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10 Tainted Love The Transformation of Oral-Genital Behavior in the United States, 1970–2000 Kevin White Growing up in England as a thirteen-year-old, listening to BBC Radio One, my innocence was protected by the Reithian guardians of morality who banned songs in which they saw innuendo such as Chuck Berry’s “My Ding-a-Ling” and the Sweet’s consummate power pop, “Little Willy,” and especially the libertine ditties of Cockney reggae boy Judge Dread: “Big Six,” “Big Seven,” “Big Eight.” Somehow, Lou Reed’s paean to Andy Warhol’s New York demimonde, “Walk on the Wild Side,” escaped any ban. Indeed, for months as the record rose high into the top ten, the hypnotic bass of local jazzman Herbie Flowers could be heard powering the track behind Reed’s snarling sociopathic vocal. From Reed I learned about the possibilities of androgyny, “shaved his legs and then he was a she.” But it was to be years later that I realized what the line about being “given head” meant. Little did I appreciate that my teenage encounter with this song on the radio was loaded with meaning. In a globalizing world, by 1973 I could be exposed while quite under age to the latest American fad: oral sex as a cutesy, hip symbol of the new world of sexual liberation where procreative heterosexuality was so last year, where penetrative male heterosexuality was out of favor amid the smorgasbord of erotic options offered by Alex Comfort in his The Joy of Sex (which piled up high also in England’s largest bookseller, W. H. Smith). But I didn’t know what “giving head” meant, so, for now, I survived this early engagement with American sexual imperialism. Probably most of the population of England did too.1  These days, girls talk about cunnilingus/fellatio all the time. Sex in the City worked in part because it captured how savvy, sassy American women have been shooting the breeze for the last few years. It’s all very matter-offact ; it is no big deal. The term “blow job” appears regularly in the series. In one scene one character visits her doctor and is asked, “Do you have sex?”“Yes.”“Do you have oral sex?”“Yes.”“Giving and Receiving?”“Yes.” In one episode, the boyfriend of one of the characters is told in no uncertain terms that “my clitoris is about two inches from where you think it is.” Funny, I don’t remember this kind of talk when I lived in the States in the 1980s. It’s all very matter-of-fact. Over the past thirty years technology has brought pornographic films from the dirty movie houses into the home, first with 16 mm film, then with video and now with DVD. This latest format has revitalized the prominence of oral sex, especially in gay pornography . For example, Falcon subsidiary Bel Ami has exploited the willingness of some (once) poor eastern European boys from the Czech Republic, Slovakia , Latvia, and Hungary to have sex with one another for money. Thus, in the classic Lukas’s Story I, we may observe the famous (in the “gay community ”) sex scene between Slovak porn superstars Lukas Ridgeton and Johann Paulik in its entirety, or one can click on oral for the oral sex portion or anal for the anal sex bit or one can go right away to the orgasm. This pattern is repeated all over porn, and Bel Ami is a worldwide brand, imitated in all sorts of surprising ways.2 Sex advice straddles every area of society from the animated Dr. Ruth Westheimer on the airwaves to sex advice columns that litter every women’s and men’s magazine. Sex advice books make it on to the bestseller charts, and they affirm the rightness of varied sexual relations. Oral sex can have many functions. Ian Kerner’s 2004 best seller, She Comes First: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Pleasuring a Woman, urges men to become “sexually clitorate” and proclaims “The Cunnilinguist Manifesto,” which is a “call to action” (for men) who should “take one small lick for man, one giant lick for womanhood. Cunnilinguists of the world unite. The revolution is upon us. Vive la Vulva!”3 According to Michele Weiner Davis in The Sex-Starved Marriage, varied sex can prevent divorce and its concomitant horrors. So one correspondent reports that “although I didn’t like oral sex before, now it actually turns me on and gets...

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