This article was originally published in Le Point on 07.09.2025
Here’s a rare bit of sex trivia you probably never expected to learn. Ready? Here it comes. Nearly half of all men (47.7% to be specific) between the ages of 18 and 60 report having ejaculated onto the face of another person over their lifetime. That aligns with the number of people who say that their faces have been the targets of such viscous eruptions: 32.3% of women and 52.7% of men who have sex with men report they’ve been on the receiving end.
Those recent figures, from a large random sample of thousands of men and women from the general population, suggest that this specific sex act is “not exactly uncommon,” as one pair of researchers commented. Granted, it was an American sample, but there’s no reason to assume other societies aren’t similarly seminally inclined.
Now, whether you’re disgusted by what you’ve just read is a revealing measure of your personality in itself, but we’ll get to that in a moment. The bigger question, according to psychologists Catherine Salmon and Jessica Hehman from the University of Redlands in California, is whether these “external ejaculatory facials” (to use the scientific jargon) are inherently degrading to the, erm, target, or just a normal expression of human sexuality whose interpretation depends on the context. It may not be polite dinner table conversation, but this specific sex act comes up a lot—sorry, there’s going to be a lot of that—in feminist critiques of pornography, with critics singling it out as a clear example of the male viewers’ contempt for women. “Particular vitriol [is] directed toward cum shots that land on the female partner’s face,” Salmon and Hehman point out. That the actor is often shown kneeling before the male ejaculator adds even more fuel to the critics’ fire.
But Salmon and Hehman, for their part, disagree with this assessment. Their hunch was that the ubiquitous image of facials in porn has little, if anything, to do with learned misogyny, and more to do with the porn industry just capitalizing on basic evolved human psychology. Especially male psychology, given that this is disproportionately the audience. “The world of heterosexual male pornography, or pornotopia,” they write, “is largely a male fantasy of low-cost causal sex with an endless supply of easily aroused interested females.” (By contrast, the genre of romance, with steamy portrayals of a female protagonist finding a warrior soulmate who proffers riches and lasting devotion, tends to be the erotic fantasyland of female audiences.) Because short-term mating strategies in men are driven largely by a desire for novelty and variety (see: the Coolidge Effect), close-ups of attractive faces also tick that libidinal box. When you add that male arousal is deeply visual, the appeal of porn is glaring.
In fact, in an earlier study, Salmon established that gay male pornography is basically indistinguishable from straight porn. There’s a little more anal sex, of course. Yet since porn caters overwhelmingly to viewers with male brains, the themes, camera angles, depictions, “dialogue,” and general interactions is pretty much the same: lots of casual sex with lots of attractive, enthusiastic partners. There was, however, one intriguing difference in that earlier content analysis of gay male and straight porn. Although gay porn featured more cum shots in general, external ejaculations onto faces was more common in the straight porn. (Not that it doesn’t happen—often—in gay porn, but the statistical significance is what matters here.)
That difference may be partially due, the authors speculate, to anatomical affordances, with more frequent face-to-face sex in straight porn. But they suspected there’s probably more to it than that. From a woman or gay male’s point of view, after all, it’s easy to tell if a man is enjoying himself, given, you know, those erect and ejaculating organs. From the vicarious perspective of a straight man, women’s pleasure is comparatively harder to discern. “This greater frequency of facial cum shots in heterosexual pornography,” explain the authors:
might reflect heterosexual males’ greater concern with visual evidence of female approval and/or enjoyment of the activity. Homosexual males might also enjoy such images, even if facial cum shots are less frequent features of homosexual male pornography. However, it might be especially relevant to heterosexual males if female positive affect increases their pleasure and negative female affect inhibits their pleasure as some studies have suggested.
By “positive affect,” the authors are referring to that emotional marquee of a smile, or at least a welcoming visage. Smiles can be faked, sure, but assuming most men are hypervigilant to signs of sexual desire and willingness, facial expressions are an obvious place to start.
There’s not a lot of research on this, surprisingly, but the logic is that negative facial displays (disgust, fear, sadness, or simply the blank stare of someone who’d rather be reading a romance novel) are a real libido-killer. If so, not all facials in porn will be perceived the same way by viewers; some should be the equivalent of an ice-cold shower. However, if the appeal of facials in porn really is all about men’s taking pleasure in the subjugation or debasement of women, as many critics assert, then the facial expressions of those who receive said facials should be irrelevant, perhaps even seen as more arousing when they show displeasure.
So, in a series of three controlled experiments, Salmon and Hehman conducted what I am fairly confident are the only published scientific studies on people’s perceptions of facial cum shots. They appeared in Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2022, 2023, and 2024, respectively.
The rather ingeniously simple design was the same for all three studies. First, the authors curated a set of 18 carefully selected static images (not film clips) of facials in porn. “All of the images,” explain the authors, “included a penis, ejaculate, and a close-up of the face of the person receiving the cum shot (hereafter referred to as the ‘target’).” Half of these explicit images showed male face targets, and half showed female face targets. Within each targeted sex, 3 of the faces displayed positive affect, 3 negative, and 3 neutral. Hundreds of online participants—male and female, heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual—were then shown the images in a randomized order and asked to rate their perceptions of each image on a scale of 1 (“very negative”) to 7 (“very positive”).
The main hypotheses were intuitive enough. Women should rate the images more negatively than men. Straight participants would rate images showing opposite-sex facial targets more positively than those of the same sex, and vice versa for gay participants. Also, images in which the target is displaying positive affect should be perceived more positively than those showing negative affect. In other words, the authors surmised that not all facials in porn are meant to be degrading, as though it were some immovable, ontological fact. Some, yes. But context matters. In fact, regardless of their sex and sexual orientation, what’s happening in a viewer’s unique subjective universe might also color their perceptions of the facials. Importantly, therefore, before rating the images, each participant answered questions measuring individual differences in: disgust sensitivity (how easily grossed out one gets in the core domains of pathogens, sex, and morality); sociosexuality (behaviors, attitudes, and desires around casual sex), and mate value (feelings of one’s own attractiveness/desirability as a sexual partner compared to others). You can take those tests yourself at the links above.
You can probably guess Salmon and Hehman’s other subset of hypotheses, then: people who are easily disgusted, or who have negative feelings about casual sex, should view the facial images more negatively than those who are/do not. As for mate value, previous data suggested that women who see themselves as low-value mates tend to perceive their male partners’ porn use as implicitly threatening to their own reproductive prospects, because it’s harder for them to compete with those attractive and sexually available women. If so, female participants with low mate value should rate the facial images—especially of female targets—more negatively than those who judge themselves as having high mate value.
All these theories were grounded, in one way or another, in evolutionary psychology. Sex differences in disgust sensitivity, for instance, show that males tend to be less easily disgusted than females. This may also contribute to individual differences in short-term mating as a greater willingness to engage in casual sex, with all its contaminative risks. The emotion of disgust is a potent dampener of sexual arousal. Thus, a close-up image of someone whose face or mouth is dripping with “disgusting” goo being squirted out of a stranger’s penis may not go over well with the easily nauseated sort, even if that person is smiling.
The findings from the initial study confirmed the authors’ main hypotheses. In general, male participants perceived the images more positively than did females. Or at least, less negatively. Women had overall negative views of the facial images, whereas men saw them mostly as “okay,” nothing really to write home about. The facial expressions of the targets mattered in the predicted way—those showing positive affect were rated higher than those showing neutral or negative affect. Not surprisingly, sexual orientation made a difference. People judged the images with faces showing attractive members of their preferred sex more positively than their non-preferred sex. And bisexuals were somewhere in between.
I have to say, there are plenty of openminded heterosexuals out there, but it’s still hard to imagine most straight men judging a facial cum shot on another man as a “positive” image (their medium score on these photos was a “2” out of “7”, which is higher than I would have guessed). Gay males, of course, gave more positive ratings to those very images, but interestingly, their ratings of the female targets weren’t nearly as negative as the straight men’s views of smeared male faces. In fact, gay males and straight males judged the female targets pretty much the same. Ah, but that makes sense in retrospect, of course. “It may be,” reason Salmon and Hehman, “that the presence of a penis itself might have also increased the appeal of the image to our homosexual male participants and this may also account for their somewhat unexpectedly high ratings of the female images as well.” Ha!
The hypotheses regarding those more fine-grained individual differences—disgust sensitivity, sociosexuality, mate value—were supported by the results too. People high in self-perceived mate value saw the images more positively than did those with low mate value. Those with high disgust sensitivity (especially in the pathogen and sexual disgust domains) viewed these body fluid images more negatively than did those with low disgust sensitivity. As did women with low self-perceived mate value. Participants with higher sociosexuality scores, indicating a desire and favorable attitudes toward casual sex, viewed the images more positively.
The authors subsequent studies mostly replicated these findings while adding additional individual difference factors. For their next study (in which they were joined by psychologist Aurelio José Figueredo from the University of Arizona), the authors factored in the participants’ religiosity, as well as their scores on the “Dark Triad” antisocial personality traits (psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism). It turned out that religiosity didn’t make much of a difference at all—except weirdly, women who were more religious viewed the facial cum shots more positively than did non-religious women. “Further study is need to unpack what is going on here,” write the authors, scratching their heads over that one. Maybe it has something to with expectations of female submission in certain religions, they wonder. But more importantly, men’s antisocial personality traits had no effect at all on their ratings of the images. Even the psychopaths showed a preference for images of female targets displaying positive affect. “This suggests,” conclude the authors, “that an enjoyment of external ejaculation images in general is unlikely to be associated with sadomasochistic fantasies of degradation, which have been associated with higher levels of psychopathy.”
In a final article published in 2024, Salmon and Hehman reran the study, but this time with participants from Brazil and the Philippines (rather than from just the United States). Not only are these countries non-Western and important cultural comparisons, the authors note, but conveniently, they’re also among the “Top 10” in daily traffic to Pornhub. (The US is #1. Go America?) The main hypotheses mostly bore out in these samples as well, but one interesting difference was with the Brazilian women, who perceived the facial cum shots just as positively as did their male Brazilian counterparts. Brazil is not only more open about sexuality in general than the US and the Philippines, the authors postulate, but there’s also a greater emphasis placed on female sexual desire and power in Brazilian society.
Oh, but these investigations into perceptions of external ejaculation are just getting started. Many pressing questions remain. The authors write, “it would be interesting to examine in a future study whether adding images . . . that involve female fluids on the face of their partner would produce similar or different effects.” Promises, promises.
In any event, none of this is to say that facials in porn are never degrading. A minority of men do get off by scenes of men subjugating women. But for most, nonconsenting sadism is a real turnoff. Context matters. Consent matters. Pleasure matters. Whether a particular sex act between consenting adults is “good” or “bad” may simply be in the eye of the beholder.
Hopefully, just not right in the eye.
Like what you read? Toss a tip in the jar—any amount that makes sense for you—so I can keep overthinking things on your behalf.
Interesting! I always wondered….