Showing posts with label orgasms. Show all posts
Showing posts with label orgasms. Show all posts

28 Feb 2014

On Cumshots and the Triumph of the Will to Orgasm

Charlotte Gainsbourg as Joe in the two-part film 
Nymphomaniac, dir. Lars von Trier (2013)

According to one sexologist, real men like to have narrative closure and some sense of satisfactory ending. Thus the importance and popularity within the pornographic imagination of the cumshot which provides an often premature but nonetheless definitive full stop to proceedings.

Only a few effeminate perverts enjoy the experience of delayed orgasm in which the purpose of pleasure and pleasure of purpose is constantly deferred and often ruined; perverts, a few philosophers, and those rare women who still value seduction over production and regard feminism in a Nietzschean sense as a loss of style, or an obscene staging of desire determined by purely phallic values.  

For such women - to whom the promise of so-called sexual liberation was always laughable - pleasure can very well exist without purpose. They don't mind exchanging amusing stories that lack a punchline (the female inability to tell jokes is rooted in an unconcern with climax, rather than the lack of a sense of humour), or receiving massages without the happy ending that most men anticipate and desire (consenting to a certain amount of back, neck and shoulder work so long as they are able to eventually flip over and have the oiled hands of their masseuse set to in the one area they want to have rubbed).

But today, as indicated, such women are few in number. The majority have been taught to demand equal rights and pleasures and to make sex visible and meaningful, i.e. the essential truth of themselves: I come therefore I am. The insistence on orgasm and the porn industry's obsession with showing such close up and in hi-definition has exorcised the ambivalence of her body and compromised the strange intensities that existed in erotic games of reticence and artifice.

I would like to think that Lars von Trier understands something of this and that his new film, Nymphomaniac - as well as the accompanying poster campaign which features many of the lead actors showing us their orgasm faces (including Charlotte Gainsbourg pictured above) - is a subversive attempt to mock the sexualized order we inhabit and to bring about some form of reversal.    

But, sadly, I suspect from what I have read of the work, that this is not the case; that he too remains a believer in sex as a form of truth to be ejaculated in all our faces in an orgy of realism. For that is precisely what it is to live in a pornified culture; one is subject to endless cumshots and an obsession with the real.