Summary: An article in WebMD says only 20% of young adults believe oral sex “counts” as sex. Jayme Waxman sets the record straight.

While I’m not completely enthusiastic about the close association between sex and disease Jayme Waxman of Sex Matters does use it in a good cause:

I just want to go on record and say oral sex is sex. That means BJ’s and CJ’s (blow jobs and clit jobs – a term I hope I just made up, but I’m sure I didn’t, still it’s what I’m calling cunnilingus from now on, as in from right now on) are sex. You can get sexually transmitted infections like gonorrhea and chlamydia form oral sex, and you can give and receive herpes and HPV that way too.

Read the quote in context here.

And yes, yes, she could also have mentioned another forgone association: that both giving and receiving oral sex is a source of sexual enjoyment. For whatever reason that never really seems to come up in conversations involving definitions of sex. So kudos to Waxman for punctuating the bottom line: oral sex is sex.

Via Rachel Kramer Bussel, John DeVore of The Frisky says in an article titled “Mouth Love Is Meh”

Blow jobs are overrated. There. I said it.

I think “meh” can be the right word. It’s not that there’s no such thing as a great blowjob, it’s that there’s not no such thing as one you don’t enjoy. (Key point: it doesn’t have to be their fault if you don’t enjoy it.)

What’s weird, or, maybe more accurately, significant, is that we feel compelled to duck rhetorically when we say it (as in “There. I said it.”) as if it was doctrinal heresy rather than a personal or even general insight.

I think DeVore, like me and like one of his commenters who said “Even if you don’t get off on mouth-love—and I rarely do—it still feels great,” are actually pretty average. Fellatio feels good; it’s hard to come that way… and therefore the doctrinal mania for receiving it comes from somewhere else.

Aside: about that “somewhere else.” Until not that long ago fellatio, in particular, was considered exceptionally coarse, the provenance of (then scorned) homosexuals and, oddly, of heterosexual lower/working-class customers of prostitutes. (For that matter it was often considered too coarse for prostitutes!**) Consequently no matter how nice it felt, nor how much fun it was to do, the barriers to either asking or giving were extraordinarily high. That, however, hasn’t been particularly true in mainstream culture for going on decades now. Yet the sense that it’s an accomplishment to receive one or, for that matter, a compromise to give one, persists. But I digress…

On the other hand the enjoyment in giving blowjobs, if it’s anything like my enjoyment of giving cunnilingus, makes a lot more sense: it’s fun, it’s a developable skill, and most important (and sort of reinforcing my point) it’s really great when you get it right. That last bit about “when you get it right,” when you think about it, belies the received wisdom that receiving oral is automatically the best sensation in the world.

Of course the same can be said, I believe, about cunnilingus… for many of the same reasons.

Anyway, any more than it’s true that the subset of those who enjoy receiving it overlaps perfectly those who’s partners enjoy performing it, neither is it true that the subset of those who feel “meh” about it overlaps perfectly those who’s partners don’t thoroughly enjoy doing it.

Point being

See also: Rachel Kramer Bussel for whom feeling “meh” about receiving fellatio is a deal breaker. And Britni Danielle who would far rather give than receive.

[** “...up to two decades ago Sydney prostitutes refused to offer French at all. The women expressed disgust at its suggestion and took affirmative action if the subject was raised. Lisa, who worked in the lanes in the 1960s, told me that at that time the guys just asked for straight sex and nothing else, no oral or anything, and if they did they would have got their heads kicked in. One girl got caught doing oral when I was on College Street (1950s) and she was smashed and left lying in the gutter.” Source: Working girls: prostitutes, their life, and social control/ Roberta Perkins
ISBN 0 642 15877 0 Canberra : Australian Institute of Criminology, 1991 (Australian studies in law, crime and justice series) —fl]

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

Still following up on the twenty questions I found at Amorous Rocker of Not Your Average Chick that I decided to answer one at a time instead of all in a rush. So…

10. Bite or Suck:

Usually when someone says “bite me” they’re being… well, non-gender specific, maybe but still not exactly polite. On the other hand they also say “you suck” so I guess that’s a wash. Which is sort of a nuisance since both can feel wonderful under the right circumstances.

When I was very young and learning about sex from a variety of pre-1960 and therefore not terribly helpful medical, anthropological, and psychological texts (with the occasional almost-a-stroke-book pseudo-academic works thrown in) I learned the following about the Kama Sutra: “The book contains five chapters about what we’d consider “normal” foreplay and sixteen chapters about biting, scratching, and slapping one’s partners for erotic effect.” And yes, I’m sure I have the exact numbers wrong but not the approximate proportions. It didn’t sound very tempting** and so I generally left off all that.

My loss, as I’ve learned since beginning to read other anonymous and then not as anonymous bloggers of kink.

Still, given a choice between the two I’d choose suck. And lick. And kiss. And mouth. And breathe warm breath across spots tender and mild. The latter, by the way, seems to work as well on recently spanked, bitten, or scratched spots as not… but not in my case if I’d agreed to pick only one. :-)

And again that’s given my choice of one. A choice I’d rather not make.

I haven’t been bitten much but if it’s not oversharing once you arouse me to a certain point I adore having my nipples bitten. But then at that point I adore having them sucked as well. You hear every now and then people praising little nips during fellatio. My experience has been that it’s… not so great. The side of my neck works well and so does the very top inside of my thighs. And while I’ve really enjoyed being bitten on the arms and shoulders it wasn’t the sensation itself but the shared level of emotion, combined with a willingness to sacrifice a little comfort in the interest of not alerting parents.

Sucking though? I love, love, love fingers and toes. When I suck yours. When you suck mine. Not hard so much as warmly, wetly, and deepy… mmm, that’s lovely almost any time. Earlobes? Yours or mine it’s also wonderful. The inside of arms, yes, and all up and down the throat and shoulders and neck, too.

Breasts? I actually don’t go in so much for sucking, or at least not the classic baby-nursing style though it’s a lot of fun to slurp as much of your nipples and breasts as I can with a gentle suction and then swirling my tongue around and around. And around. But I love licking breasts even without suction at least as much. I don’t know about you but I’ve noticed most people I’ve tried it with go deeper into haze when I kiss, or lick, or stroke the curves of the breast just below and to the outside rather than right over nipples. And, as I mentioned above, there’s blowing gently over wet flesh first to chill it and then re-warm it again with hands or lips or tongue.

And speaking of lips and tongue, does anyone else enjoy licking and sucking their partner’s lips during kissing? Gently biting there works wonders too, or would if not for that darn choice. It’s always the lower lip that gets the mention for sucking but I’ve noticed the inside of most people’s upper lip is a marvelous erogenous zone for that.

And of course there’s all the different non-bite-y things one can do during cunnilingus. I used to think that eating a partner was end-of-the-world, I-could-die-happy paradise, and while I’ve gotten over that a little in the sense that I’m no longer outright fetishistic about it I still… mmm… what was I saying? Oh yeah, something I’ve wound up doing especially during side-by-side (as opposed to top or bottom) sixty-nine, you know, where you’re each pillowing the other’s head on your thigh, is gently slurping… ok I mean sucking an inner labia deep into my mouth and then swirling the flat of my tongue across the inner surface. Like maybe a lot of people I can get pretty distracted during sixty-nine but doing that doesn’t take a lot of concentration. The only risk is that it tends to really distract the other person.

As for me? Well, fellatio tends to work in waves for me (I think this is true for a lot of people during oral, men and women) so one minute every nerve ending is on fire and a minute later I feel almost numb… although fortunately after another minute it’s back to… where was I again? Anyway, when I’m cycled down it’s wonderful when you pop me out of your mouth and tongue or slurp on the large, loose, soft vein along the side. You’re not going exactly lose my attention no matter what but that’s definitely going to keep it till my tide comes in again.

Anyway, I’m not going to say of biting that I could take it or leave it — there are too many nice ways to do it to give it up completely. But sucking? I’ll take that in a heartbeat. And give it just as quickly. Any time.

How about you?

So roughly once a year, on my blog anniversary, I link to my first ever post, which asks how anyone who’s received fellatio could use “cocksucker” as an insult.

And wow is it ever a wide-ranging insult! Misogynists use it. Fictional immigrant TV characters use it. Utterly clueless elementary-school kids use it. And I’m pretty sure there are other, possibly surprising subsets of nominally progressive culture that may deplore the word itself somewhat less than they deplore the practice itself.

I dunno. I’ve never understood it. And I could still be mistaken. But as sort of side-effect of all my agitated cogitation about agency, initiative, and the no-sex class recently I think I’ve figured it out.

“Cocksucker” has to be an insult. Because any other way would be to acknowledge the implicit agency in the act. And to allow agency for something enacted on a man just breaks everything!

If a man’s doing it to another man that’s a problem for some people because the whole point of gay homophobia, as opposed to “lesbian” homo-philia, is thanks to the limited constructions the public has to work with, when two men have sex one of them has to play “the woman” and receive from the guy in “the man” role. Which, as we all know, real menz are always supposed to be doing sex, not receiving it. So a man giving a blowjob just kind of mixes everything up especially since the active man is the receiving man and the receiving man isn’t the active man and… hey, stop snickering, I’m not the first person to observe that this stupid word game is a fundamental tolerance blocker for millions and millions and millions of homophobes.

And meanwhile, if it’s a woman giving the blowjob it’s even worse! First of all there’s still that problem with the men being receivers, yeah, but holy macaroni mosta tha time tha womanz tha active party and the dominant paradigm says even if that was possible, which it’s not, it would be wrong.

And the possibility that fellatio would ever be something women enjoyed learning and doing with all the same ecstatic gusto with which men learn and perform cunnilingus? Uh huh, when pigs fly. Whatever you do don’t leave comments saying you actually like to put Teh Cock anywhere near your mouth because, you know, experts from all over say even if you did, which you don’t, the idea that you take such an active role at all, let alone enjoy it, look forward to it, look back fondly on it, exactly the same way your partners look forward to eating you… well, you’re not just deceiving yourself, you’re not just degrading yourself, you’re not just lowering the bar for “good” women who don’t, you’re probably also oppressing yourself. In other words…

You’d

be

a

cocksucker!

That same notion that cocksucking really unhinges the universe is part of why I think there’s no comparable epithet — call someone a pussylicker and they’re almost certain to look question-marks at you not daggers. I think I’ve heard the term “cunt lapper” used derogatorily but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the “lapper” part that was meant to cut most. But nope. Cunnilingus involves women receiving and either a man giving (and so “proper”) or another woman (but harmlessly so and therefore “hawtt”) so I guess no foul.

Oh, am I going to have to say it? No, of course not but I will anyway: of course nobody is supposed to love oral, either giving or receiving, either male or female, either straight or gay, either right or left handed, either weekdays or weekends.

Update: Ok the comments so far have been just great with both intelligent agreement and disagreement. One point that’s emerged from remarks by, especially, sungold, nightfall, and m, is that a better way of putting it would be that whereas on paper the words for fellatio and cunnilingus ought to have equal connotations as actions taken by the giver, the connotations are instead not quite but close to opposite. For instance to the extent fellatio is an act at all it’s a service with the value highly weighted towards the man receiving the service whereas the actor in cunnilingus tends to receive equal or even higher value than the recipient, especially if the actor is a man. The point being that “cocksuckers” rarely get any credit because, in my view, to do so would upset people’s understanding of the nature of gendered roles.