Photo by Flickr user ejpphoto. Used under a Creative Commons license.

So eight years ago today I began this blog with the following post

Regarding Cock-suckers
Posted by figleaf on Thu, 2005-01-20 08:49

Cock-sucker: The term has many unfortunate uses and connotations, which is a shame since very very few of the connotations have anything to do with actually sucking cock. Let’s go one step further. Just as boys in the lockeroom stop bragging about sex as soon as they actually begin having it, it’s hard to use cock-sucker as an epithet once you’ve met someone who knows how to do it.

Even before I wrote that first post I'd been puzzled by "cocksucker" as a nigh-unto-nuclear taunt and insult. Because first because it's so frequently said by men, and so often said about women. What always seemed so weird about it was that second of all... well... most men kind of enjoy getting them!

This morning I finally figured it out. Which just goes to show I'm either a slow learner or else pretty indoctrinated into something I posted about a few years later.

A few years later I wrote what's turned out to be a productive for me and modestly popular post

The Bogus Two Rules of Desire (a.k.a. the Shorter No-Sex Class Paradigm)
Posted by figleaf on Fri, 2009-01-30 10:29

Over the years I've written hundreds of entries for my "no-sex" class category. Without ever feeling I'd gotten it exactly right.

Then one day I got a brainstorm and streamlined it to two basic, bogus, but amazingly deeply ingrained rules.

• It is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to have sexual desire.
• It is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired.

I hadn't put it together before, eh. The reason that a) men generally enjoy receiving fellatio while b) using it as an insult most vile would be c) that second bogus rule of desire, right?

Sigh.

That it's taken me this long to twig to something both as vexing and as obvious as that just shows how far I've still got to go.

That it's actually still true that it's inconceivable enough to imagine that no one would ever desire to perform fellatio, and that it's actually still true that it's intolerable that there are those who nevertheless do, and that it's men ourselves who are most likely to condemn it socially (even while perhaps enthusiastically receiving them in private) shows how far society still needs to go.

The good news, actually, is that in the last eight years the inviolability of both Rules have softened considerably, particularly among those who've come of age in that time. It's not likely another President would be impeached for receiving one. And increasingly it's no longer barkingly taboo, let alone illegal, that men who desire to perform fellatio on each other might finally marry each other, as women who sexually desire each other may. It's been years since I've heard anyone (mostly my generation or older) imply or outright state that fellatio is not vanilla. Even longer since I've heard anyone imply that only a "closet homosexual" would let his female partner "go down" on him. Or that only a "fallen woman" or one who didn't "care about herself" would willingly (let alone enthusiastically) do so.

So. Progress in one dimension anyway.

But people still use the epithet.

And mean it.

Maybe in the next eight years we'll grow past it.