Well this is cool! Cheri of Secret Lovers Lane seems to be saying from experience what I was trying to say earlier mostly from inference.

Today I am working, cleaning and thinking. Maybe too much thinking….my body had a physical meltdown from all the stress and I am trying to relax a little. Slow down just a bit and soak in my life. Funny, how an affair can be better for your marriage. When a rendezvous ends, I manage to think about my life and the first thing I think about is WHY AM I MARRIED? You would think I would be thinking of divorce when I am having a hot affair but its the opposite for me. I am content at that time. How ironic that I think divorce when I end an affair. So, you see the moral of the story: Affairs can be good for a marriage or at least the dysfunctonal ones!!!

She said it here.

This being, what, the fourth or fifth post along these lines I should probably be clear I’m not saying “oooh, everybody should just go have affairs.” That would be as silly as saying everyone should just go be monogamous. And even if I was I wouldn’t be saying everyone should go be capital-P Polyamorous with all the formal intentionality that can go along with that. I am saying that whatever one decides to do should be undertaken with as much responsibility and respect for all concerned as one would undertake any endeavor with the potential to involve heart, head, hands, and naughty bits such that one’s loved ones and one’s self are reinforced rather than undermined.

The rest of Cheri’s post, which is actually mostly about gendered double standards, is also acutely intelligent.

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]

Megan of Jezebel briefly explains what… really shouldn’t be a mystery in the first place.

Brazen Careerist’s Penelope Trunk examines the correlation between women getting oral sex and how much money they make. As if you needed another reason to ask for a raise!

...

...I think it’s worth noting that societies that allow and even encourage women to achieve educationally and professionally are also societies in which women have (some and increasingly more) autonomy over their lives and their bodies. If you are free to pursue your own life, your own career and your own relationships, then you are also more and increasingly free to pursue sexual pleasure. So, I’d agree with Trunk’s editor that while there is likely a statistical correlation between women’s income level and cunnilingus rates, the correlations is probably due more to the fact that these women are increasingly less likely to take up sexual roles proscribed by traditions that specifically discourage them from outside employment and equal earning power.

Read the quote in context here.

Not that everybody sees it this way. Megan raises another point:

Trunk’s (male) editor added this:

“Let’s assume that men give oral sex only because women ask for it. That’s probably 95% true. Then who asks for it? Women who consider themselves at least equally deserving of that sort of consideration -the women who are going to be better earners because they are educated enough to know that they deserve it (both the income and the oral.) So I think they are coincidental, not causal. A woman who earns more has the self-confidence (and the self-worth, boosted by external factors like earning ability, education, etc.) to ask for oral.”

Actually, that’s an interesting argument, with which I have one very large quibble. Most of the damn time, I don’t have to ask for oral sex. In fact, I’d say that he’s got the numbers completely wrong, at least in my college-educated, high-earning single experience: 95% of the time, the guy offers, requests or just heads on down there to eat me out. (Maybe it’s because I have better luck picking lovers than boyfriends?)

I… think what’s going on behind the “mystery,” as suggested by Trunk’s editor, is that some people still see oral sex in terms of power dynamics — as something you have to get, based on some reason other than it being something most people just like to do with each other because it feels great, it’s very erotic, and just as much fun to give as to receive.

If, on the other hand, you thought you had to calculate your relative advantages over each other before deciding whether one is allowed to, expected to, obliged to, or… what?... too good to go down on their partner? Or to be gone down on? You probably wouldn’t be into it either. And if one’s partner seemed to be making such calculations? Um, yeah, that’s a real turn on.

—-

And, obviously, this is entirely separate from the questions of whether one actually enjoys eating or being eaten. If you don’t then I don’t see how any amount of status or savvy obliges anybody to do something sexual that they don’t care for. Even as a “trade” for something one does.

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