For both sexes, but particularly for girls, giving oral sex was also seen as a path to popularity. Intercourse could bring stigma, turn you into a “slut”; fellatio, at least under certain circumstances, conferred the right sort of reputation. “Oral sex is like money or some kind of currency,” Sam explained. “It’s how you make friends with the popular guys. And it’s how you rack up points for hooking up with someone without actually having sex, so you can say, ‘I hooked up with this person and that person,’ and increase your social status. I guess it’s more impersonal than sex, so people are like, ‘It’s not a big deal.’”
I may be of a different generation, but, frankly, it’s hard for me to consider a penis in my mouth as “impersonal.” Beyond that, I was concerned about the dynamics around oral sex: the morass of obligations, pressures, and judgments leveled at girls; the calculus and compromises they made to curry favor with boys while remaining emotionally, socially, and even physically “safe”; the lack of reciprocity or physical pleasure they described, or expected.
One afternoon in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, I met Anna, a freshman at a small West Coast college. Anna had grown up in a politically liberal family and attended progressive private schools through twelfth grade. She wore skinny jeans with lace-up boots and had recently pierced the small flap of cartilage in front of her ear canal with a silver hoop; her long, wavy brown hair was swept to one side. “Sometimes,” she told me, “a girl will give a guy a blow job at the end of the night because she doesn’t want to have sex with him and he expects to be satisfied. So if I want him to leave and I don’t want anything to happen . . .” She trailed off, leaving me to imagine the rest.
There was so much to unpack in that short statement: why a young man should expect to be sexually satisfied; why a girl not only isn’t outraged, but considers it her obligation to comply; why she doesn’t think a blow job constitutes “anything happening”; the pressure young women face in any personal relationship to put others’ needs before their own; the potential justification of assault with a chaser of self-blame. “It goes back to girls feeling guilty,” Anna said. “If you go to a guy’s room and are hooking up with him, you feel bad leaving him without pleasing him in some way. But, you know, it’s unfair. I don’t think he feels badly for you.”
In their research on high school girls and oral sex, April Burns, a professor of psychology at City University of New York, and her colleagues found that girls thought of fellatio kind of like homework: a chore to get done, a skill to master, one on which they expected to be evaluated, possibly publicly. As with schoolwork, they worried about failing or performing poorly—earning the equivalent of low marks. Although they took satisfaction in a task well done, the pleasure they described was never physical, never located in their own bodies. They were both dispassionate and nonpassionate about oral sex—socialized, the researchers concluded, to see themselves as “learners” in their encounters rather than “yearners.”
The concern with pleasing, as opposed to pleasure, was pervasive among the girls I met, especially among high schoolers, who were just starting sexual experimentation. They often felt, for instance, that once they’d said yes to intercourse with a partner, they could never say no again, whether or not they were “in the mood.” “I remember sort of hating it,” said Lily, now a sophomore at a West Coast public university, about her sexual relationship with a high school boyfriend. “I wanted to please him, but it felt sometimes like we couldn’t have a normal conversation because he was so distracted by wanting to have sex. And I couldn’t really think of a reason to refuse”—not wanting to didn’t seem adequate. “Sometimes I felt like I was just a receptacle for his hormones.”
Those media-fueled sex panics tend to prey on parental fears about girls’ promiscuity or victimization; the backlash dismisses both as overblown. Rarely does anyone ask the girls themselves what they think, what they gain from or enjoy about their experiences. Sam mentioned social status. Lily talked about pleasing a boyfriend. Gretchen, a seventeen-year-old classmate of Sam’s, said she enjoyed the thrill, however short-lived, in having power over a boy. “I’ve gone down on four guys now. I don’t even know, really, why I do it.” She paused, chewing contemplatively on her lower lip. “I guess I like that feeling of ‘Ha! You can’t get this from anyone else. I am in control here!’ You knew they really, really wanted it and you could be like, ‘No! No!’ and then they’d be like, ‘Please! Please!’ Because they were so desperate. That part’s kind of fun. But it’s definitely not the physical side of it, because that’s so gross and it really hurts my throat. I mean, it’s sort of fun getting in the rhythm of it. But it’s never fun fun.”
Performing oral sex could make girls feel like the more active partner in an encounter. By contrast, they described cunnilingus and intercourse as passive, like something that was being done to them, leaving them vulnerable. Those empowered feelings about fellatio, though, coexisted with their opposites: a lack of control, pressure to comply, the unspoken threat of danger. Sam commented that while her male peers had been warned not to coerce girls into intercourse, pushing for oral was fair game. Because of that, while she had “plenty of guy friends,” she preferred not to be alone with them (which would, it seems, be an obstacle to true friendship). “In my social world, if you’re hanging out alone with a guy, the usual expectation is that you’re going to hook up with him,” she explained. “And if you decide not to, he might try to pressure you. So I’ll hang out with a guy at school, but I would never go to his house or to a movie or do anything that could be construed as more than ‘just friends’ unless I wanted that to happen. It’s not that they’d force themselves on you; it’s that there would be pressure. There would be disappointment. And there might be tension in our relationship if it didn’t happen.”
I want to be clear here. Sam was not a pushover, not a meek or mousy girl. She was an honor student, an editor on her school paper, a varsity tennis player. She identified as a feminist and casually bandied about terms such as slut shaming, gender binary, and rape culture. She was applying to top-tier colleges. She was an astute observer of her world. She was also, most definitely, immersed in it. Nearly all the girls I interviewed were bright, assertive, ambitious. If I had been interviewing them about their professional dreams or their attitudes toward leadership or their willingness to compete with boys in the classroom, I might have walked away inspired. A sophomore at an Ivy League college, a lacrosse player whose mother was a partner in a large law firm, bragged to me about the “strong women” in her family. “My grandmother is a firecracker at eighty-eight, and my mom is crazy, and my sister and I are going to be as crazy as they are,” she said. “In my family, you have to have a personality and be loud. That’s how we interact. It’s like a form of feminine power and knowing yourself.”
Even so, she described how, at age thirteen, she slipped into a bedroom with her best friend’s older brother, a ninth-grader on whom she’d had a longtime crush. Although she had never kissed a boy, never held hands, never had a boyfriend, somehow—she doesn’t remember the details—she ended up going down on him. Afterward, he never mentioned the incident again, so neither did she. Her subsequent sexual experiences, a handful of casual hookups, haven’t been much different. “It’s always the same unspoken sequence,” she said. “You make out, then he feels you up, then you give him head, and that’s it. I think girls aren’t taught to express their wants. We’re these docile creatures that just learn to please.”
“Wait a minute,” I countered. “Didn’t you just tell me about all the strong women role models in your family, about how you were loud and have a big personality and didn’t take shit?”
“I know,” she said. “I think I didn’t realize . . .” She paused, trying to reconcile the contradiction. “I guess no one ever told me that the strong female image also applies to sex.”
Discussions of sexual assault and consistent, enthusiastic consent are, thankfully, becoming more common on college a
nd some high school campuses, yet if teens think of fellatio as not-sex (or not “anything”), if it’s thought of as an entitlement or considered an appeasement, then both girls’ right to say no and boys’ obligation to respect that are compromised, and the lines between consent and coercion and assault risk becoming blurred. “You know,” Anna mused, “in some ways giving head is a bigger deal than sex. Because it doesn’t necessarily do anything for me. So it’s like doing the person a favor because you love and care about them. And if it’s someone you’re dating, there’s an expectation that he’ll reciprocate. But in hookups, guys are typically really douchey about it. And there’s pressure for the girl to do it. So it’s about how comfortable you are resisting that pressure or not. It gets awkward to keep resisting.”
Most young men do, of course, take no for an answer. Yet nearly every girl I spoke with had at least one experience with a boy who had tried, despite her clear refusal, to coerce or force her into oral sex: verbally, via repeated texts, or by physically planting his hands on her shoulders and pushing downward. A sophomore at a midwestern public university, for instance, told me she felt lucky that she’d never been sexually assaulted. A few minutes later she described going back to a boy’s room after a party during her freshman year. They kissed for a while, and then he attempted the shoulder push. She said no, and he backed off, only to try again a few minutes later, and then once more shortly after that. When she refused for the third time, he blew up. “Fuck you, then. I’ll find someone else,” he said and shoved her out of his room. It was the middle of the night in February and her dorm was two miles away. She cried the whole way home.
Another young woman, a freshman at a New England college, told me that she performed oral sex for the first time shortly after her sixteenth birthday. It was not by choice. “It was the summer after sophomore year in high school,” she recalled. “I’d been talking to this guy for a while; he seemed nice. We were in the back of his car kissing. He just . . . I don’t know how it happened. I was high, and that was confusing. He was very aggressive. He wanted to have sex, and I was like, ‘I don’t think this is a good idea.’ He was not accepting. He kept trying for sex. And I was like no. So he sort of forced oral sex. He pushed my shoulders. And I didn’t know how to get out of it. I was mostly just shocked. It wasn’t a good feeling. And it’s lasted. I never liked the idea of oral sex again after that. I still don’t.”
Girls have long been made the gatekeepers of male desire, charged with containing it, diverting it, controlling it. Providing reliable release from it had now become their responsibility as well. Oral sex had become their compromise, a loophole, a strategy for carrying out that expectation with the minimum of physical, social, or emotional fuss. “It’s almost like . . . clean, you know what I mean?” a junior at a New York City public high school told me. I didn’t know what she meant, not really. “It’s like . . .” she said, “it’s like . . . it’s what’s expected of you.”
Girls rarely mentioned manually stimulating a boy. If the goal was to remain detached and impersonal, I would’ve thought that would be the obvious choice. “No,” said Ruby in Chicago. “A guy can do that himself. ‘A hand job is a man job. A blow job is yo’ job.’ Guys will actually say that. ‘Just give me a blow job if you’re going to do anything.’”
Listening to stories of obligatory, sometimes coerced, usually one-sided oral sex, I began to wonder: What if, rather than blow jobs, guys were expecting girls to, say, fetch them lattes from Starbucks? Would the girls be so compliant?
Sam laughed when I asked her that. “Well, a latte costs money . . .”
“Okay,” I said. “Pretend it was free. Let’s say guys expected you to keep getting them cups of water from the kitchen whenever you were alone. Would you be so willing? And would you mind that they never offered to bring you one in return?”
Sam laughed again. “Well, I guess when you put it that way . . .”
As Anna said, reciprocity in casual encounters was never assumed. That was fine with some girls, even a relief; those like Anna, however, who enjoyed oral sex, were miffed. “It’s just expected that the guy will get off,” she complained, “and then maybe he will be like”—she dropped her voice into a low register and gestured halfheartedly toward my torso with her chin—“‘Oh, uh, do you want me to . . . ?’ It’s never like he’ll do something for me and maybe I’ll do something for him. It’s like, naturally I’ll do something and then he’ll ask if I ‘want’ him to.”
One young woman I met, a college freshman who was a self-described “nympho” (who had also, she said, spent every summer of her teens at “Jesus camp”) told me that she no longer tolerated lack of reciprocity from her “randoms.” “The worst experience I had was when I hooked up with this guy and he got me down to my bra and underwear and he’s in his boxers. Normally the next thing would be the bra comes off. But the bra didn’t come off. Instead, all of a sudden his boxers were off. And then he did this”—she pantomimed the shoulder push. “And I was like, ‘Wait, just because my organs are inside and yours are outside I’m not going to get anything and you expect me to go down on you?’ I was like, ‘We are done. This is not going to happen.’ It was incredibly awkward, though. I had to get him out of my room.”
It’s Sacred Down There. Also Icky.
When my daughter was a baby I read somewhere that, while labeling their infants’ body parts (“here’s your nose,” “here are your toes”), parents typically include a boy’s genitals (at the very least, “here’s your pee-pee”) but not a girl’s. Leaving something unnamed makes it quite literally unspeakable: a void, an absence, a taboo. Nor does that silence change much as girls get older. Adolescent penises insist on recognition. Enter any high school and you’ll see them scrawled everywhere: on lockers, on notebooks, on desks, on clipboards. Boys cannot seem to restrain themselves from drawing their sexual organs, loud and proud, on any blank surface. But whither the bushy vulva, the magnificent minge, the triangular twat?
Did I hear an “eww”? Exactly.
Even the most comprehensive sex education classes stick with a woman’s internal parts—uteri, tubes, ovaries. Those classic diagrams of a woman’s reproductive system, the ones shaped like the head of a steer, blur into a gray Y between the legs, as if the vulva and the labia, let alone the clitoris, don’t exist. Imagine not clueing a twelve-year-old boy into the existence of his penis! And whereas males’ puberty is characterized by ejaculation, masturbation, and the emergence of a near-unstoppable sex drive, females’ is defined by . . . periods. And the possibility of unwanted pregnancy. Where is the discussion of girls’ sexual development? When do we talk to girls about desire and pleasure? When do we explain the miraculous nuances of their anatomy? When do we address exploration, self-knowledge? No wonder boys’ physical needs seem inevitable to teens while girls’ are, at best, optional.
Few of the heterosexual young women I interviewed had ever had an orgasm with a partner, though most, from time to time, had faked it, taking their cues from the soundtrack of porn videos. Around a third masturbated regularly, which was, I was surprised to discover, about average. About half said they had never masturbated at all. It’s hard to imagine adults would stand for such ignorance or lack of curiosity about any other body part. Most girls waved away my questions on masturbation, saying things such as “I have a boyfriend to do that” (though these were the same girls who’d never come with a partner). Beyond making them dependent on someone else for their pleasure, this was yet another inversion of what they said boys believed: that since they could masturbate on their own (it was a “man job”), they didn’t require a partner for that. As for being on the receiving end of oral sex, girls tended to describe allowing (let alone wanting) a boy to head south as an intimate, emotional act requiring a deep level of trust. “I was in a relationship with a kid for a year where I had given him head,” recalled Rachel in Chicago, “but I never felt comfortable for him to return the favor. Because . . . okay, this is weird to say
, but a guy going down on you is more like a sacred thing. Like once you’ve done that, you really must be comfortable with the person, because it is not something that I’m just going to let you do.”
“I’d rather have sex before I did that,” Devon agreed.
“A guy is totally aware of what he looks like down there,” Rachel continued, “but I don’t know what they’re seeing on me. I can’t see it.”
“Well,” I said, “there are these things called mirrors . . .”
“Yeah,” Rachel said dryly. “I’m not going to do that.”
It’s understandable that girls wouldn’t let a partner go “down there” if they themselves were squeamish about their genitals. They worried that their vaginas were ugly, rank, unappealing. Again, not new concerns—I recall hiding a can of FDS “feminine deodorant spray” in the back of a desk drawer in junior high—but how is it that they still persist? Hadn’t these girls heard of The Vagina Monologues? Erin, a senior at a San Francisco high school who was president of her school’s feminist issues club, boasted that she was “really good” at giving oral sex to her boyfriend of a year, but when I asked how she felt about receiving it, she wrinkled her nose. “He doesn’t go down on me,” she said. “He doesn’t want to. And I’ve never asked. Because . . .” She took a deep breath. “I don’t like my vagina,” she admitted. “I know that sucks. And I don’t know why it should be so different, but I’ve internalized that idea.
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