Fridae

Come One
C-U-M. Semen. Jizz. Jism. Juice. Splooge. Squirt. Seed. Milk. Mayonnaise. Goo. Goop. Cream. CUM. CUM. CUM! I hardly need a thesaurus to come up with 10 epithets which refer to that elusive substance of gay dreams.

Cum! Cum is more politely called 'semen,' and is principally thought of by mainstream society as the carrier of sperm for the purposes of making babies (if people admit to thinking about it at all). Cum has been valorised as the epitome of male essence, so powerful in its relatively miniscule quantities that the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle thought that it was semen alone which contained all of the necessary ingredients for the creation of life. The woman's body, in his view, was simply a repository for the semen of a man. Babies grew fully formed from semen itself. Male fluid alone contained the power to create life, a quality ordinarily ascribed to the Gods!

Aristotle's view now comes across as archaically sexist. It was only from much later cultural developments that conceptions of the woman's "ovum" began to exist, but even then, the language of reproduction today in our science textbooks still involves all the jingoism of transparent male-centeredness. Semen "shoots" out of an erect penis, sperm "swim vigorously" toward the womb, "compete" with each other like aggressive tadpoles to reach an egg where only one lone ranger will emerge "triumphant" to "penetrate" the receptive egg, that lazy pillow princess.

Aside from its sperm-component, semen contains many nutrients, as Menshealth.com quite blithely tells us: "Semen contains citric acid, free amino acids, fructose, enzymes, phosphorylcholine, prostaglandin, potassium, and zinc."

Citric acid?! That's ALMOST Vitamin C! Amino acids? They combine to form PROTEINS! What's more, they're FREE! Singaporean dream come true. Better than paying for protein powder shakes at the gym! Fructose? That's SUGAR, natural flavour! Like from apples, nectarines and berries! Phosphorylchlorine and prostaglandin? They're so unpronounceable they must be important! Potassium and zinc? These minerals are some basic building blocks for maintaining our own healthy levels of testosterone! Damnit, cum sounds like a wonder food, like green tea, or ginseng.

Of course, cum means different things to different people in different cultures, that it would be incorrect to assume that its "true" meaning lay solely either in its reproductive potential or in its nutritional components, both of which seem the two primary routes which dominate our way of thinking.

Gibert Herdt, an American anthropologist, has written in depth in his essay Rituals of Manhood: Male Initiation Rites in Papua New Guinea about the initiation rites of Papua New Guinean tribe "Sambia," in which boys become men through ritual ingestion of semen. According to Herdt, in Sambia society it is assumed that the only essential difference between females and males, is that females do not need special intervention to become women, whereas boys must undergo a special ritual process in order to become men. As Herdt writes, "Underlying men's communications is a conviction that maleness, unlike femaleness, is not a biological given. It must be artificially induced through secret ritual..."

This ritual takes place within male secret society in which women are not present to witness, as their menstrual fluids are regarded as "contaminating." The society presumes that the "achievement of puberty for boys requires semen." This requirement of semen is fulfilled by what Herdt calls "oral insemination" of prepubescent boys by adult men in the tribe through fellatio. These rituals continue periodically over the period of a boy's life, with semen accumulating in the boys' bodies over time from being ingested "time and again for years" which is "believed crucial for the formation of biological maleness and masculine comportment." In other words, in the Sambia tribe, in order for boys to become men, they literally drink adult men's cum for years to "masculinise" themselves until they are ready to repeat this ritual as men for a new generation of young boys.

Talk about a Puritan Christian's nightmare!

Come All
In our generation with the scourge of HIV/AIDS, semen has taken on a more sinister, dual quality. On the one hand, many of us gay men in societies outside of Papua New Guinea no doubt "fetishise" (whose etymological root means "to make the artificial magical") semen, not unlike the Sambian people, imbuing it with magical virtues far beyond its nutritional value. Perhaps many gay men subconsciously believe that by ingesting another man's semen, we do in fact ingest some of their "masculine essence," making ourselves "more of a man" in the process. On the other hand, semen has also, from the perspective of sexual health workers, become the potential carrier of a whole host of diseases, from gonorrhoea, syphilis, hepatitis, to HIV, among so many others.

We have developed a necessary suspicion and ambivalence toward the virtues of semen in light of so many in our community having got sick and dying from being 'poisoned' or 'contaminated' by other men's cum. From unprotected sex. Even the terms "protected" and "unprotected," when applied to penetrative sex, suggest the dangerous quality of semen. Whereas in Sambia, female menstrual fluids were seen as contaminants and inhibitors of male flourishing, today, it is male semen that has taken on that charge.

It is because of this link between semen and ideas of "contamination" and "dirtiness" that may be why much male sexual fantasy seems to revolve around the idea of "cumming on" someone as an act of humiliation and degradation. Entire straight porn industries have dedicated themselves to the slick sleazy filth of "facials," in which the "money shot," as ejaculation is affectionately nicknamed by American pornographers, is most erotically charged when the man cums all over a woman's face. While many anti-porn feminist thinkers (most notably Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon) often, perhaps correctly, criticise pornography for being an exploitative industry that makes its money from the sexual humiliation of women, often for dubious recompense (that is, the women may make some money out of this, but may not have much say in the scenes they want to participate in), I have a slightly different perspective as a man.

If it is true, according to some Western psychoanalytic theory, that every act of aggression is predicated partially by the aggressor's fear of their own lack (in other words: "You have something I want, I am jealous that you have that thing I want, and hence I must destroy you"), then what is going on in the aggressive male sexual humiliation of women? What is the thing that women have that (straight) men want, but will forever be unable to have, that thing which infects men with the tyranny of their own aggressions? For me, that answer, based on the modern cult of cum-facials, is Purity. It is only the Pure that can be desecrated.

Since the scientific understanding of sexually transmitted diseases, semen can no longer be uncritically linked with "life-force." Many men now have implicit insecurities about their cum, from quantity to motility of sperm, to the texture and taste, how thick is it? How creamy? How sweet? And so on. It is as if, divorced now from the earlier conception of our cum as holy in and of itself, cum is now just another bodily fluid, empty, and meaningless beyond its aesthetic qualities. As men, we cannot live with illusions that we carry the life force that sustains the universe (as professed by the Ancient Greeks, the Sambia, and also in philosophies as diverse as Indian Tantra to Chinese Taoism). Even if one is certain that one does not have any sexually transmissible diseases, we are taught that our certainty of our own cleanliness is indeed more the exception that proves the rule of other men's (and hence our own) inherent DIRTINESS. Indeed, we know that, as much as we have the ability to co-create life when our sperm joins an egg, we also know that our testicles produce potential harbingers of disease and death.

As Long As You Come
So where now can we go as men? I have no happy conclusions. With the advent of the biological sciences (which distil all our biological processes into their essential role in the 'survival of our species') and nutritionism (which reduces the meaning of ingestible substances like food and semen into their "essential" nutritional components, such as sugars, proteins, etc., uncommitted to their social and cultural value), it is as if the meaning of cum has committed suicide. There is nothing inherently grand about cum any longer. Nothing.

For me, as a young, libidinous, noisy gay upstart, I am most interested in the gay male reclamation of the meaning of cum, as the culmination of desperate bodies (or a hand) rubbing and tugging, resulting in blissful, bonded, explosive climax. A hint at transcendence? Gay men have consistently been the "revivalists" of male beauty in almost every culture; perhaps we do the same in reviving the meaning, glamour, and valour of cum, in rescuing cum from its death of meaning. As a gay man, I refuse to be lost in fear thinking of each other as potentially "contaminated."

Being with the man I love while he is cumming is blissful, magnificent, transcendent! Our cum is that manifestation, not of our "male essence" but of our male vulnerability. It is that which is beautiful.

Malaysia-born and Singapore-bred Shinen Wong is currently getting settled in Sydney, Australia after moving from the United States, having attended college in Hanover, New Hampshire, and working in San Francisco for a year after. In his fortnightly "Been Queer. Done That" column, Wong will explore gender, sexuality, and queer cultures based on personal anecdotes, sweeping generalisations and his incomprehensible libido.