I once dated a guy who refused to go down on me. “I just don’t like the way it tastes,” was his excuse. As if his dick tasted like an ice cream cone. I joke about it now, but at the time I didn’t find it very funny. My boyfriend’s aversion to oral sex made me newly insecure about that part of my body, and the few times I did convince him to go down on me, I was too in my own head to enjoy it, constantly worrying that he was grossed out or just doing it out of obligation. Friends I confided in at the time suggested I stop giving him blow jobs, to give him a taste of his own medicine. But since I enjoy giving pleasure, no BJs felt like double the punishment.
I realize that I’m being, shall we say, candid. But I find that it’s next to impossible to talk about sex without getting specific. And how else does one get what one wants out of sex than by talking about it? So I’ll go first: I don’t understand why so many men act like, by giving head, they’re doing you a favor. I half expect them to say “You’re welcome” afterward. I recently met a guy who, while flirting with me at a party, said, “Just so you know, I’m the kind of guy who cares about making a girl cum.” He then stared at me in anticipation, as if waiting for me to faint, or for celebratory balloons to fall from the ceiling. Not to mention that when you meet the rare guy who’s up for going down, he’s often remarkably bad at it. All that spitting and sucking and vagina slapping: What is going on there? To my knowledge, I don’t have an abnormally sensitive vagina, but if someone slaps it, or slurps at it like it’s a trough, any subsequent screaming will be out of pain, not pleasure. Oral sex isn’t rocket science, so why, if you’re a straight girl, is head so often either terrible or nonexistent?
It’s now widely discussed that, due to a lack of sex ed in school, young people are learning about sex from porn. Heterosexual porn scenes usually go something like this: Girl gets naked; girl shows off her body for a while; girl gives guy a blow job; girl and guy have intercourse; the end. Rarely in this scenario does the guy reciprocate oral sex. Well, porn imitates life imitates porn, as they say. Which means that, often, real-life sex doesn’t include head for the woman, either. Of course, there are exceptions. Some guys are very generous and adept in the oral department, and some porn does emphasize pleasure for the woman. But the fact is, almost all mainstream porn is made by men, for men, and it shows—the aim of the scenes is always to get the man off. As a result, in the real world, many girls and guys think that the aim of sex is to get the man off. And honestly, many of my hook-ups with men have felt driven by that singular goal. As someone who also sleeps with women, I feel I have a good counterpoint. My female partners have been unanimously more giving and considerate, and certainly more likely to give me head.
Cindy Gallop, the woman behind Make Love Not Porn, says she’s “pro-porn, pro-sex, and pro knowing the difference.” I completely agree with her. Don’t get me wrong: I love porn and watch it often—probably too often—but I also know that it’s artificial entertainment. Porn is great for many things, but learning how to genuinely please a woman is not one of them.
Now, I understand that cunnilingus is not the simplest of tasks. There are nuances to be learned, and they differ from person to person, which means that even in lesbian sex, where you “know what you’re working with,” you still have to figure out what works best for your partner. (But as a general rule, lick lightly. Jeez.) I’ve had my own oral difficulties in the past. I once slept with a girl who had the sort of vagina that isn’t so easily navigated—her clit was sort of hidden under a bunch of other stuff. While down there, I said, “Tell me where it feels good,” thinking she would direct my tongue. Instead, she just looked down at me with disdain, rolled her eyes and responded, “On my clit, duh.” Insulted, I put my head back down and resorted to the trial-and-error strategy, taking cues from her moans on where to steer my tongue—a less efficient method, but it worked. Still, her condescension didn’t do wonders for my sexual ego.
Men seem to think that blow jobs are easy—that you just suck and try to keep your teeth out of the way. Samantha once famously broke it down for a lover in Sex and the City: the teeth placement, jaw stress, suction, gag reflex, head bobbing, moaning, and breathing through the nose. “Easy?” Samantha says. “Honey, they don’t call it a job for nothing.” Well said. Not to mention that BJs often result in a mouthful of bodily fluids—that’s way more intense than anything cunnilingus has to offer, even if the girl goes full bush. And for the record, it is possible to give a bad blow job. I once made the mistake of eating a kale salad twenty minutes before deep throating. It wasn’t pretty, nor was it my proudest BJ moment. Google “bad blow job” and you’ll find endless tales from men about women botching the job.
One of my favorite videos from the Desire Project—an evolving online documentary where women share stories about desire—is of a girl named Amy talking about how she used to hate receiving oral sex. She says, “I thought good oral sex was a myth. . . I was like, ‘This is always just going to be meh . . . but I need to pretend like I like it, because I want you to stop, but I don’t want to hurt your feelings.’ I just figured that when people talk about guys going down on girls, that it’s just more of a courtesy thing, and not actually enjoyable.” She goes on to talk about meeting the magical guy who blew her mind, made her cum in record time, and proved her theory wrong. While Amy’s story is funny and relatable, I also recognized a fault in her sexual conduct that I, too, am guilty of: She wasn’t happy with the sex she was having, but she didn’t do anything to change it.
We all get vulnerable when we’re naked. Sexual egos are fragile, probably especially in men, who are expected to be sexually competent. We don’t want to criticize our partners’ performance in bed, for fear of hurting their feelings or making them not like us. But perpetuating negative or ineffective sexual behavior is bad for everyone involved. As Dan Savage always says, women have to enable their own pleasure—we have to be our own best advocate in bed, and be as aggressive and entitled as men are. We can’t just whine about our partners being lazy and inept and not do anything to make the situation better. Whenever I encounter a guy who’s bad at giving head, I always think, God, what girl let you think that that was acceptable?! But then I remember that I, too, have been that girl.
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