A Beginner's Guide to Cumdumping
Katie Baskerville speaks with cumdumps and community holes to find out what it means to love the stranger. Plus: Everything you need to know about being a cumdump
As someone who writes about the intersection of culture with sex, I don't often sit forward in my chair when someone explains their kink to me, but today is an exception, because today I've learnt about the emerging subculture of cumdumping.
The eternal summer is beating down on me in Bristol as I open my laptop to begin my call with sexual psychotherapist Silva Neves. Neves has just published an article in the journal of Sexual and Relationship Therapy about the extreme sex act that has immediately raised my eyebrows upon finishing it, but not for the reasons you might think.
Cumdumps or cumdumping is a 'fuck and go' sex act where multiple people will leave a load in one person's anus, ie the cumdump. It is a purely transactional act, revelling in the sleaze of a cheap motel room while embracing the most carnal desire attached to sex: to get off and get others off too.
Some cumdumping events have reportedly seen the recipient take loads in their hundreds, whereas others may take only a few in one session. It's group sex on an extreme scale, but that isn't what's caught my attention.
"The emerging bit," Neves explains, "is that the community is growing and growing and now, more and more [gay, bisexual and queer men] openly identify as cumdumps."
The truth is that the growing popularity of the cumdump kink is part of an emerging subculture subverting decades-long stigma aimed at bareback sex in the gay community. Emerging – not because variations of group sex, bareback sex, or gangbangs are anything new on the scene (or anywhere else for that matter), but for the first time the cumdump kink and fetish are entering new realms of normalisation.
"The emerging bit," Neves explains, "is that the community is growing and growing and now, more and more [gay, bisexual and queer men] openly identify as cumdumps."
This is norm-shattering stuff. Once, the fear surrounding the contraction of HIV/Aids and the associated notion that bareback sex was a form of self-abuse or self-harm, contributed to shame and stigma. But now, attitudes are beginning to shift monumentally.
While HIV stigma still exists, the introduction of drugs like DoxyPEP, PrEP and immunisations against STIs has made safer sex possible and has begun to chip away at the long-held idea that sex between men is dangerous.
"Because communities are being established, more people get together and talk to each other." Neeves says, explaining that, before social media, it was harder to meet other bareback or cumdump people, "unless you went to specific clubs." He adds.
Many people still hold internalised homophobic views that go unchallenged.
Regardless of these medical advances and shifts in community attitude, anything beyond the most vanilla sex between men, and even that, is still regarded in our dominant heterocentric culture as risky. Perhaps it's because of the historic stigmatisation of the HIV pandemic, or maybe it's because same-sex intercourse by its very nature subverts gender norms by placing pleasure at the top of the hierarchy, instead of pro-creation.
"You know, if you ask pretty much anybody in the street to say what do you think about having bareback sex with a stranger, the first reaction would be, oh, it's dangerous! It's bad, all the way to it's deviant." Neves suggests, which is a sobering reminder that while in sex positive enclaves acceptability is found more easily, many people still hold internalised homophobic views that go unchallenged.
