A genealogy of the genital kiss: oral sex in the twentieth century.

Abstract: In recent years oral sex has been the subject of increasing media coverage and controversy, particularly as it applies to the sexual behaviour of youth. The purpose of this article is to present a modern genealogy of oral sex. We explore the evolving contexts and discourses concerning oral sex that have occurred from the early 20th century onward. We begin with an historical analysis of the treatment of oral sex in marriage and sex advice manuals. During the course of the 20th century, the place and function of oral sex underwent a number of transformations. It is shown that oral sex became normalized, first cunnilingus and then fellatio, initially as a way of sufficiently arousing a couple prior to intercourse and then as a sexual pleasure in its own right. However, as the 20th century drew to a close, oral sex was once again problematized as the discourse of sexual conservatism regained its prominence. With respect to contemporary discourse, oral sex leads a double life. On the one hand, oral sex is firmly established within adult heterosexual relations as an important signifier of mutuality and pleasure. On the other hand, the practice of oral sex among youth is the source of considerable anxiety.

Key words: Oral sex, genealogy, sex advice manuals, youth.

Introduction

By the end of the twentieth century oral sex had become normalized as a feature of everyday heterosexual life. In a series of identifiable phases the discourses and practices constituting oral sex had been transformed. In the late nineteenth century sex figured as a marginal medical sub-specialism that tracked "the perversions," but elsewhere there was only a deep silence accorded to any but the most euphemized mention of sexual practices. Outside the narrow, but expanding, range of texts of what was soon to be born as sexology, the manuals of marital and sexual advice remained largely silent about the specifics of sexual practices. Oral sex occasionally flickered in the dim light of the courtroom as an instance of "cruelty" in divorce petitions. But during the course of the twentieth century, at an accelerating rate, oral sex became a possible component of "foreplay," which was the great sexual discovery of the early decades of the twentieth century. By the end of the century oral sex had become an essential component of the sexual repertoire of even mildly adventurous heterosexuals. In this article we provide a genealogy of oral sex. It is a genealogy, in contrast to a chronological history, in that we explore the different contexts and discourses concerning oral sex that have occurred over time. It should be noted that the place of oral sex in homosexual communities and practices has been quite different than in the heterosexual population. Our analysis is confined to the role of oral sex within heterosexual practice.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century oral sex has become controversial; in short it has again become a problem, but a different sort of problem than it had been earlier. Oral sex has been problematized because it has left the marital bedroom and now figures in the tumultuous discourses about teenage sex. There is a scarcely veiled prurient interest indulged in by the media in the supposed proliferation of "rainbow parties" at which teenage girls compete in oral sex by trying to leave the lowest lipstick ring on a boy's penis. Investigative journalists are easily persuaded to make much of "colour-coded sex"; practices in which girls wear coloured bracelets, where the colours indicate their preferred sexual practice, white signifying oral sex, red, vaginal sex, etc. Courts have imposed penalties on young men receiving oral sex from under-age girls. School principals speak of a crisis of oral sex in the school yard. We explore the specific anxiety concerning teen oral sex in more detail below and elsewhere (Curtis and Hunt, forthcoming). Suffice it to say, that these and many other instances exemplify what Michel Foucault (1978) had described as an "incitement to discourse" (p. 17). We may well be on the cusp of a "policing of sex; that is, not the rigor of a taboo, but the necessity of regulating sex through useful and public discourses" (p. 25).

We develop a genealogy of oral sex here in a double sense in that we do not assume any linear continuity in oral sex as a stable and unchanging phenomenon, and we focus attention on the shifting ways in which oral sex has come to be treated as a problem. Our focus is on English-speaking countries, and draws on the marriage and sexual advice manuals of the twentieth century, texts and debates that crossed back and forth across the Atlantic with surprising alacrity. We do not claim that the advice given by manual writers provides direct access to the sexual practices of their readers. We do, however, claim that these texts generated what might fruitfully be called a sexual habitus that takes the form of sets of attitudes and dispositions shared by many in the social groups who were the intended audience of these texts. Thus, for example, at the beginning of our period many would have had a certain repugnance towards oral sex, but by the middle of the century, even though they may not personally have engaged in oral sex, most would probably have come to view it is a recognized feature of the sexual realm. We will show that through quite distinct phases oral sex became normalized, first cunnilingus and then fellatio, first as a physiological aid and then as a sexual pleasure in its own right. By the last decades of the century oral sex had taken its place in the sexual repertoire of most moderately adventurous heterosexuals having the distinct quality as an embodiment of both mutuality and intimacy. Then, rather suddenly, at the very end of the century oral sex becomes reproblematized in the context of controversies over teenage sexual practices where oral sex seemed to lose both mutuality and intimacy.

Foucault's (1996) work offers a valuable starting point for this inquiry in suggesting that for some social practice to enter the "domain of thought" social, economic or other processes must have made it uncertain, caused it to lose its familiarity, or to have provoked a certain number of difficulties around it.