Faith Holland: Ookie Canvas (detail) [1]
I.
Readers familiar with D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) will doubtless remember the long and explicit tirade that Mellors delivers when Connie asks him why he married Bertha Coutts.
Detailing his frustrating sexual experience not only with the latter, but also with several other women - some of whom he describes as unresponsive and some of whom he labels lesbian - Mellors also informs Connie of the fact that, in his view, the vagina is the only place in which it is right and proper for a man to ejaculate.
Mellors hates those women who find coitus distasteful and simply lie there waiting for him to finish. And he also hates those women who prefer to actively bring themselves to orgasm after he has already come [2]. But so too does Mellors despise women who love "'every kind of feeling and cuddling and going off [...] except the natural one'" [3].
That is to say, women who, for example, prefer oral to vaginal sex and "'always make you go off when you're not in the only place you should be, when you go off'" [4].
II.
Ultimately, despite his penchant for anal sex, Mellors subscribes to a very conservative model of what constitutes legitimate and fulfilling sexual activity for adults: a heterosexual model which privileges genital penetration and terminates as soon as the man has deposited his semen inside the cunt. Freud would approve. But many men (not to mention many women), might find this model - one which is firmly tied to reproductive function rather than to erotic pleasure divorced from such - rather limited and restrictive [5].
Nice as it is to spend oneself inside the female genital tract, some men prefer to splash out in other ways, though it's interesting to ask to what extent this preference has been shaped by contemporary pornographic convention. For as Linda Williams reminds us, whereas earlier porn films occasionally included spectacles of external ejaculation, it wasn't until the 1970s and the rise of hardcore movies that the so-called money shot (i.e. cum shot) assumed "the narrative function of signaling the climax of a genital event" [6] and vouched for the scene's veracity. It has since become a standard feature - arguably to the point of cliché - loved by some, loathed by others [7].
Thus, there's a whole politics involved around the question of when and where to come. Not only have options expanded (both on and off screen) to the point whereby men are encouraged to ejaculate on just about every part of a woman's body, but those who are jizzed-upon are expected to enjoy the experience and find novel ways to erotically play with semen; swallowing it, rubbing it in, forcing their partners to lick it off them, etc.
Just don't tell Oliver (Quick! Let me come inside you) Mellors ... [8]
Notes
[1] Faith Holland's Ookie Canvases are pictures composed of cum shots sampled from
pornography or submission, isolated from their background, colourised, and
then collaged together to form an all-over composition.
[2] In this post I am using come as the verb and cum to refer to the
resulting substance, but there is no established rule governing these spellings.
[3] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 203.
[4] Ibid.
[5] What Mellor's doesn't seem to appreciate is that for a sexually active woman without access to reliable methods of birth control, coitus interruptus is perhaps her best hope of avoiding an unwanted pregnancy when her lover insists on vaginal penetration but refuses to wear a condom.
Interestingly, it has been suggested that the cum shot first became popular in hardcore circles only after the actresses decided that ejaculation inside their bodies was risky, inconsiderate, and unnecessary. In other words, it does not signify a secret male desire to visualise ejaculation, nor is it a dark desire to humiliate or degrade women in some manner. See: Joseph W. Slade, Pornography and Sexual Representation: A Reference Guide, Vol. 2., (Greenwood Press, 2001), pp. 654-56.
[6] Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible", (University of California Press, 1989), p. 93.
[7] As one commentator on this tricky (not to mention sticky) subject reminds us, since the '70s anti-porn feminists have often singled out the money shot for particular criticism, though their views have since been challenged by feminists writing from a more sex-positive perspective:
"'It is a convention of pornography that the sperm is on her, not
in her,' Andrea Dworkin argued in 1993. 'It marks the spot, what he owns
and how he owns it. The ejaculation on her is a way of saying (through
showing) that she is contaminated with his dirt; that she is dirty.' But, as Lisa Jean Moore points out in Sperm Counts (2007), Dworkin ignores 'that these actresses exhibit pleasure and that it is their pleasure
that many of their male partners enjoy. It is perhaps more accurate to
theorize that men, both as spectators and actors, want women to want
their semen.' In Moore's view, it's not the woman's humiliation, but her
enthusiasm, that is so hot."
See Maureen O'Connor, 'The Complicated Politics of Where to Come', New York Magazine (13 July, 2015). It can be read online in The Cut by clicking here.
[8] Connie, however, is a different kettle of fish. She has a fetishistic fascination with the male body, particularly the sexual organs, and at one point when admiring the erect penis of her lover, she goes "crawling on her knees on the bed towards him" and puts her arms around his white slender loins, "drawing him to her so that her hanging, swinging breasts touched the tip of the stirring, erect phallos, and caught the drop of moisture".
One imagines from this that Connie would be more than happy for Mellors to ejaculate on her tits, thrilling as she does to the feel of precum on her body and, later, the heavy rain in which she frolics naked and holds up her breasts.
- D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, op. cit. The line quoted is on p. 210 and the scene referred to in the rain is on p. 221.
