The Observation: The Demise of the Blowjob

The blowjob has fallen on hard times. Or, to put it in the form of a crude question, who can really get it up for fellatio these days? Back in the 1960s and '70s, fellatio was all the rage. Its curative powers are powerfully conveyed by the moment in John Updike's Bech when the protagonist's mistress tries "to bring his weakling member to strength by wrapping it in the velvet bandages of her lips." Abandoning the protective modesty of fiction in the poem "Fellatio," Updike celebrated the way "that each of these clean secretaries / at night, to please her lover, takes / a fountain into her mouth."

When I first came across these lines, in 1972, aged fourteen, they seemed excitingly rude — if a little yucky. Now, a harmless poem can't be expected to support a zeitgeisty theory, but something, evidently, was in the air: 1972 was the year of Deep Throat, about a woman with a clitoris in her throat, so that she achieves orgasm by performing oral sex. In retrospect, this seems like a premise dreamed up by feminists as a way of showing, in ludicrously exaggerated fashion, the underlying misogyny of male fantasies. Or maybe not so exaggerated after all. At roughly the same time, a joke made the rounds about the ideal woman being three feet tall with a flat head — so you'd have someplace to rest your beer while she gave you head. One way or another, the early '70s were a time when the culture was bigging up the blowjob. Tellingly, Bech's mistress was "following less her own instincts than the exemplary drift of certain contemporary novels."

Some of this enthusiasm lived on into the late twentieth century. In 1995's To Die For, Nicole Kidman reacts with disingenuous astonishment to the story of how a famous broadcaster got her big break because a self-penned reference commended her ability to "suck your cock till your eyes pop out!" (Shouldn't that read "cave in" or "implode"?) In the same year, there's a fun exchange in Martin Amis's The Information in which a male character proposes to a lady friend that they "do 68." What's that? she asks. "You do me and I owe you 1," he shoots back. Later in the novel, the humiliation of failed writer Richard Tull is complete when his wife fellates his rival, the successful Gwyn Barry.

If this all seems rather quaint, then Susan Minot's 2002 novella, Rapture — about a single blowjob — was perhaps a last, jaw-aching hurrah. A genuinely twenty-first-century spokesman can be found in Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, in the form of young Joey Berglund, whose sexual maturity — compared with the guys he's at college with — is conveyed simply and vehemently. Their yearnings center on the blowjob, which Joey considers "little more than a glorified jerkoff."

I recently undertook a small survey of some more mature male friends, and the results, while not unanimous, were overwhelming. To speak plainly, given the choice, eight of the ten men surveyed preferred eating pussy to having their dicks sucked. Or, to put it in entirely numerical terms, 80 percent of males would opt for a 70 rather than a 68. And what about the other two men? Yes, you guessed it: They're gay! To be strictly accurate, the heterosexual respondents were partial to this kind of thing — but only in the mathematically blissful reciprocity of 70 minus 1. The gob-job continues to thrive in hetero pornography, of course, for the simple — literally obvious — reason that it lends itself to being filmed in a way that cunnilingus cannot.

I'm not claiming that the latter did not exist back in the 1970s, but it was regarded in much the same way as paying for a round at the bar: You had to do it, but if you could avoid it, you did. It would be a mistake, though, to see this change as meaning that men have gone from being selfish recipients to selfless givers of pleasure; it's just that what constitutes pleasure has shifted. As the Michael Fassbender character in Shame says to a woman he's seducing in a bar by telling her how badly he wants to go down on her (before getting beaten up by her boyfriend): "That's what I like to do."

The scale of the sea change can be observed at the Great Canadian Beaver-Eating Contest, at Burning Man, an event so popular that participants line up as if for a half-off sale. In the more discreet context of my survey, this enthusiasm was endorsed by the respondent who claimed that the only time he experienced "absolute contentment" was when his face was between his wife's legs. He wished to make clear that he was not talking just about sex; he meant in life generally.