Who's In Charge Here?

Often, during dinner, he pushed my head between his thighs. We developed a game: He tried to see how long he could continue to eat calmly; I, how soon I could make him drop his fork and moan.

---Elizabeth Mc Neill, "Nine and a Half Weeks"

He does the pushing. Her wrists are bound to the table leg all the while. He is cast as the master of the game, she as the slave. Yet only she can make him drop his fork. Only she can make him moan. Is he in charge? Or is she?

Oral sex: Hearts have been stolen by it, relationships broken by it. It can make men soft and women hard. It can serve as a shorthand for self-image and a character tip-off to others. It can be an act of manipulation, adoration or indifference. It is surely never an act of procreation, so it lacks the Judaeo-Christian stamp of normalcy. If not procreation, its purpose can only be deviant. "The use of the mouth as a sexual organ," wrote Freud, "is considered as a perversion if the lips [or tongue] of one person are brought into contact with the genitals of another." Although once upon a time in America, spouses could and did go through a lifetime of matrimony without ever tasting the genitals of their mates, no self-respecting adult who made it through the frantic fucking of the Sixties and Seventies would dare avoid what has now become a basic element of the sexual repertoire. We're all supposed to be willing and able to give it and to love getting it, but such a supposition is flagrantly simplistic. Where plays of power are involved or merely imagined, nothing is simple.

He drove into her mouth. It was not the caress of her lips the length of him he was looking for, but the back of her throat. For a long time he probed. . . . In her heart she felt her womb, useless and scorned, burning her.

---"Story of O"

It's the classic pornographic position, to drive into a woman's mouth from above her as she lies or kneels, a position intended to subjugate the woman and empower the man. For many women, it can be arousing if played as a game chosen by both parties, as an infrequent fillip chosen to break the routine, like a twice-yearly bout of anal sex or mild bondage. But if a man insists on it consistently and exclusively, any psychically healthy woman will at the very least feel extremely bored and will surely wonder about the psychic health of her lover.

Maureen was in love with Philip, an aristocratic Oriental who insisted on being the auteur of oral sex. A man with a self-admitted "pornographic mind," he wanted his sex life with Maureen to consist of certain specific elements. She was to be the responsive but passive participant in an unvarying ritual: He would undress her leisurely, go down on her with skill and concentration, and when she had come once, twice, three times, he would enter her. Depending on your attitude, this routine sounds like either tedium incarnate or a gorgeous sexual dream.

In the beginning, it was the latter for the normally strong-willed Maureen. "Control isn't important to me," she says. "I like sex too much to think about power." But as she became emotionally hooked on Philip, she wanted to sample him and give to him. Like any woman who enjoys sex and is in love, she wanted to know every curve and vein and freckle and hair of her man, and she wanted this knowledge on her own terms and in her own rhythm. But Philip would allow her to go down on him only in the classic male-supremacy position. She would be on her knees and he would be standing, directing her as always. If she tried it any other way, he would prevent her in that eloquent manner that men have: He'd go soft. Immensely frustrated and too smart not to concede that Philip's denial of her desire for him spelled out a sexual and emotional half life, Maureen ended the relationship.

Maureen grew weary with her role as the submissive receiver/receptacle, but she never felt degraded by it, because she was a full and agreeable partner in its enactment. If a woman is forced without foreknowledge into this position, she may not protest but she will almost certainly feel like garbage. A woman lacking in self-respect may feel that her self-image is justified by her being treated like garbage. However, that is not the same as finding the experience erotic, though some men think that female compliance and desire are invariably linked.

Bethany, now 40, still remembers the afternoon 12 years ago when her exhusband, Allan, came over, ostensibly to discuss their son's schooling. Since their split, Bethany had been through the typical emotional kaleidoscope that besets divorcing people---loneliness, confusion, ambivalence, anger, guilt, despair, loss, self-hatred. When Allan began kissing her, she responded from her need for comfort and sustenance. Then he pushed her head down and leaned against the back of the sofa. She complied "because I thought I was supposed to, because I felt insecure and because I was terrified of a future alone with a kid and three dogs. Afterward, I felt like a dirty dishrag. I stood over the kitchen sink and cried for an hour. If it happened again, I would never submit to him. I would shoot the fucker instead."

Sometimes, for a woman, it's titillating to play at being subjugated. Andrea has initiated the play with several lovers and found one man to be "overly sensitized" to the implications of it. "I had given him a blow job on my knees. I had chosen the act and the position. When it was over, he asked me if I felt humiliated by it or if I thought it was a subservient position to be in. I was surprised by his concern. I'd never thought of it that way. I think that's because I grew up Catholic and ignorant about sex---sex was so powerful that you could not speak its name. Thanks to my ignorance, I had no preconceptions about what was or wasn't acceptable. It had never occurred to me that a man would feel there was something degrading to a woman about that position."

Although men rarely admit to favoring the brutality component of oral sex, those who do will often justify it by saying, as Tony, 39, puts it, "Women don't mind being raped orally if they can control who's doing the raping. Choice is control." Tony sometimes has erection problems if he's with a woman who's "too willing." Although respectably married, he has an active underground sex life focused on very young girls and games of force.

He mentions a peak sexual experience he had while in his early 20s. "She was younger and a virgin. We'd just seen the movie Blow-Up---the first time I'd ever seen pubic hair in a movie. We were parked in my car in front of her house. I whipped out my cock and forced her head upon it. She struggled and gagged, but I wouldn't let her head up. The orgasm was memorable because I was in charge from start to finish."

But only because his subject of subjugation chose not to play her ultimate hole card.

Something in my Mouth he put: / I called him Beast and try'd to bit it. . . .

---Anonymous, circa 1707

It's the final irony of force, a woman's latent and powerful revenge for powerlessness. The castration factor: It blips along the back of a man's mind every so often when he has entrusted his irreplaceable organ to a woman's oral ministrations. For some, the blip becomes a solid line. Jerry, a tender and funny man, has been victimized by the ancient fear. At 35, he pursues neither fellatio nor casual sex, thanks to an experience that began as a lark and ended up a trauma. For his 21st birthday, his friends got him fallingdowndrunk and bought him a blow job. Jerry had assumed that it would be the "apotheosis" of the act and his first opportunity to come in a woman's mouth.

The hooker was short, with a six-inch scar across her throat. Giggling and weaving, Jerry stumbled after her up some stairs and into a room. He fell onto the bed. She pulled his pants down, looked at him, rolled her eyes and said, "You're gonna need some help, honey." Then she started in on him.

"I saw her head, with that scar, disappear between my legs. With my drunkenness and the sight of the scar, I was hopelessly flaccid. She came up after about five minutes and said, 'Not tonight.' The next day, when I'd sobered up, I realized she could have done anything---she could have bitten it off. I'd been at the mercy of a woman with a six-inch scar across her throat, a woman who had offered the information that her boyfriend was doing 25 years to life and she was hooking to get the money to get him paroled. The image of her burying her face, with that scar, in my groin has since flashed through my mind many times when someone's gone down on me, and every time, I've gone soft."

There are men who are eager receivers only if the woman is both clearly enthusiastic and highly skilled, apparently a rare combo. Andy, 38, is a lover of bars, bourbon---and blow jobs performed by hookers. Because he doesn't want to "scar anyone's sexual psyche," he's diffident about criticizing a woman's technique (to the point that he once endured the oral lovemaking of a girlfriend who wore braces until he finally told her that he didn't like fellatio). With a hooker, he's (continued on page 184)Who's in Charge?(continued from page 80) confident that there will be no scraping of teeth, no need to be polite and no obligation to reciprocate.

With other women, Andy would rather be the giver but not the orchestrater. He likes a woman to direct him; then he knows she's getting what she wants and he doesn't have to worry about his own performance. "I love it when a woman puts my head between her legs, and I love it when she comes. It doesn't give me a feeling of power, though. It's more a feeling of being useful."

Some men find cunnilingus both a welcome refuge from and a handy compensation for erection worries, since only your tongue needs to be in working order. Larry, 40, has been unfaithful on and off throughout 14 years of marriage. Guilt about his affairs has triggered spells of impotence with both his wife and his other women. "I never know when I'm going to turn into a eunuch," he says, "so I learned early on to give good head---partly out of guilt for not being able to perform, partly from the pleasure of having a woman on the tip of my tongue. But mostly from machismo: If my sword isn't gonna work, something's got to."

There are men who subscribe to neither the castration nor the compensation factor but still are wary of fellatio because of the con factor. These men tend to have been around the block a bit. From experience, they rebel against the subliminal message that swept through their adolescent minds: If a girl goes down on you, she'll do anything for you. Neil, 45, would rather give than receive for two reasons: "I find it more erotic to explore a woman's body than to have her explore mine. And I don't want to be conned. I think women put men on a little bit. Women know that men love the fantasy of male dominance played out, and so they go along with it by giving them head. Hookers use that. That's why they have so much contempt for men--- because men are so easily conned."

Max, 55 and on his third marriage, says he "highly values" fellatio---but although he's physically potent when he gets head, it makes him feel impotent: "I always want it more than she does, and the person who cares least always has the most power." Repeatedly, he's found himself compromised by the con factor. "At the beginning of a relationship, a woman conquers me by going down on me and acting like she loves it," he says. "Once she's got me, her basic anger about having to please men comes out. A woman gives you your sexuality; she makes you feel potent, so you marry her; and then she sabotages you and makes you impotent. Because I'm the one who thrusts, I suppose I have the power when it comes to intercourse, but I've never enslaved anyone by it as I've been enslaved by oral sex." Max chooses to be a giver, because "it means I haven't given anyone control of my cock."

His reaction may seem excessive, but it's not unfounded. From the first time a girl feels a guy's erection during a slow dance in high school, she suspects that therein lies not just his power but hers. She guesses that the way to a man's heart is likely to be south of his stomach, and soon she realizes that it behooves her to know what to do down there, even if she'd rather be elsewhere. Give a guy a great blow job, so the story goes, and he'll always call back.

The reverse of this, according to Robert, is give a girl great head and she'll drop the phone. Women aren't the only ones capable of using oral sex to manipulate a situation in their favor. Robert, an engaging raconteur who's quick-tongued in general, is a master at this. One night he was at a woman's apartment, beginning to make love to her, when her phone rang. It was another man she'd been seeing. "It was a demeaning position for me to be in, sitting around waiting for her while she talked to another guy. She was trying to control me by letting me cool my heels. I wanted to put her in her place and even the score, remind her that she was to be available to me on my time. As she talked on the phone, I pushed up her skirt and started eating her. She got off the phone pretty damn fast."

Fuck's only what you do. Animals fuck. But cunt's a lot more than that. It's thee, dost see. . . . Cunt! Eh, that's the beauty of thee, lass.

---D. H. Lawrence, "Lady Chatterley's Lover"

And the beast, some women fear. For if cunt is, literally, female essence and if there's anything unsavory about it, then by definition the woman is unsavory as well. An old-fashioned thought, OK, but one that lingers in the female consciousness. A woman is always worried about what men are thinking of her, and few things are more worrisome than what a man is thinking when his mouth is between her legs.

A woman may dream of the man who will want her so much and be so accepting of her that he'll beg to taste and suck her with all the lights on when she has her period. This man will kiss her all the way down her body, and when he reaches her "two-leaved Book," as the 18th Century called it, he will take her tampon string firmly between his teeth and slowly pull the thing out.

But it's only a dream. Women are ambivalent about living out their sexual fantasies. If this dream man materializes, she'll be hesitant and confused. She'll shrink from the physical and corresponding psychological exposure implied by her fantasy. She'll make excuses and muddle around doubting his motives. She'll think, Why would anyone want to go down there that much? As Helen Lawrenson put it in her good-natured autobiographical essay "How Now, Fellatio!," the first time someone performed cunnilingus on her, back in the Twenties, she thought he had "gone mad, like what's-his-name---Nebuchadnezzar?---who got down on the ground and ate grass."

Unless a woman knows a man very well and feels secure in his affection for her, she'll be at least fleetingly suspicious of him when he goes down on her, especially the first time. She may assume from experience that he's doing it not so much out of desire for her as for the trade-off---do unto me as I do unto you. Women do tend to maintain hidden sexual agendas and to be generally more circuitous in their dealings with the opposite sex, so they expect from men what they're used to in themselves: What's said and what's meant, or what's fantasized and what's wanted, can be different things.

Men have been indoctrinated by modern times into thinking that the only sure way to satisfy a woman is through oral sex. Some men are so sensitized to the propaganda that they feel guilty if they don't do so during the first encounter. But most women can tell whether or not obligation lurks behind the licks. Women are paranoid observers of signs and portents when it comes to cunnilingus. Some habitually notice the state of a man's erection. If he's really hard when he begins and is less so when he comes up, it will be duly noted, and she'll assume one of two things without asking for clarification: Either she smells or tastes bad or he doesn't like to do it. She may go on to feel embarrassed about the former or to hate him for the latter. Obviously, she'd be better off not looking.

Hilary doesn't enjoy cunnilingus, because she's worried about taking too long and it makes her feel resentful and powerless that someone else has his finger on the stop watch. Her sense of time pressure often gets expressed through hostility and bitterness toward the man, sometimes justifiably, sometimes not. The expectation of frustration keeps her locked in a negative cycle: She's afraid to let go, because she's sure that he'll decide that her time's up just as she comes close to orgasm.

If a woman begins with the assumption that she's not going to be well cared for, it doesn't matter how skilled or enthusiastic a man is about giving head. He just can't win. With some women, men are damned if they do and damned if they don't. If such a woman likes getting head but you don't do it long enough or in the right place or without enough enthusiasm, she thinks you're selfish. If she doesn't like it but won't say so, you'll do it for too long and then she'll be turned off by the time you want to enter her or have her return the favor. If she does like it and you do it right and for long enough---well, even then, there are no guarantees, because some women feel endangered by sexual abandon and the loss of control implied by it. Such a woman may focus on the man's pleasure instead---not because she's submissive but because she's protecting herself by holding back.

Jessie, 34, is confident of her skill as a giver of head, a confidence that has been reinforced by many lovers. Getting head is a different matter. "When I feel a man grow in my mouth, I feel power. Giving head puts me on a completely equal basis with a man. It's the only sex act that doesn't make me feel like a receptacle, because I'm directing his arousal. I can make him change size; I can make him come or make him wait. I look at his cock as a feast. But I discourage a man from going down on me. My mind won't click off. I can't reach that complete concentration and involvement that I experience when I'm giving." Why not? "I suppose because I don't like to give up that control. It makes me too vulnerable."

Occasionally, a man can seize oral control of a reluctant woman and be rewarded for his action. Fred, 28, met a woman on a business trip. She was about 20 years older than he was and had just separated from her husband. She was of a generation that produced virgins for wedding nights, and she had never known a man other than her husband. No one had ever gone down on her. "I wanted to be the first one," says Fred. "She was embarrassed about it and tried to push me away, but I held her legs open and told her to relax. I wanted to make her like it, to break down that barrier, especially because it seemed like one of those no-no, yes-yes situations. The third time I did it to her, a few weeks later, she came. She seemed awed, as if I knew her better than she knew herself. That definitely felt like power. It was the power of experience---being a professor of sexual matters."

There's one configuration that, because of its equality of action, seems to have no place in S/M pornography such as Story of O, and that's the pretzeled scene known as soixante-neuf, or 69. The vocabulary for it may be limited, but not the opinions of it. It's like New York City---people either love it or hate it. Some say it's the most mutual, intimate and engrossing sex act possible; others find it nerve-rackingly competitive, distracting and uncomfortable. People who have had simultaneous orgasm in it say that the experience is devastating in intensity. It's not a position new lovers are likely to curl into without some prior acquaintance.

In ongoing relationships, there does seem to be a pattern: The less emotional the interchange between the partners, the less likely it is that 69---by definition not a one-sided act---figures prominently in their sex life. The pro-69ers tend to be the ones least likely to relate power to sex and the ones most likely to prefer intercourse to either cunnilingus or fellatio alone. "If a man's between my legs and I'm way up here," says Anne, "it feels so detached. I want a literal physical connection. With men I love, my favorites are either 69 or fucking and Frenching at the same time. But I have to be in love to want to be that connected."

And this is sex, this is it . . . and he feels the feeling coming down right down there, grouping up and he presses his face down, with the mouth, such a mouth he's got . . . and he's done me, done me. . . .

---Jill Robinson, "Perdido"

Well, yes. We'd probably have a lot more fun if we forgot about power. "Isn't it supposed to be mindless?" says Danny, 31, under his usual façade of self containment. "I want someone to be lost in space when I go down on her. I want to be lost in space when she goes down on me. Isn't that the whole point? To lose control?"