On Your Knees, Sinner: How the Blowjob Found Emancipation

“Good head comes from the fact that you love cocks,” asserts the writer, Callie Press, in her self-help book for women, Give Good Head.

As confronting as this sentence might still be for some, it wasn’t so long ago that the author would have been jailed for daring to put such a thought into print!

Gradually, as if by osmosis, the blowjob has gained a place in the human sexual repertoire as respectable and perfunctory as vaginal penetration and masturbation. But that was not always true.

Happily, most – but not all – of us have accepted that sex, in all forms, is not be celebrated, not demonised.

Undoubtedly with considerable hypocricy, well-mannered society saw the humble blowjob as something rather wretched – even criminal, both for the donor and the recipient.

On Your Knees, Sinner!

Medieval Christians were not shy in expressing their distaste for fellatio. To be sure, oral sex figures prominently among the list of forbidden acts in medieval penitential literature, which were aimed mostly at monks.

But even under these monastically severe circumstances, penalties for blowjobs were harsher than those given for similar sexual offenses.

For instance, one medieval penitential document, from Ireland, recommended “four years penance” for cunnilingus – but, quite tellingly, five for fellatio.

While one might argue that the monks were actually penalizing homosexuality more than anything else, history is replete with accounts of medieval bishops and vicars who kept mistresses.

Who is to say that these women were oblivious to what gay monks knew?

Given the rampant bigotry of the time, one can assume that any nun caught on her knees before a vicar would have suffered the same fate – possibly worse. 

A Different Kind of Godhead

The fact that medieval monks knew about fellatio at all should dispel remnants of the once popular notion that blowjobs were invented in the 1972 movie, Deep Throat.

That said, nobody quite knows how long human beings have been doing it, but scholars suggest that we’ve been mouthing each other’s crotches all along.

The French paleontologists Yves Coppens surmises that the famous Lucy – the first prehistoric woman – practiced a sort of “paleo-fellatio.”

The French scholar Thierry Leguay nonetheless tells us that the first definitive mention of fellatio in history is found in ancient Egyptian mythology.

After the green-skinned god Osiris was deceived and killed by his brother, Set, his body was cut into pieces to build a column.

Osiris’ beloved sister and wife, Iris, put his pieces back together but discovered, by chance, that the penis was missing.

“An artificial penis was made out of clay, and Iris ‘blew’ life back into Osiris by sucking it,” Leguay told Salon in 2000. “There are explicit images of this myth.”

Blowjobs in Antiquity

Obviously, the Egyptians were far from being the only people in the ancient world who knew the life-affirming pleasures of oral sex. Indeed, some of the most captivating relics from antiquity have gods and mortals, prostitutes, satyrs and nymphs engaged in all manner of sexual activity.

In Pompeii, archeologists have uncovered erotic frescoes portraying such scenes, and some of them quite candidly depict fellatio.

In the East, the original Sanskrit text of the Kamasutra, from Northern India, contains descriptions of blowjobs in various, sometimes complicated, positions.

Certain Islamic schools of thought such as Shafi’i and Hanbali considered fellatio between man and wife permissible, as well, provided no bodily secretions were swallowed.

In Ancient Rome, fellatio was considered profoundly taboo when it involved two men of the same social status. But then a Roman senator need not hang his head for receiving oral sex from any woman (or a man of lower status, for that matter.)

In fact, it became customary for Roman prostitutes vying for high-born customers to wear bright red berries crushed on their lips to announce their oral skillset.

But the years between 400AD and 1000AD saw Christian morality gain a grip on Western thought; and, at least in the West, the blowjob went completely underground.

“Acts of Gross Indecency”

Medieval Christianity turned sex into a sacrament – and as such, sex was free of sin only when it was as barren of carnal pleasure as possible. Fellatio – along with anal sex – was especially sinful as it entailed a waste of masculine seed.

These medieval notions about sex and sin lasted for centuries. And such beliefs weren’t just held by monks, nuns, and clerics.

Right up through the 19th-century, public policy throughout Europe was to channel sexual activity, as much as possible, in the direction of marriage and procreation.

So much so, in fact, that the moral reformers of the Victorian era quite actively banished fellatio into the exclusive province of criminals, prostitutes, and gay men.

In 1885, British Parliament passed the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which criminalized – and implicitly linked – both female prostitution and “acts of gross indecency” between males.

A Princely Preoccupation

Of course, a Victorian man who wanted a blowjob would not be denied one – if he was willing to go through the necessary lengths.

He could visit London’s teeming red-light districts – or, if he was a nobleman wishing to avoid scandal, he could go to France.  

The Prince of Wales, Albert Edward, eldest son of Queen Victoria, was an avid fan of oral sex.

Some suggest this is at least part of the reason why he made France his adventure playground in the waning decades of the 19^th century.

When he wasn’t playing musical bedrooms in English country houses, Edward was ‘gadding about’ – as his mother put it – with the crème-de-la-crème of French whoredom.

The English prince was so besotted with French prostitutes and their mouths that he had his very own room in one of Paris’s poshest bordellos.

Historians claim the lavish, ornately decorated chamber came equipped with a custom-designed fellatio chair which, at least by some accounts, the prince himself had designed.

All that Jizz?

Meanwhile, the humble blowjob wasn’t fairing any better on the other side of the pond. In fact, the consequences of America’s Anglo-puritan beginnings might help explain why oral sex didn’t make the transition from brothels to bedrooms until the 20th century.

The very word “blowjob” doesn’t come into the American idiom until the 1940s. Even then, the term was coined during an era when most of America considered fellatio a taboo, homosexual act, illegal in every state until 1950.

In explaining the word’s origins for Vanity Fair in 2006, Christopher Hitchens suggested a connection between America’s illicit gay culture and the trumpets of its underground jazz scene.   

Nevertheless, a condescending attitude toward something so exquisitely pleasurable could not last long in a country that had made cultural icons of pinup girls and gangsters.

Out of the Closet and Into the Bedroom

One might say that fellatio finally blew its load in the face of polite society in the early 1970s. That was when some amateurs managed to pull together $25,000 to shoot a porn movie that would eventually gross in the order of $600 million.

Deep Throat is probably one of the trashiest, crudest, most exploitative screen classics ever made. But most experts agree it brought the blowjob out of the metaphorical cupboard and into the cultural mainstream.  

“It is a crime that movie is still showing,” Linda Lovelace, the star of the film, told the Toronto Star in 1981. “There was a gun to my head the entire time.”

Yet from then on, people’s views on fellatio began to change. The blowjob was re-energized, re-packaged, and re-exported into Europe – and Lou Reed was soon singing about it on “Walk on the Wild Side.”

Today, every person with a penis can be thankful that we are living in an era when the blowjob is seeing a kind of cultural rebirth.

People are happily going down on each other in leafy suburbs and cities, in offices, universities, libraries, restaurants, bedrooms, and cars.

There are self-help books, videos, and films about the subject – and, yes, the American presidency’s Resolute desk will forever be stained by the juicy Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.

Even Christianity appears to be softening its stance on the once maligned sex act – provided it’s performed within a mutually-consenting marriage.

“I don’t think oral sex is explicitly prohibited in any biblical command,” muses John Piper, chancellor of Bethlehem College and Seminary in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in a 2014 podcast. “If the Bible proscribes it, it would have to be by principle, and not by an explicit command.”

Go ahead, sinner, say what you will. We still think that doesn’t suck half as bad as five years’ medieval penance.

What’s your story? Do you really believe ‘good men and women’ abstained from giving head in past eras? Or is it more likely that they just didn’t discuss it at dinner parties?

Why not share your thoughts by reviewing this article below…