Seminal Article

An ode to cum

Jimmy Chen
Human Parts
Published in
3 min readMay 30, 2014

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Vanilla Sky (2001)

In the most perverse scene in one the the worst films ever made, an emotionally distraught and neglected Julianna Gianni tells a fickle and entitled David Aames, “I swallowed your cum, that means something” before driving off a bridge in an attempted murder-suicide. Talk about an awkward movie to see on a first date. On the implicated night, they apparently had sex four times, which—add to that at least one orally-induced ejaculation—brings us to five, which is less a spoiler alert than sore balls the next morning.

The viewer is left little to imagine what Cameron Crowe, producer, director, and screenwriter of this fantasy memoir, likes in bed. If art forces itself upon imaginary muses, in lieu of girlfriends, we may see the writer hunched over his screenplay with a mild woody.

That semen is associated with the male condition is physiologically obvious, but let us consider at what point it became masculine; that is, gendered. It was during ancient Greece, when homosexuality—though such a notion was unheard of, since sexual orientation had yet to be conceived—was the standard rage. And so, our obsession with cum may not be an obsession after all, but a one-sided venture made and contained by men, still in need of some gentle convincing; and that the word seminal (i.e. of great importance and influence upon) finds its etymological Latin root in semen similarly points to a group of men who would like to equate their entire culture’s historicity to blowing a load.

Imagine if Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 was described as clitoral, or Das Kapital—hard to put your finger on it.

There’s Something About Mary (1998)

Cameron Diaz can’t seem to get away from splooge. In a former role, as the maternal yet eternally nubile Mary, she unwittingly uses Ted Stroehmann’s semen as hair gel. Any guy, and experienced women, will tell you that was one unhealthy looking ear-dangling load. Dude seemed rather dehydrated, not just anxious.

As for the colloquial use of “cum,” it gained popularity as a variant of the more formal “come” in porn writing during the 1970s. Contrary to common rule, the verb come is not merely a description of sexual arrival. When roasting grains in the malting process, the top layer will often shoot off, like popcorn. These exploding grains are known as the “come,” which not surprisingly describes male ejaculation only, not female orgasm.

Various scientific articles champion the benefits of semen. It supposedly decreases depression and risk of breast cancer when absorbed by the mucous membranes lining the vaginal walls; it contains high levels of protein, calcium, fructose, vitamin B12, zinc, and potassium, a kind natural low calorie energy boost when ingested; it also increases chance of pregnancy in hopeful couples by acclimating the woman to the man’s antigens. As for exactly who’s writing and enthusiastically forwarding these pleasant articles, it seems to be half-and-half i.e. not exactly cream.

And yet, there is the grotesque moment in porn when a woman swallows a load, be it from one man or multiple. Her eyes sort of freeze over in their sockets, with a faint grimace of forced faith, gulp, then this emphatic—almost manic, desperate—pretend smile, as if instinctively pulling her facial muscles away from acute nausea. Sometimes a tear, as coaxed to the surface by deep throat, is squeezed out of her face. The mixture of his semen and spit, and her esophageal mucous and tears, covers her face like some horrific mask made out of translucent flesh, as if the person underneath had finally disappeared.

Porn’s inadvertent rhetorical device, from a literary context, may be surrealism: something vaguely troubling that ought not to happen, uncannily happening. The author is too embarrassed to recount how many times he’s induced his wad, instantly aborted, into various rooms. He misses the kleenex. He misses you.

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