Some days ago I started a discussion with my girlfriend. We had jsut watched Lovelace, bio topic about Deep Throat – a porn-cult of the wild 70s. The movie made us mad, somehow sad, but most of all it created the field for a passionate debate about Double Oral Standard.
We talked about oral sex, how it takes different connotations based on the gender of the performer and the gender of the receiver. If it’s a woman who’s doing the job, if on the other hand it’s a man, and all the other LGBT combination of the case. We also discussed about the fact that popcorn at the bottom of the bowl are usually the tastier and saltier ones, but still.
Since Pompeii’s mosaics until our sex magazines, seeing a man receiving a blowjob is a normal and anthropological accepted symbol for our society, whereas in the feminine case artistic representations and collective acceptance is completely misperceived.
This also applies in the lexicon, no kidding. In Treccani – Latin’s most famous vocabulary – the word fellatio has something like five synonymies (pompino, pompa, fellazione, irrumazione, coito orale) while the old and sad cunnilingus stays there, alone and misunderstood. And, let’s be frank, how hard it is to pronounce cunnilingus in a casual conversation. How.
Women, it seems, are in a great disadvantage here. Is it really how it works? Is it true than men are more used to receive oral sex instead of perform it? Is it true than for a woman things are completely the opposite? What does “oral sex” really mean, and why – like many other situations – our society gives it the right to define a status, an ownership of power, a bottom part and an active one, an a structure of huge control dynamics over somebody?
Dan Savage in his Lovecast has talked about it many times. A person has every right to give or take oral sex according to how much he/she is feeling comfortable, just as much as he/she has every right to close up a relationship if the other part seems to be uninterested. It’s like, everybody can say “damn, I don’t want to do it!”, but cannot turn back and get angry when the other part decides to look for somebody more sexually compatible.
All pretty cool Dan, all very liberal. Too bad the porn industry still lives on amazing and incredibly long blowjobs, with entire categories about it, while inserts moments of cunnilingus only right before the actual penetration (usually in these cases the cunnilingus comes together with amazing and incredibly long fake orgasms, but still.)
Sex is not only brain; sex is biology. Everybody knows that a man physically enjoy penetration just as much as penis stimulation and fellatio. In the female circumstance, coming only by penetration is way harder and unlikely to happen: clitorises stimulation through oral sex, vibrators or fingers becomes not just important – it becomes essential.
What about LGBT world?
Michel Foucault and his philosophical studies have shown that sex is control, and oral sex may be the test for it. Inside the lesbian scene there not such a thing as diversity of power and holding authority when you receive oral sex, as it doesn’t even happen when we are on the other side of the bed performing cunnilingus. Statistically, it is proven, lesbian women are far more comfortable in performing oral sex than straight men.
Sure, these are all generalizations. But we do see the double oral standard here: when we perform fellatio (as men or women) we are considered bottom, while doing cunnilingus doesn’t make us feel this way at all.
According to Glamour our society has a double standard, while for other blogs there’s not such a thing and we should stop question it. Opinions are so misleading and contradicting that the (final?) solution can only be found in the beloved sociological studies and in statistical evaluations.
According to a British study conducted this year on a group of teenagers between 16 and 18, pretty much all the boys don’t feel at ease in the act of cunnilingus and test themselves only “when they feel ready“, while the girls even try methods to make even more enjoyable blowjobs. The sad thing about this research is that both boys and girls claim to have a very bad vision of the female genitalia.
Another study, this time made in the USA, gives a glimpse of hope. According to the results, in the age range between 20 and 24 men appear to perform oral sex in 55% of the cases while women 74%. The numbers, however, oddly reverse as the age range go forward. Between the age of 30 and 39 the percentage of active men is 69%, while the female 59%. And it goes descending in subsequent generations. Those who are more “into the job” becomes, in other words, men.
My question is: why?
Perhaps the secret of a good relationship with oral sex in a couple – and a good relationship in general – is in its communication, its appreciation and in seeing each other naked as often as possible. Perhaps men need more practicing with the female genitalia and its many facets. Perhaps women need time to establish a good relationship with their own sexuality and their own bodies. Perhaps as long as our society does not inform and do something about the disparity between men and women, what happens between our sheets it’s what really touches us and the one thing we can try to change immediately.
Perhaps it is really just a matter of bananas and popcorn.
