Today’s topic: coitus vs. fellatio. Fucking vs. blowjobs.
I’m coming (sorry) at this from a specific (heterosexual) angle; let me lay it out:
When I was in high school in the ’70s, getting sex from a girl was hard to come (sorry) by. Perhaps I just wasn’t a very good closer, or maybe I preferred the company of “good girls,” but in order to, in our lexicon, “ball a chick,” you pretty much had to date a girl for awhile, have said the L-word and perhaps even hinted that you were considering a long-term future with her.
Then the girl might let you “make love” to her — usually in pretty uptight, unimaginative ways. (Not that we complained.) Let me stress that these were the experiences of me and most of my friends — rarely, in high school, did a guy come rollin’ up with a story about how he scored with some chick he just met. It may have been different elsewhere, but I get the sense that this is a pretty fair depiction of the sexual mores of teenagers during my late adolescence.
So with enough diligence, you could get laid. Blowjobs, on the other hand, were a different matter. That was a major leap, and a young man would be very proud indeed if he was able to procure such a service (from his girlfriend, of course). By and large, the high school girls we knew and dated were of the I’m-not-putting-that-nasty-thing-in-my-mouth mindset. Blowjobs were dirty.
That script seems to have flipped. From anecdotal data I’ve picked up from some of my younger friends and colleagues, blowjobs have become a sort of social currency. No big deal. One friend of mind, who’s now 30, remembers having first dates with girls in high school whose stance was, more or less: I won’t fuck you, but I’ll give you a blowjob.
I’m a little envious, I guess. I’m pretty sure I’ve never been the beneficiary of a casual blowjob; even later in my life — after the whole blowjobs-are-nasty thing went by the boards — it was always part of the foreplay. Thinking back to the never-ending horniness of my high school days, casual blowjobs would have done the trick most of the time. That said, I’d never want to trade blowjobs for fucking. Given one or the other, I’ll take fucking almost every time.
What interests me now is more or less when this worm turned. When did high school girls get over the not-in-my-mouth attitude? I've heard that they work on technique — they want to give good blowjobs. (Ok, now I'm definitely envious.) When did blowjobs get easier to come (sorry) by than getting laid? The ’90s? I can’t say — although I think it’s, at least in part, fallout from the AIDS era — because I’ve been out of the game for a long time. But if anyone has any thoughts, regarding a time frame for this script flip, or any other aspect of the fucking/blowjob continuum, I’d love to head, I mean hear, it.
