Head-In-The-Toilet Sex
There’s a long-dead Canadian folk singer name of Stan Rogers who had a comedy bit in his live act where, at one point, he’d ask the audience for a show of hands from those not familiar with Morris dancers. Then he’d laugh an evil laugh and say “You lucky few!”
Well, I need to introduce this post in much the same way. Is there anybody here who hasn’t been exposed to the gonzo porn trope of the girl being fucked from behind with her head in the toilet?
You lucky few.
This trope can get almost infinitely gross and/or scary — the toilet may or may not be in use by the performers or by others, it might or might not get flushed during the scene, the girl may or may not have her faced pushed or held beneath the surface of the “water” — but it’s almost always presented as extremely degrading and disgusting.
No, I don’t personally grok the appeal, and I like me some fairly serious BDSM scenes from time to time. But I don’t have a sexual response to pee or poo or girls gasping for breath or crying uncontrollably or vomiting or screaming in terror — all of which I have seen in gonzo porn scenes of this sort.
Now, full-disclosure and eschewing all hypocrisy, back in 2005 or so Kink.com did put out one of these face-in-toilet scenes on one of its F/f BDSM sites, and I did blog about it approvingly under the title Bondage Porn, Hold The Patriarchy. Partly this was because I was in a grumpy mood after several days of wading through some really awful anti-porn “feminist” blogs. Partly it was because the face-in-toilet-ee was the lovely Annie Cruz, whose enjoyment of edgy BDSM play as both dominant and submissive is well-documented, and whose own strong will and personal agency could not be less in doubt. And partly it was because this underwater toilet-cam shot of Annie’s face remains to this day one of the most comical porn photos I have ever seen:
Anyway, there are just four photos in sequence that touch on the face-in-toilet part of the shoot, and they struck me at the time as being fundamentally different from the usual gonzo head-in-toilet disgusto-fuck. (It would be interesting to see if that impression survived contact with the actual video, which I haven’t watched.) Is it degrading and/or humiliating? Almost certainly. Is there anything wrong with that? Given that Annie signed up for it with her eyes open, I don’t think so. But it don’t matter — it’s just one of those editorial decisions I make every day, that we all get to live with. This one I remember, though, because it tracked close to a line I don’t usually cross.
I was reminded of all this when I encountered Ms Naughty’s blog post called How Sex With Your Head In A Toilet Bowl Can Be OK. She’s reviewing a movie called Tight Places, and describes one scene thusly:
Brooklyn, the haughty, dominant lesbian pauses in her frantic fisting and then whispers in the ear of Vai, her moaning, submissive female partner. She points to the toilet her lover is leaning on.
“Do you want to put your head in there?”
Vai, panting and flushed as the result of several gushing orgasms, looks a little hesitant. “Is it clean?” she asks.
Brooklyn nods. And so the eager submissive lifts the lid and places her face into the toilet, her hair dropping into the water as Brooklyn fucks her hard with a strapon.
She then writes:
Right now, anti-porn activist Gail Dines is touring the world, marketing her book that argues that porn has “hijacked men’s sexuality.” She maintains that the current crop of porn websites and movies is far more sexist and degrading to women than ever before. She cherry-picks examples from the dark alleys of internet porn to illustrate her point. One of the regular things she mentions are sites where women’s heads are pushed into toilet bowls while they’re fucked.
How interesting, then, to encounter the very same sex act in a film that aims to be feminist, sex positive and queer- and female- friendly; a movie that features a cast of lesbians and trans-identified people but doesn’t star a single straight man.
Clearly, this movie is not following Gail Dines’ script.
Neither was Annie Cruz, blowing her toilet bubbles back in 2005. I mention this merely to reinforce the point about cherry-picking. Gonzo porn has been around a long time; I find it fairly nasty as a category (with some exceptions because there are huge diversities of presentation even within the category) but you don’t learn much about “porn” as a category by pointing out the more extravagant excesses of one of its most excessive genres.
Back to Ms Naughty and the real point of all this:
This scene is a perfect example of how consent and intent make all the difference.
Though I was personally turned off by the sex act portrayed, there is actually nothing wrong with the scene itself. Both performers consented to being in the scene and, once it’s underway, Vai voluntarily puts her head in the toilet bowl. Indeed, it seems to increase her physical pleasure by ramping up the psychological arousal. Her partner may have done it to degrade her but the intent is benign; Brooklyn seeks to get her partner off rather than to exert power or make her look or feel bad.
It’s an important difference and one that pro-porn feminists are doing their best to illustrate. It’s not the sex acts that are important, it’s the ethics of consent and how the performers are treated.
If the goal is consensual female pleasure, who cares how the results are achieved?
Indeed, I’ll go a step further in defense of BDSM and its tropes than Ms Naughty has gone here. Assuming the performers have consented to perform the scene and have adequate safewords and procedures (since it’s tough to say “Richard Nixon” with a mouthful of toilet water) to ensure that consent is maintained throughout the scene, I don’t think it matters who puts her head in the toilet bowl. Nor do I think it matters whether Brooklyn’s intent is “exert power”. Indeed, if BDSM is about mutual sexual pleasure (which need not always be simultaneous to be mutual), exerting power or inflicting degradation may be perfectly valid, legitimate, sexual, loving acts. Whether we are talking sex or sexual performance, it’s really just “the ethics of consent” that need concern us, and not the details of the acts, nor how they play out in the scene.
What, then, makes these two movies different from some of the gonzo porn flicks that disgust me, and that happen to feature men sticking women’s heads in toilets instead of women sticking women’s heads in toilets? {Carrie Bradshaw voice}Am I giving lesbians a free pass on toilet fucking?{/Carrie Bradshaw voice}
Answer: no. Speaking only for myself, there are two differences. In the case of Kink.com, at least, I have lots of evidence for my belief that they are ethical producers, and that what I see under their brand is well-consented to. I don’t have that same degree of faith in some of the gonzo producers, for reasons too subjective and particular to detail here. The other difference is purely aesthetic. In the M/f gonzo scenes I’ve seen, there’s been an element of physical overpowerment, big beefy guys “forcing” much smaller and very young and scared-looking girls and manhandling them around, usually accompanied by lot of verbal abuse. It has looked like bullying. Even if we assume it’s all high quality acting, I so despise bullies that my reaction has been a version of: “That’s not sexy, that’s just mean and pathetic. Do not want!”
And that should be quite enough about toilet-fucking to hold y’all for awhile.
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I am impressed! Bacchus is a Stan Rogers fan!
Thanks for the further discussion Bacchus.
I probably should have used a different choice of words when I wrote “exert power” because I do agree with what you’re saying re BDSM and yes, Brooklyn is putting on a display of dominant power in that scene and it’s fine. I was thinking more in terms of the negative, nasty “bullying” that you describe, the sort that is less about pleasure and more about using sex as a weapon. In so many “head in the toilet” scenes there’s a distinct “revenge” agenda, a real misogyny and hatred on display which is why the act has so many negative connotations for me. But that wasn’t what was happening in Tight Places so it was OK.
Also, I think that’s what’s so frustrating about the anti-porn brigade. There IS porn out there that is bad, that is worth campaigning against. But they can’t seem to see the subtleties. The Tight Places scene is a perfect example.
You’re welcome Ms. Naughty.
We may disagree about the campaigning, unless of course you just mean “try to persuade people to buy the good stuff instead of the crap.”
There’s porn I don’t want to look at, but there isn’t any porn I’m willing to crusade against in a legal sense, as in “try to get it removed from the market” — until of course we have crossed the line to the stuff where consent is not present in the making of it.
Obviously we don’t allow people to profit from films of them committing crimes, but the good legal reasons for that have nothing to do with the aesthetics of the films.
The bullying gonzo porn scenes — if you could convince me it was ethically made — are strongly not to my taste. But I’m something of an absolutist on the subjects of free expression, so my only ethical reaction to the stuff is to avoid it and (to the extent my input is desired) warn my friends away. And, yes, defend it against would-be censors at need, because if you pick and choose when to defend freedom of expression, things get ugly fast.
Personally, I’m not into the “pee and poop” scene either, so I’m not here to defend toilet sex, but I will defend some of the producers of the fantasy.
Kink.com for instance takes very good care of their models, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that workplace hazards have been minimized there.
I’m guessing there toilet used in that scene may have come straight from a plumbing supply house, and may not even have been hooked into actual plumbing. It was probably cleaner than a restaurant plate in a Sunday buffet line.
I’m a bit hesitant to be the magician who divulges his tricks, but I’ve acted in enough movies and television productions to know that any toilet water is probably chicken bullion adulterated with a bit of coffee or tea, and anything solid floating around in there is probably a mixture of chocolate pudding, mustard, and instant potato flakes.
I’d also bet that they didn’t set their $2000 cameras in the bottom of some nasty toilet to get that shot you’ve posted above. It was likely shot (without ever even getting wet), from below a three inch deep plexiglas tray (made like a shallow aquarium), and filled with about two inches of water, or maybe even just a big stretched out sheet of Saran Wrap held from the corners by a couple of assistants with about a half an inch of bottled water caught in it.
The outside of the toilets can be made to look exceptionally nasty with potassium permanganate ( http://en.wikip...#Uses ), but more likely its just something like egg-drop soup, and powdered cinnamon or nutmeg.
I realize that there are plenty of people who really like to play with real body fluids/solids, but does Kink.com really want to make their regular models sick? I doubt it. The hospitalization is too expensive, and the downtime is costly, and so would be the turnover in talented key personnel.
Anecdotally, the most degrading acts I’ve ever witnessed at a REAL BDSM gathering, were performed by an older woman on a younger girl. It disturbed other participants enough that they took steps to have the couple’s “session” ended before it had run its natural course…
Just to clarify something — I’ve never seen Kink.com produce anything having to do with poop. That was other producers I was talking about in that sentence.
Pee, on the other hand, they briefly launched a site about. And there was no faking there.
It turns out if you study up on your sexual risk factors that there’s not a lot of health risk from contact with pee. Kink.com performers do it regularly and cheerfully (some of them, of course, not all of them).
A couple of things:
I really love this line: “It’s not the sex acts that are important, it’s the ethics of consent and how the performers are treated.” This is what it ALWAYS comes down to for me. Every single time.
“I’ve never seen Kink.com produce anything having to do with poop.”
Based on some of the things Mistress Matisse wrote about her shoot with them, I believe there might be some sort of government regulation regarding poop. Also, if you look at Kink.com’s “Shooting rules” page, they do not allow “scat or defecation” in their scenes.
OK. I’m going to file this under the “things that offend me and I wish didn’t exist, but I don’t have to watch it so it’s ok for people who want to watch it” file. It’s a big, weird, fun, disgusting world, and I’m happy I get to live in it. But still, I feel like this is like “ravishment” porn (“things that have the possibility to be ok and sexy but are usually just mysogynistic and creepy”).
Thanks for writing about it though. I would never have known about this if you hadn’t. And more knowledge about the world is good, I think.
Er… I also didn’t mean to imply that Kink.com specifically was responsible for any “floaters” real or simulated, and the toilet referred to (in the original article above), actually looks relatively clean to me (though the floor itself looks a bit menacing…). As far as the toilet exteriors I mentioned, I was just trying make reference to the whole “swirly” scene in general, and the outsides of some of the grody-looking gas station toilets used in glory-hole porn etc..
I shouldn’t have wedged the paragraph about “solids” in between paragraphs referring to Kink. As I was trying to say at the top of the comment, I’m betting Kink runs a well-managed outfit.
Admittedly, it was a poorly constructed paragraph meant to be addressed at toilet porn in general, my point being things are not always what they seem. Those scenes in Hollywood movies where actors are fighting, drowning, or hiding in sewage, are not really the cesspools of filth that they appear to be, and some porn producers actually have similar standards. Both can be purely fantasy worlds, if done properly.
…and yes, if the participants are reasonably healthy, golden shower scenes are relatively safe. However, in a real-life toilet situation, the waste matter in a toilet can acquire various health-threatening parasites if stains are left clinging to the surface area to marinate for any length of time…
There’s at least one other kink.com head in toilet scene out there. Mika Tan did a prison sex “brutal prison guards scene” that ended that way for Sex and Submission; I haven’t seen the video but there’s one still in the free gallery. I blogged it here:
http://www.bond...-tan/