So Cheryl of Claiming my inner bitch has an excellent summary of the last month’s worth of fellatio wars which begins this way

Pinko Feminist Hellcat did it for me today in a quote she placed in her post:

the “woman who has sex for pleasure is a slut.”

Thanks. Now I know. I don’t have sex with men for money to feed my children or keep a roof over my head. I don’t have sex with men because I love them or respect them or want to marry them. I like sex with men and have had sex with men primarily for my pleasure, making me a slut. I like sex with women, too…more than sex with men, actually. But women are a little more complicated for me. That’s another post.

Phew! “Slut.” Thank God that issue’s settled. Next issue?

and ends thusly

I guess I know where I stand in the feminist sex wars. I’m a Feminist Slut Extraordinaire, and damned proud of it. ... I still don’t enjoy BJ’s (sorry, guys) but I love cunnilingus! ; )

Read the rest of her chronology and commentary here

I love Cheryl’s stance: She doesn’t object on principle. She doesn’t consider them an affront. She just doesn’t enjoy giving blowjobs.

I strongly get the impression she and I are roughly the same age, and as I read her post I kept thinking about her personal chronology and how it corresponds to mine. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere when I was growing up cunnilingus as foreplay or simply for its own sake simply wasn’t optional for progressives. At the same time, for progressives, to seek or offer fellatio was simply unthinkable.

Anyway, back in those pre-Title-9 days progressives tended to look at women as equal-but-special, still physically delicate, still easily offended, still sole arbiters of propriety, still the sole gatekeepers for sex. In other words still “sugar ‘n spice ‘n everything nice.”

And meanwhile men were still considered elemental, coarse, and constantly thrusting. “Snakes ‘n snails ‘n puppydog tails” for short.

Within that (quintessentially heteronormative) framework cunnilingus made perfect sense because, whatever else could be said about gender relations, men, if they were going to be involved at all, were held absolutely responsible for women’s enjoyment of sex. (If not in the way Oliver Mellors satisfies Lady Chatterley then the way Dr. Reuben recommended.) Similarly within that old framework the idea that women in an equal relationship might actively (rather than passively) seek to satisfy their partners just didn’t make sense. [Note: This wasn’t a crazy position, by the way, and counterexamples fly to the tips of our tongues — criminal sexual assailants require no initiative from their victims, for instance, but by definition neither do they seek consent, and in any case the gratification they seek is scarcely sexual in the first place. —fl]

All in all I can think of 10,000 reasons not to “commit” fellatio, from concern about nurturing patriarchy to ordinary esthetics. But I can really only think of two bad ones, where “bad” means “ill-considered, self-limiting, and inequalitarian.” Those would be a) that it’s physically impossible for anything as delicate as women are to do it, let alone enjoy doing it, or that b) it’s an affront to expect women to do more than make themselves available to their partners and perhaps (considering what animals men can be) an insult to suggest that they’d need to do more than show up. On the off-hand chance anyone still buys either of those they might want to consider reconsidering. And don’t get me wrong here — by “reconsider” I’m not saying “start giving blowjobs” though that might be a consequence. I’m just saying there’s probably value in examining the propositions. After all by my reckoning there are still another 9,998 perfectly good reasons not to.