Oral History

The story of the blow job is vast, fluid and incomplete. But We'll give it a try

The Early Years

No one knows when the first blow job occurred, but we can guess who suggested it. Bipedalism may have been its biggest evolutionary leap. French paleontologist Yves Coppens hypothesizes that hominids such as the 3.2-million-year-old Lucy engaged in fellatio, if only because no moral codes stopped them. He has observed that "nothing must have been as good as paleofellation." In his book The Prehistory of Sex, archaeologist Timothy Taylor describes what may be the world's first recorded hummer: neolithic rock art in which a woman sucks one man while she is being penetrated by another.

The first civilized blow job 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 through a reconstructed penis. Osiris' father, the earth god Geb, also made appearances sucking his own penis, a feat that, according to modern sex researcher Alfred Kinsey two or three mortals in a thousand can achieve.

Greek poets supplied some of the earliest lyrical references to BJs. "As on a straw a Thracian man or Phrygian sucks his brew, forward she stooped, working away," wrote Archilochus in the seventh century B.C. A century later, Hipponax of Ephesus offered: "She demands eight obols to give him a peck on his prick."

The official culture of glorified gaydom and naked exercise made oral sex a matter of course in early Greek' life, though not all men lifted their togas for teen boys. Educated courtesans known as hetaerae performed a good many blow jobs on influential Athenian men, and the women enjoyed an influence that the men's wives could barely fathom. "We have hetaerae for our pleasure, concubines for our daily needs and wives to give us legitimate children and look after the housekeeping," explained the orator Demosthenes, summing up the politics of sex at the time.

The Romans

The Romans viewed the blow job as the passive act of receiving the penis (fellation) and the dynamic act of providing it (irrumation). The fellator represented weakness, ridicule and submission; the irrumator embodied valor, strength and conquest. In his 1969 treatise Ora-Genitalism: Oral Techniques in Genital Excitation, scholar Gershon Legman defends the Roman view, arguing that the role of men as irrumators is based on "biological principle and erotic rule" and that it "gives the deepest psychic satisfactions possible in this act for both the man and woman involved."

In the Roman 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. But the Romans also recognized--or found it hard to ignore--the value of the blow job as an act of pleasure. In the ruins of Pompeii, archaeologists uncovered graffito that reads Lahis fellat assibus duobus, which translates as "Lahis gives head for half a sesterce." According to a legend popular among her enemies, the 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") or Cheilon ("thick-lipped"). Egyptian and Phoenician prostitutes advertised their oral skills by painting their mouths red to resemble vulvae. From this enterprising act we have history's most ubiquitous homage to the blow job: lipstick.

To The East

According to the Chinese, giving head was a path to enlightenment so long as the "yang essence" (semen) was not lost. In their many sex manuals, the Chinese diagrammed contortions designed to help men get their Jade Stalks, Swelling Mushrooms and Heavenly Dragon Pillars sucked while rerouting the sperm to their brains.

The first modern Chinese novel, Gold Plum Vase, written during the Ming Dynasty and still popular in China today, includes many scenes of fellatio: "Golden Lotus saw that Hsi-men's weapon stood upright like a ramrod. 'Darling,' she said, 'you must forgive me, but I can stand it no longer. I want to suckle it!' 'Suckle it,' said Hsimen. 'If you can soften it, good for you.' The woman seized and received his member between her lips. She sucked for a whole hour, but it did not die."

One of the most influential early sex guides came from India. Written sometime between the third and fifth centuries, the Kama Sutra taught that good sex is good karma. It featured eight stages of "oral congress," including side-biting, polishing, mango suction and absorption. Each had been perfected by eunuchs.

The Indians inspired the Arabs. Middle Eastern sex manuals, such as The Perfumed Garden for the Soul's Recreation, borrowed heavily from the Kama Sutra. Edwardes and Masters described the harem women of lore as "passionately wild, penis-sucking, freelancs fellatrices,"

Across the geothermal hotbeds of the vast Pacific, the Peruvians left ancient spout vessels festooned with couples having oral sex in various positions. And certain pre-Columbian pots had two spouts--one penis-shaped and the other vulva-shaped--giving the drinker the choice between fellatio and cunnilingus.

The Dark Ages

The dawn of Christianity was not a happy time for the blow job. Early church leaders proclaimed that only missionary-style sex for procreative purposes within the context of marriage was permissible in the eyes of God. For example, 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 because of your diabolical deed he might burn all the more with love and desire for you? If you have done this, you should do penance for seven years on legitimate holy days." By comparison, using a dildo "of a size to match your sinful desire" cost one year of penance, using a strap-on meant five years and doing it doggy style could be rectified by 10 days on bread and water. Ironically, the only mention of oral sex in the Bible is by an appreciative woman in the Song of Solomon: "I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste."

If sex for pleasure was sin, many people sinned heartily. By the time of the Renaissance, oral sex had become so popular in France that "frenching" became shorthand for any type of genital kiss. (It remains a hit to this day: In a Playboy survey of nearly 6000 men from around the world, the French reported receiving the most blow jobs, followed by the Greeks, Brazilians and Poles.) The first Western literary blow job appears to come from François Rabelais, whose writings were so obscene he now enjoys his own adjective: "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."

Two hundred years later, frenching played a recurring role in erotic theater pieces presented in the private salons of noblemen. One play written in 1788 features a countess and her lover Belamour. While fearful of her "ivory scissors," Belamour submits to her relentless sucking and "shoots into her libertine mouth the torrent that he is not permitted to spill elsewhere."

Criminal Blows

In England and the colonies, authorities took a dim view of deviant sex. However, statutes banning sodomy were generally understood to include only homosexual anal sex and bestiality. As blow jobs grew in popularity, so did official efforts to put them down. According to historian George Painter, in 1880 only three U.S. states banned fellatio. By 1920, at least 24 had taken the plunge, and 11 state courts defined oral sex as sodomy. In the first such case, in 1904, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled fellatio had not been indictable under English common law only because it had not been so common.

In another Georgia case, this one decided in 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of states to ban blow jobs and other "unnatural" acts. Today, heterosexual fellatio remains illegal in more than a dozen states; among them, only Alabama offers an exemption for married couples. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover once supposedly lamented that the federal government couldn't investigate cases of oral-genital intimacy unless the act had in some way obstructed interstate commerce.

A Century of Progress

The blow job began its slow march to cultural acceptance at the end of the 19th century. The pornography possessed by the middle class at the time showed an almost obsessive interest in oral sex. More married couples began to experiment, and the French continued to offer encouragement. In his study of oral sex, Legman includes a translation of A Practical Treatise on Fellation: Its Advantages and Inconveniences, which he identifies as a monograph written by an anonymous Frenchman about the time of World War I.

The tract asserts that the best blow jobs are 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 warmup 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 three eighths of an inch in diameter.

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 centerline of the scrotum), the drawstring (the frenulum) and the balano-preputial groove. The treatise closes with suggestions for postfellatio conversation. The weather and recent political assassinations are high on the list.

In 1926 Theodoor Van de Velde published Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique--America's first popular sex manual. The book was notable for its discussion of "the genital kiss" as a form of marital foreplay. But Van de Velde wasn't ready to fully embrace the blow job. As an act unto itself, he wrote, it could easily open "the hellgate of the realm of sexual perversion," especially if it led directly to orgasm. This reflected a common view. One writer recalled how she and her gal pals in the Twenties viewed a blow job as something "so out of the ordinary that prostitutes charged extra for it."

Charlie Chaplin was one of the most notorious victims of the antifellatio vibe. 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, perverted and degenerate sexual desires, as to be too revolting, indecent and immoral to set forth in detail." Chaplin had asked his wife for a blow job. He settled the case in 1927 for $625,000, and may have gotten off easy. In Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, published two decades later, Alfred Kinsey reported that "there are several instances of wives who have murdered their husbands because they insisted on mouth-genital contacts."

A Semen Change

When the U.S. government sent millions of young men to Europe to fight two wars, it inadvertently introduced a great number of them to frenching. By 1948, Kinsey found that about 40 percent of a sample of American males had received oral sex. Five years later, in Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, he reported that 49 percent of married women provided oral sex, and that 62 percent of the youngest, well-educated and sexually active women said they gave blow jobs to boyfriends. "It is not surprising," Kinsey wrote, "that the two areas of the body which are most sensitive erotically, namely the mouth and genitalia, should frequently be brought into contact."

Kinsey's findings became the topic of much controversy, and he eventually lost his funding. Aware of Kinsey's fate, and that oral sex was illegal in almost every state, Masters and Johnson opted not to include their findings on the topic in Human Sexual Response, published in 1966. As Masters explained some years later, "We didn't have the courage."

Nevertheless, oral sex had become increasingly common. One social science survey concluded that the incidence of premarital oral sex had nearly doubled between the early Thirties and late Sixties. A more recent study found that 68 percent of all women (continued on page 162) Oral History (continued from page 116) and 71 percent of married women reported giving head. Blow jobs are more popular among college-educated whites than with any other group.

Literary Blows

Erotic literature played a vital role in expanding interest in fellatio, and some of the best writing on the topic came from women. Here's Anaïs Nin, in her short story The Woman on the Dunes: "She licked it softly, tenderly, lingering over the tip of it. It stirred. He looked down at the sight of her wide red mouth so beautifully curved around his penis. With one hand she touched his balls, and with the other she moved the head of the penis, enclosing it and pulling it gently."

In 1967, another Frenchwoman, Emmanuelle Arsan, took fellatio to new depths in Emmanuelle:

"She explored more and more intimately, searched, moved forward and back, abruptly returned to the end of his penis, pushed it to the bottom of her throat, so deeply that she nearly choked, and there, without withdrawing it, she slowly and irresistibly pumped it while her tongue enveloped and massaged it."

By comparison, American literary blow jobs were searching, inquisitive or euphemistic. John Updike's reference to a blow job in his 1960 novel Rabbit, Run caused a sensation--despite his never using the term. While he loosened his belt in later years, the oral sex in his 1968 novel Couples remained heady: "Lazily she fellated him while he combed her lovely hair. Mouths, it came to Piet, are noble. They move in the brain's court. We send our genitals mating down below like peasants, but when the mouth condescends, mind and body marry. To eat another is sacred."

A year later Philip Roth's characters frantically grappled with the basics in Portnoy's Complaint:

"Did she really kneel, are you shitting me? Did she actually kneel on her knees? And what about her teeth, where do they go? And does she suck on it or does she blow on it, or somehow is it that she does both? Oh God. Ba-ba-lu, did you shoot in her mouth? Oh my God! And did she swallow it right down, or spit it out, or get mad--tell me! And who put it in--did she put it in or did you put it in, and does it just get drawn in by itself?"

Deep Sucking Sounds

It's hard to ignore a 20-foot blow job. Deep Throat, the 1972 adult film about a woman whose clitoris is deep inside her throat, transformed Linda Lovelace into a latter-day saint of fellatio. Her penisguzzling talents both glorified the blow job and rendered it banal. Was it dirty, or was it fun? The best-selling book The Sensuous Woman declared it fun: "Oral sex is, for most people who give it a try, delicious."

Over the next two decades, The Joy of Sex and the VCR drove the point home. By the early Nineties, the blow job no longer seemed mysterious. Hugh Grant brought the discussion to late-night TV when he made the rounds to apologize for placing his penis in the unfit orifice of a prostitute. He paid a fine of $1180 (the hooker paid $1350) and his career quickly rebounded.

Three years later, Bill Clinton's confession that he had allowed a White House intern to blow him recalled medieval liturgies--and yet his hairsplitting over whether fellatio constitutes sex was thoroughly contemporary. Speaking on National Public Radio, John Updike suggested that fellatio is "more intimate than intercourse because it involves one's head," while in The Guardian, John Ryle wrote, "If Clinton did not have extramarital relationships, he did, we gather, have what might be called fellationships."

The president found himself sandwiched between an older generation that revered the blow job for its intimacy and a younger one not sure of its value. While Monica Lewinsky could be cast as a classic Greek hetaera, faithfully lowering her head to service a powerful penis (and preserving its sacred stain), she also is a product of the modern fellatio-as-petting culture. For many young people, blow jobs are a way of having safer sex, getting a boyfriend off your back, keeping your virginity, remaining semifaithful, getting a quick, lubricious thrill without the bother of removing your clothes, and just being cool. Plus, according to surveys of high school and college students, it's been decided: A blow job is not sex. Right? In 1994 director Kevin Smith captured the zeitgeist in his comedy Clerks, in a scene between a video store worker and his girlfriend:

Dante: You said you only had sex with three different guys. You never mentioned him!

Veronica: Because I never had sex with him.

Dante: You sucked his dick!

Veronica: We went out a few times. We never had sex, but we fooled around.

Dante: Why did you tell me you only had sex with three different guys?

Veronica: Because I did only have sex with three different guys. That doesn't mean I didn't just go with people.

Dante: Oh my God, I feel so nauseous.

Veronica: I'm sorry, Dante, I thought you understood.

Dante: I did understand! I understood that you had sex with three different guys and that's all you said!

Veronica: Please calm down.

Dante: How many?

Veronica: Dante----

Dante: How many dicks have you sucked?

Veronica: Let it go!

Dante: How many?

Veronica: All right, shut up a second and I'll tell you! Jesus! I didn't freak out like this when you told me how many girls you fucked!

Dante: This is different, this is important. How many?

[Long pause as customer comes to counter to buy something]

Dante: Well?

Veronica: Something like . . . 36.

Dante: What? Something like 36?

Veronica: Lower your voice.

Dante: Wait a minute, what is that anyway--something like 36? Does that include me?

Veronica: Ummm . . . 37.

Dante: I'm 37?

Veronica: I'm going to class.

Dante: My girlfriend has sucked 37 dicks!

Customer: In a row?

Dante: Try not to suck any dick on the way through the parking lot!

Browse through a gallery of historic blow job art at cyber.playboy.com.