In her early work, Williams was responding to the radical feminist voices of the 70s and 80s—specifically calling out the Women Against Pornography who condemned mainstream porn as inherently harmful and anti-woman—by giving pornography a serious, objective, and academic treatment—invoking Marx and Freud but also viewing and dissecting a lot of porn, herself. Today, anti-porn activists still rail against the hyper-phallic cumshot as proof that the whole industry is sick.As the slang term for the moment the hard-core film "delivers the goods" of the representation of sexual pleasure, the money shot seems the perfect embodiment of the illusory and insubstantial nature of late capitalism's "one-dimensional" "society of the spectacle"—advanced societies that consume images even more avidly than they consume objects.
[…] But, of course, it is in its connection to money proper—that ultimate obscenity—that the money shot is most obviously a fetish. And it is the convergence of money and sexual pleasure both imagined as visible, quantifiable, sensuous, and intrinsically valuable things in themselves rather than the mediating vehicles or relations of exchange that the money shot most perfectly embodies the profound alienation of contemporary mass society of consumption.
Men's health experts generally agree that for most guys, drinking more water, eating better and exercising usually go just as far in the pursuit of the holy cum-grail. And the size of the load varies from man to man: between one and a half to six milliliters, according to urologists. None of this has anything to do with how valiantly you've performed in bed, regardless of what Semenax says.Performance enhancing supplements and fake cum lube are both featured in Tobi Hill-Meyer's autobiographical 2012 film Money Shot Blues and How to Fake Ejaculation. In it, she recounts her first porn shoot gig as awkward and disappointing, because of the directors expectations and ignorance of trans women's orgasms, which vary from powerful cumshot to no visible cum at all."Audiences these days, they want to see it really shoot," Hill-Meyer says in the film. "They want to see it practically hit the ceiling." She recalls taking a pill, and explains how to DIY a fake cum pump with some medical tubing.Despite being designed for porn folks, Hahn told me that his cumtraptions and faux Kum refills are mostly bought by private citizens. This baffles him. "I don't claim to understand the mindset of the folks that buy it. I don't share this particular fetish. But that's exactly what it is. And there are worse things in life."“I don't share this particular fetish. But that's exactly what it is. And there are worse things in life."
One sex worker I spoke to admitted a serious aversion to cum, but asked to remain anonymous because admitting semen disgusts her could hurt her work. "I am in the sex industry and no man wants to hear that their cum physically repulses me and there is nothing they can do about it," she said.For her, it's a texture thing: "I dislike cum like I dislike all things with that sort of texture: Gooey, stringy, messy, gunk," she said. "No slugs, no worms, no cum.""I enjoy having sex with men—cum is just a bitter end to a good thing”
Most people outside the porn industry I talked to who are into cum as a fetish echoed a similar sentiment; that it's not so much the cum—the viscosity, or the smell, or the taste—but who's delivering it."It's more a psychological thing, I think," one fetishist who asked to remain anonymous told me. "Kind of like…..a sign for 'sex happened!' I guess, or like a 'marked territory.' This part confused me at first, since I don't like sex as competition or with heteronormative power dynamics. But then I realised, that the same feelings apply to cum from other people than cis-men, and that it can also apply to the cum of a submissive person. Then it's more a sign of the dominant who made them cum."PJ Sage connected the cumshot—as well as things like cum tributes, where people jerk off onto phone screens or photographs and post the results—to an attempt to reach across a digital divide, to break the fourth wall of the screen and find a facsimile of closeness."Like so much of sex, it’s about blurring the boundaries between bodies," he said. "About being on and in and around and across someone else."Sometimes what's sexy about cum for fetishists is the taboo itself. Millennials are one of the first generations to be taught that condoms or abstinence are the only ways to avoid pregnancy—and we were taught this by people who survived the AIDS crisis, who had their own valid fears about coming into contact with bodily fluids in a sexual context."I think suddenly cum becomes this weighty substance, that is dangerous in a whole hell of a lot of ways”