Authors: Tom Hickman
In the 1940s Kinsey found that only four married men in ten had had oral sex. A quarter of a century later, the Playboy Foundation found that almost two-thirds of all men had been beneficiaries, and nine out of ten under the age of twenty-five. Since Linda Lovelace’s performance in the film
Deep Throat
, fellation has come to be seen as a cultural phenomenon in
the
West. In recent decades the incidence of it has grown exponentially among the young – no longer something to which a couple, who probably had already had intercourse, graduated, but just another element of foreplay.
Oral sex, of course, is a two-way street (‘to eat another is sacred,’ John Updike wrote in
Couples)
. And while there is at least twice as much fellation as cunnilingus among those who are unmarried, largely because of anatomical accessibility in sometimes awkward surroundings, there is equal give and take among those in stable relationships. If the penis is capable of penis envy, it should be of the penis-possessor’s tongue.
The reasons why a man finds skilful oral sex unspeakably pleasurable is because the lips of a woman’s mouth are infinitely more versatile than the lips of her vagina; and her pliant tongue in the words of Gerstman, Pizzo and Seldes (
What Men Want
) is ‘the Swiss Army knife of sex’; and the mouth is further accessorised by the teeth, which can be tantalisingly employed to nibble and nip. The Japanese call fellatio ‘mouth music’; indeed a woman who knows her stuff can play a man like a flute.
2
Does fellatio put the man or the woman in physical or psychological control? The question concerns several of the ‘ological’ disciplines. A man doesn’t care; he never quite believes he’s so lucky that a woman will take his penis in her mouth. Only a relatively small percentage of men want to ejaculate in a partner’s mouth, but the experience is heightened for those who do: there is no interruption necessitated by moving to the coital site as the moment of inevitability approaches – and they are observers of their own climax.
Most women, whatever the depth of their feeling for their partner, however much they might enjoy giving oral sex – if hardly to the extent of the already introduced Jordana in
The Pirate
, who wants ‘to swallow [Jacques] alive, to choke herself to death on that giant, beautiful tool’ – can’t bring themselves to
permit
buccal insemination. Contrary to the delight shown by women in Internet pornography, many have feelings of disgust; the violence of the final orgasmic thrusts can be distressing; and, even penis-possessors admit, the smell and taste of semen are not wholesome.
The smell of what the eighteenth-century physician John Hunter called ‘a mawkish kind of substance’ has been likened to seaweed, musk, pollen, the flowers of the Spanish chestnut tree, a greenhouse in summer – all of which may sound alluring – but most penis-and non-penis-possessors agree that semen smells like nothing so much as household bleach. As to its taste, the
Brihat Samhita
, the ancient Sanskrit astrological treatise, suggests it can be like honey; most women would suggest fish, perhaps, or worse: overripe Brie, dirty socks, nasal mucus are descriptions given in modern surveys. In Rick Moody’s
Purple America
, Jane Ingersoll muses that ‘men’s curds’ taste ‘like toothpaste with a soy sauce chaser’.
Different foods affect all bodily secretions and that applies to ejaculate, though to what degree is debatable. Red meat and dairy produce are said to result in the least pleasant flavour, with asparagus, garlic and onion not far behind. Beer and smoking have a deleterious effect. On the other hand most vegetables, peppermint, parsley, cinnamon and citrus fruits are said to make ejaculate more palatable. In America a powdered drink is marketed made of pineapple, banana, strawberry, broccoli and celery ‘at nine times their normal concentrations, together with three essential spices and a select blend of vitamins and minerals’, supposedly making semen sweet ‘in only twenty-four hours’.
What is indisputable is that, if ingested, the average ejaculate won’t make the recipient fat – it contains only one to seven calories.
Location, location, location
How many positions are there for a man and a woman to have intercourse? The great ancient literatures of India, China, Japan and Arabia were obsessed with calculating the permutations, some attempts running into the hundreds.
Classical Greece pragmatically reasoned there were about a dozen. They didn’t bother to describe them all (one they called ‘the lion on the cheese-grater’ still has scholars unsure). But basic physiology and the elimination of the improbably gymnastic – such as the
Kama Sutra’s
‘fixing the nail’, in which the prone woman stretches out one leg while placing the other on top of her head – make this difficult to argue with: man on top or underneath; woman on top or underneath, face to face with her partner or reversed; side by side, face to face or with the woman reversed; one or other kneeling or sitting; the woman on hands and knees, her partner behind her; both standing up or only the man – whether or not using the furniture as props, seemingly a fixation among the Chinese.
There was only one position as far as the medieval Church in Europe was concerned; anything other than the man above was perverse. The Elizabethans later advocated the position principally because they believed that face-to-face sex distinguished human sex from bestiality (they would have been horrified to know that pygmy chimps [bonobos], orang-utans and occasionally gorillas enjoy a bit of ventro-ventral activity). There is no woman-on-top sex in Shakespeare but that does not mean there was no woman-on-top sex in Shakespeare’s England.
According to ancient sources, interpretations of ancient art and anthropological studies, what is now universally called the missionary position was often adopted in the first great civilisations only when conception was desired, medical conviction being that it ensured ‘the proper flow of semen’. But for pleasure it was not that high on the list for the Sumerians,
Indians
, Persians, Romans and Greeks, who all favoured woman-on-top sex – the Greek courtesan/prostitute
hetaera
charged the most for the ‘racehorse’, in which she sat astride a prone client. Whether the Greeks really did have a predilection for heterosexual as well as homosexual anal sex is now disputed, though from the woman’s point of view the act obviously had the advantage of protecting against pregnancy, and prostitutes up and down the social scale certainly offered a price; what is certain is that men had a fondness for standing rear-entry vaginal sex, usually for ‘quickies’ in the street, the woman arching herself against the penetratee (cheapest) or resting her hand on her knees or feet (more expensive). Coincidentally, standing rear-entry vaginal sex was not peculiarly Greek: an anthropological study published sixty years ago identified eight primitive peoples around the world who practised it at the time, ‘confined to brief and sudden encounters in the woods’. Traditionally, coital preference in the vast islanded region of the Pacific, as well as in parts of Africa (notably Ethiopia), had different preferences yet again: the most popular position involved the woman recumbent with the man squatting between her thighs. In a variation, the man sat in the lotus position, the woman, also in the lotus position, facing him while squatting on top of his thighs.
Islanders found the European way both indecent and amusing. Kinsey, misreading the journal of a 1920s anthropologist who’d lived among the Trobrianders, in 1948 wrote that Christian missionaries had instructed the natives that only intercourse with the female supine beneath the male was allowable. In fact, missionaries had done nothing of the sort. What had happened was that the natives had parodied the Europeans, joking that the evangelisers must have forced them to adopt the ridiculous position. Kinsey’s error is neither here nor there – except that it gave the position, previously in the modern world known
as
‘male superior’ or ‘matrimonial’, a new demotic designation.
Today, the missionary position is the most common throughout the world, from West to East. Its popularity has been ascribed to a man’s psychological need to feel dominant and a woman’s to feel submissive; to face-to-face (and heart-to-heart) sex seemingly being the most intimate. From a physiological viewpoint it would appear to be the most natural way for male and female bodies to connect. In
Purple America
, Jane Ingersoll muses that ‘missionary style is boring as oatmeal’. But it need not be, with imagination – and using it does not preclude adopting others for variety. Some people never try another way. Many are more adventurous – ‘Three-quarters of love,’ Casanova wrote, ‘is curiosity.’
3
The violent mechanics
Feminists, including the writer and academic Germaine Greer, objected to the word ‘fuck’ on the grounds that its original meaning was ‘to strike’, which therefore made sexual intercourse an act of violence against women. Later, fed up with the habitual use of ‘fuck’ in almost all contexts, Greer suggested the reintroduction of ‘swive’, an alternative with a longer etymological history (and its original meaning was nonviolent, ‘to revolve’).
But sexual intercourse requires physical vigour – or violence, hardly a semantic difference – on the part of a man to reach completion; not for nothing did the Ancient Greeks label intercourse ‘the violent mechanics’. Which is why, from the moment of penetration, a penis-possessor on average thrusts his way to ejaculation in about 4 minutes – the length of time that has been accepted by generations of sexologists.
But a 2005 survey in Britain, America, Spain, Holland and Turkey, reported in the
Journal of Sexual Medicine
, found the average to be 5.4 minutes. The finding, however, was reliant
on
self-timing, which might be as reliable as penile self-measurement (couples were provided with stopwatches – the British claimed the longest, 7.6 minutes; the Turks the shortest, 3.4). According to another survey, taken among American sex therapists who drew on their male and female clients’ responses, 7 to 13 minutes was ‘desirable’, 3 to 7 was ‘adequate’ and 1 to 2 was ‘too short’ – but not unknown in the lazy Sunday morning leg-over or the snatched ‘quickie’. Again in a Rick Moody novel,
Ice Storm
, a man has intercourse with his friend’s wife in the front of his friend’s Cadillac in ‘less time than it takes to defrost a windshield’.
Coitus and copulation, the modern standard terms for sexual intercourse, are hardly in everyday use. But throughout history people have almost always preferred slang expressions, most of them vulgar – and many with a ‘violent’ connotation.
There have been periods when the acceptable standard words were, in fact, the most common. The earliest and least-known now was sard, first recorded by the Anglo-Saxons, with currency up to the seventeenth century, and which co-existed with swive, the most popular colloquialism for almost six hundred years from Chaucer to the late Victorians (‘Do not bathe on a full stomach,’ advised a popular self-help book of 1896, ‘nor swive’). Another word found in both formal and daily contexts was jape (thirteenth century), which faded as the modern meaning of ‘practical joke’ established itself. ‘Occupy’ is curious in that it came into being in the fourteenth century with the respectable modern meaning of being ‘in possession of’, was a vulgarity for three hundred years, and then became respectable once more. Over two hundred slang terms for sexual intercourse are recorded in English, Old, Middle and Modern. Many have come and gone and exist only as dictionary archaisms: for instance, plough (which goes back to the Greeks and Romans); root and the much older rootle; and foin (from
Old
French for fish spear; in fencing, to thrust).
But many old terms are still with us, including the sixteenth-century shag (Shakespeare favoured the variant shog), grind (but in Elizabethan times ‘to do a grind’), knock (today usually followed by off or up) – and fuck (which Shakespeare never used). Hump was fashionable in the seventeenth century; roger and bang (prostitutes were bang-tails) in the eighteenth; poke, shaft and screw (contraction of screw driver) in the nineteenth. ‘To lie with’, used by the King James Bible and Shakespeare, has disappeared, though the confusion between the verbs lie and lay gives rise to America’s favourite euphemism, laid.
The twentieth century’s contributions to the lexicon include bonk and boff, which like fuck meant, and in other contexts still mean, to hit or strike. Fuck, however, besides being the most frequent expletive – and doing service as virtually any word in a sentence – remains the commonest term for intercourse. Sometimes the variant ‘frig’ (which is also slang for masturbate) is used. The young Norman Mailer was persuaded to change ‘fuck’ to ‘fug’ for the publication of his first novel,
The Naked and the Dead
, in 1948. ‘So you’re the darling boy’, exclaimed the actress Tallulah Bankhead on meeting him, ‘who can’t spell fuck.’
4
Eighteenth-century Indian harlots scoffed at the way European males ‘scurried’ to ejaculation and mocked them as ‘dunghill cocks’; they were used to somewhat better, at least with educated higher-caste clients. As Hindu, Buddhist and other erotic literatures make clear, a woman’s pleasure should be central to sexual activity and a man should learn to hold back from climax so that she can have as many orgasms as she wishes. Through the sexually orientated spiritual meditation techniques taught for millennia by tantric and taoist masters, a man can copulate without climaxing for a considerable time, even almost indefinitely. And he achieves this by first understanding that orgasm and ejaculation are not the same thing. Ejaculation occurs
in
the penis, orgasm in the brain – which, of course, triggers ejaculation. Kinsey pointed this out; and that half of five-year-old boys have orgasms which is long before ejaculatory age. Masters and Johnson later discovered that in some men ejaculation doesn’t occur until some seconds after orgasm, which makes it incontrovertible that they are separate functions, though for the majority they’re simultaneous.