It's 2015, and Men Are Still Being Pussies About Eating Pussy
LatestIn explaining why he will never “turn your cherry out,” a man named William Lloyd may have just inadvertently pinned down why casual sex is so bad for straight women: because for some men, the very thing that will help women achieve orgasm is too gross and traumatic to ever attempt more than once.
In a piece called “Why I Don’t Go Down on Girls” over at The Tab, Lloyd explains that people are always shocked by his admission that he’s a lazy, squeamish lover. He admits he grew up in a perfect storm of sexual ignorance—no sex-ed and plenty of Catholic guilt. Like most men, he was fed a steady diet of free online porn which prepared him for sex “about as well as a man with a bazooka is equipped to swat flies.”
After unsurprising bad luck with women, he eventually found someone willing to fuck him. However, Lloyd writes, he was unprepared for the realities of sex:
There’s no way of being ambiguous here: the first time I went down on a girl she ejaculated all over my face.
A hot, sticky, wet jet of piss.
The next day my eyes were dry and itchy. They appeared to be swimming in some kind of red soup. More than piss I felt rinsed in a shame and embarrassment so total as to make me say to myself that I’d never go down on a girl a second time.
To be clear, it’s his prerogative to not perform any sex act he doesn’t want to. It’s “OK,” theoretically, for anyone not to perform any sex act they don’t want to. For every sex move one person loves, there’s someone who finds it about as exciting as applying for a second mortgage. So it goes.
But one “bad” experience is no reason to never try again. I should also point out that another straight hetero dude who outed himself as a cunnilingus hater also admitted his first experience attempting it was a bad one. Coincidence? If every woman who’d ever been jizzed on wrong stopped sucking dick, well, there’d be a lot less dick sucking.
Let us compare this situation to an essay we covered by Alison Stevenson, a woman who announced her own hatred for oral sex and subsequent decision to stop giving blowjobs. Here’s the thing: Alison Stevenson and William Lloyd both find giving oral sex gross and not fun. Lloyd did it once, hated it, and swore it off forever, whereas Stevenson gave head for most of her head-appropriate life, never got off, and finally got fed up.
By not sucking dick, Stevenson has prevented no man from still getting off via sex. By not going down on women, Lloyd has effectively refused to give women orgasms from sex, while ostensibly continuing to get them for himself. This is why Alison Stevenson is a hero, and William Lloyd is the exact opposite. Here is a dude who has merely admitted aloud what legions of men have been doing for ages: not giving a shit whether the women they fuck come or not, and expecting applause.
But here’s the upside to this ongoing saga. Stevenson got a lot of shit about being “selfish” for refusing blow jobs, but as Lane Moore notes over at Cosmopolitan, people are giving Lloyd plenty of shit for his refusal, too, mostly by pointing that—news flash—blowjobs can be pretty gross. “Every girl who has ever gagged giving head is laughing and/or swearing at you,” writes one commenter. (And now let us direct you to the complex issue that is vomiting on a D.)
But the more important lesson here is that a large, essential part of what it means to be a good lover is to take pleasure in giving pleasure. It means moving past the squeamishness we’ve all had in some way or another about sex parts and treating sex as a mutually respectful, very fun way to relieve stress that both partners should benefit from. Bad casual sex between hetero men and women may have reached near epidemic levels, so listen up, boys: why not get over yourself and be part of the solution?
Illustration by Jim Cooke.