http://www.olimu.com/WebJournalism/Texts/Commentary/Fellatio.htm


Playing the Flute



I have been thinking about fellatio. No, no, don't hit the back
button. This is serious stuff. I have issues.

Fellatio is now, I am told, very widespread among young people. In the
stairwell of your local high school, a teenage girl is fellating a
teenage boy at this moment, according to Tom Wolfe. It is apparently
- I am working on hearsay, here, I have no direct contacts with
teenagers - very common for 17-yr-old girls to proudly consider
themselves "virgins" (virginity is "in", e.g. Britney Spears) in spite
of having fellated the entire school football team. The larger social
acceptance of the practice is now total: on Christmas Day 1999 -
Christmas Day! - viewers of British network TV were treated to a
performance of Thomas Ades' fellatio-themed opera Powder Her Face.

There has been some large cultural change here. Until a generation
ago, fellatio was consicered an aberrant activity practiced only by
fringe groups - homosexuals, bohemians and jailbirds. Fellatio was
no part of my own adolescence, in 1960s provincial England. Tentative
enquiries among older male colleagues and friends suggest that it was
not widely practiced by well-brought-up Americans either until the
early 1970s. A friend who grew up in a small midwestern town in the
1940s and 1950s says he heard of the practice in adolescence, but in a
context which assumed that no respectable woman would do it. A
colleague - a smart, worldly & successful married man in his late
50s, reports never having been fellated. Another, aged early 60s: "I
suggested it to the wife once. She said: 'You want me to put what?
where? What have you been reading?'" Fellatio was actually illegal
in many states until the 1970s. I cannot find the word in my complete
1971 Oxford English Dictionary (which includes an updating supplement).
The worldly and depraved Humbert Humbert, in Lolita (1955), thought
the practice so far beyond the pale he would refer to it only at two
removes, via a French euphemism.

Fellatio's first steps towards its current universality may have come
with G.I.s returning from France after WW2. It was a common saying
among these servicemen that "the French f- with their mouths and
fight with their feet," and "French" is to this day
prostitutes' slang for fellatio. (While the longstanding French term
demi-vierge prefigures the attitudes of those football-team
comforters.)

Of people in past times whose sex lives we know with fair reliability,
fellatio hardly seems to have figured, even when it was an obvious
solution to large problems. The 18th-century biographer and diarist
James Boswell, for example, was a compulsive fornicator, helping
himself to street girls on his way home at night in London. This
brought him numerous bouts of venereal disease, a very painful and
inconvenient business in those days, and distressing to his wife, whom
he adored (but who was at home in Scotland). Yet it never seems to
have occurred to him to ask the street girls to fellate him.

Fellatio pops up (look, you can't avoid double-entendres when
discussing this topic, and may as well just give in to them) in erotic
art and literature from past ages, though of course this tells us
nothing about everyday practice. The classic 16th-century Chinese
erotic novel Jin Ping Mei has a character, Golden Lotus, who is
especially adept at it. The term used is pin-xiao, "playing the
flute". However, this expression does not appear in any of my
Chinese-Chinese or Chinese-English dictionaries; and "fellatio"
appears in only one - the bulkiest one - of my half-dozen
English-Chinese dictionaries, where it is translated via a dogged
25-character explanation: "The behavior or action of using the tongue
to rub the male organ for the purpose of stimulating sexual desire or
bringing about ejaculation." It seems, therefore, that there is no
commonplace Chinese term for "fellatio" in current usage, so the
Chinese may be behind the curve here. Or I may just need some more
up-to-date dictionaries.

One friend with whom I discussed this suggests that the recent
popularity of both species of oral sex reflects improvements in indoor
plumbing since 1945 and escalating standards of personal hygiene, from
one bath per week to one shower per day. I am not sure this really
meets the case, though. The French are not best known for dedication
to personal freshness. Contrariwise, upper- and upper-middle-class
English people were taking baths daily by the mid-19th century, yet
fellatio does not seem to have been part of their sexual repertoire.

What does it all mean? I asked Steve Sailer, who is, as Warren G.
Harding said of Herbert Hoover, "the smartest gink I know". Steve:
"It's birth control. See, a girl may really like a boy and want
to keep him, but yet not want to get into the deep-emotional region of
coitus. Before the pill and easy abortion, she could just say: 'Oh,
no, I don't want to get pregnant.' Now she can't plausibly say
that. If she doesn't want to have actual sex with him, she fellates
him as a compromise."

I find Steve's thesis quite persuasive, but it can't be the whole
story. The real conundrum is not: Why is there so much of it about
now, it's: Why was there so little before? Why was such an obvious and
harmless practice neglected for so long? Why didn't James Boswell -
an extremely horny and imaginative man - or the adolescent boys I
hung out with back in Northampton, whose minds could not possibly have
been any filthier than they were, even think about it? The answer must
be obvious, but I can't quite get at it ... it's on the tip of my
tongue ...

I have been thinking about fellatio.

http://www.olimu.com/WebJournalism/Texts/Commentary/Fellatio.htm


Playing the Flute



I have been thinking about fellatio. No, no, don't hit the back
button. This is serious stuff. I have issues.

Fellatio is now, I am told, very widespread among young people. In the
stairwell of your local high school, a teenage girl is fellating a
teenage boy at this moment, according to Tom Wolfe. It is apparently
- I am working on hearsay, here, I have no direct contacts with
teenagers - very common for 17-yr-old girls to proudly consider
themselves "virgins" (virginity is "in", e.g. Britney Spears) in spite
of having fellated the entire school football team. The larger social
acceptance of the practice is now total: on Christmas Day 1999 -
Christmas Day! - viewers of British network TV were treated to a
performance of Thomas Ades' fellatio-themed opera Powder Her Face.

There has been some large cultural change here. Until a generation
ago, fellatio was consicered an aberrant activity practiced only by
fringe groups - homosexuals, bohemians and jailbirds. Fellatio was
no part of my own adolescence, in 1960s provincial England. Tentative
enquiries among older male colleagues and friends suggest that it was
not widely practiced by well-brought-up Americans either until the
early 1970s. A friend who grew up in a small midwestern town in the
1940s and 1950s says he heard of the practice in adolescence, but in a
context which assumed that no respectable woman would do it. A
colleague - a smart, worldly & successful married man in his late
50s, reports never having been fellated. Another, aged early 60s: "I
suggested it to the wife once. She said: 'You want me to put what?
where? What have you been reading?'" Fellatio was actually illegal
in many states until the 1970s. I cannot find the word in my complete
1971 Oxford English Dictionary (which includes an updating supplement).
The worldly and depraved Humbert Humbert, in Lolita (1955), thought
the practice so far beyond the pale he would refer to it only at two
removes, via a French euphemism.

Fellatio's first steps towards its current universality may have come
with G.I.s returning from France after WW2. It was a common saying
among these servicemen that "the French f- with their mouths and
fight with their feet," and "French" is to this day
prostitutes' slang for fellatio. (While the longstanding French term
demi-vierge prefigures the attitudes of those football-team
comforters.)

Of people in past times whose sex lives we know with fair reliability,
fellatio hardly seems to have figured, even when it was an obvious
solution to large problems. The 18th-century biographer and diarist
James Boswell, for example, was a compulsive fornicator, helping
himself to street girls on his way home at night in London. This
brought him numerous bouts of venereal disease, a very painful and
inconvenient business in those days, and distressing to his wife, whom
he adored (but who was at home in Scotland). Yet it never seems to
have occurred to him to ask the street girls to fellate him.

Fellatio pops up (look, you can't avoid double-entendres when
discussing this topic, and may as well just give in to them) in erotic
art and literature from past ages, though of course this tells us
nothing about everyday practice. The classic 16th-century Chinese
erotic novel Jin Ping Mei has a character, Golden Lotus, who is
especially adept at it. The term used is pin-xiao, "playing the
flute". However, this expression does not appear in any of my
Chinese-Chinese or Chinese-English dictionaries; and "fellatio"
appears in only one - the bulkiest one - of my half-dozen
English-Chinese dictionaries, where it is translated via a dogged
25-character explanation: "The behavior or action of using the tongue
to rub the male organ for the purpose of stimulating sexual desire or
bringing about ejaculation." It seems, therefore, that there is no
commonplace Chinese term for "fellatio" in current usage, so the
Chinese may be behind the curve here. Or I may just need some more
up-to-date dictionaries.

One friend with whom I discussed this suggests that the recent
popularity of both species of oral sex reflects improvements in indoor
plumbing since 1945 and escalating standards of personal hygiene, from
one bath per week to one shower per day. I am not sure this really
meets the case, though. The French are not best known for dedication
to personal freshness. Contrariwise, upper- and upper-middle-class
English people were taking baths daily by the mid-19th century, yet
fellatio does not seem to have been part of their sexual repertoire.

What does it all mean? I asked Steve Sailer, who is, as Warren G.
Harding said of Herbert Hoover, "the smartest gink I know". Steve:
"It's birth control. See, a girl may really like a boy and want
to keep him, but yet not want to get into the deep-emotional region of
coitus. Before the pill and easy abortion, she could just say: 'Oh,
no, I don't want to get pregnant.' Now she can't plausibly say
that. If she doesn't want to have actual sex with him, she fellates
him as a compromise."

I find Steve's thesis quite persuasive, but it can't be the whole
story. The real conundrum is not: Why is there so much of it about
now, it's: Why was there so little before? Why was such an obvious and
harmless practice neglected for so long? Why didn't James Boswell -
an extremely horny and imaginative man - or the adolescent boys I
hung out with back in Northampton, whose minds could not possibly have
been any filthier than they were, even think about it? The answer must
be obvious, but I can't quite get at it ... it's on the tip of my
tongue ...