Content warning: This entry is going to use some explicit language, including various terms for bodily fluids.
Much has been made of the fact that in this, the 69th year of Eurovision, we have not one, but two, songs that are about orgasms. In early February, Finland chose Erika Vikman’s Ich Komme to be its entry in its UMK competition, while later that month, Australia announced Go-Jo’s Milkshake Man as its internal selection.
Of the two songs, Vikman’s is, from the lyrics, more clearly about an orgasm. She talks about welcoming a lover, engaging in a naked wedding dance, experiencing a mutual orgasm, and going for a second round because “you’re full of stamina.” Milkshake Man flirts with plausible deniability – claiming that “the shake is not a drink, it’s a state of mind” – but Go-Jo has confirmed that Milkshake Man is about ejaculate.
So if we have two songs about orgasms, why am I so enthusiastic about one – Erika’s – and so creeped out by the other?
I think it comes down to the way that the orgasm is being presented. Erika talks about the orgasms that she’s going to experience as something to be shared jointly with her lover – a piece of mutual pleasure. (From a gendered perspective, there’s a longer exploration of why her song probably needs to link love, sex and orgasm, and the song sung by a male does not, but that’s not the point of this article.)
The chorus of her song is:
And before you come, I hear you screaming
And to that, I scream out loud, “I’m coming”
And together we come and be like
It’s like that when you fall in love
What’s most fascinating about this whole thing is the staging. We got our first view of Ich Komme in a music video release.
In this video, Erika is in a tub of what looks like honey, surrounded by women dancers, yet she remains resolutely alone and untouched during the performance. Her dance moves are not innocent – at one point she thrusts her hips in the air – but we never see the partner to whom she refers.
The same thing happens in the live staging of the performance for UMK, the competition in Finland to choose its Eurovision entrant.
Here Erika’s only companion on stage is a series of ever-larger microphone stands, which she straddles. Again, the performance is sexy, but not explicit, because it teases us while leaving so much to the imagination. We never see the partner to whom Erika refers, although it would have been easy to swap in a buff male dancer or hot female dancer to gyrate with her. Rather, the staging emphasizes the universal appeal of the song. It is trading on the fantasy created by the song, leaving Erika (and all of us) to imagine our ideal partners. They are (in English) a genderless second person ‘you’. In fact, they may even be imaginary, existing only on demand for a person who is otherwise fine living alone.
What we do know is that, aside from singing about it to the world in Eurovision, Erika Vikman’s orgasm involves just her and her consenting partner. It is a moment that they share, and that is described in gauzy terms to us (aside from the one mention of grabbing an ass). The only thing Erika Vikman might be impacting with her orgasm is her neighbours, because she is quite loud.
Go-Jo, on the other hand, seems determined to share his milkshake as widely as possible:
He boasts “They drink my milk all across the land!” But there’s no details on how milkshake does that triggers pleasure in Go-Jo’s partners. Now, I understand that there’s different things that turn people on, but it’s also the case that, taking the song at its most literal meaning, consuming one of his “milkshakes” orally is not likely to induce a woman to orgasm, nor does Go-Jo suggest that he will reciprocate by drinking the milkshakes of his partners, regardless of their gender.
If the Milkshake Man is focusing on the “shaking” part of the milkshake, as suggested by the rocking of his ice cream van in the video, he’s going to have to be doing a lot more than producing a milkshake to satisfy the women riding in the van with him. So yes, this is a song about orgasms, but it’s a song primarily about Go-Jo’s orgasms that he subjects other people to, rather than any orgasms that people are having with him. The mutuality present in Erika’s song has been replaced by a man bragging about spreading his milkshake to as many people as possible without any suggestion of exactly how it’s going to make them feel good. It may be a funny joke, but it’s certainly not a recipe for pleasure.
In fact, what Go-Jo probably meant as a lighthearted song ends up seeming creepy due to the video, as his use of an ice-cream van invokes the “stranger danger” lessons some of us were taught as kids, about avoiding strange men in vans who were offering sweet things.
So why, out of both of these songs, is the one that features a lone woman singing about orgasms in Finnish and German more controversial than the one where a man talks about making people drink his jizz while driving around in an ice cream van? We live in a time when many right-wing governments are coming to power with patriarchal, pro-natalist philosophies, where women’s sexual needs are subsumed by the mandate to bear more children. A woman who is able to control her sexuality and meet her sexual needs without the help of a partner is seen as a threat to the societal order.
It’s for that reason I’m more excited about Erika’s song. I think we need a reminder that female pleasure is not a bad thing – especially female pleasure that can happen at the expense of no one else or, indeed, while mutually enriching a consensual partner. It’s a powerful message, and an important message.
Look, I may be a feminist, but I’m not a killjoy. I’m going to be there in Basel screaming “YUM YUM” after Go-Jo yells “SWEET SWEET.” However, I’m also not going to pretend that a cheeky Aussie who wants to make a cum joke is making a statement anywhere near as profound as the one being made by the sex-positive Erika Vikman, and I think we need to stop pretending that these two orgasm songs are even remotely the same.
dudepoints.fun 