To my fellow free-wheeling, sex positive feminists, I have to beg you once again to prioritize intellectual honesty over proving your bona fides of non-prudery. In the long run, being scrupulously honest about certain sexual practices is more sex-positive, for reasons I’ll detail. But let me start with the links that brought this on. It all started with Jessica Wakeman writing a defense of facials (that is, acting out this pornographic trope in your bedroom), a defense she issued after she 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. As for the latter piece, well let’s just say that it’s not my experience that every guy desires to have his girlfriend admit to being a bad girl for liking sex and then punishing her in a demeaning way for it. In fact, while it’s still a minority thing, a lot of men get off on the idea of unapologetic female sexuality.
But 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. I’d even go a step further than Amanda and say that it’s not really a compromise with the patriarchy if you do it like getting married is. 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. This sort of thing has ramifications for people that aren’t interested in being demeaned and don’t find it fun.
Sadly, denying that the shot to the face is about degradation is what Jessica does:
I see those commenters’ points, but I have to respectfully disagree with ‘em. I think leaving facials up to the porn stars—actors who are making the facial appear to humiliate the woman—is what keeps it looking demeaning. Certainly some facials are depicted in porn as humiliating or degrading, but not every man who wants to give a facial wants it to degrade and humiliate just like it looks onscreen. Many do love and respect their partners, and know, to varying degrees, that porn isn’t real. Likewise, some of those female partners enjoy the act as well.
Well, because they get off on being degraded, I’d imagine. I don’t disagree that people can bracket off their sex life and otherwise be good to each other—-S&M types swear they do it all the time, and I believe them. But what’s great about them is they admit that the degradation is the point. You can’t have it both ways. Later, Jessica kinda sorta admits that this might be about domination, and compares it to spanking, a common and general playful form of domination. But that strikes me as a misleading comparison. 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. But don’t pretend it’s something it’s not.
And the face is the thing. Figleaf picks this ball up and runs with it, but he gets into this dissection where he assumes that the debate is “inside/outside the body”. Interesting, but irrelevant when talking about the facial. The real axis is on the face/anywhere else. What everyone is afraid to talk about, I believe, is that the facial is a visual representation of spitting in someone’s face. Which is a very specific trope, and that’s why it’s powerful. That’s why it’s comparable to slapping someone in the face. That has roughly one meaning. If you get off on that meaning, go for it. But don’t pretend it’s something it’s not. (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.) The face and doing things to it is loaded, whether we like it or not. 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. The very reason for going for the face is you don’t want this to be mistaken for playful, low stakes, affectionate minor acts of dominance. 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. And if you’re into the heavier stuff, I imagine you shouldn’t want these acts to get redefined, because they’ll lose their power to signal degradation and get you off.