(This posting has a fair amount of linguistic content, but also pretty much gay sexual content, in sometimes very plain language, plus an image at the edge of X-rated. If such material is offensive to you, or merely unwelcome, please pass on this posting.)
It starts with a bit of language play, turing on an ambiguity in the verb come: between the motion verb (as in Santa Claus came to our house on Wednesday night) and the orgasm verb (as in He came like a fountain).
Put together in a racy Xmas image, showing a (rather goofy-looking) Santa basking in the after-pleasures of jacking off. The full image, titled
SANTA CAME!
is viewable on AZBlogX, and here’s the crucial part of the image (minus the dick):
(#1)
[Thanks to Mike McKinley for the image, pulled up from 420bate.blogspot.com, which as I’ve noted in the past, is devoted to sexy images of naked men, but not to attribution of any of its sources.]
Two things: the orgasm verb (and ejaculate noun); and masturbatory practices and vocabulary.
Spelling /k^m/, On LLog back on 12/3/06 I looked at the expressions come face and O face, with a digression on spelling the ejaculatory verb and noun. From that posting:
For lots of people (of whom I am one), differentiating in spelling between the verb come and the noun cum gives you a verb with the past form came (which is what I say), and a noun that clearly looks like a noun, and (since it it has a non-standard spelling, an ear spelling) looks “dirtier” than the spelling come would for the noun.
Meanwhile, from the noun cum there’s a (zero-)derived verb cum ‘ejaculate on, shoot cum on’, apparently seen mostly in the past participle: someone gets their face/ass/boobs/whatever cummed. [note that Santa in #1 has managed to cum his torso and face, not just his crotch]
But the V-come/N-cum pattern isn’t the only one around (though I suspect it’s the dominant one, and it allows you to distinguish come face from cum face). Some people have cum for both, giving a past form cummed, as in
The other day i cummed for the first time. My male friends told me that i should have only cummed a droplet, but i cummed and it ran all down my penis. (link)
And some people have come for both. No doubt there are people with variation for one or both of these items, with the spellings belonging to different stylistic levels (with come as a bit more refined than cum, if you can talk about refinement on this topic). Someone should investigate this.
For all I know, there are people who have cum only as the verb and come only as the noun, though that looks bizarre to me.
In any case, it seems that there was a time, not long ago, when English had no expression of any currency for ‘facial expression during orgasm’. Now we have two, both of them easily understandable in context on first hearing, so at least one of them is likely to endure — unless, of course, our culture enters a phase of visual and linguistic modesty in sexual matters.
Before I pass on to jacking off, here’s another play on come:
(#2)
(From the T-Shirt Hell site, here.) The sexually modest reading: ‘I’m so good / nice (rather than naughty) that Santa came twice to our house (with presents)’, But then there’s a salacious sex-with-St.-Nick reading: ‘I’m so good (at sex) that Santa Claus ejaculated twice’.
On the jack-off patrol. I’ve remarked many times on the bad press that masturbation gets — a contempt that’s the inheritance of centuries of cultural and religious attitudes. So it’s no surprise that there’s not at much vocabulary as you might expect.
There are jack, jerk, wank, etc. verbs (choice of verb depending on the dialect) in just a few argument structures: using jack off as an exemplar, primarily a basic (reflexive) intransitive and and a basic transitive:
(1) Agent jack off ‘Agent manually stimulate himself” (i.e., Santa jacked off)
(2) Agent jack off Experiencer ‘Agent manually stimulate Experiencer’ (i.e., I jacked off Santa / jacked Santa off)
(For (1) there’s a giant inventory of playful, largely ornamental, synonyms (flog the bishop, fire the Surgeon General, and so on. Not really relevant here.)
Argument Structure (1) is compatible with a wide range of events. The jacking off can be private or public (public in the sense of having an audience — jacking off for someone — or in the sense of acting in concert — in what’s sometimes called a circle jerk, though group jerk would be a better term); it can be directed at someone (jacking off on someone, as in bukkake, but not only there); it can be celebratory, flagrant, or matter-of-fact. The jack-off in (1) is without an audience or co-actors, directed back at the guy jacking off, and celebratory. All these distinctions are important to men who engage in jacking off (which is virtually all men), but none of the activities have customary names.
The crucial point is that this domain of sociocultural practices is poorly differentiated lexically. Further: there is slang vocabulary for a man who’s enthusiastic about sucking cock — cockpig, cockslut — but no corresponding terms for men who are enthusiastic about jacking off or jacking other men off. And though there is a term for a video depicting a guy jacking off — (gay) solo video — it doesn’t allude directly to masturbation. And though guys almost always finish off in porn flicks (both gay and straight) by jacking themselves off, the term for this segment of a flick — the cumshot — doesn’t allude to the masturbation, but to its crucial product, the cum.
More contrast between sucking cock and jacking off: the world of safer sex now provides institutions for each of these activities, but they are configured very differently. One set of clubs, like Blow Buddies in San Francisco (which I wrote briefly about here), serves gay and bisexual men and focusses on cocksucking, though it affords an opportunity for all sorts of safer sex between men, including jacking other guys off. Jack-off clubs primarily offer circle jerks and accommodate many straight guys. An explanation from a website:
I am male and straight. What happens at jack off clubs? Are all the men gay or bi? —Michael
Dear Michael, When you get a group of horny men together, there’s no predicting exactly what will happen—aside from frequent orgasms, of course. However, you can expect most jack off clubs to involve men of all different ages, shapes, sizes, and sexual orientations, gathered together in a circle, stroking their cocks. Most men will probably only handle their own meat, but some guys will lend a helpful hand if that is mutually desired. Most men will be naked, except for their shoes (so as not to slip on jizz that has been spilled on the floor.) Jack off clubs are by no means strictly gay or bi. The majority of men will actually be predominantly straight. Why do straight men get off on getting off with their buddies? The fact of the matter is that nothing could be more natural. Jacking off with another man or several other men involves sharing one’s masculinity, participating in a common feeling, acknowledging a simple and frequent activity shared by all men, and celebrating manly passions. All men experience horniness, and all men masturbate (okay, perhaps there is a handful of men on earth who do not jerk off regularly, but the vast majority of other men more than make up for this lack of masturbation by shooting off more than once a day). A jack off club is a sexy situation, but jerking off together is not technically a sex act. There’s no penetration or feelings of love between the participants, so it is not particularly gay or straight in itself. It’s just sexuality, plain and simple, which is one of the attractions. If you desire to jack off with gay or bi men only, there are certainly some jack off clubs with strictly gay or bi memberships, but unless you want to suck and fuck other men in addition to jerking off, it doesn’t really matter what their sexual orientation is.
The view here of these clubs as primarily for a celebration of masculinity, a kind of male bonding, echoes accounts by MSMs (“men who have sex with men” but explicitly do not identify as gay or bi) of what they get out of their sort of down-low sex; brief discussion here, with links to Language Log treatments.
(The San Francisco Jacks club has a site here, with links to other groups.)
Leave a Reply