Since then, facials have really popped off among porn consumers. Porn insiders actually at times complain they'd like to retire the trope because it can be difficult for performers to get off at the end of a scene, meaning producers have to burn money idling on sets for up to an hour while they masturbateand because many stars on the receiving end dislike them . But they can't, because there's too high a demand: Theyre so popular that even amateur performers feel the need to include them in their clips, notes Joseph Slade , a professor of media studies who researchers porn history and patterns. Porn fans, he adds, make more compilations of facials (often known as "cumpilations") than of any other kind of adult scene.
In recent years, sex researchers , therapists , and writers have also noticed a major uptick in the number of people talking about facials in their own sex livesand of men trying to figure out how to increase the size of their ejaculate so they can shoot porn-sized loads onto their partners.
No one knows for sure how common they are in practice, but at least one big (if unscientific) survey from 2018 showed that 42 percent of male respondents wanted to give their partners a facial, and a third of women believed most men want to give them facials. A spike in diagnoses of ocular gonorrhea (yes, that is a thing) and cases of genital warts cropping up on peoples necks suggest that more and more folks are in fact trying facials out, argues sex educator Lawrence Siegel . And regardless of how common they actually are, many people just feel that facials are, as Siegel puts it, now part of the slate of the typical sexual dynamic.
It's hard to say exactly what accounts for the popularity of facials, especially among men. As sex researcher Justin Lehmiller pointed out on his blog a few years back, for lack of dedicated research and hard data, no one can offer a firm verdict on the matter. But sex researchers have still come up with a number of compellingand tellingexplanations.
Slade and others argue that facials are popular simply because they're pervasive.
Facials became popular in part because of their novelty. Porn trends often rise and fall on the appeal of novelty alone, and producers talk about the industrys follow-the-leader mentality the drive to ape others successful formats. Eventually, facials became so common that they just became a self-reinforcing standard; if you didnt use them in your film, you were a jarring outlier. As a porn consumer, when youre confronted with the same standard over and over it has to get in [your head] eventually," Siegel says.
There's definitely merit to the idea that what we see in pornespecially in the absence of truly comprehensive sexual educationsubtly influences our sexual expectations, habits, and even desires. But this view doesnt seem to account for the fact that some porn tropes permeate popular consciousness more than others, nor does it fully account for why facials seem to appeal so much more to men than to other porn viewers.
Many sex experts argue that the real secret to the popularity of facials stems from the sense of male domination they conveythe way they seem to inherently degrade receptive partners. Literally, someone is over you, because you cant do a facial from down below, points out sex counselor Eric Garrison . Theres a thing of marking territory.
Some people, like columnist Dan Savage, say that degradation can be a kinky kind of power exchange in the bedroom. Others, like anti-porn activist Gail Dines, think that degradation speaks to men because of deep-seated misogyny a common male impulse to assert power over and punish women.
Makes sense, given the ways many filmmakers shoot facialswith men ordering their partners to get down on their knees and look at them, sometimes with clear degrading intent. It also stacks up with one very small study from 2017 , in which over a dozen men said that they felt like facials were part of a sexual script, and clear acts of male dominance that they want to impose on their female partnerseven if those women arent into facials. Anecdotally as well, many people have told reporters they dont like the idea of facials because they seem degrading.
But there are also many anecdotal accounts of men and women who enjoy the feel of a facial and dont think theres anything degrading about them. ( Only 12 percent of women in that 2018 survey said they are independently into facials, a figure that tracked with porn viewership levels. But more in other surveys have said that even if theyre not gung-ho about them, they can get into them in the right contexts .) Painting all facials as degrading can veer into kink-shaming territory, Lehmiller cautions.
An almost polar opposite theory maintains that people like facials because they represent a sort of gleeful sexual excess and abandon. From this vantage , facials stem from a passion so great that a man just wants to be all over his partnerto wallow in the visceral experience of sex.
This not only lines up with the way some people describe the pleasure they get out of facials, it also seems to fit with some recent research suggesting that a fair number of women at least like to see their partners ejaculate because they think the size and intensity of a load is a good proxy for how much a man enjoyed sex with them. A few women even told researchers that they felt more sexual pleasure themselves, had stronger orgasms, when they saw or felt a large cum shot from their partnersfacial or otherwise.
Of course, this facials-as-joy theory feels like it has just as many holes in it as the theory that all facials represent some deep brain masculine attraction to sexual aggression and domination. But that doesnt mean these theories are both wrong. It probably means theyre both totally right.
Sexual diversity is part of human nature. We all find ourselves attracted to different elements of the physical and psychological experience. So, we all likely have a slightly different relationship with facials. The secret to their popularity, then, is likely not that they appeal to one specific type of person or set of desires, but their ability to speak to desires as diverse as the urge to dominate and the urge to liberate, supercharged by their longstanding utility for porn producers and thus their ubiquity.
Its so complicated and so layered," Nelson says of the popularity of facials.
This complexity makes it hard to predict if or when facials will eventually start to fall out of fashion in porn, popular discourse, or peoples personal lives. It also means that facials might fade out of some corners of the sex-scape (Garrison says he has noticed that they show up less and less in gay male porn and culture these days, and that they were never as popular in, say, German porn and culture as they have been in recent years in the U.S.) but hold strong or gain traction in others as tastes evolve.
If you like facials in your porn or your personal sex life, however, it is worth trying to figure out what about them appeals to you specifically. In truth, more often than not your motives will not matter. We are all entitled to our fetishes. But if you find that you do like facials exclusively because they speak to or fuel a desire to dominate women, you may want to interrogate that impulse, perhaps even seek professional help. Because, as Nelson puts it, for some men in the unhealthy spectrum of desires, facials can represent a lot of anger towards women."
No matter what draws you to facials, it is also worth remembering that, because your desires are unique, your partner may not share them. No matter how commonplace facials may seem, they are never part of an implicit, universal sexual script. It is never okay to try to give one to a partner without asking, or after that partner has expressed a lack of interest in them. But if you are open with your partner about your interest in facials and what you like about them, you may be surprised by how many of them, even if they have no independent interest in the act, will be willing to explore that desire with you.