Thomas Pitilli
And our second date had started out so well. New Year’s Eve was a strange night to have a second date, sure, but after my first date with John had ended on a chilly December evening with evidence that he was a great kisser, I decided he was perfect for me.The guy I thought I was going to marry had recently left me for someone else, and John’s good lips and good looks were, I thought, just what I needed.
So on the last night of 2006, our date began with sushi and sake, followed by a party in Tribeca. I introduced John to my friends, and I loved his quiet confidence. I loved his blazer because my ex never wore one. I loved that he was going to eclipse my heartache. For years to come, I realized, John and I would celebrate our anniversary on New Year’s. Honestly, I’d all but picked out our kids’ names by the time we found ourselves in a dark corner of the loft, kissing at midnight.
“Come back to my place with me,” he whispered in my ear. “I don’t know,” I said, my face pressed into to his. “We can just keep kissing,” he said. I wasn’t naive enough to think we were going back to his place to just keep kissing, but I did figure I could go back to his place and not fuck him until the third date. We left the party and stumbled into terrible weather. It was sleeting and we practically froze before we found a cab that would take us to Queens. In his well-kept room, I slipped my boots off and sunk into his down comforter.
He turned on some soft music and climbed on top of me, accompanying his kissing with welcomed groping. Soon, he unhooked my bra, took off my shirt and slid off my jeans. Before I knew it, I lay there naked and he’d shed nothing but that blazer.
Wow, I thought. He was one of those men who was going to get me off before he even thought about himself; maybe I had really found my perfect guy. Moving from my lips to my neck to my ear, John took a breath and reached down to unbuckle his belt. Then, he spoke.
“Let me cum on your face,” he said. I sat up. “What?” “Come on,” he pleaded. “You’ll love it.” “Are you kidding?” “You know you want it.” That’s when I told him I thought he watched too much porn.That’s when he got offended and collapsed into his pillow. And that’s when I found my underwear and his bathroom floor, where I sat on cold tiles and flipped through a copy of Wired for the next hour, feeling sorry for myself.
I don’t hate pornography. I’ve always been fully aware of past boyfriends’ pornwatching habits, and I can be as turned on by it as the next gal. But, at a certain point, pornography that’s exploitative to women enters into our collective unconscious and damages both men and women because— unless I’m missing something about what makes jizz on the face so pleasurable—it’s an act influenced by a brand of pornography that’s pretty damn degrading.
Even so, I didn’t storm out of John’s place the next morning—after all, I’d had such high hopes for him. So like an idiot, I pretended that the whole thing was an alcohol-induced aberration. But the next time I slept with him, it was New Year’s Eve all over again, and I found myself compromising.
“OK,” I told him while we were hooking up. “You can cum on my tits.” And so it went. He couldn’t have sex unless he could pull out and shoot his wad all over me. Every time I let him do it, I felt like I’d become a towel he was jerking off on. Had I let him cum on my face, I would have felt completely disgusted with myself. Letting him cum on me like that, I just felt kind of gross.
We broke up a few sticky months later. Somehow, in a short while, I’d gone from being with a guy who had given me gift certificates to get facials at spas to being with a guy who thought I should enjoy an entirely different kind of facial, one that couldn’t possibly be good for the complexion.
Eliza Faye (a pseudonym) is a freelance writer living in New York City. She likes dating men who don’t want to cum on her face.
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Matt Harvey
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