I think you're too quick to dismiss the hygiene angle. Even in the modern age I've had plenty of experiences where a partner did not smell the best, and throwing taste in there makes that even worse.
I came here to say exactly the same thing, that David's dismissal of the "showers" explanation is a bit too rash and decisive. There may have been "adequate" hygiene in "lots of past societies," but the convenience and efficacy of having piped-in water, readily opened up at any time in bespoke cleansing areas, would undoubtedly result in more frequent and thorough cleaning of sebaceous accretions that would otherwise develop a foul and buttery pong.
The presence of a wash basin or a bucket in a common area may have provided adequate hygiene by the standards of the time but that doesn't mean people would have been likely to hoist a leg and start lathering up Parson's Notch.
It's probably not a coincidence that the tribe of people whose demonym -- "French" -- is a synonym for oral sex were the ones who invented the bidet in the 17th century.
It's said that one of the peculiar customs of Ninon de l'Enclos, often reputed to be one of the most desirable women who ever lived, was bathing regularly, perhaps daily.
Is pornography the answer? The argument could go something like:
1. Oral Sex is depicted in pornography more frequently than it's actually practiced between couples. This could be because it's more visually appealing than other sex acts, or easier to film/preform, or safer for performers.
2. Pornography consumption and exposure has increased substantially over the past 30-40 years thanks to the internet.
3. Viewing pornography meaningfully changes people's behavior when they have partnered sex, either because it changes their expectations for what's normal or "conditions" them into finding things arousing that they others wouldn't.
I have no evidence that any of the 3 above claims are true.
Your 1 strikes me as the weakest part of the argument. If anything I would have thought that the activity most suited for porn is ordinary foreplay, kissing and caressing and undressing. For one thing that feels more like seduction, sexual tension over will she/won't she, than either intercourse or oral sex.
Years ago, I looked at a book on the Latin sexual vocabulary. It cited several distinct verbs: fello (to take a penis into a mouth), irrumo (to insert a penis into a mouth), futuo (to insert a penis into a vagina), pedico (to insert a penis into an anus), and ceveo (to receive a penis into a vagina OR anus). I believe there also were sexual uses for frigo (to rub) and lingo (to lick). So the Romans at least were aware of such activities.
It may not be irrelevant that Christianity opposed nonprocreative sex, and eventually decreed criminal penalties for it; I have read that "sodomy" (a very broadly defined crime in many jurisdiction) carried the death penalty for a long time. Knowledge of such practices may also have been suppressed, beyond the suppressive effects of legal punishment of engaging in them.
"Procreative" may have been an issue. The Roman emperors seem to have been chronically worried about low fertility, especially in the upper classes.
Seems like venereal diseases could motivate opposition to oral sex too, even in cases wherein oral sex doesn't risk transmission (AFAIK, very few or no cases wherein oral carries no risk but vaginal carries high risk): if doing sexy stuff is known to invoke the curse of God by way of disease, well, how much moreso a clearly ungodly act like cunnilingus?!
In Yukichi Fukuzawa’s memoir, he mentioned a bowl he used during a voyage to America… He used it as an eating bowl. Anyways, the story went something like how later he learned said bowl had been used at a brothel for prostitutes to spit into after finishing their customers. This implies oral sex was a thing in Japan in the nineteenth century and probably long before that.
1. Nature. I would guess that until fairly recently most humans would have had much more observation of livestock (and in the case animal husbandry) and wild animals almost from infancy and learn a great deal about the birds and the bees, so to speak, in that way. But they would never see any animals engage in oral sex, and if they never saw anyone else do it because the kind of thing kept private, they would have nothing to imitate and it might just not occur to them as something erotic (or expected) instead of evoking a disgust reaction, which I'd guess is common when imagining anything going into one's mouth that isn't thought to be nutritious good or healthy medicine. There are some oral sexual practices thought to be pleasurable by some minority but which a majority still finds disgusting in just this manner. I have never researched it, but I've heard that deep French kissing (also something never seen in animals) was considered a novel act of romance and/or disgusting by people exposed to it for the first time.
2. Prostitution. Prostitutes in the Roman empire would sometimes make coins depicting acts and prices, and I suspect such devices or "menus" were actually quite common in any place with a large and tolerated prostitution sector, which seems to be most places at most times in history. Looking for these menus might provide some insight into what practices were in demand in that market. But also, it may be that during eras of moral tightening such sectors shrank substantially in size, supply fell, and demand also fell when a few new generation were born into ignorance that was never sullied in this respect.
I'm largely with the hygiene crowd. These days our hygiene is beyond any objective idea of "adequate". Not 100 years ago, some people in America were still doing the thing where there was a weekly bath - the tin tub was taken off of the side of the house, a fire was lit to heat water, and then everyone bathed, children first, then women, then men, in the same water. Frequent hand washing and oral hygiene is another thing we take for granted. - we can get some unpleasant infections if the wrong stuff touches the mucous membranes.
The other angle I'd look into is mass media. These days, someone on the opposite side of the planet can do something, and thanks to social media, a billion people might hear about it the next day. 20 years ago, this was the province of computer geeks. 30 years ago the World Wide Web barely existed. Non-rhetorically, where would someone in 1924 hear about oral sex? What classes of people would have access to that information? What types of people would spread it?
Thinking about this -- it's unclear to me whether people writing in the past got more enjoyment out of the sex acts themselves or out of the thrill that they were behaving in proscribed ways. Rather than 'cheating to get sex' were they 'having sex in order to get to cheat'?
Once the idea that 'sex is primarily for pleasure' takes hold, it is no wonder that people look for more pleasurable ways to have sex. Right now, I am told, the majority of American college aged women have 'experienced and mostly enjoyed' mild choking. see: https://unherd.com/2024/03/on-choking-during-sex/ Do they share goals with those unfortunates who are found dead after hanging themselves while masterbating because they were told it made the sex better? The unherd author, Mary Gaitskill is interested in the psychological reasons why women like being choked, but I wondered if the reasons were more physiological. (This idea assumes that the result is more pleasurable, or at least that curious people were willing to test the thesis.)
Have you checked sources like the <em>Kama Sutra</em>? It documents an awful lot of positions, and if neither fellatio nor cunnilingus is included, that suggests they weren't done in that time and place... or perhaps that they didn't count as "sex" and therefore weren't interesting enough to include.
There's also an early-20th-century Norwegian sculptor named Emanuel Vigeland (brother to the better-known Gustav Vigeland, IIRC) who sculpted an encyclopedic collection of sexual positions.
This one is reliably dated to 940 CE. The temple has depictions of both fellatio and cunnilingus. At least in India we can safely say it was well known and well practiced method.
I am not too expert on KS, but I know that it had entire section on female simulation which goes into topics like dildos and mentions oral sex as one of the tools that partners can use when a dildo (or erect penis) might not be available.
Not sure if data backs this up, but here's a potential thread: The rise of fellatio directly correlates with a rise in male sexual satiation. Not sure if this holds for women, but it's pretty well documented that novelty increases libido for guys, particularly when they're approaching satiation. The rise of contraceptives led to more sex all around, and the rise of digital porn led to more masturbation. Guys are more satiated then they've ever been, so there's a growing need for sexual novelty, in order to get things moving along. Fellatio fills that role pretty effectively, hence the recent boom?
Another obvious substitute for traditional sex I haven't seen mentioned here: toys.
When I was in Boy Scouts (hell of a segue there, I know), we visited Philmont, a high adventure camp in New Mexico. Among the many activities were tours of reproduced camps of pre-European Americans. It's been decades, but based on where we were, I would guess they were Navajo, Pueblo, or perhaps Comanche. Inside a teepee, we got a lot of detail about everyday home life - including a polished horn we passed among ourselves as the guide explained that while the men were out hunting, the women resorted to that.
It wouldn't be hard to craft all sorts of things, even for a pre-metalworking culture. Inexpensive rubber and contraceptives probably wouldn't alleviate the appeal for all the other artificial aids still in existence. Especially once augmented by modern lubricants.
One thing that might have something to do with it: Not all women reach orgasm from vaginal penetration. However, the human tongue (male or female) is very well able both to locate the clitoris and to supply it with lubrication and pressure, and the clitoris is a superior place for erotic stimulation for a lot of women. Perhaps as the idea that sexual gratification is desirable for women, and providing it for their partners, has become more widely accepted, such concerns have influence sexual practices.
I wonder how many references to such things were purged or censored... I recall that Gargantua and Pantagruel was pretty heavily suppressed by the French church in the early 1500's for obscenity, so it may well be that many other works of the time (as well as earlier and later) went through a pretty strong filter, either disappearing after writing or authors self censoring to avoid getting in trouble. Extant works might leave out references entirely, or use very obscure ones that wouldn't be recognizable today.
That could also have strong knock on effects as well, as over time people more or less forget things that used to be more common just from lack of examples. That might explain the dearth of examples in the 17-1900s, along with a sense of "proper people don't talk about that" meaning that works that did mention it might not be preserved.
The sources I am looking at talk about sex pretty freely — in the case of Aretino including anal sex, for Casanova lesbian and anal — so it would be odd if they suppressed oral. I agree that pressure reduced the amount of material we have — the artist responsible for the pictures that Aretino based his sonnets on got in a good deal of trouble for it — but I don't see why what got through would be a biased sample of acts.
That's a fair point, and I really don't have a good sense of what culture was like at all in the Mediterranean during those times, so I totally believe they are more open about it. It does seem plausible that some acts were considered more taboo than others, so while maybe talking about lesbian relationships between unmarried women was fine other acts were considered over the line. I recall people complaining that movies can show dozens of people getting violently murdered by the main characters and retain a PG-13 rating, but showing a naked woman is an instant R, so I can imagine what people thought was too racey over the course of 2-300 years might not map up with my expectations, either.
Were I researching it I would also be concerned that the slang or euphemisms might have changed quite a bit. People seem to love coming up with new terms for things, and future people looking back on us will probably wonder why the hell "tossing salad" should come into certain conversations, for example, or what a "blumpkin" even is. Though maybe that is a more modern habit too... maybe premoderns weren't so keen on euphemisms.
More or less every society seems to have euphemisms. There's a well recognized process in linguistics where one word is used for a negatively valued concept, and people are uncomfortable with it, so they come up with a euphemism, and then over time the euphemism becomes well understood to mean that thing, and can no longer be used, and a new euphemism emerges.
When I was in junior high school in the 1960s, we were told that idiot, imbecile, and moron were technical terms for different degrees of intellectual dysfunction; but there were already moron jokes them (Q: Why did the moron throw the clock out the window? A: He wanted to see time fly). So people started saying "mentally retarded" (with different degrees: educable, trainable, custodial). And then "retard" became an insult. So the next generation was told to say, I think, "intellectually challenged"—and then people started coming up with sarcastic variants on that.
Or consider the way "gay" went from "homosexual" to "stupid."
Yea, definitely agree on that. I am just wondering if maybe moderns, especially with the internet, tend to split more hairs and come up with lots of different names for things more aggressively than previous people. A gay buddy of mine from college once spent about 10 minutes explaining the encyclopedic nomenclature of different types of gay men, and this was in 2000. I suspect that kind of differentiation requires a lot of easy communication by people very interested in the subject matter.
I dunno, I can see it going either way. Premoderns had much more detailed and distinct local dialects just by virtue of isolation, so maybe even contemporaries wouldn't recognize each other's euphemisms and slang. I can't help but suspect if we were to read a 1500's book with contemporaries they would be really confused as to why we didn't get some of the jokes and puns, like when I tried watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail with my daughter when she was 9. I gave up at the Black Knight scene when she asked "Daddy, why is this movie funny?"
It would require a lot of explaining for most people to see why describing what mercenaries do as "mercin'"* is humorous.
I think you're too quick to dismiss the hygiene angle. Even in the modern age I've had plenty of experiences where a partner did not smell the best, and throwing taste in there makes that even worse.
I came here to say exactly the same thing, that David's dismissal of the "showers" explanation is a bit too rash and decisive. There may have been "adequate" hygiene in "lots of past societies," but the convenience and efficacy of having piped-in water, readily opened up at any time in bespoke cleansing areas, would undoubtedly result in more frequent and thorough cleaning of sebaceous accretions that would otherwise develop a foul and buttery pong.
The presence of a wash basin or a bucket in a common area may have provided adequate hygiene by the standards of the time but that doesn't mean people would have been likely to hoist a leg and start lathering up Parson's Notch.
It's probably not a coincidence that the tribe of people whose demonym -- "French" -- is a synonym for oral sex were the ones who invented the bidet in the 17th century.
It's said that one of the peculiar customs of Ninon de l'Enclos, often reputed to be one of the most desirable women who ever lived, was bathing regularly, perhaps daily.
Is pornography the answer? The argument could go something like:
1. Oral Sex is depicted in pornography more frequently than it's actually practiced between couples. This could be because it's more visually appealing than other sex acts, or easier to film/preform, or safer for performers.
2. Pornography consumption and exposure has increased substantially over the past 30-40 years thanks to the internet.
3. Viewing pornography meaningfully changes people's behavior when they have partnered sex, either because it changes their expectations for what's normal or "conditions" them into finding things arousing that they others wouldn't.
I have no evidence that any of the 3 above claims are true.
Your 1 strikes me as the weakest part of the argument. If anything I would have thought that the activity most suited for porn is ordinary foreplay, kissing and caressing and undressing. For one thing that feels more like seduction, sexual tension over will she/won't she, than either intercourse or oral sex.
Years ago, I looked at a book on the Latin sexual vocabulary. It cited several distinct verbs: fello (to take a penis into a mouth), irrumo (to insert a penis into a mouth), futuo (to insert a penis into a vagina), pedico (to insert a penis into an anus), and ceveo (to receive a penis into a vagina OR anus). I believe there also were sexual uses for frigo (to rub) and lingo (to lick). So the Romans at least were aware of such activities.
It may not be irrelevant that Christianity opposed nonprocreative sex, and eventually decreed criminal penalties for it; I have read that "sodomy" (a very broadly defined crime in many jurisdiction) carried the death penalty for a long time. Knowledge of such practices may also have been suppressed, beyond the suppressive effects of legal punishment of engaging in them.
"Procreative" may have been an issue. The Roman emperors seem to have been chronically worried about low fertility, especially in the upper classes.
Seems like venereal diseases could motivate opposition to oral sex too, even in cases wherein oral sex doesn't risk transmission (AFAIK, very few or no cases wherein oral carries no risk but vaginal carries high risk): if doing sexy stuff is known to invoke the curse of God by way of disease, well, how much moreso a clearly ungodly act like cunnilingus?!
In Yukichi Fukuzawa’s memoir, he mentioned a bowl he used during a voyage to America… He used it as an eating bowl. Anyways, the story went something like how later he learned said bowl had been used at a brothel for prostitutes to spit into after finishing their customers. This implies oral sex was a thing in Japan in the nineteenth century and probably long before that.
Two thoughts.
1. Nature. I would guess that until fairly recently most humans would have had much more observation of livestock (and in the case animal husbandry) and wild animals almost from infancy and learn a great deal about the birds and the bees, so to speak, in that way. But they would never see any animals engage in oral sex, and if they never saw anyone else do it because the kind of thing kept private, they would have nothing to imitate and it might just not occur to them as something erotic (or expected) instead of evoking a disgust reaction, which I'd guess is common when imagining anything going into one's mouth that isn't thought to be nutritious good or healthy medicine. There are some oral sexual practices thought to be pleasurable by some minority but which a majority still finds disgusting in just this manner. I have never researched it, but I've heard that deep French kissing (also something never seen in animals) was considered a novel act of romance and/or disgusting by people exposed to it for the first time.
2. Prostitution. Prostitutes in the Roman empire would sometimes make coins depicting acts and prices, and I suspect such devices or "menus" were actually quite common in any place with a large and tolerated prostitution sector, which seems to be most places at most times in history. Looking for these menus might provide some insight into what practices were in demand in that market. But also, it may be that during eras of moral tightening such sectors shrank substantially in size, supply fell, and demand also fell when a few new generation were born into ignorance that was never sullied in this respect.
I'm largely with the hygiene crowd. These days our hygiene is beyond any objective idea of "adequate". Not 100 years ago, some people in America were still doing the thing where there was a weekly bath - the tin tub was taken off of the side of the house, a fire was lit to heat water, and then everyone bathed, children first, then women, then men, in the same water. Frequent hand washing and oral hygiene is another thing we take for granted. - we can get some unpleasant infections if the wrong stuff touches the mucous membranes.
The other angle I'd look into is mass media. These days, someone on the opposite side of the planet can do something, and thanks to social media, a billion people might hear about it the next day. 20 years ago, this was the province of computer geeks. 30 years ago the World Wide Web barely existed. Non-rhetorically, where would someone in 1924 hear about oral sex? What classes of people would have access to that information? What types of people would spread it?
Yeah, it's showers
Thinking about this -- it's unclear to me whether people writing in the past got more enjoyment out of the sex acts themselves or out of the thrill that they were behaving in proscribed ways. Rather than 'cheating to get sex' were they 'having sex in order to get to cheat'?
Once the idea that 'sex is primarily for pleasure' takes hold, it is no wonder that people look for more pleasurable ways to have sex. Right now, I am told, the majority of American college aged women have 'experienced and mostly enjoyed' mild choking. see: https://unherd.com/2024/03/on-choking-during-sex/ Do they share goals with those unfortunates who are found dead after hanging themselves while masterbating because they were told it made the sex better? The unherd author, Mary Gaitskill is interested in the psychological reasons why women like being choked, but I wondered if the reasons were more physiological. (This idea assumes that the result is more pleasurable, or at least that curious people were willing to test the thesis.)
FWIW I believe that Kinsey reported that about half of his sample of women had performed fellatio, based on data collected in late 1940’s.
Have you checked sources like the <em>Kama Sutra</em>? It documents an awful lot of positions, and if neither fellatio nor cunnilingus is included, that suggests they weren't done in that time and place... or perhaps that they didn't count as "sex" and therefore weren't interesting enough to include.
There's also an early-20th-century Norwegian sculptor named Emanuel Vigeland (brother to the better-known Gustav Vigeland, IIRC) who sculpted an encyclopedic collection of sexual positions.
Here is a Kamasutra chapter associated with fellatio.
https://sacred-texts.com/sex/kama/kama209.htm
Kamasutra is dated to be between 300BC to 200 CE and was translated into English in 1880s.
Here is s statue of a men giving fellatio to another men from India's famed Khajuraho temples that have several depictions of sexual activity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayoni#/media/File:At_the_Lakshmana_temple_in_Khajuraho_(954_CE),_a_man_receives_fellatio_from_a_seated_male_as_part_of_an_orgiastic_scene.jpg
This one is reliably dated to 940 CE. The temple has depictions of both fellatio and cunnilingus. At least in India we can safely say it was well known and well practiced method.
I am not too expert on KS, but I know that it had entire section on female simulation which goes into topics like dildos and mentions oral sex as one of the tools that partners can use when a dildo (or erect penis) might not be available.
Not sure if data backs this up, but here's a potential thread: The rise of fellatio directly correlates with a rise in male sexual satiation. Not sure if this holds for women, but it's pretty well documented that novelty increases libido for guys, particularly when they're approaching satiation. The rise of contraceptives led to more sex all around, and the rise of digital porn led to more masturbation. Guys are more satiated then they've ever been, so there's a growing need for sexual novelty, in order to get things moving along. Fellatio fills that role pretty effectively, hence the recent boom?
Another obvious substitute for traditional sex I haven't seen mentioned here: toys.
When I was in Boy Scouts (hell of a segue there, I know), we visited Philmont, a high adventure camp in New Mexico. Among the many activities were tours of reproduced camps of pre-European Americans. It's been decades, but based on where we were, I would guess they were Navajo, Pueblo, or perhaps Comanche. Inside a teepee, we got a lot of detail about everyday home life - including a polished horn we passed among ourselves as the guide explained that while the men were out hunting, the women resorted to that.
It wouldn't be hard to craft all sorts of things, even for a pre-metalworking culture. Inexpensive rubber and contraceptives probably wouldn't alleviate the appeal for all the other artificial aids still in existence. Especially once augmented by modern lubricants.
Not to mention batteries.
One thing that might have something to do with it: Not all women reach orgasm from vaginal penetration. However, the human tongue (male or female) is very well able both to locate the clitoris and to supply it with lubrication and pressure, and the clitoris is a superior place for erotic stimulation for a lot of women. Perhaps as the idea that sexual gratification is desirable for women, and providing it for their partners, has become more widely accepted, such concerns have influence sexual practices.
I wonder how many references to such things were purged or censored... I recall that Gargantua and Pantagruel was pretty heavily suppressed by the French church in the early 1500's for obscenity, so it may well be that many other works of the time (as well as earlier and later) went through a pretty strong filter, either disappearing after writing or authors self censoring to avoid getting in trouble. Extant works might leave out references entirely, or use very obscure ones that wouldn't be recognizable today.
That could also have strong knock on effects as well, as over time people more or less forget things that used to be more common just from lack of examples. That might explain the dearth of examples in the 17-1900s, along with a sense of "proper people don't talk about that" meaning that works that did mention it might not be preserved.
The sources I am looking at talk about sex pretty freely — in the case of Aretino including anal sex, for Casanova lesbian and anal — so it would be odd if they suppressed oral. I agree that pressure reduced the amount of material we have — the artist responsible for the pictures that Aretino based his sonnets on got in a good deal of trouble for it — but I don't see why what got through would be a biased sample of acts.
That's a fair point, and I really don't have a good sense of what culture was like at all in the Mediterranean during those times, so I totally believe they are more open about it. It does seem plausible that some acts were considered more taboo than others, so while maybe talking about lesbian relationships between unmarried women was fine other acts were considered over the line. I recall people complaining that movies can show dozens of people getting violently murdered by the main characters and retain a PG-13 rating, but showing a naked woman is an instant R, so I can imagine what people thought was too racey over the course of 2-300 years might not map up with my expectations, either.
Were I researching it I would also be concerned that the slang or euphemisms might have changed quite a bit. People seem to love coming up with new terms for things, and future people looking back on us will probably wonder why the hell "tossing salad" should come into certain conversations, for example, or what a "blumpkin" even is. Though maybe that is a more modern habit too... maybe premoderns weren't so keen on euphemisms.
More or less every society seems to have euphemisms. There's a well recognized process in linguistics where one word is used for a negatively valued concept, and people are uncomfortable with it, so they come up with a euphemism, and then over time the euphemism becomes well understood to mean that thing, and can no longer be used, and a new euphemism emerges.
When I was in junior high school in the 1960s, we were told that idiot, imbecile, and moron were technical terms for different degrees of intellectual dysfunction; but there were already moron jokes them (Q: Why did the moron throw the clock out the window? A: He wanted to see time fly). So people started saying "mentally retarded" (with different degrees: educable, trainable, custodial). And then "retard" became an insult. So the next generation was told to say, I think, "intellectually challenged"—and then people started coming up with sarcastic variants on that.
Or consider the way "gay" went from "homosexual" to "stupid."
Yea, definitely agree on that. I am just wondering if maybe moderns, especially with the internet, tend to split more hairs and come up with lots of different names for things more aggressively than previous people. A gay buddy of mine from college once spent about 10 minutes explaining the encyclopedic nomenclature of different types of gay men, and this was in 2000. I suspect that kind of differentiation requires a lot of easy communication by people very interested in the subject matter.
I dunno, I can see it going either way. Premoderns had much more detailed and distinct local dialects just by virtue of isolation, so maybe even contemporaries wouldn't recognize each other's euphemisms and slang. I can't help but suspect if we were to read a 1500's book with contemporaries they would be really confused as to why we didn't get some of the jokes and puns, like when I tried watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail with my daughter when she was 9. I gave up at the Black Knight scene when she asked "Daddy, why is this movie funny?"
It would require a lot of explaining for most people to see why describing what mercenaries do as "mercin'"* is humorous.
*pronounced as "merkin"