Watching Men Come

In feminist writings, I've often encountered the argument that the emphasis on cumshots in porn is purely for male gratification: that it provides confirmation of his potency and his orgasm and disregards the woman's pleasure.

I can understand this view to a certain extent. Generally speaking, it's not that exciting to have someone ejaculate on you. [Notwithstanding my occasional bukkake-style fantasies, which are about degradation and exposure and excess and mass loss of control, and may or may not get a separate post at some point.]

And yes, the emphasis on the male orgasm as the endpoint of sex can definitely be detrimental in real life, even if it does provide an easy narrative closure. But I think these critiques perhaps miss the fact that for some women - for me at least - seeing a bloke come is very very erotic.

Admittedly, a lot depends on the specific way it's represented. I'm not aroused by watching a woman's face or breasts as she waits to be splattered on: in particular, the emphasis on women looking apprehensive or resigned or disgusted is unappealing, and probably somewhat misogynistic. And porn which fetishises the spunk itself doesn't do it for me either. Bubbles? No no no.

But watching a man masturbate - the gradual build-up, the rapid, instinctive, almost unconscious movements of his hand as he gets close, the twitches in his belly and thighs and balls, the sudden pulse through his body in the millisecond before he comes, the moment where his consciousness is annihilated - is incredibly erotic.

Hardcore pornography breaks down the boundaries between fiction and reality, performance and life, and this is perhaps most evident in orgasm. It must be difficult for a man to come on command in what is most likely an unsexy and uncomfortable environment. So to see him overcome that, to get to the point where the context doesn't matter any more, and he's just intent on reaching orgasm ... appeals to me very much, for some wrong reason.

I actively like the disjunction between the industrial conveyor-belt nature of porn and the immediacy, the realness, the physical ooomph of watching a man ejaculate. I like seeing him have to make a conscious mental effort to block out the surroundings. I like the flicker of relief in his face when he realises that, despite the situation, he is going to come.

Yeah, that's not right, is it?

Train (of) Thoughts

B seduces me with words. There is, as he said, a 'powerful mutual physical attraction', but that isn't what does it. When my mind wanders, when I'm struck by a memory that makes my stomach go suddenly hollow, it's verbal. I remember stuff he's said: jokes, compliments, statements about what he'd like to do to me, how I make him feel, replaying real encounters we've had. We meet up and we start to give in to our desire but then we stop. Responsibility to other people (and, in his case at least, fear about falling too hard for each other) gets in the way. So we go home and go online and 'talk' to each other on MSN for half the night.

Through typed words alone, he reduces me to a quivering breathless mass of sexual desire. There's nothing of the body in it, not even as much as in handwriting or speech. I remember the physical events, they turn me on, but I don't dwell on them in quite the same way. And when I do, it's about what we said and about what I think he was thinking when he touched me like that. The look in his eyes. The conflict in him. His desire fighting against his better judgement. [More on that at a later date.]

And my ultimate desire to really fuck him is at least partly because I want to destroy his ability to think and to articulate. It's ridiculous. It's his verbal dexterity that makes me want him so much, but what I want is the dissolution of that dexterity. What really makes me catch my breath is when his brain melts. When he can no longer manage the quotations, the witty phrases, the polysyllables. When he can do nothing except mumble obscenities or inanities, and grab me and bite me and smack my arse. The sudden plummet from the ultra-intellectual to the visceral. The funny thing is that most blokes are like that most of the time, and it turns me off. What I want is to take the clever articulate ones and turn them into gibbering priapic wrecks.

Is this a statement of principle? A mission? Is it possible to stick to verbal fucking alone? Because when we kiss, when we grope and stumble and stagger together, it's not just biology. It's the end result of the way we talk and write to each other. The verbal tension-building. Is it possible to go so deep into someone's sexual psyche, to know so much, that you can never forget it? That it's always going to get in the way, at least until you've fucked and destroyed the mystique and the tension and the imagining and reduced each other to sweaty, spludgy, rutting animals?

None of which erases the fact that I want to feel him come inside me. I want to hear him come. I want to see his face. I want to know if he groans my name. All those times on MSN I made it happen - I chose my words so carefully that he came over himself, but I didn't get my reward. The sound, the look, the smell, the taste. Yes, I do love talking to him. Yes, he is witty and articulate and ridiculously educated. But I want to drink his come. I want him to come in my mouth. I want him to come over my face and up my cunt and in my hair. I want him to come with his hand tangled in my hair, or over my mouth, gagging me, with his cock inside me.

But why can't that be just anyone? Desire is such a weird, fucked-up thing. Just because he can talk like that - why should that mean I want to feel him orgasm inside me? What the fuck is the connection there? And what I should do about any of it is another matter entirely.