The Kama Sutra refers to fellatio as auparishtaka – “superior coitus.”
I waited for her to unbuckle my belt, undo the button at the top of my jeans, and lower the zipper. Rhonda bent down and unzipped me. As she slipped me into her mouth, I was stiff but not yet rock-hard. With her lips tight against my shaft, I felt myself expand. She circled her tongue around the head, then took me deep inside her mouth. As she sucked and licked, she looked up into my eyes, reaffirming my masculinity. Down on her knees, submissive before me, Rhonda had given herself over to cock worship. Now was not the time to be a gentleman. I moved my hand to the back of her head. It was dark, dirty, and liberating.
“Fellatio” comes from the Latin fellare, meaning “to suck.” It was coined in 1894 by Haverlock Ellis. (A “fellatrix” is a woman who sucks.) “La pipe” is French slang for fellatio. English has its own terminology.
Because of its non-procreative potential, Christian moral theology condemned oral sex. Tertullian equated it with cannibalism. The medieval canonical penalty for fellatio was 15 years penance. It neglected a possible biblical sanction for orally pleasuring a man. In the Song of Songs, the woman says of her beloved:
With great delight I sat in his shadow,
and his fruit was sweet to my taste (2:3).
I recall hearing whispered rumors that some of my female classmates at my conservative evangelical college engaged in the oral arts while technically maintaining their virginity. (Apparently President Clinton’s definition of sex was definitive.) Virtually all of my sexual encounters with professionals and the majority of my encounters with non-professionals have included having oral sex performed on me.
“Suck on, suck on, I glow, I glow!”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
“[O]ne of the sources of its power and significance is the desire to place the penis in a forbidden location,” John H. Gagnon and William Simon write. Fellatio still has an aura of the taboo about it. “[T]he act of fellatio is symbolically constructed in terms of men’s dominance and women’s submission….The images of…dominating, controlling, degrading are all immediately available.” I can’t escape the impression that performing fellatio is in some way degrading. I’ve had trouble conceiving of it as something that “good girls” do. It has an ancient provenance. The ancient Romans thought the subservience involved in providing oral sex made it demeaning. In his book The Roman Gaze: Vision, Power, and the Body, David Fredrick writes, “Both ancient literature and graffiti tell us that fellatio was the province of prostitutes; it was a sexual act no Roman male of the elite class would request of his wife.” Certainly the way it is roughly portrayed in pornography makes it look degrading. Philosopher Alan Soble states, “Putting your face in someone’s crotch, no matter the posture, no matter the language used to name the event, is degrading and humiliating.” Given the intimacy of the act, and the inherent vulnerability of the recipient, some see it as a tender expression of romantic affection. I can’t help but think that, when a girl presses her mouth onto my cock, she’s a dirty little whore.
“Every one of her blowjobs would have been enough to justify the life of a man.”
Michel Houellebecq, Submission
Lutheran Guilt 