Visible male ejaculation is such a deeply engrained mainstay of pornography that few people—especially those outside the industry—take time to wonder why. Or to ponder how it came to be. But thankfully for all of us, Vice’s Samantha Cole takes money shots seriously. So seriously, in fact, that she wrote a feature article where she asks and answers these very questions. 

“Anytime I look at a mainstream porn site today, especially tube sites, cum is flying in all directions, in double-speed in the ads and in the thumbnails, and filling the videos themselves,” wrote Cole. “There have never been more porn genres to choose from for the eager cum enthusiast. Facials (cumming on a face), bukkake (multi-partner facials), gokkun (drinking many loads of cum at once, for example from a cup), cum-eating instructional videos made by dominatrixes, ‘cumpilation’ videos that are just scene after scene of cumshots—the list goes on.”

Clearly, splooge is a hot commodity for porn makers and viewers alike. But it hasn’t always been that way.

While pornographic films have been with us since the early 20th century, Cole said, “It was rare to even see male ejaculation at all, until the adult industry came into its own with movies like Deep Throat, which has been cited…the first time close-up male ejaculation hit the big screen in grindhouse theaters.”

With its cum shot in mind, it’s probably not a coincidence that Deep Throat was so wildly successful. Or that, once Deep Throat broke the money-shot barrier, they “became a must-do within just a few years.” By 1977, director Stephen Ziplow wrote in The Film Maker’s Guide to Pornography: “One thing is for sure: if you don’t have the come shots, you don’t have a porno picture.”

Porn scholar Madita Oeming told Cole, “Originally, [the term ‘money shot’] meant that male performers would not be paid if they did not manage to ejaculate on camera. It also implies that the cumshot is what viewers want to see and will pay money for.” Since splooge shots sell, Oeming said, producers have kept doing it for decades. “We now take this for granted.”

But why do porn consumers—and producers—find the viscous liquid so enticing in the first place? In her article, Cole ticked of a list of theories, ranging from Dan Savage’s 2009 musing: “Facials are degrading—and that’s why they’re so hot”; to gender studies professor Hugo Schwyzer’s 2012 thought that a cumshot is a cry for acceptance; to Gary Day’s 1988 theory that cisgender male ejaculation is mimicry of a mother’s ability to breastfeed. “There might be as many theories of cum as there are cumshots,” mused Cole.

Whatever the reason for our collective obsession, cum has turned into big business. A satisfying cum shot is now such an expected part of porn scenes starring cisgender men that there’s a whole industry built up around it—and around faking it. Cole talked to Max Huhn of Magic Money Shot, a company that makes artificial semen, and referenced multiple cum-mimicking lubes, as well. Many of these are used on porn sets or by cam models, said Cole, but according to Huhn, most sales are to private individuals who are so into semen that they buy it in bucketfuls. Likewise, wrote Cole, “There’s a whole market for enhancing one’s own splooge,” in the form of “cheap, over the counter supplements that claim to increase seminal volume and force.”

And the fixation on visually satisfying loads has become a fetish for plenty of porn fans over the years, which has allowed some performers to develop brands around it. Performer, producer, and director Jimmy Broadway, she wrote, has “embraced cum-eating as part of his own adult brand” and sees it as a part of power dynamics in the scenes he does.

Cole notes that cum—and people’s comfort levels with it—is providing room for models direct-to-consumer sites like OnlyFans to specialize, too. For some models, that means eschewing semen entirely, but for others, it means leaning into cum fetishes. Jade Vow, wrote Cole is a “facial enthusiast” whose splooge-spattered selfies and after-the-fact videos drive her sales.

The article goes deeper into what I’m calling “cum theory” in fetishes, porn studies, and power dynamics (you can read more here). But suffice it to say here that ejaculation has driven pornography in America for years, for a variety of reasons, and it doesn’t seem to be going—or coming—anywhere soon.

Milk splash photo by Pixabay from Pexels