ABSTRACT
A walking tour of the architectural heart of Brooklyn, bounded by Grand Army Plaza, the Brooklyn Museum and Prospect Park, reveals an urban landscape flanked by fountains. In the centre of Grand Army Plaza, the Bailey Fountain presents statues of the water god Neptune together with nude figures representing Wisdom and Felicity, poised under torrents of water bathing them in a continuous and forceful spray. Down the street, the Brooklyn Museum’s fountain is banked by stadium seating for an audience to watch syncopated jets of water emerge from the concrete. The forty-eight holes in the sidewalk pump out streams of varying velocity and volume sometimes in a rhythm interspersed with random blasts. One could sit for hours and watch the Museum’s fountain as it spurts and splashes, often animated by joyous children dancing in front on hot days. (At the third point in our triangle, Prospect Park’s ‘Vale of Cashmere’, water no longer sprays over the lost fountains that have become overgrown with brush; but, as one of the most celebrated cruising areas in Brooklyn, their representation has been replaced by less mediated activities.) Fountains are not unique to Brooklyn. Consider how spurting fluids grace
many public buildings, parks and town squares across the globe. Although many may not admit a correspondence between these commonplace public celebrations of spurting water and the money shot, that moment in a pornographic film when a penis ejaculates, we believe there is traffic between the everyday celebration of ejaculation in the urban landscape and in pornography. Displays of surging fluids please spectators. Indeed, the term ‘bukkake’, a popular genre of pornography that valorizes ejaculation in particular ways, is translated from Japanese as ‘splash’. It is not exclusively fountains that revel in the ejaculatory moment. Firework
spectatorship, glossy champagne advertisements, images of volcano eruptions, ocean spray, the pilgrimage to Ol’ Faithful and fantastical musings about the Fountain of Youth are but a few examples of ejaculatory representation and worship. Depictions of ejaculate, both literal and symbolic, are possibly even more prevalent than phallic images. Perhaps, we are socialized in our semi-conscious to experience ejaculate and admire it – the bursts, thrusts, mini-explosions and
spurts. All these homages go beyond the phallic and celebrate the production of fluid, the springing forth of juice. At the same time, during our walk through Brooklyn’s neighbourhoods, we
see messages on billboards, buses and jumbo-trons about pregnancy prevention, HIV medication and condoms. These messages convey a sense of semen as filthy, dirty, infectiously diseased and dangerously fertile: something to avoid. This language of fear and protection imagines the borders of the flesh as vulnerable to penetration by the pathogen – the sperm cell. The body must be fortified to avoid the sperm cell, or modified in order to combat the effects of its penetration. So how can we explain the inconsistencies in the messages we see during our
urban jaunt? We participate in celebrating the ejaculate and yet are bombarded with warnings to fear it. And what do we do to these contradictory messages as they resurface in our creative and erotic expressions? In what ways does the erotic representation of ejaculate follow from these seminal expressions of pleasure and danger? Semen within these everyday pornographic renderings becomes simultaneously celebrated, feared, fetishized and revered. In sum, its representations are erotically vital. The constant juxtaposition of the culturally produced thirst for semen and the fear of its capabilities is precisely what gives representations of semen their power. This anxious tension creates a super-erotically charged substance. These commonplace examples set the stage for our examination into one
example of everyday pornography. We wish to take this observation of the mundane production of meanings about semen and ejaculate and examine the ways in which it is co-constitutive with do-it-yourself pornography broadcast on the internet. In what follows, we posit that semen, its ejaculation and materiality, is invested with social meanings that have the ability to signify ownership over property, corporeal or otherwise, satisfy a female (and in some cases male) thirst or hunger for male body fluid, or humiliate the other or, less frequently, the self. Representations of semen moving through space – how it travels, who it touches, where it lands – provide (for men) a positive inversion of the real materiality of semen’s position as a feared and dangerous substance, but do so often at the expense of women. This stylization is meaningful and powerful because it constructs a narrative of men’s semen as able to produce certain feelings and values about objects and people. The male gaze is constantly reinforced through the ejaculating of a masculine glaze, a glaze that coats the other or the self with a glossy, slippery substance that modifies social relations.1 Semen is depicted as a mechanism of marking territory and claiming ownership.
