I’m on rotation in the popular “Ask the Wise Guys” feature at Em & Lo This week’s question was

“For guys who like to give oral sex, what’s the appeal? What differentiates them from the guys who seem to hate giving it?”

Read the other Wise Guy responses here.

Here’s how I answered:

I’m going to go out on a limb and say guys who find it appealing enjoy it for the same reasons women who enjoy it like eating their partners. It involves all our senses — sight, sound, hearing, taste, touch, and scent. It’s sensual and pleasurable the same way kissing a partner’s lips and face is. We like it because we’re right there so it’s easy to tell the effect we’re having. And because we know it can feel really, really nice for our partner. Also it’s a skill and because you can always learn something new about doing it. And it’s just cool to feel present and in control while your partner’s dissolving into inarticulate quivers. In other words, as I said, it’s for the same reasons many women say they like going down on their partners.

For guys who hate it? Again I’m guessing it’s not that different for women who don’t like giving either. You feel obliged. Your partner won’t do it to you unless you do it to them. You heard somewhere you’re supposed to. You don’t like the taste, or the smell, or the feeling of someone’s private parts pushing into your face. You have bad associations with it. You think it’s undignified or unbecoming or inappropriate or exploitive. You think it’s a necessary step on the way to “the real thing” so you want to get it over with as quickly as possible. You think if either you or maybe they “were any good” you’d both be satisfied with “real” sex, i.e. intercourse. In other words, much like the same reason some women don’t want to go down on their partners.

Just as it’s nice to enjoy receiving or giving, it’s also okay not to. Not everyone likes to go down, and not everyone likes to be gone down on. Just don’t pretend.

Teresa Strasser of MomLogic says

If you’re thinking about conceiving, or certainly if you are already pregnant, there is some pretty convincing evidence that instead of just swallowing, say, folic acid, you might want to swallow something else.

Let me be delicate about this, if I can.

As far as I can tell, not only should you be having lots of oral sex with the father of your baby — even up to a year before conceiving — you should also make sure to ingest his seminal fluid. Listen to what I’m telling you: the international medical community is giving you an Rx for oral. Sure, they say frequent intercourse is good, too, but oral is better. So, if you care about having a healthy baby and not potentially unleashing what scientists call a “destructive attack on the foreign tissues” of your fetus, if you want to avoid immunological disorders during pregnancy, and I’m sure you do, get to work. Or to pleasure, depending on how you feel about it.

Basically, the research says you need to be able to tolerate your baby’s foreign, paternal DNA; in other words, you need to get your body accustomed to the stuff, need to cozy up to some daddy double helix for a while so your body doesn’t reject it.

She said it here.

Further down in the same post, though, Dr. Suzanne Gilberg-Lenz, also of MomLogic says that’s true if and only if a single, very small study by a non-specialist counts as “the international medical community.”

Maybe I have not been attending grand rounds enough and am out of date — but I NEVER learned about this benefit of oral sex in medical school or residency, or at any of those fancy continuing medical education conferences!

So while my search was far from exhaustive, I checked out a few of the wiki sources named in Teresa’s blog. The one academic paper that seems to support this supposed “immune maladaption theory of preeclampsia” is in fact published in one of our most esteemed peer-reviewed journals, but it is a small study and, no offense, was authored by a resident … and the bigger, better controlled study with more than 2,000 subjects published in another peer-reviewed journal concludes otherwise. So, if you like, swallow, and if you do not … please do whatever it is that you do with undesired contents of the oral cavity

Care to guess which way most of the comments on the post go? Suddenly being skeptical about a very dubious study makes Gilbert-Lenz a prude? Or “a feminist,” as if that was a bad thing?

I think fellatio feels very nice, and I agree that it’s lovely when a partner swallows. I also think there’s no, zero, none chance the study demonstrates that “gastrointestinal absorption of semen” is the best way to establish immunological tolerance. Or anything of the sort.

That’s a good thing, too. Because from the look of it the cluster of related papers all say the immunological effect seems to be related to substances in semen, not sperm. Which would suggest another, even more reliable way to avoid preeclampsia would be to altogether avoid contact with semen, period. So.

Quick question for anyone hoping Dr. Gilberg-Lenz is a spoilsport: would you be as credulous about a similarly small, obscure study claiming preeclampsia could be avoided through total lifetime abstinence except specifically for procreation? No? Good call.

I mean, it sounds like a good call. She says clearly, if a bit medically, “so, if you like, swallow, and if you do not … please do whatever it is that you do with undesired contents of the oral cavity.” Do it if you already like to, otherwise don’t force yourself is feminist advice, sure, but it’s pretty good advice period.

For instance what if an “international medical community” of one claimed that “gastrointestinal absorption of semen” was the best way for men to avoid prostate cancer instead? How many straight-oriented men do you think would start swallowing semen? Even if their wives emailed them the links? Even if their wives reminded them that prostate cancer leads all other forms in men? Are those crickets chirping? I thought so.

If you look at this (or, obviously any other sex-related recommendation) from an it-could-happen-to-me perspective “swallow if you want to but don’t let anyone force you if you don’t” starts sounding pretty good for everybody. Feminism’s good for everybody.

—-

Finally, despite admonitions about not looking gift horses in the mouth and all I think it would be weird to find out one’s partner’s suddenly interest in oral sex turned out to be about her enjoyment, or her interest in my enjoyment, but because she was thinking about its medicinal properties.

I mean, yeah, inside the fantasyland where “men just need a place to have sex, women need a reason“ womanly/maternal/feminine concern for health is great “leverage” for sex. But… first of all eww, and second of all I’m really, really tired of the Two Rules of Desire where men are incapable of being desired, and women of desiring them… and where it’s inconceivable that a man might receive a blowjob because a woman wanted to give him one.

Update:

Me? As much fun as it is for you when someone lovingly kisses his way down your body… from your lips to your neck to your shoulders and breasts… gingerly across your belly and then down further, lingering longer and longer while your eyelids flutter and your breath quickens and… Ahem, where was I? Oh yeah, as much fun as it might be for you, one of the pleasures of eating you for your partner is that he gets to be the reason for your… well… flutters and sighs. And that he enjoys the way you look, the way you taste, the way you feel against and in his mouth… the way her legs flex… and quiver… rise… and squeeze or thump his shoulders.

And so much as I enjoy the same trail of kisses down to my naughty bits, and don’t notice my curled-toenail marks further kisses bring, it’s hard to believe the common belief that being the source of my murmers and sighs and shortened breath might not be just as enjoyable for a partner… or that she wouldn’t enjoy the way I look, the way I taste, the way I feel against and in her mouth, and the way my legs stretch out… the way my muscles tense… the way my hips roll and surge up against palms of her hands.

I mean… in the broadest terms could one gender really get less enjoyment from that than another? Could it be that the only motivation for one might be it’s possible medicinal value?

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 FotoRita [Allstar maniac]. Used under a Creative Commons license.

So anyway, I was thinking about a long-ago relationship where whoever got up first semi-platonically kissed their way down the sleepier partner’s body: nose, lips, chin, collarbone/sternum, belly button, cock in her case, clit in mine… and then we’d slip out of bed, slip into a robe or other clothes, and go make the other person coffee.

I have to say, a very nice way to begin the morning. It never (or pretty much never, I could be forgetting something) went any further than that. Like a lot of people she wasn’t that interested in sex in the morning, and while I’ve never minded it I don’t think I’ve ever felt deprived by missing it. I don’t remember us being particularly oral when we did have sex either — I’m sure I ate her but I hadn’t learned to feel comfortable receiving, but I mostly remember a we had a sort of slow-paced over-and-over roll where I’d be on top for a while then she’d be on top for a while then she’d sit up, then I’d sit up, and then I’d roll her onto her back and we’d be me on top for a while again.

But anyway, the memory popped into my head at another one of those waiting-at-the-stoplight moments and I got a little epiphany.

See, what I remember from her muzzy/fuzzy early-dawn-light kisses was the little skin-buzzing kiss she’d plant on the loose skin on the side of my cock. And I remembered that with her pubic hair in the way I was never able to get the same sort of skin-to-skin slurp when I kissed her. (Instead I’d have had to spend a moment first parting her hair with fingers or tongue and that would have sort of broken the arrangement by complicating it.

And that’s where I had my little epiphany about the difference in oral sex for men and women: chances are very good that anyone fellating an ungroomed man isn’t going to get his or her nose tickled or face wet with saliva-drenched pubic hair, on the other hand chances are excellent that anyone (umm… why isn’t there a Latinate word for this?) cunnilingualling someone with natural pubic hair is going to wind up tickled of nose and a very wet of face. And very hairy of tongue. It’s not a bad feeling, but it’s not the sort of feeling you’d really look forward to doing under other, less erotic circumstances.

So anyway, what I’m getting at is that while there’s certainly that whole ridiculous two-sphere gender model where if men are hairy women have to be the opposite… which means hairless. And yes that’s stupid because the way men’s and women’s body hair grows you can tell a naked man from a naked woman from the north end of the beach to the south. (Very different, you see, while not opposite is still, well, *very different!)

But if the double standard really does seem to be the biggest issue, it nevertheless obscures the point that with oral sex among heterosexuals, cocks stand well clear of hair and clitorises and labia generally don’t, and that given a choice I’m pretty sure most people, and not just women, would tend to be less interested in removing it if it didn’t get in the way of quick kisses…

... or very long ones.

Ironic isn’t it, especially in terms of that pesky two-sphere gender model, allegedly big hairy men are the ones with no hair where it would interfere with oral sex.

So there you go. A little epiphany because it’s not really a huge deal.