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Other research over the last twenty years bears out these ethnic differences. (Of these groups, only 55, 46, and 25%, respectively, describe performing fellatio as appealing). Yes, 75% of white college women reported in 2001 having done it at least once, according to a 2001 study called “Race, gender, and class in sexual scripts,” but only 56% of Latina and 34% of African American college women say they have. Perhaps the reason we’ve come to believe that everyone is into oral sex is because it’s most common among white people, and it’s white sex writers who are saying that it’s universal.
(The idea that it is “not sex” could go part of the way to explaining why people tend not to use protection for it.) At the time of the Starr Report, Newsweek warned readers that some of the activities described would make readers “want to throw up”, which does suggest that their readers in the 1990s (or at least the editors at Newsweek) were still not of the view that the President’s predilections were “standard.”Įven today, the “everyone’s doing it” attitude that prevails in sex writing is not entirely accurate. Bill Clinton made famous the notion that fellatio is “not sex”, and 60% of teenagers today agree with him. The act is barely depicted or mentioned in mainstream films at all before the 1990s, when the act itself became a well-known activity in the Oval Office.
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Indeed, as Samantha, the most liberated of the group on Sex and the City, consoled a friend, “there’s a reason it’s called a job.” The narrator of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying(1974) references it, unpleasantly. Women started to write about fellatio, but as something they merely did, much more rarely as something they enjoyed. The sexual revolution brought fellatio into the public consciousness, via its most famous practitioner, Linda Lovelace.ĭespite the counter-cultural frisson of the subversive act going mainstream, there’s indication that not everyone was on board with it at this point. Laumann’s surveys, which describe the sexual histories of various age cohorts, show a big jump in oral sex right about the time when the baby boomers started hooking up. Laumann theorized that oral sex became more popular in the 1920s. In his 2000 study, The Social Organization of Sexuality, sexual behaviorist E. In 1919’s Sexual Truth Versus Sexual Lies, Misconceptions, and Exaggerations, the author wrote that cunnilingus and fellatio “are very common in the less worthy marriages.” Apparently some healthy couples indulged in this kind of thing, the message ran, but it’s not part of most people’s repertoire. Hetero oral sex tended to get passing references in pre-World War II sex manuals, the kind that talk about the need for a man to “instruct” his presumably virgin bride. The statutes referring to it, originally falling under the vaguely defined idea of “unnatural acts,” were about catching gay men. In American legal texts of the early 1900s, fellatio was clearly for fellas. That classic of the dirty book canon, 1748’s Fanny Hill, makes no reference at all to fellatio, which suggests it wasn’t something commonly offered in London brothels at the time (or else that it wasn’t something that the clammy-handed readers of smut novels were expected to want). (Interestingly, the Kama Sutra spends much longer on the erotic quality of using one’s fingernails to impress dents in a lover’s skin.) I went to the Kama Sutra, thinking that would be an obvious starting place for historical ideas about the topic, but its discussion of fellatio is fairly brief, associating it with dirty and loose women. Cultures and religions, however, have not all taken-and still do not take-the same attitude towards it. Today, the act is something more like bread before dinner: noteworthy only if it’s absent.īut there’s more to the history behind that change than a simple move toward permissiveness - and, it turns out, the ubiquity and “standardness” of fellatio is perhaps not as widespread as one might believe.įellatio has been happening for as long as humans have been around, and there are references to it from ancient Peru and classical Rome. How did attitudes change, and so quickly? As recently as the 1970s, this was certainly not something that a gentleman would expect. Advice about it is now a staple of Cosmopolitan today indeed, today’s readers are told that it’s basically “the kickoff…for sex.” Perhaps she’ll be one of the millions of people off to see Fifty Shades of Grey this week: the story of a young woman’s sexual awakening in which said act accounts for some of the tale’s least provocative moments. Reading that line, I wondered where that woman is now.