Friday, Jul 4, 2008
To the women who came of age in the '60s, oral sex was an act of great intimacy. To their daughters, it's about as intimate as shaking hands.
Jul 21, 1999 | Long before blow jobs entered the public discourse, a psychotherapy patient of mine in her 20s revealed that she was upset because her boyfriend had "cheated" on her. (Translation: He had sexual intercourse with another woman.) When I pointed out that she had been involved with other men recently, she replied, incredulous, that she had not "gone all the way" -- she had "only fooled around." (Translation: She had performed fellatio.) Obviously, this was less of a transgression than that of her boyfriend because oral sex is not quite sex. The subtlety of this distinction may have eluded me, but it was entirely obvious to her. As I listened to her talk, it occurred to me that I was stuck in a time warp. Like many in the baby boom generation, I tend to regard oral-genital contact as, well, real sex.
Of all the revelations that emerged from the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, this transformation in sensibility -- this sexual generation gap between young women and their mothers -- is one of the most interesting. As we slide toward the end of the millennium, various sexual practices are taking on different meanings. What was deviant for middle-agers has become mainstream for their offspring. Phone sex, casual transvestism, computer sex -- it's all OK. And the genders are leaking into each other. Each is playing with each other's toys, mimicking each other's icons; this is the age of G.I. Jane and Mr. Mom. With these transformations, the significance of various bodily orifices has changed as well. Contact with one or the other may variably signal intimacy, contempt, hipness, commitment or any combination thereof -- or not much of anything at all. Among many young people, fellatio is notably banal. Think of the scene in the film "Chasing Amy" where two of the main characters boast about their fellating techniques, as if oral sex was as neutral an act as shaking hands.
But for boomers, it is not like shaking hands. Oral sex means something -- or it used to. My over-40 male patients, for example, take for granted they have "scored" when they get a woman to perform fellatio on them outside of a relationship. (To do so within a relationship means something else, especially when it is in the course of making love.) In these men's salad days, good girls -- the kind of women with whom you had conversations -- did not do that sort of thing sans souci.
To male boomers, the practice of oral sex involves the reduction of a woman into a desiring body (or, more accurately, a body part) available for servicing them. The word "score," of course, speaks volumes. As illustrated in Woody Allen's recent movie "Celebrity," in which access to blow jobs was portrayed as one of the perks of being an alpha male, unilateral oral sex is a power trip for middle-aged men. Swallowing is the ultimate victory. Even President Clinton must have understood this, for in an uncharacteristic gesture of gentlemanly concern, he resisted using Monica Lewinsky in this manner. His consideration turned out to be gratuitous, however, for Lewinsky has said that, far from feeling used, she regarded it as a measure of his trust. Therein lies the generation gap.
The view of my middle-aged women patients is consistent with that of their male peers. Veterans of the '60s sexual revolution, these women might well have engaged in casual sexual intercourse in their youth, but they tended to reserve oral sex for a relationship in which they felt safe. To most of them, fellatio was somehow more serious than intercourse. It was a privilege of intimacy. A loving, enduring relationship would allow these women to find pleasure in a range of activities that might shame them otherwise. In "giving head," a woman assumes a subordinate position (sometimes literally down on her hands and knees) -- it was understood that she was performing this act in service of her passion for a man and that no decent man would exploit her. Moreover, he should be willing to return the favor in kind.
In retrospect, the era of free love was not quite as free as it was billed, at least with regard to one's oral cavity; the 1972 porno film "Deep Throat" would not have been such a threshold event had it been otherwise. When John Updike included oral sex in his 1960 novel "Rabbit," it was quite sensational. In an interview last year on National Public Radio's "Fresh Air," he explained that it was a way of indicating a special bond between two people in an adulterous relationship. "Fellatio," he asserted, "is more intimate than intercourse because it involves one's head."
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