Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(Very high sexual content. You have been warned.)

In e-mail yesterday, an ad for the Cocky Boys gay porn video Creampie Surprise. Creampie is a compound noun in which the first element, cream, refers to semen (a fairly common metaphor). The whole thing is an allusion to the foodstuff known as a cream pie, but with a different, and decidedy sexual, meaning. (As far as I can tell, the food compound is always spelled separated, and the sexual compound always spelled solid, so that they’re distinguished visually, though they’re pronounced the same.)

I’ll get the food out of the way first. From Wikipedia:

A cream pie is a type of pie filled with a rich custard or pudding that is made from milk, cream, flour, and eggs. It can come in many forms, including vanilla, lemon, lime, peanut butter, banana, coconut, and chocolate. A constant feature of all cream pies is the whipped cream topping. The custard filling is related to the French crème patissière which is a key component of various French cakes and tarts. It is a one-crust pie.

Cream pies are often associated with comedians who use them as a gimmick in their routines. When used for show business purposes, cream pies are generally mock-up pies made from only canned whipped cream or sometimes the less expensive shaving cream.

On to the sex. Again from Wikipedia:

Creampie, also known as internal ejaculation, internal cum shot and, in homosexual contexts, as breeding [or seeding], is a term used in pornography to describe when a male ejaculates inside his partner’s anus or vagina. [from this definition, it’s not at all clear what the syntax of the word is; I’ll get to that] The term also refers to the visible seeping or dripping of semen from the vagina (or anus).

Internal ejaculation shots are a comparatively recent development in pornography; they are not found in early pornographic films. [I’ll get to this too in a while] The use of the word “creampie” to describe such scenes originated in U.S. pornography in the early 2000s. Internal ejaculations, followed by images of semen dripping from the anus, are sometimes depicted in bareback gay pornography, where they are referred to by the term “breeding” or the “reverse money shot”. Breeding is sometimes followed by felching, which involves sucking the semen from the partner’s anus.

… In male homosexual pornography, Treasure Island Media is a notable representative, its title Breed Me (1999) having been noted as one of the “earliest and most notorious” in the genre.

The sexual noun creampie referring to the act of barebacking has syntax resembling that of head referring to the act of fellatio: you give or get (a) creampie; the noun is mostly count, but in headers its article can be omitted, so it often looks like a mass noun like head. Two examples (of a great many) in headers:

tattood lad fucks and gives creampie  (link)

Ass Fucked Gay Gets Creampie (link)

The essence, if you will, of the creampie is the externally visible ejaculate; that’s where the name comes from. It leaks, or even spurts, out. So the noun can also be used to refer to the results of barebacking, the leaking cavity and the leaking semen.

[Digression on internal vs. external ejaculation. Internal ejaculation (whether with or without a condom) is of course the standard for intercourse, anal or vaginal, in real life. But things are different in visual pornography, where what Linda Williams (in Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (1989)) calls the principle of maximum visibility holds sway; one consequence of this principle is the convention of external ejaculation; the fucker pulls out so that his ejaculation can be fully visible to the audience. Climax is usually achieved by masturbation, most often by the fucker himself.

Note that the convention runs against a piece of sexual folk wisdom, that masturbation isn’t “real sex”. The convention is a compromise between the “real sex”of internal ejaculation and the visibility demands of the genre: in porn, most of the sexual act is a long period of penetration (arranged so that the fucker’s penis is as visible as possible, as often as possible) followed by a relatively brief masturbatory finishing-off. Lots of fucking, then the cum shot.]

Next linguistic observation: creampie has been verbed, as in these porn headers from here:

College Twink Gets Creampied

Hot Studs Creampie Each Others Ass

Next sexual observation: there is such a thing as creampie bukkake, extending the usual sense of bukkake. On bukkake, see the Wikipedia entry; a brief account from this blog:

group ejaculation, as portrayed in porn films, onto someone, originally a woman but then a man as well; and there’s a urinary variant as well

There are two parts to this definition: releasing semen (or urine) (a) onto someone, most often on the face, and perpetration (b) by a group of men. But (b) is sometimes lifted, with bukkake used to refer to action by a single man (if on the face, this would usually be termed a facial). In creampie bukkake (from what I see on the web; there are a surprising number of videos), the agent seems always to be a single man: after being bred, the man drips, or spurts, the cum onto his fucker’s face. An alternative to felching, but not very distant from it, since some of the cum often goes into the fucker’s mouth.

(I remind you that I’m reporting on these practices, not recommending them.)

[Digression on syntax. About breed and seed (often paired, thanks to the rhyme). From a posting of mine on argument structure in porn:

… on two vernacular verb uses related to shoot s.o.’s ass on the INTO reading: seed s.o.’s ass and (heteronormativity alert!) breed s.o.’s ass, both confined, so far as I know, to descriptions of barebacking male-male anal intercourse.

… another transitive use of seed, this time with a direct object referring to a man, but conveying seeding his ass in the sense above [I’m gonna seed you]

… Similar uses for barebacking transitive breed. [Breed me, baby!] ]

I noted above the verbing of the noun creampie. Other lexical items in this tale have also been verbed. The oldest of these verbings is probably bareback (though these things aren’t easy to track).

Bareback ‘without a saddle’ as an Adv (ride bareback) or Adj (bareback rider) goes back at least to the 16th century (according to the OED). But things don’t become sexual until the AIDS crisis; before that, straight couples used condoms or not depending on their views and intentions about conception, and gay couples didn’t use condoms at all, since con(tra)ception wasn’t an issue for them. Then condoms became protective, and (especially in the gay context) not using them became transgressive. A need for a lexical item meaning ‘without a condom’ came into being; bareback was metaphorically extended, and we got fuck bareback and bareback fucking. As far as I can tell, the item was verbed almost immediately, possibly through the intermediate synthetic compound barebacking plus back-formation, possibly directly. From Wikipedia:

Bareback is a slang term to describe acts of sexual penetration without the use of a condom. The term comes from the equestrian term bareback, which refers to the practice of riding a horse without a saddle. Barebacking usually refers to a conscious and deliberate choice to forgo condoms; accidental misuse or non-use is not usually called “barebacking.”

(Nice semantic point here: barebacking isn’t just condomless sex, but *deliberate* condomless sex.)

On to bukkake. It’s recent enough as a lexical item in English (as opposed to Japanese, though it’s not venerable there) that the OED hasn’t caught up with it. But it too has been verbed. In the gay context:

Gay twink bukkaked by eight guys (link)

Gay dude gets gangbanged and bukkaked (link)

These are passive, and that seems to be the majority of the occurrences. But there are active uses too:

i still think the best on stage act this season was when chris(nosmadac) went down on the whole band and they bukkaked him!!! then Zac licked it all off. (link)

Well, if you want to talk about this stuff, it’s genuinely useful to have a verb.

 

 

 

 

This entry was posted on March 10, 2013 at 10:07 am and is filed under Argument structure, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Metaphor, Syntax, Verbing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.