Yesterday Jezebel posted an article by Hugo Schwyzer — “He Wants to Jizz on Your Face, but Not Why You Think” — that discussed the sexual politics of the facial. His thesis was that people who view facials as degrading should instead view them as a unique opportunity to relieve their partner of anxiety about their sexual apparatus:
During our discussion of the monologue, a male student noted bravely that he thought many men felt the same way about their penises. Perhaps, he suggested, the intense appeal of facials in porn (and real life) was about men’s desire for that same experience of being validated as desirable, as good, as “not dirty.” For a young man raised with the sense that his body – and especially his penis – is “disgusting”, a woman’s willingness to accept a facial is an intensely powerful source of affirmation.
“Noted bravely” the narrator praised lavishly. Yes, while genitalia is generally considered to be shameful, people with penises aren’t subjected daily to ad campaigns created to convince them their business needs to to be completely redecorated before a sexual partner would even consider going near them and no cis person is subjected to as much malicious scrutiny of their genitals as trans people are. Portraying the cis male’s penis as some flaccid underdog in the organ olympics is wrong, wrong wrong wrong, and the word “circumcision” changes fucknothing about that discussion.
I find little bravery in an article that refuses to thoroughly engage with its critics and instead seeks to convince people to change the way they think about a private sexual act because some dude had a theory in a class once, and I do not find that idea to be more important to develop and give voice to than the criticisms of people who find the practice to be sexually degrading or humiliating.
I went on a facial kick when I was 20, giving and receiving. The dude I was with at the time was down for whatever so I got in the habit of finishing on his visage and he would do the same to me. After a few weeks my interest in it waned. It had been a novelty, but I didn’t find it hot because I didn’t find it degrading. All of the pornographic scripts I was recreating told me that a facial would change the dynamic immediately, that my jizz would conquer him and make him mine in a way that would make me feel sexually powerful, because sex was about conquest and sexual compromise. Even when he reciprocated and I found myself in front of the mirror having that funny “My my, look how much semen we have on our face” conversation, I still didn’t feel any differently about myself or feel degraded by the experience. Because I had asked. I had decided. It was not something he sprung on me at the end of a sexual encounter and it wouldn’t have meant the same thing even if he had.
Second, as Glickman — a former adult film reviewer —pointed out, a lot more straight porn features women happily accepting facials than reacting with disgust and evident humiliation. That acceptance may be feigned, but it suggests that the primary turn-on about facials for men isn’t the desire to degrade women. (Glickman further suggested that the fact that facials are also so common in gay male pornography – where the sexual politics are radically different – argues against the assumption that coming on someone’s face is rooted in men’s misogyny.)
Well, duh. The fantasy is not that you do something degrading to your partner and they hate it, but that you do it to them and they LOVE it, because you control them so completely that degradation feels like love. This is a perfectly lovely fantasy for those who enter into it willingly but it shouldn’t be something a partner can opt you into simply because they think it will be sexually cathartic. Some people are fucking REVOLTED by the idea of having someone do that to them and you DON’T get to pretend they don’t exist.
And DON’T compare straight sex to queer sex and try to manufacture proscriptive statements about what women should be doing to or for your knob based on that comparison — my sex is not a bargaining chip. EXAMPLE! Some men have convinced themselves that anal sex is a relationship milestone that means their girlfriend really loves them or is a sign that they have done enough for her and that she owes them. Some unquantified amount of love and affection and kindness within a romantic relationship is the ticket to anal, and if she doesn’t think so she doesn’t love you enough. This is not typically the case for gay men, whose sexual repertoire features anal sex more heavily, but that does NOT mean the two acts mean the same thing to the people engaging in them or that a dude who thinks the woman he’s with owes him anal because he’ll throw a fucking tantrum if she doesn’t isn’t being a sexually-coercive misogynist.
At the same time (as perhaps with anal sex), many people struggle to believe that receiving a facial is something a woman could enjoy. Andelloux told me a story about a seminar she ran recently on a college campus during which a young woman shared that she experienced her first orgasm when her boyfriend came on her face. “Nothing else that was said that day shocked the audience so much. I could tell a lot of people didn’t believe her. But I did. Andelloux remarked that some other women reacted with hostility, “as if by admitting a liking for facials, she was committing an act of violence against other women.” In the era of porn wars, perhaps not even anal sex is as politicized as the question of where the ejaculate lands.
That discussion, the “I know someone who likes it” discussion, never ends there. That discussion becomes the “You should enjoy it because it is possible to enjoy it” discussion and the “Why are you broken and bad at sex?” discussion and maybe the women in that classroom weren’t fucking having it that day. Women can and do wreck shepression on each other over their sexual likes and dislikes, and that is fucked up. When anyone does it. But that doesn’t make the “Facials As Radical Acceptance” camp the winner by default and it certainly doesn’t make the facial as a sex act anywhere near as stigmatized as anal sex, give me a goddamn break here. Next time you’re in a crowd of more than 100 or so heterosexuals look around and see if you see any tall ass signs that say FACIALS = DEATH, oh, and please send me links to articles suggesting that engaging in facials makes you an unfit parent. Facials are more politicized than anal sex? Have you ever been a facial-slinger in a state that hated facials so much they fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep facials illegal? No. You have not.
That classroom discussion about facials and the Vagina Monologues had an unforgettable finish. A female student turned to the guy who’d brought up the topic of semen and validation and asked him, “So you’re saying that when a man comes on a woman’s face, it’s not about making her dirty — it’s about making him feel clean?” The young man blushed, the class tittered. “Yes,” he said, “that’s it. And that’s what makes it so hot.”
Instead of taking this last chance to give audience to someone, anyone, who at least thinks facials might be degrading on a case-by-case basis, we get more of Unnamed Male Sexual Philosopher. Whose particular sexual matrix can be used as a yardstick to gauge your commitment to your partner, because your sexual objections aren’t enlightened enough to overwhelm the idea that a sexual act is positive or neutral in all contexts because one dude thought so in a class once. OR MAYBE HE DIDN’T EVEN THINK THAT. Maybe he was tailoring his participation in the discussion to the interests of his straight male instructor and he didn’t even believe any of that was true. But still, the memory of his sexism is reason enough for you to reevaluate your flimsy personal objections to this sex act, because if there is anything I know about Feminism, it’s that not nearly enough people are getting jizzed on and this is a crisis.
