In the world of modern porn, they don’t refer to an ejaculation as “the money shot” for nothing. Thanks to the relationship between the orgasm of an adult actor on a computer screen and the orgasm of a masturbating viewer at home (or at the office, but just be sure not to come on the company keyboard), it’s not an overstatement to say that orgasms are the crux of the entire industry.
A recent article by Eric Spitznagel in Details magazine states, “Considering the standard climax to even the most vanilla hard-core scene today, that means there is an entire generation of young people who think sex ends with a money shot to the face.” Indeed, a typical 21-year-old college student told him, “It was the happiest moment of my young life. There is just something about blowing a load in a chick’s face that makes you feel like a man.”
Spitznagel continues: “For most men over 30, facials aren’t something you actually do. They’re like car chases or hurling someone through a plate-glass window—the difference between cinema and life. But the ubiquity of porn has blurred the line. Since a facial requires a female to receive it, the real story might be the apparent surge in the number of willing participants.”
In fact, in Immersion: Porn, a documentary by New York photographer Robbie Cooper, a 22-year-old female named Lindsay actually considers bukkake to be an act of empowerment for women, claiming, “Even if she has eight dicks on her face, she’s still the queen of those eight dicks. I definitely like cum on the face.”
It used to be that it was enough for a male porn actor to simply withdraw his penis during intercourse, perhaps cumming on the tummy of a partner, in order to simultaneously show the ejaculation and thus gain the trust of the consumer that this particular climax was not being faked. Ironically, the conventional wisdom has it that in real life women, not men, are the ones who fake having orgasms.
However, a new study in the Journal of Sex Research, titled “Men’s and Women’s Reports of Pretending Orgasm,” concludes: “Research shows that many women pretend or ‘fake’ orgasm, but little is known about whether men pretend orgasms: Both men (25%) and women (50%) reported pretending orgasm (28% and 67% respectively, for PVI [penile vaginal intercourse] experienced participants). Most pretended during PVI, but some pretended during oral sex, manual stimulation, and phone sex.”
The main reason offered by women for faking orgasm was to protect a partner’s feelings. In contrast, the men who faked orgasm most often did so because they were either too drunk to perform or had had one or more orgasms within the previous hours. The most common reason for faking orgasm offered by men was wanting to end the encounter. Men most often wanted sex to end because they were tired or wanted to sleep. While 90 percent of women reported acting out orgasm, only 78 percent of men faked orgasm in that way. Women faked orgasm to make the men happy, and men faked orgasm to make themselves happy.
Women were more likely to fake orgasm because they considered themselves incapable of achieving orgasm in similar situations, or at all. But in the political news magazine In These Times, Terry J. Allen writes about Big Pharma’s newest fake disease, Female Sexual Dysfunction: “Pfizer is selling women Viagra based on the fact that it works for men, and Procter & Gamble has put its money on testosterone. Viagra’s failure in trial after trial to work on women has not stopped doctors from writing 1.4 million off-label prescriptions.
“Despite FDA refusal to approve P&G’s testosterone patch, Intrinsa, U.S. doctors wrote two million off-label testosterone prescriptions in 2007, but the Intrinsa patch doesn’t really work for women. The companies and clinics that narrow the range of sexual normality to porn industry standards suffer their own disease. Symptoms include: a compulsion to concoct illnesses and then develop drugs to treat them, and vice versa.”
According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, 43 percent of American women “experience some degree of impaired sexual function,” but the problem is considered a dysfunction only if the woman feels “personal distress” about it. Since greed is a pre-existing condition in the pharmaceutical industry, convincing women to feel distress is a key component of the strategy to market a multibillion-dollar pill that will cure billions of women of what may not ail them. Promoting the belief that “normal” women have explosive sex all the time helped launch the disease. LexaFem pills contain “horny goat weed extract” in order to “feel like a real woman today. You won’t ever feel unhappy again with LexaFem in your arsenal.”
And don’t we all really love a happy ending?
Paul Krassner is the author of Who’s to Say What’s Obscene? His column appears bimonthly in AVN.
This article originally ran in the February 2010 issue of AVN.
