Clinique Bukkake

The other night it was foggy and cool here at San Francisco's outermost edge; I was just starting a week off work; my boyfriend was producing dinner; I was happily just beginning to browse through the newest issue of Allure magazine (September 2006, with a platinum blonde, 1940's-styled Christina Aguilera on the cover). A few pages into the magazine, I came across this ad; a model's face, huge and close, with creamy, pale yellow, viscous stuff dripping off her cheek and nose and down her lips.

Huh.

Two jobs ago, I worked as a sex educator/sex toy salesperson/quality control person at an internet sex toy store with a supposedly feminist bent. In actuality, it was about as feminist as ads for discreetly packaged tampons or floral-scented douches or clothing detergent for the tough guys in your family (your Dear Husband and Dear Sons) are feminist. But I digress.
The longer I worked there, the more I learned about sex, vibrators, sex books, and porno movies. As with working in any industry, working in the sex products industy, a person learns not just basics but detailed info like the month and day that the newest highly-anticipated and much-critically-acclaimed bukkake video is being released. Being Released. Yes, indeedy.

Bukkake, you innocents, is a Japanese word, but like "sushi" and "futon", everyone who does not speak any Japanese knows it.
Everyone into porn, that is...baldly put, it's when people splooge (ejaculate) all over someone's face. It's a whole porn genre unto itself. When I started working at the sex store, I didn't know that word. I had just started working there when I talked to a customer on the phone who said something something about "bukkake" videos.
"Um, hold on, please," I told him, pressing my finger over the voice tube of my headset and standing up to yell to my co-workers, "WHAT'S BUKKAKE?"

"Ejaculating on the face," Maude, my co-worker and pal replied. (Not really her name, but that was her work name there, and mine was Dot. We tried to pick names that we thought were hilariously unsexy, kind of the opposite of Honey or Cherry or Ashley or whatever other names sound like they belong to a Hot and Sexxy gal.)

"Here, I'm emailing you a link," Maude said.


Call me Pollyanna: it still amazes me how much porn imagery shows up in mainstream advertising. In fact, sometimes it seems mainstream advertising is nothing BUT porn imagery.

The first photo is the Clinique cosmetics ad for their Dramatically Different Moisturizing Lotion. You can see the ad in all the major fashion magazines this month.

The second photo is a still I found at a "free bukkake pics" website. You'll appreciate the fact that I cropped some stuff out, methinks.