According to an article in this month’s issue of Esquire, the blow job is all but becoming extinct in favor of cunnilingus. In an informal poll, conducted by the writer Geoff Dyer, eight out of 10 of his “more mature male friends” preferred “eating p**sy to having their dicks sucked.” And guess what? The two who preferred BJs were gay! He uses this data to assert that the excitement that surrounded fellatio beginning in the ’70s has all but faded.
Clearly, that must be the case, if his friends say so. But it’s not just his friends. He says blow jobs are out in pop culture as well. I mean, Michael Fassbender’s character in “Shame” tells a man in a bar that he wants to go down on his wife. It’s of no consequence that he’s a sex addict, I suppose. And in a scene from Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, Joey Berglund says he considers getting a blow job as “little more than a glorified jerk off.” Should we talk about how he had been sleeping with his neighbor since he was 13 or something? Perhaps I should remind Dyer of the entire page in Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot dedicated to the sucking of Mitchell Grammaticus’ c**k. That came out just this year.
Dyer says of his perceived decline of the blow job:
“[Cunnilingus] 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.”
