Who killed bukkake?

[imomus]

Once upon a time -- in December 1986, if Wikipedia is to be believed -- a new genre was born in Japanese porn: bukkake. The semantics of the word take in the ideas "splashing forcefully", "completely astonished" and "overwhelming win", and there's an allusion to the slurping of noodles too. Most of us now know what bukkake is; in the twenty years since its invention the idea has gone from East to West, from straight to gay, from the margins to the mainstream. For those without access to google, I'll just define it as a kind of secular rite, a liquid ballet in which an individual with a closely-watched face receives the excessive, successive sexual seed of a faceless collectivity.



I became aware of the genre in about 1996, and found myself drawn to its transgressive liquid mechanics, its Mishima-esque theatre of stoicism and sacrifice in the face of excess. I never dreamed, though -- as young Japanese men are said to -- of taking my place in the shirudan, the "juice association", that sweaty-palmed, stiff-pricked, boxer-shorted crowd. I assumed they were faithful yakuza grunts being rewarded for loyalty and discipline. The job certainly wasn't open to foreigners (except for black Americans, who had their own segregated subgenre).



Recently, though, there seems to be an ominous hush settling over those milky bully's paradises, the specialist bukkake sites. BukkakeMania! failed to update between March and June. "I know that many of you hate lactation titles," wrote the webmaster of Japanese Bukkake DVDs back in April. "I do not and will never add them INSTEAD of bukkake if new bukkake is available! The only reason I haven't added any NEW bukkake is that they seemed to have stopped making as many of them in Japan. I wonder why?"



Replacing squirting penises with squirting breasts may not have pleased his customers, but the webmaster asks a good question. Why is bukkake dying in Japan, and who or what is killing it? Today I'd like to offer, in note form, a few speculations.

1. Porn, like everything else, has fashions. Twenty-two years isn't a bad run for a single, repetitive idea.

2. How long can transgression stay transgressive? A Kafka short story describes how leopards broke into the temple and drank the holy wine. They did it again the following year, and before long it became part of the ceremony. Even the most astonishing splash, repeated regularly, becomes routine.



3. Let's speculate, for a moment, that bukkake is a branch of calligraphy. After all, one of the pleasures of the genre is seeing the expressive, gestural shapes sperm can make on a face, the satisfyingly graphic representation of the transition from internal repression to sudden external release. It really is painting with the white ink of life. But maybe the Japanese are neglecting their traditional arts?

4. Let's continue with this theme of the traditional Japaneseness of bukkake. Traditionally, at least, Japan is a tightly-controlled society with high levels of work pressure. Its sex industry is one of the few places where salarymen can let off steam. Bukkake, invented at the peak of Japan's hard-working, high-earning bubble economy, might be the perfect expression of corporate, collective stress relief: sex as a corporate-family sport. But what if Japan today were a more atomised, individualistic place, a place where people work more temp jobs and feel more spontaneous? What if people no longer felt able to identify with that big huddle, the shirudan? Wouldn't that tend to send bukkake out of fashion?



5. Maybe it's more depressing than that. Maybe Japan has got more conformist recently, and its porn industry is now as devoid of fresh, radical, original ideas as its pop industry. Maybe straight fucking is the porn equivalent of an Ayumi Hamasaki power ballad.

6. Maybe feminism plays a part; as women gain more power in the marketplace, they lose their status as sacrificial victims.

7. The oral aspect of bukkake might tie it to an earlier, more naive stage of consumerism which has now passed.



8. The spirit of Bushido -- stoicism in the face of adversity -- may be less of a turn-on these days. Because bukkake is, in many instances, a kind of ordeal that the "victim" must endure with stoicism. That stuff tastes pretty bitter, and stings when it gets in your eyes.

9. One typical bukkake scenario might see a yakuza mob forcing a woman to repay her husband's huge debts sexually. But these days the small loan companies formerly run by the mob are increasingly going overground in Japan, being bought out by official banks. And who wants to see, or even dream about, bukkake by bank clerks?

10. It may be that Japanese men integrated gansha (facial ejaculation) into their normal sexual practice and found that their girlfriends didn't like it. Women on Japanese bulletin boards grumble about this sometimes, saying it makes them want to punch their partners.



11. Over a noodle-slurping lunch, I asked my friend Nathan if he had any theories. He said maybe the genre was invented to give impotent old men hard-ons, and that now Viagra does the trick better. He also thought that, if it was calligraphic in some way, it may be that handwriting is in decline in Japan because everyone uses computers.

12. Nathan launched off into a lecture about tantric sex, which is all about postponing orgasm as long as possible to avoid ending the session: maybe the identification with a collectivity is something to do with trying to prolong sexual duration by other means? In bukkake it's okay to come, because someone else is right behind you, ready to continue the relay. Your end doesn't mean the end of the session.

13. We tried to relate it to Shinto. "Shinto is an agrarian cult religion, all about plants and seasons. And bukkake is about seed -- the Japanese word for sperm is sahmen, the German word for "seed". How can bukkake not be a Shinto rite?"

14. Nathan then called a french friend of his and handed me the phone. This frenchman -- an expert, apparently -- had a very simple answer. "Girls these days just like to fuck, and they like to be very active and dominant, very masculine about it," he said. It would certainly explain why the only liquid splashing forcefully on bukkake sites these days is milk.

Comments

three thoughts

[niemandsrose.livejournal.com]

1. I wonder what Peter Greenaway would say about bukkake as a form of calligraphy?

2. Can the rise of bukkake (read as an anti-procreative gesture) be correlated with falling Japanese birthrates?

3. Can the fall of bukkake be correlated with an increase in female consumption of porn?

Re: three thoughts

[imomus.livejournal.com]

1. He would make a 4-part trilogy about it. Or a 3-part tetralogy.

2. I planned to include a section about gansha as birth control, because the pill is, to this day, not widely used in Japan. It makes sense to come outside. But I don't think porn can be correlated directly to birth trends. It's like correlating murder rates to Agatha Christie novels. There are so many contradictory subgenres, too: if bukkake is concerned with letting seed fall on barren ground on the upper part of the person, nakadashi focuses on vaginal ejaculation and the seed's slow trickle back to visibility.

3. Hmm, not sure. I wish there were reliable stats on this kind of thing. Sort of "Kneel, son!" ratings.

[god-jr.livejournal.com]

It's true, there are fashion trends everywhere and the sex industry is not immune. To take a step sideways from the topic: I moved to Berlin eight and a half years ago, and it's quite astonishing how much fashion effects the type of sex people have here, at least in the gay scenes. More so than in the States. In cruise bars, whatever is "fashionably sexy" dominates (so to speak). People who are out of fashion will sometimes be vocally criticized by others and certainly shunned from any action. Sex clubs reflect the trends with theme nights that spotlight certain sex acts and enforce dress codes. Berlin-based porn companies are famous for being the vanguard of fetish trends, and bars open up here on the crest of those trends (holligans, sports wear, bearded, business suits...). When the trend has run its course, the bar associated with that trend looses popularity and sometimes goes out of business. Sexual acts also fall in and out of style, and you will hear people speak of them in the ways they talk about fashion, as if the latest act on the scene were the product of a hot new designer, and anyone who is "fashion forward" is expected to be riding the crest of this wave. In this way sex in general, for gay Berliners, is a type of bukkake: a scene which is not about personal preferences, but about faceless group participation.



On another aside, do you know the title of this Kafka story? I'm curious to read it.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It's really just an aphorism. I remembered it as panthers, but in fact it's leopards:

"Leopards break into the temple and eat the sacred host. This happens again and again. Soon it can be calculated in advance and becomes part of the ceremony."

[god-jr.livejournal.com]

[(Anonymous)]

She can slurp on my noodle anytime.

[(Anonymous)]

You keep a studiously impersonal tone in this post, but I'm interested in how you respond personally to this stuff. I think you mentioned elsewhere on this blog that you were a big fan of gansha - what do you like about it? Does Hisae like it? If she doesn't, does she still let you do it? It seems to be an act that kind of precludes female enjoyment, why is this so appealing to some men? My boyfriend of a couple of years ago was always wanting to come on my face. I didn't hate it, but I didn't particularly like the psychology of it either. It just seemed to be saying: "This is the climax, the meaning of the sex act: a guy comes on a woman's face, just like he might come on a page from a porn mag."

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure H would like me to go into detail on those questions, but sure, I love that stuff, and probably wouldn't be with someone who didn't love it too. Why do I love it? We all have an action painter somewhere inside us. We're all Jack the Dripper.

R.I.P.

[(Anonymous)]

Re: R.I.P.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Never heard of him, but he's pretty good! Oh, was.

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

First Yangtze river dolphins, now bukkake. What next?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Good news, I hear cars are over too! In selected markets, anyway. More on this later in the week.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Hooray, I really needed a post about bukkake on a morning when I'm all sick and vomity from period-pains already.

Really, you deserve the shitty dicknipple bukkake pictures for this but I'm already gagging over here so have this instead.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Feathers? You sicko Dutchies! It'll never catch on...

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

Bukakke = humiliating women, something the Japanese seemed to have based most of their culture around.

Right, glad that's sorted.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

lol no wai, a person with a brane.

But sry2say nearly all cultures and especially all porn is based on that.

[(Anonymous)]

maybe it has something in common with the origins of bukkake. wasn't bukkake in some way 'created' to make some kind of more "extreme" porn with all the traditional japanese censorship? you can't show much, but you can show sperm, then, Lets add tons of it!
maybe the censorship is starting to fade out, or the western pornography is having some sort of hit in japan.

[mitchco.livejournal.com]

Did the images of penises come to you (no pun intended) blurred, or did you self-censor? The latter, I admit, would be surprising to me.

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

re 10.
Nowadays A Woman's Gotta Hit A Man (http://www.youtube.com/v/J_jZ_DgR8Yk&hl=en)

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

It might just be that the porn market in Japan is flooded with hundreds of cookie-cutter titles each month as hundreds of flash-in-the-pan starlets try to get a foothold in the industry. With such a deluge of DVDs hitting the shelves (distribution bukkake, indeed), each year shows the dilution of the available money pool and studios make less and less money. Paying 50 soup men and one girl used to be a quick way to rake in loads of cash, but now the profits are dropping since, in true Japanese fashion, there is oversaturation (see: convenience stores every 100m in cities).


It's just better sense to go back to smaller-scale filming with one or two girls and get a higher profit margin, I guess. The opposite end is to do crazy things, but it's harder and harder to make money.


The really bad part is that the girls have to deal with falling rates from overcompeting...so they get shafted.

Art school will ruin your brain

[lupoleboucher.livejournal.com]

What's happening has nothing to do with the hermeneutics of Japanese blahbity blah: it is simple economics. It's also happening in American porn. Bukakke is something that requires many people, and at least three of them (camera man, cleanup and victim) are likely to draw a salary. Now a days, porn is something given away for free on the internet machine. All the porn that was ever made is pretty much downloadable for free. That means there is almost zero economic inventive to generate new porn, and what does get made is going to be lower budget than in the glory days of porn (when the VCR was new technology -the VCR being a porn dispensing machine for the first decade or so of its lifecycle). Bukakke is high budget porn. Squirting nipples about the lowest budget porn imaginable. Combine this with the trend toward people doing porn for free as a form of "empowerment" and the prostitutization of Japanese (and American, though at a slower rate) society, and high budget porn is dead. Why should a Japanese girl of dubious morals let 100 dongs squirt their genetic slop on her face for a few hundred bucks, when she can tease a clean and well behaved salaryman on a regular basis for much more money? Why would an American trollop risk a lifetime of opprobrium and almost certain venereal disease for a few hundred dollars when she can go on sugar-daddies.com for a much higher payday?

Also, I summarize your post thusly:

Re: Art school will ruin your brain

[tropigalia.livejournal.com]

i thought this was a pretty good point but do we see the same trend in other types of group sex porn? are there fewer orgies or groups of ten girls farting in a guy's face or whatever the fuck?

i think in the case of any expensive porn, the demand will justify the cost. i think the real question is what happened to the demand that the cost can't be maintained anymore.

[tropigalia.livejournal.com]

maybe women started to enjoy being humiliated in that fashion and it just wasn't fun anymore!

[viceanglais.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia might be mistaken regarding the date - see below!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Frank Muir: So, "bukkake" is a kind of tobacco pouch in which a Manhattan Indian would have carried slivers of ham used to bribe spaniels belonging to officials employed by the Dutch occupying forces.

Robert Robinson: There we have it. A sort of fanny pack for ham, the act of snookering in football, or a bizarre Japanese sexual practice which won't be invented until 1986, eight years hence. Over to Arthur Marshall's team.

Arthur Marshall: We liked the idea of lots of sperm being shot into faces, and briefly considered organising a trip to Japan in 1986, should we be spared, to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy. But we're a little worried by the hygienic aspect, and by the fact that the OED can't cite first uses in the future. So we're going for the Red Indian ham.

[sm255.livejournal.com]

On alternative sex websites, it is usually submissive women who are looking for real-life bukkake, and they have trouble finding a group of men who are interested in joining in. Men make it into a competition, as men do, and so they shy away from it. And dominant men don't like to share with other men.

Porn fantasies often don't work in realtime.

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

> Porn fantasies often don't work in realtime.

Which is surely why they appear in porn? I don't know anyone who has ever come home to find two G-cupped cheerleaders(*) lezzing off in their kitchen, both of whom were instantly up for a threesome, 90% of which was BJ.

(*) leathery 35-year-olds dressed as cheerleaders.

My avant-garde penis.

[(Anonymous)]

I think the decline is due to a rather prosaic change in porn fashion, even a cursory overview of the history of pornography reveals the existence of very definite trends/cliches and even fetish cycles.
For example hairy muffs were all the rage back in the seventies and are due to stage a comeback shortly - blotting-out all those neat, razored pubic-lines.
Squirting one's love-juice on a young lady's eyebrows will become the missionary-hump of the 20-teens but by 2050 will once again be the (not so) nouvelle vague of the carnal arts.
It will be interesting that just as I'm shuffling out of life in a nursing home, the last thing I will hear may very well be be two nurses exchanging ideas on bukkake.....was it all for this...?

My avant-garde penis.

[thomascott.livejournal.com]

Sorry forgot to sign in, above is from me

men integrated facial ejaculation into their normal sexual practice

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

I'm saying it sure takes it out of the park and puts it right into the Shinjuku arena of capitalism. Maybe it was once considered eligible as an Olympic sport in some minds. Tokyo is an amazing city. Campai!

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

Did you seriously just analyze bukkake? SERIOUSLY? BRB linking this to Stefano so we both can laugh hard at this. Oh man this seriously deserves a post on momus_lolz, I'll have to think of something creative to say because at the moment I'm just speechless.

Oedipus Wrecks

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

"The father will devour the sons until the sons dare to devour the father."


I think you are missing the bigger picture Michelle. Momus spends a week on holiday with his mom, then the week after Click Opera features posts on -- a) revolution by way of fucking (prompted by memories of a favorite childhood book), b) revisiting the "womb" of his college dorm and losing his virginity c) bukkake.

Today's post is about the renunciation of the "car" and the first image is of a tiny red micro-car (remember what he said about his mum's citroen with the "longboat shaped speedometer"?) I'm guessing this is the guilt reflex kicking in and a projection onto society of his primal oedipal conflict.

I think Dr. Freud would have a field day with our friend the momus.

hmmmm

[(Anonymous)]

Bukkake is way more of a rite, an event that can fade w/time and lose popularity than gansha in general. Im not sure if you imply both or just bukkake is fading. gansha outside of a bukkake setting seems unfun, less participating in a (no longer?) bizarre sexual rite, more just irritating your partner. Its usually hot when a partner pulls out to cum on me, esp belly/back but eyes, nose, ears?? irritating.

As a girl w/ no intrest in gansha/bukkake, I am however def a huge fan/consumer of milking porn, which i find fascinating and beautiful. [cant stop watching this: http://youporn.com/watch/37100 so tender!] The practical implications of this are just as puzzling to me as gansha/bukkake. Both have a milk/seed/life aspect - very shinto. In the age of environmental/terrorism worries do we turn to glorious full breasts? Also, thanks, porn. Now I fantasize my breasts are dripping while masturbating & I cant really replicate that. When/if i do breastfeed my children will it now feel incestous?

the japanese have names for all these styles and festishes. whats women w/ pregnant women called? im that.

what about Shibari ?

[lezardnoir.livejournal.com]

I first met bukkake (euro) in a PTV CD booklet, the live issued by Sordide Sentimental. It seems japanese porn is more into "mother and child", "chikan" etc those days
but what about Shibari, we are making a Save the Shibari campaign (ie the release of our latest book), anybody here ?
http://lezardnoir.blogspot.com/

check also Trevor Brown's blog
http://www.pileup.com/babyart/blog/?p=152

Who killed it?

[surferelf.livejournal.com]

I think you can safely blame Warren Ellis.

leopards

[(Anonymous)]

really?