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Article:

Bukkake: When Did It Get to This?

Sometime last year I went out with some friends of mine to dinner, a friendly Japanese joint being the destination. Sushi and sake were of course consumed, but of more interest was a dish called bukkake-udon – cold noodles with tuna and sauce poured on top. It was delicious. Eager to find a recipe so I could impress others at home, I entered bukkake into google. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed by websites offering images of “German Goo Girls” and fresh sperm. Naturally, I was horrified. Had I just eaten the semen of a mischievous chef?

Actually, the term bukkake is an ancient Japanese term that is derived from bukkakeru – ‘to splash’. It is often used in food recipes to describe a sauce that is poured over food, such as noodles, after preparation. However, in more recent years the word has taken on a new meaning. In the late 1980s, a number of porn directors in Japan began filming scenes of Bukkake. A large group of men (up to 80 or more), would surround a clothed female and masturbate until, one by one, each had ejaculated onto her face. These movies became hugely popular in fetish scenes, as it heralded a perverse new form of BDSM. By the late 90s, American companies keen on capitalising on the phenomenon’s fanatical cult following, had brought Bukkake to a western audience.

A myth surrounding Bukkake attempts to put it in an historical setting. In ancient Japan, it was supposed to be a form of punishment for women caught cheating on their husbands. Going by the logic that, if you are going to take it from one person, be prepared to take it from everyone. This is similar to the old school rule: don’t bring sweets to class unless you have enough to share around. As a result of the affair being found out, all the able-bodied men in the village would be summoned to ejaculate on the guilty woman, who was subsequently expected to commit hara-kiri(ritualistic suicide). Ultimately though, it appears this fable resides in the realm of fiction. As a story, it is only mentioned on websites publishing Bukkake, and there appears to be no historical evidence to suggest that this practice actually existed. Yet it demonstrates what Bukkake ultimately is: a ritualized humiliation of someone who evokes resentment.

As it is today, Bukkake represents a somewhat bizarre art-form and extreme counter-culture. The Japanese films always present a careful mise-en-scene, with the event typically taking place in a sparse, clean room, with a prop to emphasize the “target”. Occasionally there is a routine where a moderator will clap to indicate the time for the male participants to drop their shorts, throw them at the woman and begin masturbation. In the less formal American films, the scene is usually in a warehouse big enough to accommodate the large number of people. The important thing to note, though, is that Bukkake is a fetish culture, not a sexuality. It is beyond sex. In fact, pure Bukkake involves no penetration of any sort, instead centering around the ejaculation and the resulting messy face. More telling, the female (in Japan in particular) is often fully clothed, typically in a schoolgirl uniform, and sits as impassively as is possible.

Visual evidence seems to indicate that most men who participate in Bukkake are obese, heinously ugly, and quite possibly married. Having lived archetypal first-world lives, replete with rejection and failure, they see themselves as victims, left to endure the guilty and hollow pleasures of auto-eroticism, and building cages of resentment and anger for those women in society that they believe have spurned them. These women range from the air-brushed and untouchable, right down to the co-workers that they have been unable to summon the courage to ask on a date – the common factor is that these women all remind the males involved of their own sexual failings, and even their failings in life.  The woman in the centre becomes a symbolic scapegoat, feeding male resentment, and in the end, the Bukkake becomes their sadistic and degrading collective catharsis. 

While the concept of Bukkake is relatively new, many undertones are very similar to other fetishes. Domination and submission, linked closely to the aforementioned humiliation, tie in with acts such as bondage and discipline. Clearly, the female is in one of the most submissive positions possible: surrounded by a circle of horny testosterone-fueled males, and accepting their “insults” of semen. The men, standing over the woman, are free to do as they please in order to gain satisfaction.

There is also now emerging an adapted form of bukkake. Instead of on a woman’s face, the men will ejaculate into a cup or bowl until the vessel is full. The woman is then forced to drink the gloopy soup of semen.  In many of these films (specifically the American ones), the woman at the centre is forced to appear pleased at her bowl-full of ejaculate. Psychologically, it appears this is merely an extension of the male sadism. A variation on this is the use of a ‘collar’, similar to one a recently-operated-on dog might wear, so that the semen pools in it, flooding the woman’s face as opposed to running down her body.  

Involvement and participation are other interesting factors of Bukkake. The director of a series called American Bukkake (13 installments so far), places advertisements in local newspapers, offering the opportunity to be involved in a porn movie. For a large number of men, normally resigned to self-pleasuring over pictures of women they’ve grown to resent, this is a chance to leave their caves and act out their degradation fantasies in a real-word setting. No one is discriminated against based on their sexual fantasies, seeing as most probably do realise that the idea of Bukkake is horribly decrepit anyway. What results is a festival atmosphere, similar to an orgy, but far less sexualised. Often beer and snacks are supplied to the naked men while they wait their turn to ejaculate.

It’s difficult to judge what sort of women participates in Bukkake. While it would be easy to label them as mere sluts or whores, the reality is that there are other factors involved. Women, as an almost universal rule, are neither willing nor favourable to the idea of having their faces plastered with the sperm of a dozen penises. If asked, chances are extremely good that ‘she’ will decline in a less than polite fashion – fair enough considering that it’s not a polite question. From the expressionless faces in the Japanese shoots, it’s impossible to judge whether they are enjoying the experience or not. Models used for the American shoots, however, are more animated: a few seem to appear ecstatic about the whole experience, but many more seem to be clearly repulsed and violated. As these videos are produced for sale, there is little doubt that virtually all the women used are paid actors; while some, it seems, can work through the horror and into an imitation of joy, others are too distraught to act.

For something that is borne out of male resentment and aggression, the American addition of having the woman enjoy the experience seems to have added to the concept: a fetish industry catering to the lonely and resentful men of America, one where he can degrade a woman beyond all standards of decency and still have her appear to enjoy it. For the lonely and bitter masturbators of the first world, their sex and their sadism are suddenly combined. Normal penetrative sex is a foreign concept to many of these men, where as the visual image of semen on a passive smiling girl’s face fits far more with their own experiences of masturbating onto a smiling, two dimensional image in a magazine.

So, in the end , what brought Bukkake to the fore? Sociologically, it seems to come from the root of a troubled male psyche: men that see the world and see that they’ve lost control. The patriarchal male of the previous millennia is gone, along with the harems, the male domain as ‘leader’, and the status awarded to one simply for having a penis. Bukkake as a phenomenon has emerged as an exploitable commodity for the males unable to cope with this era’s paradigms of increasing gender equality. But the decline of the male has happened almost concurrently with the massive proliferation of sex in our society.  When the patriarchy was the dominant force in society, men chose women. Increasingly today, women choose men. Now, with sex pushed in front of the male nose 24 hours a day, the lonely male feels that he should be having sex; the most successful people in society tend to be the prettiest, the most sexually active, and for the modern caveman, masturbating to the unattainable instead of actually participating cements their feeling of being the loser. Bukkake is the expression of this loss – it is the whimpering cry of the patriarchy on its last legs, the male dregs of society acting out their failures, sadistically and blindly, amidst a strange and frightening new world. That, or the previously unknown levels of ‘sex-for-pay’ now allow men to enact pathetically sick sexual fantasies, that ultimately will be packaged and sold to men even more pathetic, wishing they were a part of the ‘action’.   

For your information, here is a recipe for buukake-udon:

Ingredients:
4 Balls of udon noodles
4 tblsps of tuna flakes
Sauce: 1/2 cup soysauce / 2 cups dashi soup stock / 3 tbsp mirin (rice wine)

Mix soysauce, soup stock and mirin in a pot and bring to boil. Remove the heat and let mixture cool down. Boil lots of water in a large pot and start cooking the noodles till el dente. When the noodles are cooked, quickly transfer them to cold water. Drain them and divide into four bowls. Sprinkle the tuna flakes over the noodles before pouring (bukkake-ing) the sauce on top. Enjoy!

Serves four.

The Muncherdale