The first time a man came on my face, I assumed he’d missed.
‘It’s fine!’ I said blithely, as I rubbed my face on his sheets. ‘Don’t worry about it! You missed my eye!’
It was only when I spoke to my friends at school on Monday morning that I realised it hadn’t been an accident, he hadn’t pulled out of my mouth because he’d had a cramp or been trying to hold back. He had, in fact, wanted to come on my face.
‘That’s called a facial’ one of my more worldly friends told me, ‘It’s actually good for your skin.’
‘But why?’ I remember asking. Despite being a D cup and having been one of the first people in our year to have sex, the worldly friend wasn’t able to answer that question. And, as it turns out, not many other people I’ve spoken to have been able to either.
The rise of popularity in facials is often attributed to porn. But then, any change in human sexual behaviour that came around the same time as the internet is automatically attributed to porn.
Broadly speaking, the moment when fellatio became a central feature of sex was the 1972 film Deep Throat, a film which features a woman who had a clitoris in the back of her throat, therefore derives sexual pleasure from giving oral sex.
It’s a pretty rough film, and not at all in keeping with the kind of porn we’re used to seeing today, but it does feature an early example of a ‘money shot’ – when the male star finishes over the female star’s face. From then on, the ‘money shot’ became a central and extremely common aspect of porn.
The popularity of the facial was then cemented by the AIDS crisis. According to Charlie Glickman, speaking to Jezebel, ‘cum on me, not in me’ was a popular sex education slogan right in to the 1980’s.
You can kind of see why – semen was suddenly dangerous, something to be afraid of, and with HIV a very different diagnosis back then, people were scared. So if ejaculating over someone rather than inside them could keep you safe, it seemed like a great idea.
This created some issues in terms of porn production, though. Ejaculating on a woman’s or chest made it difficult for the camera to capture the co-star’s expression. By filming the ejaculation on her face the viewer got to see her reaction, as well as the ‘money shot’.
Forty years later, STI testing is faster and more reliable within the adult entertainment industry, but there’s no doubt that facials are common.
In the Metro.co.uk survey of 90 people, 89% of respondents said that they had experienced a facial.
The popularity of this sex act has left me asking the same question I was musing on ten years ago, the first time a man came over my face. Why?
Experts seem to share a consensus that part of the appeal of a facial is the humiliation. What they disagree about is whether that humiliation is a problem.
Dr Ruth Westheimer describes facials as humiliating in Sex for Dummies, and urges people not to consider them a normal part of intercourse.
Explaining to teens that “facials” are not the norm is as important as telling them how babies are born.
— Dr. Ruth Westheimer (@AskDrRuth) August 11, 2011
Writer Dan Savage, however, takes a different stance, saying that the humiliation aspect of a facial is entirely real, but not a problem, writing: ‘Facials are degrading—and that’s why they’re so hot’. Savage seems to suggest that a little consensual humiliation isn’t going to do anyone any harm.
While the conflation of humiliation and pleasure might sound contrary, human beings are complicated creatures and a quick search for ‘humiliation fetish’ will lead you to 712,000, most of which are people confessing to having one.
Even so, humiliation can’t be the entire aim of the game, otherwise actresses wouldn’t adopt expressions of bliss during a facial in porn films, instead they’d be making faces which implied humiliation and unhappiness.
Permission
58% of people said that their sexual partner did not ask permission to come on their face
It’s old fashioned and disrespectful to assume that no woman would want to have come on her face – that it’s the kind of hideous shame which women put up with in order to please a man. That kind of sentiment does women a disservice. Of course there are women who will be aroused by it, who will find it a raw and arousing experience. Alexa, 23* told Metro.co.uk that she loves facials, saying:
‘When a guy comes on my face I feel like it’s the mark of a job well done. I like that he finds looking at me so arousing, and I’m proud that he wants to look at me when he has his climax.’
Sophie, 31, shared Alexa’s sentiment, saying: ‘It makes me feel really sexy. Maybe it’s because of porn, but I just find it really hot. I like being the center of attention.’
Personally, I find Alexa and Sophie’s stances on facials tricky to comprehend (much as I respect them). As I’ve written before, I have a phobia of semen. It’s bad enough on my body, but on my face? Enough to make me properly sick.
Even aside from my phobia, I find the experience of having something which isn’t supposed to go in your eyes that close to your eyes a stressful one.
Enjoying facials
48% of respondents said they did not enjoy the experience of getting a facial
8% said they did not enjoy the first experience but did subsequently enjoy it
48% of women said they had always enjoyed the experience
I’m not alone in finding a facial deeply unpleasant. Katia, 27 told Metro.co.uk: ‘I find it disrespectful. It’s not arousing to lie there waiting for him to finish, and of course I don’t get any sexual pleasure from it – there are no pleasure receptors in my face. It’s boring, and it makes me feel stupid. And then I have to clean up.’
Katia’s point resonated with me. While, once again, I am not in the business of shaming other women for what they get off on, it does seem strange that such a central focus of porn films is an action which has literally no physical pleasure for women.
How do facials make you feel?
Our survey found that 25% of people who received a facial felt either disgusted, queasy or angry afterwards, that’s compared to 41% who said they were aroused or pleased by the experience.
Similarly to when you see a woman in lesbian porn give a blow job to a dildo, the expressions of ecstasy on a woman’s face during a facial are a little confusing. Are men being hoodwinked into thinking that women really get pleasure from these things? Or when you’re lost in sex or porn, is it very difficult to care?
The thing about facials is that they’re not inherently wrong, or bad, or problematic. Just like any other sex act, as long as it takes place between two consenting adults, it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
But, given that it’s only sexually gratifying for one partner physically, it must either be something that the receiver puts up with, or it must be tapping into the receiver’s psychology.
The fact that the adult film industry has managed to tap into our sexuality and mold it around what is safest and fits best with production values is both terrifying and enormously impressive.
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