Sex and the Street: Achieving success downtown, and why I can never look a honey-bear straight in the eye.

In my senior year of high school, I began dating a boy named Chris* who I had been pretty close friends with throughout the years, and due to a strange mix of dares and – let’s face it – convenience, we ended up together. He was my first “real” boyfriend, and up to that point the only experience I’d ever had with guys had been a little kissing now and then. I had major issues with insecurity and my body, and had been afraid to show myself to anyone, but he was a good friend so it made things a bit easier. In true high school fashion, most of our hookups took place in the backseat of his Prius. Yes, a Prius’ backseat is incredibly tiny, especially considering his 6’ 4’’ frame, and yes, it was uncomfortable at best. Contrary to what my prior innocence would’ve predicted, we zoomed through the “bases” in no time. Nothing we’d been doing had been particularly pleasurable to me, so the logical progression seemed to be to oral sex. In terms of giving, I was nervous, but also pretty sure that it couldn’t be THAT hard (no pun intended), so I just went for it. In terms of receiving, I had my hang ups. I wasn’t sure my vagina was ready to be greeted so up close and personally. Of course I was worried about if it would look weird, smell weird, taste weird….I had always been insecure about the normal things, like my stomach and my thighs, and now I had a new part of my body to worry about. Unwilling to face this step unprotected, I came up with the genius idea of incorporating food into our sex life. Chocolate sauce? Too runny. Whipped cream? Too fluffy. My pussy’s topping of choice? Honey. It was late at night when we decided to try this out, and we both walked into a grocery store, in search of a cute little plastic bear to violate. We thought the cashiers were onto us. We quickly drove to a secluded spot where we liked to hook up, and he drizzled it on. “Mmm tasty,” he told me, and I tried to relax in that tiny backseat and enjoy. For the majority of our relationship, I would not let him go down on me without that honey bear present. More than 3 years later, I still can’t look at bottles of honey the same way.

Fortunately one day, we forgot the honey bear, and he said, “it’s ok, I’ll still do it.” I was a little afraid, but he didn’t really seem to mind, so I decided to just let it go. At the time I didn’t know that it was a terrible idea to put honey there in the first place, and I’m just glad I didn’t get any weird irritations from it all. Today, I laugh at how absolutely ridiculous the whole situation was, but I’m sure I felt the same way that a lot of girls have felt or feel about receiving. I don’t have any real statistics on this, but I’d say that if you ever meet a girl who “doesn’t like” receiving oral sex, there’s a 98% chance that she has vaginal insecurities, with the other 2% just having unfortunate experiences with clueless men. Growing up I’d always heard jokes about vaginas smelling like fish, or otherwise being particularly unpleasant. Once, a male friend of mine told me that he had pretended to choke on something to get out of eating a girl out once because it smelled so bad. I was TERRIFIED to be smelly-pussy-girl. Finally, half a bottle of honey, countless pairs of sticky underwear, and zero (ZERO!) orgasms later, I realized that this was no way to live.

Since then, I’ve let go of my pussy anxiety. With one recent and terribly upsetting exception (“where I come from, we just don’t do that!”), I’ve never met a man who wouldn’t go down on me, and thank God, because I enjoy (good) oral sex endlessly, mainly because it’s the only way a man can get me off without technological interference. Pussy smells like pussy, and that’s just how it is. And for all of the shit I’ve heard in music and in life about men’s aversion to it, in my experience, the majority of guys don’t mind going downtown every now and then. Adam once assured me, “well I wouldn’t, like, want to smell it all day long, but, it ain’t half bad.” Perhaps all of this talk about taste and smell is masking the real reason why I think that some men are averse to cunnilingus: because many of them don’t really know what they’re doing down there.

Sitting around the table for a meal yesterday, I asked my friends, “so, oral sex. How good are you at it?” The overwhelming answer from the men was, “I have no idea, but if I had to guess, pretty mediocre.” I felt sad for women everywhere; if this is the answer I was getting in public, I shudder at the thought of what was REALLY going on down there. “I just kind of get down there and hope it works,” one friend admitted. “You can never tell,” another explained, “you don’t know whether they actually like it, or if they are faking.” Faking orgasms, particularly during oral sex, seems to be an eternal sore spot for men. Upon admitting to a group of male friends that I’d once merely thought of faking an orgasm during oral sex, but didn’t, one yelled out, “You are a horrible person if you fake an orgasm while a guy is going down on you. That is the WORST thing you can do to a guy.” While that may be a bit of an exaggeration, it’s true, guys like it when girls actually get off. That’s kind of the point, right? So as a bit of advice to everyone, male or female, faking orgasms is a no-no. If you fake it, they’ll never learn. Well, “duh,” you might say, but faking orgasms is not as uncommon, even on this campus, as you may think. When I took a survey for a psych major’s thesis about faking orgasms, with the exception of me, all of the sexually active Princeton women she’d surveyed up to that point had faked orgasms with their partners.

I could go on and on about how faking orgasms is a terrible practice which ultimately results in bad habit formation and thus, fewer actual orgasms, but that’s another post. My friends for whom I decided to write this post may be disappointed, because I think they were looking for technical tips, but they can find that with a simple Google search. What I will say to the men out there is that when I’ve asked my girl friends what they like, they say the same unsurprising, but still important, things: softer strokes in the beginning, varying movements, directions, and tongue coverage (flat and wide versus pointy, etc), but most important is persistence and a good mindset. The best oral sex I’ve received has been from men who did not necessarily have a lot of experience, but who had expressly asked me to tell them what I liked or I didn’t like, and who (within reason) were willing to stick it out. Good oral sex flows not from expertise, but from an attitude. That is not to say that the most well-intentioned novice will instantly be able to make women cum left and right, but without the right attitude, it’s hard to be good at anything, really. When I’m going down on my boyfriend, my train of thought goes something like this: “I’m about to drive you insane, and you are going to fucking love this.” I would hope for both of our sakes that the man between my legs is thinking something similar. And sure, going downtown isn’t everyone’s favorite pastime (though for some, bless them, it is), but while you’re there, you might as well enjoy it. I don’t know everything about the art of masterful cunnilingus, but I know what feels good, and I remain dedicated to my research. ;)

* Name has been changed