Girl with a pearl necklace

Johannes Vermeer, Woman With a Pearl Necklace, ca. 1662-1665, oil on canvas 

So far the highlight of my week has been jumping rope, just once, really well — two minutes at top speed without once catching myself flat-footed. I had claimed one corner of a deserted outdoor basketball court that in the midday sun looked like over-baked fondant and started jumping rope in a seething rage. Somehow, thrillingly, it worked, and much better than the different soundtracks, surfaces, and times of day I had previously tried in the hope of improvement. I couldn’t even see the plastic-coated red wire as it whipped through the air, just heard it whistling as it passed overhead.

I had spent the prior couple of days frustrated by texts of all sorts, and I had been pushed past frustration into anger that morning when a friend with benefits asked me, in the course of otherwise fun sexting, whether I would like to have lots of men come on my face. I like this friend, and trust him and know his tone and comment were meant in the specific context of our play. Had he asked me a few days earlier, I might have rolled my eyes rather than abruptly telling him that I wasn’t feeling it and going to jump rope in a rage.

But men I didn’t know had been talking to me about their cum for weeks, ever since I decided to try my hand at sexting whilst sheltering in place. A novice, I was not prepared for the firehose of textual jizz that would be aimed my way. I have been regaled with detailed descriptions of the force, velocity, trajectory, volume, and consistency of cum in no fewer than five languages. I have heard about “powerful loads” and “big spurts” and “thick ropes”. I have been treated to grainy, shaky videos of cocks bobbing around like exotic nocturnal creatures, spewing semen like venom. I am as turned on by these snippets as I would be by vintage Animal Planet footage. 

Men don’t ask whether I would like to hear about their cum — that I do seems to be a given. They ask me where I would like them to come, as though they are bestowing upon me a great honor, and I know instinctively that “your hand” or “a sock” or “shoot for the moon, why don’t you?” are not acceptable answers. Some don’t bother asking and instead list the parts of my body on which they want to come. If pressed to respond, I used to send an upside-down smiley face — that blessed, enigmatic, all-purpose emoji, long may it reign — which they invariably interpret favorably. These days, I simply unmatch.

When men ask me whether I swallow — and they always phrase their inquiry this way, regardless of the language, as though they themselves have swallowed the direct object — I know what the right answer is. It also happens to be the true answer, though not, I suspect, for the reasons they wish. It’s simply less of a mess. There are some like-minded and practical men out there (#notallmen). Q is one of those correspondents who has become a sort of friend, so when he sent me a solicited picture of his cock, I didn’t hesitate to ask why he was bothering with a condom. He said it made cleaning up easier — no small thing in this time of toilet paper shortages.

The more men wrote to me about the physical evidence of their pleasure, the more I looked for evidence that they cared about mine. I looked for the signs by which I would judge any other conversation — a give and take, both parties asking thoughtful questions, a sense of mutuality. Mostly, I found instead well-worn scripts, demands for pictures and videos and calls, a fixation on cocks and cum, tits and cunts, as though the rest of our bodies had ceased to be, as though the very hands with which we were typing to each other had come untethered. 

Earlier that week, R, another correspondent-cum-friend, had lamented, “I feel that there’s no sense of co-creation in a lot of sexting.” I had thought immediately of G, who went on for ages, telling me in great detail what he was imagining doing to me without asking a question or even requiring a response. I had watched his words appear on the screen at a steady clip, growing ever more conscious of feeling superfluous, knowing that he could be writing the same to anyone, that perhaps he had. I had known to be leery of getting too personal when chatting with strangers, but I hadn’t thought the opposite would be a problem. 

After my workout, I laid on the artificial turf beside the basketball court and reconsidered the exchange that had set me off that morning. I care about my partners’ pleasure and would like them to come, would like to play a role in getting them to come, but the plain truth is: no, I would not enjoy having lots of men come on my face. I would not enjoy having any number of men come on my face. I would not even enjoy having a man I cared about enough to want to please come on my face. 

I don’t want to come across as anti-cum. Under normal in-person circumstances, I’m cum-neutral. I don’t think much about a man’s ejaculate except in the event that it gets on me or of a condom malfunction. But in so much of the sexting I’ve done since shelter-in-place began, cum-neutrality hasn’t seemed to be an option.

If these men were called upon to defend their prose, I expect some would say that it’s part and parcel of the standard sexting script (I hope not) or that I hadn’t objected (true). But I suspect more would argue that in fact I should feel gratified that their cocks are spurting in my honor (or so they say — I take all such claims with a mountain of salt), raining down the manliest manna from heaven, a twenty-one gun salute I never asked for.

A more seasoned woman might have asked, “Are men ok?” A woman with more time on her hands might have delved into what I imagine is a vast body of research and discourse regarding men coming on women and the sticky questions it prompts (my quick Google Scholar queries turned up mostly results on premature ejaculation). I assumed instead that I must be peculiarly prudish in this regard, one of the few women in the world who just doesn’t get off on descriptions of semen. If men were bothering to pen these odes to their ejaculate, I thought, it must surely be to contribute to our mutual pleasure, and so the disconnect must be at my end.

I peeled myself off the turf and headed home for a shower and some lunch, my brief reprieve from sheltering in place over. Later that afternoon I pulled up the newest installment of How to Do It, an advice column about sex at Slate, and nearly stopped reading thanks to the first letter writer. He says that his new relationship is wonderful, except for one thing: “She seems hostile to my semen.” Another man, enamored of his own cum! His girlfriend’s post-coital, post-cuddle clean-up wounds him: “When she rushes to cleanse herself of my semen, I feel that she is throwing me in the waste bin and sending me down the shower drain.” 

I wanted to howl — was this how all the men I’d been texting with thought about their cum? As though we were in olden times, as though it were their essence? Could they really be this precious about jizz?

Stoya responded, “It’s her body. She’s willing to share it with you. And you seem to need your semen worshipped.” Her summary of the situation gave me hope — surely semen worship was not a standard expectation, codified in some Slack message I missed. 

I made a quick survey of my own. I had been discussing the unwritten codes of sexting with R, and wrote to him, “I’ve been so frustrated recently by men saying they want to come on me — as though I should be honored.” He responded, “They feel that it is a gift. Coming on a girl’s neck is called a pearl necklace after all.” I asked H about his perspective on cum and whether he found himself emotionally attached to his own. He wrote back, “Generally I find it inconvenient because now it’s there, like a sneeze.” I brought up the subject on a video chat with N, who agreed with H, though he added with a wistful air that he also found his cum a bit sad, because its presence meant something pleasurable had ended, if only momentarily.

A sample size of three, far from randomly selected, might not carry much weight against the cum-loving hordes whose texts drove me to despair — maybe someone else will conduct a more rigorous survey, or point me in the direction of published findings. For now, all I can reasonably conclude is this: one man’s sneeze is another man’s pearl necklace.