Inspired by a Mary Sue article about a dress themed around period blood

[feotakahari]

The filmmaker Catherine Breillat proposes that men are sexist if they wouldn’t drink period blood. I propose that if your feminism involves any variation on this idea, then your feminism is bad. 

Comments

[flamingsword]

I would posit that anyone who expected their partner to swallow ejaculate but was unwilling to get their own mouth on their partner's fluids is an asshole.

[feotakahari]

If you bleed when you ejaculate, you probably shouldn’t be asking anyone to drink that.

[flamingsword]

Why is semen considered more sanitary than blood?

[ilzolende]

Some guesses:

If semen started off incredibly unsafe to have in other people's bodies, males with the least harmful semen would be more reproductively successful since the females they had sex with would be more likely to survive. People don't generally exchange blood, so there's not any strong reason why ingesting other people's blood would need to be safe.

Semen is less associated with sickness and injuries than blood is. If someone's injured, there will probably be blood around. If someone's sick, there might be blood around. We then end up associating blood with unsanitary things.

Blood's a really effective vector for disease. So is fluid exchange during sex, though, and I'm not sure to what extent blood is actually worse. I know sex gets much riskier for the person with open wounds if someone has open wounds.

Semen doesn't produce such vibrant stains compared to blood?

Also, like, menstrual fluid contains not only blood but also other things, like shredded chunks of discarded uterine lining, which are pretty disgusting. I've desensitized myself to this somewhat because I used to have really heavy periods, but if anyone expected me to be up for ingesting pieces of dead, decaying human organs, I would consider that person to be completely unreasonable.

Insomnia thoughts

[flamingsword]

Sushi, poké, ceviche, caviar, and steak tartare are all considered delicacies. Those are all dead meat that has begun to decay. The Maasai people who drink blood are perfectly healthy also. Maybe it's not the dead meat that is why people have the problem with it.

I think the comparative reasonableness of drinking semen is a facet of the normalization of male sexuality, where female sexuality is othered and taboo. Due to the upswing in testosterone during the premenstrual period and the first day of menses, many people with vaginas have a higher drive for sex during that period. Instead of normalizing that, it is shamed and made taboo. I think that is cultural, since so many cultures have raw delicacies and simultaneous period taboos.

Also,

[flamingsword]

Blood's a really effective vector for disease. So is fluid exchange during sex, though, and I'm not sure to what extent blood is actually worse. I know sex gets much riskier for the person with open wounds if someone has open wounds.

If we had seminal fluid in our veins we might run the exact same risk. You are asserting that the blood, and not the breached barrier, is the cause of the risk. And I'm afraid that is not how that would work.

[feotakahari]

If you want to argue that drinking semen is gross and no one should be expected to do it, I won’t argue with you. I neither drink semen nor ask anyone else to.

[discoursedrome]

Hm, theorizing:

Semen archetypally goes into someone else's body anyway, so you could make a case that drinking it is less of a big deal than drinking a fluid that wouldn't normally be going into your body at all?

I think a lot of it is also the actual act of ejaculation, though. Contrary to what feotakahari said, I imagine that if people ejaculated blood when they orgasmed, there probably would be more norms around swallowing it.

Possibly also people are reminded of having mouth injuries when they taste blood, whereas there's no other situation where you'd be tasting semen? That one's a bit of a stretch, though.