www.vanityfair.com/features/general/articles/060607fege05
As American as Apple Pie Ten years ago this spring, an intern named Monica Lewinsky was transferred out of the White House, and the nation became obsessed, once again, with the subject of, well, fellatio.
s there anything more tragic than the last leave-taking between Humbert Humbert and Dolores Haze (his very own "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins")? They meet in the dreary shack where she has removed herself to become a ground-down baby machine for some prole. Not only does she tell Humbert that she will never see him again, but she also maddens him by describing the "weird, filthy, fancy things" to which she was exposed by his hated rival, Quilty. he asks, in a calm voice where the word "exactly" makes us hear his almost unutterably low growl of misery and rage: "Crazy things, filthy things. I said no, I'm just not going to she used, in all insouciance really, a disgusting slang term which, in a literal French translation, would be souffler your beastly boys ... In its past participle, it can describe a light but delicious dessert that, well, melts on the tongue. It has often been said, slightly suggestively, that "you cannot make a souffle rise twice." Vladimir Nabokov spoke perfect Russian and French before he became the unrivaled master of English prose, and his 1955 masterpiece, Lolita, was considered the most transgressive book ever published. Laugh not, as you imagine me, on the very rack of joy noisily emitting dimes and quarters, and great big silver dollars like some sonorous, jingly and wholly demented machine vomiting riches ... " Erotic poets have hymned it down the ages, though often substituting the word "his." The menu of brothel offerings in ancient Pompeii, preserved through centuries of volcanic burial, features it in the frescoes. It was considered, as poor Humbert well knew, to be worth paying for. The temple carvings of India and the Kamasutra make rather a lavish point of it, and Sigmund Freud wondered if a passage in Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks might not betray an early attachment to that "which in respectable society is considered a loathsome perversion." Da Vinci may have chosen to write in "code" and Nabokov may have chosen to dissolve into French, as he usually did when touching on the risque, but the well-known word "fellatio" comes from the Latin verb "to suck." My friend David Aaronovitch, a columnist in London, wrote of his embarrassment at being in the same room as his young daughter when the TV blared the news that the president of the United States had received oral sex in an Oval Office vestibule. He felt crucially better, but still shy, when the little girl asked him, "Daddy, what's a vestibule?" Acey told me she was at a party and she said to a man, What do men really want from women, and he said, Blowjobs, and she said, You can get that from men.
But I think Acey (who in the novel is also somewhat Deecey) furnishes a clue. For a considerable time, the humble blowjob was considered something rather abject, especially as regards the donor but also as regards the recipient. Too grungy--especially in the time before dental and other kinds of hygiene. Too risky--what about the reminder of the dreaded vagina dentata (fully materialized by the rending bite-off scene in The World According to Garp)? Ancient Greeks and Romans knew what was going on, all right, but they are reported to have avoided the over-keen fellators for fear of their breath alone. And a man in search of this consolation might be suspected of being ... The crucial word "blowjob" doesn't come into the American idiom until the 1940s, when it was part of the gay underworld and possibly derived from the jazz scene and its oral instrumentation. But it has never lost its supposed Victorian origin, which was "below-job" (cognate, if you like, with the now archaic "going down"). This term from London's whoredom still has a faint whiff of contempt. On the other hand, it did have its advocates as the prototype of Erica Jong's "zipless fuck": at least in the sense of a quickie that need only involve the undoing of a few buttons. And then there's that nagging word, "job," which seems to hint at a play-for-pay task rather than a toothsome treat for all concerned. The three-letter "job," with its can-do implications, also makes the term especially American. Perhaps forgotten as the London of Jack the Ripper receded into the past, the idea of an oral swiftie was re-exported to Europe and far beyond by a massive arrival of American soldiers. For these hearty guys, as many a French and English and German and Italian madam has testified, the blowjob was the beau ideal. It was valued--not always correctly--as an insurance against the pox. And--this is my speculation--it put the occupied and the allied populations in their place. Certainly by the time of the war in Vietnam, the war-correspondent David Leitch recorded reporters swapping notes: "When you get to Da Nang ask for Mickey Mouth--she does the best blow job in South-East Asia."
t some point, though, there must have been a crossover in which a largely forbidden act of slightly gay character was imported into the heterosexual mainstream. If I have been correct up until now, this is not too difficult to explain (and it fits with the dates, as well). The queer monopoly on blowjobs was the result of male anatomy, obviously, and also of the wish of many gays to have sex with heterosexual men. It was widely believed that only men really knew how to get the "job" done, since they were tormented hostages of the very same organ on a round-the-clock basis. For many a straight man, life's long tragedy is first disclosed in early youth, when he discovers that he cannot perform this simple suction on himself. One day, he dreams, someone else will be on hand to help take care of this. When drafted into the army and sent overseas, according to numberless witnesses from Gore Vidal to Kingsley Amis, he may even find that oral sex is available in the next hammock. There might come a day, he slowly but inexorably reasons, when even women might be induced to do this. Through the 1950s, then, the burgeoning secret of the blowjob was still contained, like a spark of Promethean fire, inside a secret reed. I don't mind the association with incandescence, but for Christ's sake, sweetie, don't be smoking it. The comics of R Crumb used to have fellatio in many graphic frames, but then, this was the counterculture. No, the big breakthrough occurs in the great year of nineteen soixante-neuf, when Mario Puzo publishes The Godfather and Philip Roth brings out Portnoy's Complaint. Puzo's book was a smash not just because of the horse's head and the Sicilian fish-wrap technique and the offer that couldn't be refused. It achieved a huge word-of-mouth success because of a famous scene about vagina-enhancing plastic surgery that became widely known as "the Godfather tuck" (sorry to stray from my subject) and because of passages like this, featuring the Mobbed-up crooner "Johnny Fontane": And the other guys were always talking about blow jobs, this and other variations, and he really didn't enjoy that stuff so much. He never liked a girl that much after they tried it that way, it just didn't satisfy him right. He and his second wife had finally not got along, because she preferred the old sixty-nine too much to a point where she didn't want anything else and he had to fight to stick it in. She began making fun of him and calling him a square and the word got around that he made love like a kid. Never mind if Johnny Fontane likes it or not, what is that? And here's Puzo again, describing the scene where the lady in need of a newly refreshed and elastic interior isn't quite ready to sleep with her persuasive doctor, and isn't quite inclined to gratify him any other way, either: "Oh that" she said. Well, baby, I can take you to the house of a little old lady right here in Las Vegas who was the youngest madam of the most popular whorehouse in the wild west days You know what she told me? Note also the cowboys, likewise deprived of female company for long stretches. Now that we know about Blowjob Mountain, or whatever the he...
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