Sex

That isn’t to say that I never bring work home with me — part of what makes sex interesting in the larger cultural sense is that it does have unavoidably deep personal implications. For instance, the time I witnessed the filming of a porn scene in which several amateurs slapped and spit on a naked woman while a popular male performer rammed into her and a dominatrix shocked her with cattle prods. Afterward, I felt … annihilated, emotionally depleted, depressed. I called my boyfriend that night and told him I desperately needed a wholesome cuddle — and, to my surprise, that wholesome cuddle turned into a deeply passionate romp. For me, it was a personal affirmation of the other, loving and intimate side of sex.

The biggest personal impact of writing about sex five days a week doesn’t happen behind closed doors, though. People attach certain expectations to you: As my former roommate once told me, “You’re the most prudish sex writer I’ve ever met!” (For the record, she had met exactly zero other sex writers.) A straight female friend said a similar thing when I turned down her drunken proposition for a make-out. There’s a belief that if you write about sex, you will be an exhibitionist without boundaries (this is even truer for most anyone in the sex industry). I was on Judith Regan’s Sirius radio program recently talking about how porn influences the way that people have sex, and the host asked me to reveal my most embarrassing fantasy; I shyly demurred.

Most profoundly, this trip through the vast landscape of the human sexual psyche has changed the way I view other people’s sexual experiences. I’ve realized how deeply concerned we all are about whether our own experiences are normal. That basic concern is driven by the fear, a sneaking suspicion, that we are a total freak. That’s why I started my “advice” column, “Am I Normal?” — where I take readers’ questions to the world’s leading experts. From questions about a distant lover to a cross-dressing kink, there is that one common thread. As I’ve developed relationships with leading sex researchers who are themselves wrestling with the scientific definition of “normal,” I’ve realized how relative and subjective the concept is — and, really, how little it matters.

This year has made me exceedingly compassionate about and open to the myriad ways that people seek sexual intimacy. Sex is one of the most profound ways that we have to connect with other human beings, to transcend our physical separation; and the fear of being sexually abnormal is ultimately a fear about being rejected, unloved and alone. Judgment is easy when it comes to extreme or socially unacceptable manifestations of sex. But, increasingly, my own reaction to people’s erotic idiosyncrasies — whether it’s their interest in strictly vanilla sex or a fetish for latex animal costumes — is: Aw, sweeties.

The question of why the money shot has since then, ahem, exploded in popularity is more complicated. The most obvious explanation is one of pure mechanics. “It has to do with the real physiology of orgasm and ejaculation,” says Lisa Jean Moore, author of “Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid.” “The way that male orgasm is external, as opposed to female orgasm, which is internal, it sort of lends itself well to cinematic capture.”

In terms of evolutionary biology, the money shot also triggers sexual competition. Ogi Ogas, author of “A Billion Wicked Thoughts,” a book that explores human sexuality through popular porn genres, says, “The penis itself is a sperm competition cue, unconsciously triggering arousal designed to motivate a man to have more vigorous sex with a woman than the man who just finished,” he says, drawing on theories in evolutionary psychology about sexual competition. (For example, one study showed that heterosexual men produced more potent ejaculate when masturbating to images of two men having sex with a woman, compared to porny shots of three women together.) “The sperm might also function as a sperm competition cue in the same manner,” he says.

It’s also simply the case that viewers desire proof that the pleasure they’re seeing performed on-screen is authentic — and in the age of Viagra, an erection itself isn’t convincing enough. “The money shot actually implies that what we are seeing is real,” says Cindy Patton, a professor of sociology, anthropology and women’s studies at Simon Fraser University.

The irony is that such proof actually requires suspension of disbelief, because “the male pornographic film performer must withdraw from any tactile connection with the genitals or mouth of the woman so that the ‘spending’ of his ejaculate is visible,” writes Williams. “Within convention, viewers are asked to believe that the sexual performers within the film want to shift from a tactile to a visual pleasure at the crucial moment of the male’s orgasm.”

In recent years, in a bizarre sleight of … penis, some “pornographic videos, and particularly the cover photographs that entice one to buy, feature partially concealed artificial yet very realistic phalluses that shoot decidedly unrealistic quantities of artificial semen when squeezed,” writes Michael Thomas Carroll in “Popular modernity in America: experience, technology, mythohistory.” He explains, “This desire to provide the ‘evidence’ of male sexual pleasure has given way to ‘natural magic’ and illusory spectatorship.”

Some cultural commentators have paradoxically argued that the money shot is the result of the relative invisibility of the typical female orgasm. “The problem of an equally irrefutable and visible proof of female orgasm, at a physiological level, both leads to the convention whereby male orgasm stands in for female orgasm and to attempts to convey female orgasm by more indirect means,” argues Bill Nichols in “Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary.”

Williams writes in “Hard Core,” “While undeniably spectacular, the money shot is also hopelessly specular; it can only reflect back to the male gaze that purports to want knowledge of the woman’s pleasure the man’s own climax.” She calls the cum shot “a poor substitute for the knowledge of female wonders that the genre as a whole still seeks.”

Some would rather explain this gender divide in terms of sexism. In heterosexual cum-shot porn, Carroll argues, chauvinism is evident in the “domination of the standing male/kneeling woman stance that is one of the most popular forms of this image, but also in the implied degradation of the phallus ‘spitting’ on the woman’s face — that part of the body which is most closely associated with one’s individual dignity and personality.” (It’s worth noting that a similar dom-sub dynamic plays out in gay porn, too.)

In some but not all contexts, Moore sees the money shot as a way of “marking” a partner as “territory or property.” In a paper titled, “Cocktail parties: Fetishizing semen in pornography beyond bukkake,” she and co-author Juliana Weissbein wrote, “The most prominent type of [cum shot] video on X-Tube … was of disembodied males masturbating to ejaculation onto a still photo of a female,” they explain. “The women in these photographs, often difficult to see, are described variously as ex-girfriends or ex-wives, famous models or actresses. Ejaculating onto photos of a specific woman allows the man to claim her as his property.”

Perhaps most important is the impact of AIDs and HIV since that seminal moment in “Deep Throat” four decades ago. “In heterosexual contexts, women have avoided semen for a long time, partially to prevent pregnancy,” as well as various STDs, says Moore. But the AIDS and HIV crisis gave ejaculate an even greater “toxifying, disease-ridden” image. “Semen is something we’ve tried to sanitize and protect ourselves from in a prophylactic sense — we’re covering the body up, or covering the penis up, figuring out ways to avoid contact,” she says.

The funhouse mirror of sexuality often eroticizes that which we most fear and abhor, thus “a fantasy develops about somebody actually wanting [semen], and they want it so badly that they want to drink it and they want to slather it all over their bodies and they want you to wipe it all over their faces,” Moore says. “The messages that are so adverse and make semen to be this abject, disgusting substance have had this other effect of making male spectators want to live out the fantasy that women and men actually want it and are celebrating it.”

Carroll argues that it “is not merely a carnal fantasy; it is also an emotional one — a fantasy of ‘unconditional acceptance’ in which the female” — or male, presumably — “seems to say ‘I exist wholly for you. I will never reject you. You cannot disappoint me.”