Ok, this isn’t really a post about semiotics of semen, at least not in Saussure’s sense of signs deconstructed into signifier and signified. Although I’m sure if I’d just taken that dang course back in 1984 or so, instead of just backyard seminaring with a bunch of roommates who did, I’d be able to take a pretty good crack at the real thing.

Instead I just liked the alliteration in “semiotics of semen.” :-)

But seriously. I keep getting reminded of semen because any time I try to look at pretty much any kind of pornography involving heterosexuality then sooner or later semen’s going to show up. Which people have been remarking upon for going on two decades now.

Not that semen isn’t a perfectly laudable substance but the way it’s presented in pornography is kind of odd. I mean, for one thing it is presented. Placed. Precipitously. In plain sight. (If I may again alliterate.) And that’s the thing. Most of the time if you’re having sex with someone you don’t put semen where everyone can see it because it doesn’t feel as nice.

You know what feels really, really nice? To be locked in a passionate embrace with your partner, sometimes after barely enough time to rip each other’s clothes just loose enough, but preferably after what at least seems like hours of increasingly steamy, turgid, creamy, dreamy kisses and caresses, till your partner’s breath is hot and short against your cheek or ear and at least one of her hands is locked in your hair, pulling your face into the crook of her neck where you’ve been ravishing her throat with lips and tongue and teeth, your own hands less coordinated, yes, but still purposefully able to ruck her hem up to her hips, to crook them under her knees and pull them up and wide somewhere between your hips and her shoulders (a process that she’s perfectly capable of, of course, but you might both enjoy), and then perhaps with her hand, perhaps with yours, she glides your cock deep inside her not in one quick gulp but in sweet, increasingly slickery, increasingly deep sips. And then as your hips surge down into her and hers rise up to meet yours, and you feel her aiming her blood-hard clitoris to bump, bump, bump against your pubis, and her ankles cross against your lower back with one heel in the cleft of your ass pulling you tight, tight into her and the base of your rocks and grinds against her and her inner rings of muscle milk, milk, milk the length of your cock, and as both your pants break down into near-confused oh, oh, oh’s and she bites down hard on the muscles high above your collarbone and from your belly to the cheeks of your ass you feel deep wrenching, clenching squeezing of familiar but no less mysterious for it muscles pumping once, twice, in rhythms older than our species before you first collapse against each other, breath slower but far, far deeper, confused fingers unclenching as self-consciously as they earlier had clenched unconsciously, aftershock quivers against your bellies, murmured mmm’s, and woah’s and the sort of solemnity-breaking giggles that follow before one or the other of you leaps or reaches for a cloth (if there’s upholstery to be rescued) or maybe just wet, splishy wiggles (if there’s still room for two somewhere else on the bed.)

That? That feels great! Really great! As you can imagine. As you might not even need to imagine because, after all, that’s so often how things work out.

Or work out in life…

...but not in porn.

In porn, if you’re a man, you can get maybe to where your partner begins to dip and slip you inside, to where you and your partner begin to badminton your cock back and forth between you, until you and… who knows… maybe even she is on the verge of something warm and close and wet and wonderful happening and… in porn…

you stop! And then, in porn, you remove yourself from where you were and, usually, wait while the camera zooms and refocuses before… using, usually, your own hands you ejaculate. A “money shot,” to be sure, but an orgasm? Meh… and while the camera’s attention is elsewhere your face can reflect your true feelings your partner, her face usually very close to the camera, must continue looking pleased, even eager, for… however long it takes you to do by hand what you’d almost surely rather do some… any... other way.

Yes, indeed one might wonder why, and many, including me, have speculated endlessly.

Here’s a new possibility I hadn’t considered: most hetero porn and quite a lot of gay and/or lesbian porn is made for men, right? And mostly what men do with it is watch while they masturbate, right?

Which brings up an interesting bridge for men between masturbation and porn.

There’s certainly a story about (heterosexual) men’s distaste for looking at other men’s cocks but, unlike women who ordinarily don’t see their own vulvas, or even the vulvas of other women, at at least some points in their lives most men, certainly most American men, see cocks in abundance in lockerrooms if nowhere else and, of course, whenever they masturbate or even pee, see their own cocks, soft and hard, easily a dozen times a day. And when we masturbate, and when we ejaculate, we very often see it spring forth from our bodies whether in dribbles or jets.

And so, perhaps contrary to expectation, I think maybe the appeal of the “money shot” for porn viewers isn’t so much a demonstration that it’s “the real thing” but that one sees in images the reminder, the cue, the proxy for their own masturbation which, being masturbation, must inevitably fall without rather than within.

Maybe so. Or maybe no.

What I do know, though, is that being aware of the agency of actors in porn no less, obviously, than the actresses, is that however much such aerial ejaculations might encourage, or inspire, or comfort, or (if my thesis is mistaken) merely entertain the average customer the leave something to be desired for the actors themselves and thus only distract me with how little I’d like to do that.

Again that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t enjoy masturbating for a partner, of showing her even as, perhaps, she showed me. And if instead it’s she who’s plying me with hands or mouth or other parts of herself then it’s obviously her prerogative to direct my expression wherever she will. But neither of those special circumstances carry with them the relentless inevitability of male orgasm ejaculation semen production in porn.