A History of the Blowjob The Early Years
No one knows for sure when the first blowjob occurred. Some paleontologists hypothesize that hominids such as 3.2-million-yr-old "Lucy" engaged in fellatio, if only in the lack of moral codes. Neolithic rock art
has been found which seems to depict perhaps the first recorded hummer (as well as a 3-some) : that of a woman sucking one man while she is being penetrated by another.
The first civilized BJ belongs to myth: Hacked to pieces by an enemy, the Egyptian god Osiris is reassembled by his faithful wife, who "blows life" back into him thru a reconstructed penis. Osiris' father, the earth god Geb, also made appearances sucking his own penis (a feat that only two or three mortals in a thousand can achieve, according to Alfred Kinsey).
Greek poets offered some of the earliest lyrical references to BJs - Archilochus in the seventh century B.C. wrote, "As on a straw a Thracian man or Phrygian sucks his brew, forward she stooped, working away."
The official Greek culture of gaydom and naked exercise made oral sex a matter of course, although not all men lifted their togas for teen boys. Educated courtesans known as hetaerae performed a good many BJs on influential Athenian men; these women enjoyed an influence that the wives could barely fathom.
Summing up the sexual politics of that time, Demosthenes wrote, "We have hetaerae for our pleasure, concubines for our daily needs and wives to give us legitimate children and look after the housekeeping."
The Romans distinguished the BJ between the passive act of receiving (fellation) and the dynamic act of providing (irrumation). The fellator represented weakness, ridicule and submission; the irrumator embodied valor, strength and conquest. In their world, fellatio was considered so base it was often
inflicted as punishment. If a farmer caught a traveler stealing potatoes from his field, he might compel the thief to blow him (it's arguable whether this may have kept the crime rate low, or just led to burglers tending to be a bit swishy as well as incautious). In the ruins of Pompeii, archaeologists uncovered a graffito (probably on what was a remnant of wall from a public restroom) that read Lahis fellat assibus duobus, which translates to "Lahis gives head for half a sesterce".
Legend has it that Egyptian queen Cleopatra blew more than 100 Roman noblemen during a marathon orgy. The Greeks knew her as Meriochane ("she who gapes wide for 10,000 men")
According to the Chinese, giving head was a path to enlightenment so long as the "yang essence" (semen) was not lost. Many of their sex manuals diagrammed contortions designed to help men get their Jade Stalks, Swelling Mushrooms and Heavenly Dragon pillars sucked while rerouting the sperm to their brains. From India sometime between the 3rd and 5th centuries came the seminal (no pun intended) sex guide, Kama Sutra. It's thesis being that good sex is good karma, it featured eight stages of "oral congress" (but nothing on "oral presidency")including side-biting, polishing, mango suction and absorption. Each had been perfected by eunuchs.
The Indians inspired the Arabs. Middle Eastern sex manuals like [i]The Perfumed Garden for the Soul's Recreation[I] borrowed heavily from the Kama Sutra. Harem women of lore were portrayed as passionately wild, penis-sucking, freelance fellatrices. On the South American continent, certain
pre-Colombian pots had two spouts -- one penis-shaped and the other vulva-shaped -- giving the drinker the choice between fellatio and cunnilingus.
The Dark Ages of Christianity
The only mention of oral sex in the Bible appears in the Song of Solomon, where an appreciative woman recounted, "I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste."
Despite this - or perhaps because of its lack of prominence - the blowjob was frowned upon by early church leaders. In 1012, a German bishop, Burchard of Worms (?), laid down the law for women: "Have you swallowed your husband's semen in the hope that... he might burn all the more with love and desire for you? If you have... you should do penance for 7 years on legitimate holy days." By comparison, using a dildo "of a size to match your sinful desire" cost only one year of penance; using a strap-on meant five years and doing it doggy style could be rectified in only 10 days on bread and water.
But if sex for pleasure was a sin, many Christians sinned quite heartily. By the Renaissance, oral sex had become so popular in France that "frenching" became shorthand for any type of genital kiss -- an
appellation which those froggies still justify. One contemporary survey of 6000 men from around the world indicates that the French report the most blow jobs, followed by Greeks, Brazilians and Poles. The first
Western literary BJ appears to come from Fran�ois Rabelais, whose writings were so obscene he now enjoys his own adjective (Rabelaisian): "My wife will suck my sweet tip. I'm ready and waiting. I swear and promise to you that I'll always keep it succulent and well victualed."
The New World
Although authorities in England and the colonies took a dim view of deviant sex, statutes banning sodomy were generally understood to include only homosexual anal sex and bestiality. In 1880, only 3 U.S. states banned fellatio. By 1920, at least 24 had also taken the plunge, and 11 state courts defined oral sex as sodomy. A 1904 Georgia Supreme Court ruled in one case that fellatio had not been indictable under English common law only because it had not been so common (I like a judge with a sense of humor)
By 1986, in reviewing another Georgia case (what's with these paranoid rednecks in Georgia?), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of states to ban BJs and other "unnatural" acts.
Today, hetero fellatio remains illegal in more than a dozen states; among them, only Alabama offers an exemption for married couples (hmm, doesn't sound like a fair trade to me).
Despite the legal rigamarole, the average American didn't pay much attention to those robe-wearing chuckleheads. Around the turn of the 20th century, pornography possessed by the middle class showed an almost obsessive interest in oral sex. In A Practical Treatise on Fellation: Its Advantages and Inconveniences, a translated WWI-era monograph by an anonymous Frenchman, the best blow jobs are asserted to be those received in small rooms with dark red furniture and bathrooms stocked with port, sherry or madeira and "biscuits of any kind except those too allegorically cylindrical and long." Men are advised to accept fellatio only from women under the age of 35. Each woman should be proficient in warm-up exercises such as tracing the sign of infinity with her tongue and being able to pierce with its tip, without touching her lips against any surface, a hole 3/8" in diameter (a hole in what? I wonder).
The author also encourages women to use advanced techniques such as spider-clawing and flutterblasting while skillfully handling the complex riggings of the male genitalia, including the
puckering string (the scrotal centerline), the drawstring (frenulum) and the balano-preputial groove. His treatise closes with suggestions for postfellatio conversation - high on the list are the weather and recent political assassinations.
Silent movie actor Charlie Chaplin became on of the most notorious victims of the official antifellatio sentiment. Caught up in an acrimonious divorce, the actor was charged with having "solicited, urged and
demanded that the plaintiff submit to, perform and commit such acts and things for the gratification of defendant's said abnormal, unnatural and degenerate sexual desires, as to be too revolting, indecent and immoral to set forth in detail." Chaplin had asked his wife for a blowjob. He settled the case in 1927 for $625,000.
(Aside: Why does lawyerly rhetoric always come in such redundant triplicate even to this day? I urge all would-be barristers reading this to consider its absurdity)
[b]Blowing and Shooting: The Post-WWII Invasion[B]
When the boys finally came home, they brought with them higher sexual expectations on their women as a result of contact with those professional froggie cocksuckers among others. Kinsey in 1948 found that about 40% of American males had received oral sex; five years later, he reported in Sexual Behavior in the Human Female that 49% of married women provided oral sex, and that 62% of the youngest, well-educated and sexually active women reportedly gave BJs to boyfriends.
Kinsey eventually lost his funding due to the controversy this introduced, being that oral sex was illegal in almost every state. Aware of his fate, Masters and Johnson opted not to include their findings on this topic in their 1966 [i]Human Sexual Response {/I]. "We didn't have the courage," Masters explained years later.
No Holding It Back: Mainstreaming the BJ
By this point we all have awareness to some extent of the literary anchorpoints for the BJ's insertion into modern culture: Ana�s Nin's The Woman on the Dunes, Emmanuelle Arsan's Emmanuelle, John
Updike's Rabbit, Run and Portnoy's Complaint. Cinematically, Linda Lovelace in the 1972 adult film Deep Throat made an indelible impression as a latter-day saint of fellatio (it's hard to ignore a 20-foot hummer).
Then came the VCR. The rest was all downhill from there.
Postscript from the last gasps of the 20th century: the BJ had inarguably and ironically come a long way (heh) by the time the President of the United States was forced to publicly elucidate his thesis
that perfectly echoed the common view: inserting one's penis into a mouth is distinct from -- constituting a lesser degree of intimacy than -- inserting it into a vagina.
LOL