjugation dynamic rather than provide an alternative.  Either it’s a marking-one’s-property thing or a toddlerish ‘look, I made a poopy’ moment given that kind of symbolism, and I’m not sure which is more disturbing.

I’ve never really wanted to get married, but sometimes I wonder if I should just grab the next rational, down-to-earth straight male I find, because the more cultural relationship expectations change, the less I think anyone’s worth the hassle, even for the companionship.

Very, very interesting thread. 

It reminds me of a long conversation I had once about the “N word” at a leftist party in DC a couple years back. 

In the abstract, the meaning of anything is dependent on context.  “N****” doesn’t HAVE to mean something bad.  That’s true independent of who’s saying it, and who they are saying it to.

Also in the abstract, I (who am white) could call a close black friend my “n****” all the time, in a loving way, and it would be fine.  But in practice it just doesn’t really work.  It’s degrading to him (and, in a way, to me) in a way that we as individuals can’t overcome, because of the cultural baggage that’s attached. 

If you take and extend this idea to the bedroom, and imagine me with a black sexual partner, whether male or female, it’s very, very hard to imagine me calling my partner a “n*****” in the bedroom without it having the connotation of aggression, domination and degradation.  That’s true almost regardless of any other context - including if I were, say, giving head while occasionally pausing to call my partner “my n*****.”

That’s not to say that it couldn’t be hot, and fine for anyone that likes that sort of thing.  But it IS hard for me to imagine that it would be stripped of all of its cultural meaning, even in a context like the above that is itself almost completely devoid of such baggage.

Maybe that’s a failure of imagination on my part.  But to make a long story slightly less long, I think I reluctantly agree with Amanda here.

But it IS hard for me to imagine that it would be stripped of all of its cultural meaning,

No, it’s not stripped of all its cultural meaning—but negotiating the relationship between when an act means its “cultural meaning” for true and when it means its cultural meaning ironically or performatively and when it used to mean its cultural meaning but stopped… these are difficult things, clearly.  Saying the facial originates as a trope in porn that is all bound up with degradation and marking… I think that’s true.  But it can drift from there, especially via play-acting.  Not everyone who wears extra baggy jeans is trying to look like he did time in jail.  It’s a quotation of a quotation of a quotation.

No more unreasonable than it is to expect men to grok how women can be a bit sensitive about becoming a sexual object/blow-up doll/fuckhole/whatever-the-highly-entertaining-sock-term-was-many-posts-above by being a passive thing to be marked.  I’m actually even more put off by this glory-of-seed implication because it seems to reinforce the dominance/subjugation dynamic rather than provide an alternative.  Either it’s a marking-one’s-property thing or a toddlerish ‘look, I made a poopy’ moment given that kind of symbolism, and I’m not sure which is more disturbing.

Yes, of course.  The idea that there’s no middle ground between “you’re revolting” and “you’re my glorious conqueror” is where your analysis falls apart, though.  It is (or should be) pretty clear that a sexual object/blow-up doll/fuckhole/whatever-the-highly-entertaining-sock-term-was-many-posts-above would be diametrically opposite the one that’s being posited for the man in question here, who’s (essentially) looking for validation that he (or his sexuality) is something that’s good and likable, and that kind of thing can only really come from someone he sees as a moral equal or superior (and in this context, I’d guess it’s in fact the latter.  Which’s probably problematic, though in exactly the opposite direction of that being posited by Amanda to begin with.)

I’ve never really wanted to get married, but sometimes I wonder if I should just grab the next rational, down-to-earth straight male I find, because the more cultural relationship expectations change, the less I think anyone’s worth the hassle, even for the companionship.

I’d guess most halfway sensible men would be bright enough not to bring up the subject in the first place, since they’d probably be able to anticipate that you’d see it entirely different from how they would (or they might also see it as degrading, either way).  It’d be much preferable to ignore the reality of the rejection than be confronted by it.

Everyone is speaking as though sex was invented by the porn industry, and/or cannot exist for anyone outside of it.

The idea that “the original cultural context” of any specific sexual act lies exclusively in porn is absurd, particularly when it is coupled with “I first saw this in porn, so that is the only way any rational person is allowed to think about it without being considered delusional.”

ABSOLUTELY NO ARGUMENT that porn has added a serious overlay of meaning to specific sex acts. ABSOLUTELY NO ARGUMENT that people get to decide for themselves what the meaning they will relate to is, and that includes making choices with the full knowledge that porn, or the patriarchy, or the Starr Report or some music video may have overlaid on it.

But can we lay aside the idea that coming on someone else was invented by the porn industry? Next you’ll be declaring that Hugh Hefner invented nudity.

First of all, thank you WSOTT

They are attempting to erase the original symbolic meaning, to say that “its just an act and it means whatever you want it to mean… or it means nothing at all.” THAT is, I think, what Amanda meant by “they are fooling themselves.” They are divorcing an act from a context that it is pretty much impossible to divorce it from.

That is my point, yes you can.  Some of us can divorce ourselves from societal constructs very nicely, thank you very much.  As matter of fact, there are some of us who barely notice they exist at all.  “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Read through the Meyers-Briggs stuff. 

Now while I agreed with Amanda that people who enjoy degradation in a private sexual context should own it and admit it; I still say that some women can simply enjoy semen for its self without any societal context whatsoever.  Several women have said so.  I do not think they are in denial.

I still want someone, anyone, to comment on my point that at one time every sexual act was held by Victorian society to be demeaning to women but yet there may have been Victorian women who enjoyed their sexuality freely and without feeling degraded or demeaned.

the man in question here, who’s (essentially) looking for validation that he (or his sexuality) is something that’s good and likable

So swallowing semen, allowing it on my stomach and breasts and hands and ass and thighs, and of course taking it into my body, isn’t enough; I’m supposed to accept it in an incredibly personal-- and by personal, I mean that my face is my visual self, not a generic term for intimacy-- way from an impersonal distance?  Rather like shoving a pie in someone’s face and saying ‘but honey, I want you to really, really accept and enjoy my cooking, but if you only eat from utensils or fingers I won’t believe you,’ I think.  Also, to be honest, I’m still grumbling about current hair-removal expectations, so perhaps I’m just too damned old to playact my way through the dating game anymore.

Actually, the scary part of this, and the reason I likened it way upthread to gun nuts and Republicans, is that it’s all about the man’s self, with the woman as observer/target and him acting upon her, asserting himself.  You can add some layers of trust and symbolic/spiritual acceptance and whatever it is you’re arguing, but as has been pointed out many times so far, the starting point is that of the actor and the prop, with the actor of course dominating the scene, no matter how it’s rationalized in a given situation.  And let’s be honest, most people don’t do sexual nuance often or well, except in the half-assed sense of embarrassed retroactive justification.

However, I’ll concede your last point, and say that while sometimes I lament a shortage of potential partners, I’d rather put off the ones who layer all kinds of quasi-emotional dreck onto second-rate porn antics.  Seems to have work wrt hygiene, too; I’m just about the only woman in my circle of acquaintance who has never had a short- or long-term partner who didn’t shower & brush teeth with nearly absolute consistency (although most women only admit it after the relationship’s over).

Dr Shrinker:

it sounds like you fetishize semen quite a bit, and expect everyone to share that fetish. There should be a happy medium somewhere....

“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Freud meant that it’s just a cigar WHEN HE’S IN THE PROCESS OF SMOKING IT.  He was NOT nullifying its use as a symbol in other contexts. He was saying it depends on the context. Yes, CULTURAL context.

Crikey, people!

Amanda wrote

[Jessica] wrote a piece for the Frisky where she implied that taking a shot to the face is a minimum entrance requirement to being a good girlfriend.

This completely misrepresents what Jessica wrote.  Argue all you want about whether facials are demeaning or are not.  Argue all you want about whether demeaning sex acts are okay or not.  But please recognize that Amanda started the whole discussion with a gross representation.

@ Flip

I think you are right and we agree with each other and are just saying it in different ways!

I came in late and was relating my take on the thread to the kinds of complaints about symbolism in general that I see in my undergrads.

@ Magis

I’m not saying that individuals can’t experience the act divorced from its context but just that context in general cannot be erased.  I think that the N-word example above is a good way of explaining this.  Just because a some white guy with a black friend uses it outside of the usual context does not make that original context cease to be.  Perhaps “divorce” was a poor choice of words.  I think we might very well be agreeing with each other also.

425 latts

No one anywhere is saying anyone has to do anything. The question was “what could possibly be erotic about a facial?” with the assumption by Amanda and many others that it’s inherently degrading for a man to ejaculate on his partner’s face. I personally don’t find it the end-all, be-all, but I was answering the question. Thanks, liviaclaudia for the armchair analysis. (BTW, your interpretation of the Freud anecdote is completely off. He didn’t concern himself with cultural context. What he was basically saying was that things have symbolic meaning that resonate with our unconscious...except when they don’t. Which is exactly what I’m saying about facials...)

I don’t understand how swallowing is somehow less degrading than facials...if the basic premise is that semen is gross, then swallowing gobs of it seems a lot worse to me than wiping it off my face. (A previous poster, interestingly, compared semen to shit. Again, I’d rather wipe shit off my face than swallow a load of it.) Why is swallowing being given a pass but facials are inherently degrading?

swallowing is an action performed by the woman, she has total control of the moment. Having semen sprayed in her face is a totally passive, submissive action, on her end.

that’s the difference.

Huh. So now not all facials are degrading, just ones in which a woman has no control, and is passive/submissive? Okay...didn’t know we were parsing it to that level.

So swallowing semen, allowing it on my stomach and breasts and hands and ass and thighs, and of course taking it into my body, isn’t enough; I’m supposed to accept it in an incredibly personal-- and by personal, I mean that my face is my visual self, not a generic term for intimacy-- way from an impersonal distance?  Rather like shoving a pie in someone’s face and saying ‘but honey, I want you to really, really accept and enjoy my cooking, but if you only eat from utensils or fingers I won’t believe you,’ I think.  Also, to be honest, I’m still grumbling about current hair-removal expectations, so perhaps I’m just too damned old to playact my way through the dating game anymore.

Actually, the scary part of this, and the reason I likened it way upthread to gun nuts and Republicans, is that it’s all about the man’s self, with the woman as observer/target and him acting upon her, asserting himself.  You can add some layers of trust and symbolic/spiritual acceptance and whatever it is you’re arguing, but as has been pointed out many times so far, the starting point is that of the actor and the prop, with the actor of course dominating the scene, no matter how it’s rationalized in a given situation.  And let’s be honest, most people don’t do sexual nuance often or well, except in the half-assed sense of embarrassed retroactive justification.

Okay, well if we’re in sync over “face is personal”, we’re a lot of the way to ... I dunno, understanding?  Also parsing subsequent comments, there may be a huge disconnect in how active an agent we’re imagining the participating woman to be.  You seem to think of her as maximally passive, but I’d imagine a lot more active, which may well create very different impressions (and yes, I’d guess the more passive she is, the more likely it is to come off as degrading, and the less likely it is to come off as accepting.) Certainly I’m not the world’s biggest connoisseur of internet porns (in fact, it’s been a while), but I’m certain both end of that spectrum are represented (though I have no idea in what proportions).

I won’t defend anyone who’d require removal of body hair (though I do date someone who does), but I’m not sure about equation here (or whether it doesn’t betray an attitude incompatible with the mentality I’ve promoted.)

I’m not saying that individuals can’t experience the act divorced from its context but just that context in general cannot be erased.

Madavis4:  It can’t be erased?  Once again, the context of what is or is not degrading has changed.  To say changed means, well, erased.  All “French” sex (mouth to genital) was once considered perversion.  Now it’s not.  Can an act that was once degrading now be considered liberating; e.g., cunnilingus?

Either she feels degraded or she does not, wholly independent of the mores of the moment.  Upon feeling degraded either she enjoys degredation or she does not.  It’s wholly up to her to decide upon her feeling quite independent of outside opinion.

Huh. So now not all facials are degrading, just ones in which a woman has no control, and is passive/submissive? Okay...didn’t know we were parsing it to that level.
Dr. Shrinker

You know, in all honesty, I’d say that submissiveness is probably built in our DNA.  Kids like to play cops and robbers, and even my cat thinks it’s a fun time to roll around and play act submission while we dominate her.  That this is part of sex play isn’t particularly unnerving to me.

Being honest about things like facials is a way to fight back, to put it into a space where it’s negotiated as the rules of tonight’s game.  By being cagey about it, we give its power to demean a lot more strength. .
Amanda

I think the big deal for me is the word “degrading” which feels wrong and shameful, while play acting some submissive stuff doesn’t. But still, labeling other people’s play feels deeply insulting to the person labeled.

I’m sure kids playing cops and robbers would be really surprised if you tell them they are being degraded. Or even if you tell them they are being submissive. To them it is just play. Tomorrow the cop will be a robber and vice versa. Play acting cop and robber on the bedroom feels the same to me. Is just play. Today I hold the handcuffs, tomorrow is his turn.

I bristle at the implication that for me being so playful with my sex life I’m spoiling someone else’s life.  Heard it all my life: sluts who kiss spoil the life of the virgins who don’t. Girls who do BJs are spoiling the lives of girls who hate doing it. Sex before marriage ? You are spoiling the lives of those who wait....

When will the people who wait, who don’t like or don’t do realize that it is not us “sluts” that are the problem ? It’s your jerk of a boyfriend who is! 

And the premise is wrong. It doesn’t really matter what label I accept or don’t. Even if I accept the label “degrading” what makes you think a jerk that is bent on forcing you to do what you don’t want will tell the truth about what I said ? If he is so insensitive that he can’t even see - or care - for the feelings of the woman that is currently with him, what makes you think he will care about the feelings of a past lover ?

Having a set of absolute rules for what is degrading or not, submissive or not, etc.. sounds really comforting if the rules are exactly what you think. We used to have a lot of rules for what was a “slut”. Did that end up well ? Did that make women happier ?

You are the only one who can let your boyfriend humiliate you. If that is not what you want, don’t let him. Grow a backbone. Stop allowing him from using me as an excuse to give in.

Swallowing more closely mimics coming in a vagina.  It is more pleasurable v/s spraying elsewhere because of actual sensations on the penis.  It’s physical.  Guys like it because it feels good.  A dick isn’t going to feel any different spraying on a face or on a towel.  It’s appeal is mental, not physical.  That’s an important difference IMO.  What is the mental appeal of a facial if not domination or degradation?  I think Amanda’s assesment is right on.  If this is somehting you enjoy either giving or receiving, own it as a kink.  Kinks are OK.  Kinks are honest was of expressing diffences with the norm or ideal.

People don’t seem to understand what the word “internalized” means.

Comment #435: lostmypassword on 08/26 at 04:59 PM

I think the big deal for me is the word “degrading” which feels wrong and shameful, while play acting some submissive stuff doesn’t. But still, labeling other people’s play feels deeply insulting to the person labeled.

I’m sure kids playing cops and robbers would be really surprised if you tell them they are being degraded. Or even if you tell them they are being submissive. To them it is just play. Tomorrow the cop will be a robber and vice versa. Play acting cop and robber on the bedroom feels the same to me. Is just play. Today I hold the handcuffs, tomorrow is his turn.

I think this really hits the nail on the head.

I must say that I like kristin’s term “status play” a lot better than “degrading” in the context of this discussion, because of the implication that we’re talking about a move in a game.  However, I just cannot call a specific instance of an act a “status play” if it is not actually being used to enact a status difference.

Two kids playing cops and robbers is a pretty nice example, yes.  If the kids switch roles all the time, then the choice of cop vs. robber isn’t a status play.  If on the other hand, one of the kids is a bully and always chooses to play cop and make the other one play robber against his preference, then yes, it is a status play: “you must always accommodate to what I want, and I don’t need to accommodate to what you want.”

I won’t defend anyone who’d require removal of body hair (though I do date someone who does), but I’m not sure about equation here (or whether it doesn’t betray an attitude incompatible with the mentality I’ve promoted.)

I mentioned it because it’s just another fairly recent cultural expectation (when I was a teen & college-aged, we just shaved our legs, the visible bikini area, & armpits, and sometimes not even our legs above the knee if we were more blondish, yet no men complained that I can remember) that seems to be somewhat porn-related and ends up being rather burdensome in terms of time, [possibly] money, and general anxiety.  Which is related to Amanda’s original point IMO, that sex itself can easily become a burden at best and often just a really unpleasant performance standard because of these images-- not even really tactile, sensual, intimate moments*, mind you, but porn-oriented games-- that we’re expected to fulfill.  It’s easy to argue for oral and anal sex and teabagging and hell, even the hairlessness issue as sensually pleasing and therefore worth some exploration & maybe some effort, because they undeniably can feel amazing; facials are much more of a reach in that regard, so to speak.

*yes, I’ve read this interminable thread and seen the arguments about all of the supposed sensuality and depth in face-jizzing, but it’s still not likely the sort of thing anyone would even bother to imagine on their own-- as they would sex acts that involve actual physical sensations instead of just mental games-- without having internalized it culturally as a performance.  There’s just no particular reason to do it without the roles & their cultural connotations.

There’s just no particular reason to do it without the roles & their cultural connotations.

And we’re back to, hands up, everybody who remembers the argument that no true feminist sucks cock. Or, if you’re even older, that no true feminist has sex with men at all. Because those acts are degrading, they’re portrayed in porn as something women inherently enjoy even though not all women do, it’s centered around pleasing the man and, c’mon, it’s just like gross!

It’s almost funny to see people draw that careful line just around the edge of their hipster toes. Inside this line I’m a free, libertine, egalitarian soul; outside of that line, I am the sole arbiter of how fucked-up your sexuality is.

(I mean, really. “The S&M;crowd”? Does anybody except folks who think leather cuffs are TEH HARDCORE ever use that phrase?)

@ mythago—I’m also having a hard time understanding why the line is drawn where it’s being drawn.  Because the prog/liberal/left side has been through this so many times and emerged (I thought) with a consensus that willing consent is the most important thing, and that the possibility of subversion and performativity is always there.  Even on this thread we’ve seen well-considered, nonjudgmental discussion of BDSM practices; Amanda has been fairly vocally pro-sextoy in the past, IIRC.  I don’t get why this act in particular is a bridge too far, and that it _has_ to be degradation, whether it’s the good kind of consensual degradation or the bad kind of coercive degradation, but never non-degradation.

SexGeek said way, way upstream @ 178:

Either way, seems to me that way of universalizing the meanings of sex acts went out of style when mainstream feminists stopped believing that all penetration is rape à la Andrea Dworkin, or that dildos were a tool of the patriarchy and made one “male-identified” (Adrienne Rich’s 1980s lesbian separatist wisdom there). Universalizing the meanings of sex acts is dangerous.

I know people often say that Dworkin has been misunderstood, but the dildo/strap-on examples seem like useful reminders of how the “obvious” deep meaning or cultural context of a sexual practice can get reshuffled pretty quickly in the right, um, hands.

Ah, another day, another post from Amanda about why she has the pure objective truth and anyone who feels differently is either a liar or a fool.

Because I am so gosh-darned interesting, allow me to share WAY too much information:

I’d never seen a single porn film when one of my boyfriends asked for a facial. I wasn’t particularly surprised or non-plussed by the request - cum has to go *somewhere* afterall, and the face seemed as good a place as any. And although he may have been doing it for porn-induced reasons, he genuinely was extremely sensitive, physically, when he came and he preferred to cum ‘outside’ in order to avoid sensations that he claimed were uncomfortable. In fact, it had reached almost a mental block - he was so afraid of the pain that followed ejaculation “inside” that he almost literally could not cum inside. Blow jobs had previously ended in him cumming wherever was convenient, but not in my face because it wasn’t something I wanted for myself. Still, he asked for it, for reasons that only he can do, and we did it.

I didn’t like it. We tried it a few times and if it gets in your eyes, it stings like a motherfucker. But I can honestly say that I never felt degraded, or like it was a “power play” - it was just coming in a specific spot. He liked it, possibly because it made him feel like a porn star, but we stopped because I didn’t.

Sexuality is complicated, and so is human interaction. It is ridiculous to state that cumming in X place is inherently degrading, regardless of intent. It is equally ridiculous to assert that Amanda knows who is delusional (those who feel differently from her) and who is not. The whole, “Oh, it’s totally okay to do it, but you MUST admit that you do it for the reason *I* believe you do it” is crap. I love how Amanda talks about “normal” sex acts that women sort of have to do and she’s worried that facials will fall into that category. Um, shouldn’t we instead get rid of this idea of “normal” sex acts and instead focus on the fact that every person is unique and different? Because, otherwise, this whole thing just boils down to “we need to admit that facials are degrading so that when my BF tries to pressure me into it, I have more ammunition to say ‘no’.”

Incidentally, BlackBloc, I didn’t come up with shaving my legs outside of cultural context… but I did come up with shaving my PUSSY. Been shaving it since about a year after the pubic hair appeared and it was YEARS before I found out it was a porn-y thing to do. Why did I shave? Well, I didn’t like how cum and blood got matted and dried in it and when I picked the dried pieces out, it would pull the hair and hurt. So I figured, if stuff got caught in the hair, the hair needed to go. I also shaved my head for awhile, but that was just for fun and because I was tired of styling my hair every day.

Because, otherwise, this whole thing just boils down to “we need to admit that facials are degrading so that when my BF tries to pressure me into it, I have more ammunition to say ‘no’.”

This.  It seems like Occam’s Razor (for the smooth, hairless argument of your dreams!) would dictate that it’s going to be much easier to “just be honest” about saying No to sexual requests that squick you out rather than staying the same and conceptually reconfiguring the world around you.  Make a stand on the idea that coercion and shame and pressure are Teh Unkoolnezz, rather than trying to finesse a way for degradation to be simultaneously cool and uncool (Schroedinger’s Facial?).

Well, this is getting tedious and rather ickily revealing, so I’m going to relegate facials to the same part of my brain that houses anal bleaching & Girls Gone Wild videos and hope to God that some otherwise sensible 35-40 y.o. non-hipster doesn’t end up pestering me about it to the extent that I have to ditch him because his cum fetish is just too silly to tolerate.  I’ll feel sorry for the younger women whose entire collective sexual personhood-- hell, even their non-sexual personhood-- will complete the transition to soft-porn reality show if this catches on, but eventually most of them will get fed up with putting on a performance to make partners feel manlier.  Thankfully, I caught the last part of a generation that learned to associate sexual proficiency with more useful skills than one learns on XXX websites.

I always just assumed that the male fetish for having her swallow was just subverted desire for unprotected sex. Which is silly because you can still get STIs from oral sex. But you can’t get pregnant, at any rate, and I think this idea that you cum inside her and it actually goes into her body and stays there is an end-run around not being able to just knock her up because she’s all stuck up and wants to live her life her own way.

Now I figured out why the concept of a facial being sexy felt so weird and odd to me......it seemed too analogous to the Star Wars Stormtrooper school of wild kinky sex.....

People are not parsing/reading the term “status play” the way I intend it.

It’s “status play” because it’s playing with notions of status, indicators with status, when people perform acts that are culturally understood to reflect lower or higher status. Not because it actually reflects or necessarily affects the status of those people in any other context. (That’s why it’s play.)

So kids constantly switching back and forth from robbers to cops? Definitely status play, as far as cops and robbers are seen to occupy different status levels in the kids’ culture.

Argh. “indicators with status” should read “indicators OF status”.

Swallowing more closely mimics coming in a vagina.  It is more pleasurable v/s spraying elsewhere because of actual sensations on the penis.  It’s physical.  Guys like it because it feels good.  A dick isn’t going to feel any different spraying on a face or on a towel.  It’s appeal is mental, not physical.  That’s an important difference IMO.

This isn’t remotely true.  The difference in spit v. swallow is enormous in how (some) men react, though the physical sensation is identical.  It’s enormously psychological.  On a personal level, in the former case, I’d just try to avoid the issue coming up entirely.

I always just assumed that the male fetish for having her swallow was just subverted desire for unprotected sex. Which is silly because you can still get STIs from oral sex. But you can’t get pregnant, at any rate, and I think this idea that you cum inside her and it actually goes into her body and stays there is an end-run around not being able to just knock her up because she’s all stuck up and wants to live her life her own way.

It hadn’t occurred to me that this might factor in at all, but you’re probably right that it’s in the mix.

when I was a teen & college-aged, we just shaved our legs, the visible bikini area, & armpits, and sometimes not even our legs above the knee if we were more blondish, yet no men complained that I can remember)

Jeez, I must be not be getting the cultural expectations I’m supposed to.  I’ll have to speak to my mail carrier.  My field research has shown most women shaving their armpits, and most women shaving their legs in the summer.  I think that’s all - what else is there?

I think that’s all - what else is there?

Pretty much bare from the waist down, or really, essentially hairless (I think sparse blond forearm hair’s still okay) from one’s hairline down.  There’s a reason Brazilian waxes used to be a, well, Brazilian specialty thing but now everyone knows about them… hell, I remember on earlier seasons of Sex and the City we assumed the lead characters had pubes, but by the end and in the movie going bare was a plot point.  I’m told this standard is from porn as well, but have no real inclination to verify.

Late to the party here. But I really don’t think that Amanda really understands what people are trying to do when they reclaim sex acts. And I think her argument that we should admit to eroticizing dominance when engaged in sex acts that the dominant culture calls degrading is both misguided and heterosexist.

Because I’m reminded on a daily basis that the straight world considers my entire sexuality with men to be degrading. Kissing is an assault that justifies violence. Anal and oral sex are treated as equivalent to rape. Mutual masturbation is synonymous with male prostitution and liberally used to describe artists and publishers who have “sold out.” Masturbation has a long history of being equated with “self-abuse” and it’s still a taboo in some circles to admit that you do it. Even my joyful gaze for my lover is considered by straight society to be a profound and aggressive insult.

Does this cause cognitive dissonance? Certainly. And I’m not one for shying away or hiding from the baggage that comes with those acts. But the cultural baggage that comes with having gay sex is so toxic that we have to do the hard work of making what we do not degrading and not shameful.

If we didn’t reconsider those acts, we couldn’t have a sexuality at all outside of a BDSM or top/bottom context. And the reason why I reclaim those acts as wonderful (aside from the fact that they just plain feel good) is because I don’t want it assumed that because I’m giving head or catching during anal sex that I’m submissive and therefore, fair game for verbal abuse or other head games.

I think for the heterosexual women here, the next time a guy ejaculates on your face, you should wipe it off with your hand and put it on his cheek.  How erotic.  A real taboo-breaker a het man having spunk on his face which ought to make it extra hot.

Alternatively it will show you exactly what the power dynamics are at work in your relationship.

Same thing with anal sex: get yourself a strap on and return the favor to him.  He’ll love it and he’s got a prostate gland which for him, unlike for women, actually makes being anally penetrated enjoyable.

Amanda you’re half way there with your analysis, but to hit real feminism you need to start questioning why men get off on degrading women and why they will bully women into it even when they don’t want to.  Same thing with your own experience:  why did men bully you into watching women being degraded in pornography?  What were they getting out of it and why did they think they were entitled to treat you like that?  You notice it but it remains uncommented upon.  The answers lead us towards women’s liberation, ignoring it is patriarchy as usual.

Comment #448: kristin on 08/27 at 01:55 AM

People are not parsing/reading the term “status play” the way I intend it.  It’s “status play” because it’s playing with notions of status, indicators with status, when people perform acts that are culturally understood to reflect lower or higher status. Not because it actually reflects or necessarily affects the status of those people in any other context. (That’s why it’s play.)

I specifically intended to disagree exactly on that, kristin.  Call it semantics if you will, but I just think calling something a “status play” that doesn’t actually affects the status of the participants is misleading.  More generally, the way I see it, you’re judging actions by broad conventional meanings, and I’m judging them by effect in context.

And there a big problem behind this discussion. D/s isn’t about the act it’s about the power exchange which is why a fair number of submissives don’t do sex that often but do housework instead. And when you tie something like facials, anal sex, or fellatio to “status play” you are implying that a person game for one would be game for other kinds of status play as well.

In my mind, the problem of the pushy boyfriend rests squarely on the shoulders of the pushy boyfriend and not his ex lovers. I really don’t think people should be held accountable for the behavior of their exes.

If for a woman to agree to a facial and not find it degrading threatens to make her partner think all women like it and no women find it degrading. won’t her agreeing to it as a degrading act make him think all women like being degraded? And surely that’s at least as bad.

It’s interesting that, generally speaking, those who find it necessary to attach degradation to facials are those who’re older and who grew up with the context that its use in porn was intended as a degrading act.  Those of us of the younger generation who have grown up with it as ubiquitous as it is these days don’t see it that way, regardless of what its original intent was.  Therefore, it is ludicrous to assert that we must accept it as a “degrading” act in order to “own” it.  That’s bullshit.

Facials were around long before porn glamorized them, Amanda (it appears in many historical accounts and stories, and many people in other forums have stated they practiced it before they ever saw it in porn).  And they had little, if anything, to do with degrading the receiver.  It isn’t/wasn’t any different then receiving it on any other part of the body for many people.  Your insistence that everyone must attach degradation to it simply because you do is quite arrogant, IMO.  Human sexuality is far more complex than that.

Facials were around long before porn glamorized them, Amanda (it appears in many historical accounts and stories, and many people in other forums have stated they practiced it before they ever saw it in porn).

I doubt you’ve talked to many people who were doing facials before porn movies existed. Most people who do it nowadays “got it,” directly or indirectly, from porn, and therefore the predominant cultural attitude in 2009 is the one that got attached to it in that context. And whatever you feel about the facial, even if ypu find it an honor that elevates you, nearly anyone you tell you do this will at least initially see you as someone who gets degraded.