Fellatio, Anyone?
Bill and Monica may have elevated the blowjob to superstar status, but they didn’t invent fellatio. Hell, bonobos do it. They didn’t even perfect it, as far as I know. If you want tips, look to the performances of Sasha Gray. (Watching her, I reaffirmed by belief that the young have much to teach us). So, it could be in our ancestry, primate and human, but we haven’t all always taken a such a dim view of it.
The ancient Greeks, for example, likely didn’t have a problem with the nob job. After all, it was a pretty good contraceptive.
The Romans, conversely, saw everything as a power issue—and the BJ was no exception. In Latin there were two words to differentiate the giver and receiver: “irrumare” to penetrate, and “fellare,” to be penetrated. One is active and in control, the other passive and being controlled. (Cleis Press), “Gloss” by Rachel Kramer Bussel.]]
Practicing irrumato is different than just happily receiving the attention of another—it involves active thrusting into the mouth, and was considered an act of power by the Romans; Roman men could practice it on anyone of lower rank but to receive it from anyone of lower rank would have been taboo. In fact it was looked down on in general because “known practitioners were supposed to have foul breath, and were often unwelcome as guests at a dinner table.” (Maybe it’s not surprising that the Greeks invented and early form of chewing gum from the sap of the mastic tree.)
Around the same time (300 CE), the Kama Sutra asserted that oral sex was fine, but more as a stimulant provided by eunuchs before marital sex, or as an aid to masturbation.
The Middle Ages saw oral sex reduced to a sin because it was useless (nonprocreative) fun. (So how come Skeeball isn’t a sin?) Whether it was especially taboo or in vogue at different times in the next few centuries is a little difficult to discern but at least it pops up in the 19th century as in this painting of fellatio by Charles Chaplin from the Kinsey Institute Gallery, as well as in the story of Felix Faure. Faure was a French politician who died in 1899 while having sex in his office with a younger woman. It was alleged to be oral sex. (One wonders if there were moments Bill Clinton didn’t wish he’d gone thataway.)
From Sin to Sensation
Just a scant hundred years ago, according to the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality: A Genealogy of the Genital Kiss—Oral Sex in the Twentieth Century, “Oral sex occasionally flickered in the dim light of the courtroom as an instance of ‘cruelty’ in divorce petitions.” That dark-age idea of not mixing business with pleasure—and sex was about the business of procreation and not the pleasure of enjoying yourself and your partner hung in there as the century progressed—and still does for some people. It wasn’t until 2003 that the U.S. Supreme Court declared state laws against sodomy unconstitutional.
However, at the same time as the advent of the acknowledged need for contraception gathered momentum, the idea of sexual satisfaction helping to secure marital stability was also gaining ground.
Foreplay—with an emphasis on “play”—was a relatively new concept in sex. The husband was cast in the role of a tutor who was tasked with helping his wife to feel comfort and arousal: “The teacher-pupil construction of the heterosexual relationship provided the context in which explicit attention to oral sex entered the discursive universe of the marriage manuals. Oral sex makes its appearance cautiously within a specifically physiological context. The physiology of the male tutor’s duty of arousal is the necessity of lubricating the vagina, which is essential for female comfort…Cunnilingus thus enters, not as a form of sexual pleasure for either the female or the male, but rather as an obligation essential to secure the physiological conditions for successful coitus.”
You know what? As long as it enters.
While that undercurrent of discomfort with non-procreative sex persisted, fellatio was quietly integrated into the normal sexual bag of tricks until pop culture got loud about it in the 1970s. It was a golden moment in U.S. culture that would last about ten minutes: couples going to mainstream theaters to watch hardcore porn films as part of a trendy night out on the town. In 1972, the film to see was Deep Throat, about a woman who discovers she has an unsatisfying sex life because her clitoris is located in the back of her throat. Guess what the answer to her problem is?
“They saw it demonstrated on the screen, and all of a sudden it was on the map,” author Camille Paglia told Time magazine in 1994. “Next thing you knew, it was in Cosmo with rules about how to do it.”
By the ’80s it wasn’t so much whether to do it but when to stop: to swallow or not to swallow, which our guru, Dr. Ruth Westheimer (1986) urges women to keep open the possibility that “sometime” they might try it!
But Dr. Ruth’s, “What the hey?” approach didn’t involve the married President of the United States diddling an intern in the oval office, nor was she burbling at you 24/7 from CNN. The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal that would come in the next decade was an overwhelmingly big deal—at least it seemed like one at the time. But has it really effected how we see sex?
Next time, a look at how the most infamous blowjob in modern history has changed the way we define sex today. Damn! If only Monica had swallowed…
To purchase the Naked Reader Book Club selections, visit the Naked Reader Book Club Store.
| The Naked Reader Book Club | Selections for June 2010 |
| The Ultimate Guide to Fellatio by Violet Blue | The Ultimate Guide to Cunniligus by Violet Blue |
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| Tasting Him–Oral Sex Stories Edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel | Tasting Her–Oral Sex Stories Edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel |
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