When I was a teenager, I had an older relative who used to like to tell any young person who crossed her path, "You kids think you invented sex! After all, hadn't sex been pretty much limited to heterosexual missionary-style couplings with the lights off until, like, ? Of course, after I took a break from having my vagina touched and decided to go read some cultural history, I learned that sexual innovation was nothing new. Not only had people been inventing and dropping sexual trends since pretty much the beginning of recorded history, but many of our most hallowed sexual and romantic traditions started as freaky sexual trends hundreds or thousands of years ago.
A History of Oral Sex, From Fellatio's Ancient Roots to the Modern Blow Job
According to recent press reports, Americans are having oral sex at alarmingly younger ages -- and with increasing nonchalance. Note: Oral sex here refers exclusively to fellatio. Oral sex precedes and often replaces sexual intercourse because it's perceived to be noncommittal, quick and safe. For some kids it's a cool thing to do; for others it's a cheap thrill. Raised in a culture in which speed is valued, kids, not surprisingly, seek instant gratification through oral sex the girl by instantly pleasing the boy, the boy by sitting back and enjoying the ride. A seemingly facile command over the sexual landscape of one's partner is achieved without the encumbrances of clothes, coitus and the rest of the messy business. The blow job is, in essence, the new joystick of teen sexuality.
What comes to mind when you picture Victorian-era sex? Marriages of convenience and social bartering? Maybe, like, a lot of repression? Turns out, how we view that time in sexual history might be more than a little warped. We can start to get a better idea of what women of the time really thought about sex by looking at the work of Clelia Duel Mosher, MD.
Let's dive in, shall we? Art depicting sexual acts has been found around the globe, left behind by countless ancient peoples and dating back thousands of years. Author and scholar Thierry Leguay told Salon in that "the first clear real traces of fellatio are from ancient Egypt