Money shot

The moment in a porn scene when a performer cums on camera, outside the body, so the viewer can see it: the proof and the punchline of the scene.

The money shot is the moment in a porn scene when a performer cums on camera, outside the body, where the lens can see it. It is the full stop at the end of the scene, the proof that the sex "really" happened, and for decades it has been the one shot a porn director could not go home without.

Outside porn the phrase has gone mainstream as a figure of speech: the money shot of a film, a speech or an ad campaign is its big climactic image, the bit that sells the whole thing. When gay men say it, though, we usually mean the original.

Where it comes from

The phrase was already industry talk by the 1970s. In 1977 Stephen Ziplow's how-to manual for porn producers, The Film Maker's Guide to Pornography, called it "the come shot, or, as some refer to it, 'the money shot'" and laid down the law: "if you don't have the come shots, you don't have a porno picture".

Why money? The film scholar Linda Williams, who wrote the classic study of the shot, explains that the name comes from mainstream film slang for the image that costs the most to produce, and notes that porn producers paid their male performers extra for it. Green's Dictionary of Slang adds the obvious: these shots are where the commercial value of the film lies. Williams also points out that it was only in the early seventies, with feature-length hardcore, that the visible external cumshot became the standard way to end a sex scene; the older stag films mostly stopped at penetration.

In gay porn

Straight porn needed the money shot to prove something it could not show about the woman. Gay porn has a simpler problem, because everyone on screen can produce the evidence, and often does. Richard Dyer, writing about gay porn in 1985, put it plainly: the goal of the porn narrative is coming, "in filmic terms, the goal is ejaculation, that is, visible coming," partly as proof that nobody faked it and the viewer got value for money. He also noticed that even when the pleasure of being fucked is on screen, the story is organized around the desire to ejaculate, not the desire to bottom.

The money shot comes in a few classic shapes, each with its own entry here: on the face (a facial), on the chest or back, shared mouth to mouth (snowballing), or, in the bareback studio era, inside, which is why the camera then waits for the creampie to show what it could not see. A pop shot is the same thing under another name, and the load is what everyone is counting on.

Related terms