The Mickey Mouth Club
Just guess what it takes to win your pair of ears. Christopher Hitchens' gives deep background in -- The Oral History Of The Blow Job in Vanity Fair:
At 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. (W. H. Auden's New York underground poem titled "The Platonic Blow"—even though there is absolutely nothing platonic about it, and it lovingly deploys the word "job"—is the classic example here.) This was therefore an inducement the gay man could offer to the straight, who could in turn accept it without feeling that he had done anything too faggoty. 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. (In his stand-up routines, Bill Hicks used to speak often and movingly of this dilemma.) Cursing god, the boy then falls to the hectic abuse of any viscous surface within reach. 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. And then the word is out. 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. (In France and Greece, to my certain knowledge, the slang term used to involve "pipe smoking" or "cigar action." I don't mind the association with incandescence, but for Christ's sake, sweetie, don't be smoking it. I would even rather that you just blew.) If you got hold of Henry Miller's Sexus or Pauline Réage's Story of O (both published by Maurice Girodias, the same Parisian daredevil who printed Lolita), you could read about oral and other engagements, but that was France for you.
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.
Earthquake! Sensation! Telephones trilled all over the English-speaking world. Never mind if Johnny Fontane likes it or not, what is that? And why on earth is it called a "blow job"? (The words were for some reason separate in those days: I like the way in which they have since eased more cosily together.) Most of all, notice that it is regular sex that has become obvious and childish, while oral sex is suddenly for real men. 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.
"Oh that" he mimicked her. "Nice girls don't do that, manly men don't do that. Even in the year 1948. 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? That those gunslingers, those manly, virile, straight-shooting cowboys would always ask the girls for a 'French,' what we doctors call fellatio, what you call 'oh that.'"
Notice the date. Note also the cowboys, likewise deprived of female company for long stretches. Now that we know about Blowjob Mountain, or whatever the hell it's called, I think I can score one for my original theory.
special thanks to our sex expert, Lena Cuisina
This subject always makes me think of the scene in Last of the Mohicans when the English officers are speaking disparagingly about the French, "....and they'd rather make love with their faces than go to war..." Even then, those crazy Frogs known for talking on the mike...
cat brother at July 1, 2006 8:25 AM
Hitchens on BJ's is like a thermonuclear detonation at a ping-pong tournament... An inexcusable disproportion of candlepower in pursuit of victory. I love the guy, I'm just saying.
Besides, Treacher scored more laughs without chewing three thousand words:
http://jimtreacher.com/archives/001336.html
Crid at July 2, 2006 12:25 AM
Lena Cuisina, sex expert? Oh, please. I haven't even had sex lately (except for doing it doggystyle with that married father of two on the floor of my office last weekend).
Lena at July 2, 2006 12:53 AM
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