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.
Submitted by 1938 (not verified) on Fri, 2008-02-15 05:22.
I'm glad you had a good Valentine's Day, Figleaf ;-). I did, too.
[Hey, I'm glad you had a good Valentine's Day too then, Mag! --fl]
Submitted by 1938 (not verified) on Fri, 2008-02-15 08:54.
whatever it is i am not supposed to do, or have done to me, i know what i *want* to do right know.
happy belated blog birthday
[Ooh, ooh! I enjoy that feeling too, BSM. --fl]
Submitted by 1938 (not verified) on Fri, 2008-02-15 10:02.
Happy birthday Figleaf... I've been thinking about the politics of certain sexual insults as well
[Wow, you have. Interesting set of posts, Close. And thanks for your kind wishes. --fl]
Submitted by 1938 (not verified) on Fri, 2008-02-15 14:05.
happy blog-birthday!
The term itself suggests agency. Sucking is a verb after all.
[I know, that's what's so weird about it, M. It's obviously an act but in almost all references it's described more as a service (a-ha, I think that's what I was trying to get at!) --fl]
Submitted by 1938 (not verified) on Fri, 2008-02-15 19:02.
I remember one time when I was in college, I was on one of the internal campus chatrooms where some other student was complaining about one of the college administrators and he said "[admin guy] sucks cock and takes it up the ass" and I responded... "hey, what's wrong with that? *I* do that!"
p.s. - please don't thank me. I am really getting tired of being thanked for all my comments. a response is thanks enough. save the thanks for when I say something really especially insightful, ok? Otherwise it just becomes meaningless.
[Your objection to being thanks is duly noted, Plymouth, and while I actually usually really do mean it I'll try not to do it for you unless I really *really* mean it. As for your main comment, yeah, what exactly *is* wrong with it anyway? The weird thing is that had he been using equal creativity insult a female administrator he would have picked different but, in his opinion, no less degrading acts that... he'd still hope his next date would engage in. Common behavior but very weird. --fl]
Submitted by 1938 (not verified) on Fri, 2008-02-15 22:22.
Sometimes I think that with your "agency" this and "no sex class" that, you're brandishing a hammer and whacking at anything that even remotely resembles a nail. While I agree that much of what you say on this sort of subject is possible, even likely, this whole entry seems to be a bit reaching. I always figured that "cocksucker" was entirely about homophobia, because I have never seen or heard that term being used to refer to a woman. I'm sure a few people probably have, but I don't think that's the normal use of it.
The female equivalent, which I have only heard in reference to lesbians, is "rug-muncher" or "carpet-muncher".
[Hi Nightfall. Although rumors that I don't show my face because I always wear a tinfoil hat are unfounded, I plead guilty to completely overdoing it with the no-sex class business. Less so on the agency thing because there really are both affirmative gaps and gaps of omission in the discourse women (see, for instance, Michelle Fine's article "Missing Discourse of Desire") but also, especially, men are exposed to. As for the homophobia thing, I agree it's an element but at least when I was a kid it was a searing brand when used on women and at least once upon a time it wasn't *that* uncommon for men to wheedle their partners into performing it and then, out of some combinations of guilt and revulsion, to reject them, sometimes violently. For instance my neighborhood's "back alley" sex educator, the boy's paper-route manager, primly informed us that it "some guys do it but it don't make no sense" to beat up a girl after she's gone down on you. At any rate it was in the spirit of that admonition that I came up with this particular bit of my hobby-farm conspiracy theory. --fl]
Submitted by 1938 (not verified) on Sat, 2008-02-16 14:30.
This topic is entirely theoretical for me, because I've got the sort of cold that turns a me into a mouthbreather, unable to suck anything larger than a cough lozenge. More's the pity.
I agree that the agency business is really interesting here, and I don't think you're pushing it too far.
But there's also a confounding factor. Ever since the heyday of the Greeks, there's been a status difference between the penetrator and the penetratee (for lack of a better term). For the ancient Greeks, this distinction was so important that a man could engage in same-sex activities without losing status, *unless* he allowed himself to be penetrated.
The meaning of penetration is not quite clear in your post because I think you're using "receiving" in two different senses: 1) receiving pleasure and 2) receiving a cock in one's mouth. It would be worth unraveling the two.
I also think that the amount of agency involved in giving a blow job is *highly* variable. In my own experience, I've usually been the active party, controlling speed and depth and all the other lovely variables. But if the guy starts thrusting and holding the giver's head, control evaporates pretty quickly (and I have one pretty distressing memory along those lines). I guess some women like turning over that much control, but I'm skeptical; to me, this seems like thinking it *must* be hawt because that's how it's done in porn.
[Agreed in all particulars, Sungold. One of the biggest peculiarities in our language of sexual agency is that (barring the generally unacceptable and objectionable case where the man trusts without invitation or consideration) the person who's performing the *act* is still considered the *recipient* of the penis. That goes back to the same thing I was trying to get at the other day as well talking about Z's post where we just don't seem to have much in the way of affirmative language for sex acts where the man is the object rather than the subject. Except, of course, for fellatio and I still insist that phrases like "that sucks" and insults like "cocksucker" serve the purpose of deprecating the agency for *whoever* performs it, male or female. And finally, thanks for the tip on the two words the Greeks used, I'll have to look them up. They sound helpful. Oh yeah, and sorry you're under the weather, Sungold, I'm down on the couch with a cold as well. Feel better soon. --fl]
Submitted by 1938 (not verified) on Sat, 2008-02-16 17:22.
I don't agree that you're going overboard with your attention to the "no-sex class" paradigm. Hammering hard, most certainly - but most of the relevant issues are nails. I might quibble that the paradigm in question is misnamed, and goes far beyond sexual activity, but I believe, from various things you've said, that you're well aware of that.
Without limiting the scope in some way, the topic is dauntingly huge. The limitation you've chosen seems to me to be a particularly useful one. As well as being an area that has often been neglected in feminist discourse, it's also a sharp-edged, highly personal microcosm in which most if not all of the power issues of the paradigm as a whole play out in sexual/romantic/marital form. (And we get to talk about sex, which is a helluva great way to keep the discourse, um, stimulating.)
Sunflower
[Yeah, I may not be *right* but I have a focused rationale for using the name I've chosen, Sunflower. But you're right that I'm aware of the classic terms and I'm using mine in hopes of better resonance for men. Who, at this point, could be the low-hanging fruit for feminist recruitment since, goodness knows, we're breathtakingly more despised by anti-feminists than by (most) feminists. And finally you're right that I'm not entirely confident, nor necessarily competent to address the full scope of feminism. But I passionately believe that creating public reconsideration of the fundamental sex roles, plus the sociology and psychology of the institutions that have formed largely to regulate those roles, would massively undermine many of the other problems. I appreciate your comment. --fl]
Submitted by 1938 (not verified) on Sun, 2008-02-17 01:16.
There's a huge disconnect between how fellatio is portrayed in popular culture and how I've actually experienced it. A lot of people seem to be under the impression that there are a lot of specific rules: the fellator has to study the proper technique, practice on toys, stick their partner's penis farther down their throat than is comfortable, keep sucking until their partner has an orgasm, and finish it off by swallowing his come. If I had to abide by those rules, of course sucking cock would feel like a tremendous chore. But I've had a lot of success with doing what feels best on my tongue and lips and produces the hottest noises, then switching activities when I feel like it.
It occurs to me now that this stuff is kind of bound up with male entitlement issues.
[That's just so perfectly put, P! Sure, it *can* be about the man but really, at least in the modern increasingly-patriarchally-undermined parts of the world fellatio, like cunnilingus, can and really should be all about the giver and what he or she enjoys, what he or she discovers, what he or she *wants out of it!* That whole male entitlement thing, with it's fatuous assertion that "a woman is never more powerful than when she's on her knees" just fucks up the experience for *everybody.* And the weird thing? Who suffers most if nobody wants to give blowjobs? Um, the same guys calling everyone else "cocksucker?" Bingo! So WTF-enH? --fl]