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Dear How to Do It,
As a recent gift, I went down on my wife for the first time. She had three orgasms from it.
But I hated every minute of it. I tried doing it once before in a previous relationship and hated it then. I thought I might be over it, but I was wrong. It’s nothing personal against her; it’s just not for me. The trouble is that she’s been begging for a repeat ever since and has been trying to convince me to get used to it. Should I give it another shot? Is this sort of aversion the type of thing that can be overcome?
—Not Down With Going Down (he/him)
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Rich Juzwiak: This is a really hard thing to untangle because I think that we both believe that boundaries are boundaries and require no explanation to be valid. If you don’t want to do something sexually, you don’t have to do it.
At the same time, there is a kind of cliché of the heterosexual leaning man who refuses to give his partner oral sex despite how much oral sex she gives him. Sometimes it’s a point of pride. You sometimes hear people in interviews bragging about it. DJ Khaled once talked about how he doesn’t go down on women because “women should praise the man.” This kind of hatred or disdain of anything vaginal is wrapped up in misogyny or male privilege at the very least. So I guess that makes it the perfect thing to talk about in an advice column where we can say, “You don’t have to do this, but also, why not unpack it?”
Jessica Stoya: So, in the first part of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity, when the author is laying out the cultural contexts in which Christianity began, he sort of casually mentions that Romans did not perform oral sex on women. Romans did not eat pussy is essentially the statement that is made. And of course, you’re like, “OK, which Romans? What class? What time period? Are we talking about when the Roman Empire was all one? Did this carry through to the Byzantines?” While we’re on this digression, one time someone sent me a whole book about the brothel of Pompeii.
Rich: Wow.
Jessica: You never know what obscure academic work has been published. If someone knows about the cultural perspectives on eating pussy in the Byzantine Empire, please get in touch. So, there is, though, some amount of evidence that this Oxford-trained theologian dug up that undergirds the statement: Romans did not eat pussy. So the cultural tendency to be like, “Oh, I don’t do that because that’s not manly,” taken in the context of all the other stuff we know Romans were up to, is interesting. You’ll do all these other things, but not this act in particular. I have got to know why. There was a decision made there for a reason, and I need to know that reason, if it’s at all possible.
Anyway, no matter the reason, the “it’s just not for me” means that in the decision-making framework of each of us as individuals, and this column throughout its history, the answer to whether the letter writer should give it another shot is only if you want to for reasons that do not involve being coerced into it.
Rich: Right. One other thing that I often recommend is to be generous. You’re walking into a gray area sometimes when you’re thinking of things that you are not necessarily motivated to do sexually, that your partner wants to do. You don’t want to push yourself to the point of disgust or even discomfort. But if you’re less than 100 percent thrilled with this thing that you’re taking on, it still might be worth doing if it’s not too much of a hardship to endure. So, should you try it again? If you want to, if you feel like it, give it a try. See if you can break down your dislike through experience and thinking.
Jessica: In my opinion, even in scenarios where your first reaction is disgust, if you want to challenge yourself for the fun of it or you love this person so much and are so committed to them that you’re motivated to see if there’s a way to unpack, dismantle, defuse that disgust, then everybody is going to need more information about what about it you hate and what about it is not for you.
Rich: Everybody, including the writer, who I’m not sure has done that self-interrogation to really understand. You don’t need this explanation in order to have your lack of consent or unwillingness to do it be valid. There are plenty of people who don’t want to do stuff who don’t know the reason why they don’t, and it’s still OK for them to say no. But since you put it in writing and this is the exercise, you have more work to do, I would say, if you’re really curious about this. What is it about it you don’t like?
Also, another thing that I talk about a lot is that it’s good to have that information for communicating. If you tell someone, “I don’t want to do this just because,” you run the risk of being interpreted as a diva or having less than honorable intentions. Even if you aren’t, and even if you do have good intentions, it creates the opportunity for conflict over something when ideally you both should want to come to an understanding.
Jessica: This is one of the, in my view, very rare instances where straight men do experience negative sexism. The story of men who won’t go down on women is so pervasive because it is so common that it’s going to be really hard for most people, including both of us, to assume anything other than that this man doesn’t want to reciprocate the blowjobs he’s probably getting because he’s got some objectively dumb hangup about masculinity or about women’s bodies being gross. So in this case, even though you should never have to justify a, “I have a boundary around that when it comes to sexual activities that you are or are not willing to perform,” from a strategic defense capacity, being able to offer some understanding of why, especially if it’s something that has to do with texture, for example, could help. Labia have a texture that is quite possibly in line with kinds of textures that are not on people’s bodies that lots of people don’t like.
I have successfully swallowed an oyster once in my life. Every other oyster before and after, it’s gone in my mouth, and I cannot swallow it. It gets spat back out, if I’m lucky, onto a plate, if not, literally the tablecloth. And I’m sorry, I know that’s so impolite. I just can’t.
Rich: Well, it helps to go with the little ones. I’ll tell you that much.
Jessica: It doesn’t matter. Little ones, big ones. Different textures of toppings, flavors… Nope. I only managed to do it because I was really drunk. For me, personally, labia and oysters are not the same, but I feel like I can really see how, for instance, those two would be super similar in feel.
Rich: There’s a slickness, an inherent shininess to them.
Jessica: And it is tissue, but it’s not firm tissue. It’s also not jelly. It’s sort of wobbly.
Rich: Right. Well, I’ve eaten way more oysters than pussy. So the oysters have never been anything I’ve had to interrogate. And honestly, I have never had to interrogate my pussy thing. I actually think I’m kind of pro. I feel very strange engaging with women in any kind of sexual capacity, just because I feel like I’m out of my depth. But I don’t actually have a problem with the actual act of cunnilingus and would do it in the right kind of scenario. That’s the easy stuff for me. Always was when I did have sex with women.
But when you notice that your tastes align with certain elements of the status quo that any rational, compassionate person would see as toxic leaning or adjacent to bigotry, prejudice, and misconceptions that women’s bodies are disgusting, you want to get in there and look at that. You want to really understand yourself, at least so you can sleep at night. So you can say, “This isn’t my latent misogyny that’s guiding me. This is something else.”
Because otherwise, then there’s the open question. Do you want to live with that open question? I don’t. I don’t want to notice something in myself that I see as contributing to a cancer in greater society and be OK with that. I need to have an alternate explanation.
Jessica: If you love your partner enough to have done something that you’ve already tried and hated doing for someone else, I’m guessing you love her enough to say, “Maybe I do have some problems with women that are deep enough under the surface that they’re only showing up in a substantial way when my face is literally in her vagina.”
But that would be a signal to try to understand what’s going on there. Even if it doesn’t end with the writer being happy to eat their wife’s pussy or even willing, I’d want to follow up for similar but more small-scale interpersonal reasons.
To that end, the wife loved having her pussy eaten and has been begging for a repeat, so our writer has some leverage to say, “I hated every minute of it, but I already knew I hadn’t enjoyed this previously. I tried it for you with you. I still feel like it’s not for me, but I don’t understand why. Knowing that the hope is to arrive at a world where we are happily (or at least willingly) engaging in your pussy being eaten, will you work with me on this? This is not really going to be that erotic, probably, but can I just get close enough to the scenario to then be able to pay attention to what feelings are coming up and get a sense of whether this is something mechanical or sensory-based?” Because that’s a pretty easy solution. You slap a dental dam on there to change the texture.
Or you get used to the texture, possibly, with enough experience, as you said earlier. Or is it more emotional and psychological? If that’s the case, work with a licensed therapist or a trained coach who works with sexuality—someone who focuses on sexuality to sit there and, in real time, walk you through it.
Rich: I think that this letter is a really positive sign. It’s a sign of inquiry and interest in thinking through these things, figuring it out, and being practical. To that end, I would say a way to frame this in your mind to move forward is that you have this ability to give your wife three orgasms. Your own experience is important, but that is incredible. Maybe if you could focus on the gift of it as it was presented, you could allow yourself to understand that what you’re doing is generous and that in that moment, it’s not all about you. If you want to move forward, maybe that’s the frame of mind that you do it with. Not saying you have to. You could say no tomorrow and never do it or talk about it again. That’s fine. But you asked, so there you go.
Jessica: That second question really signals some amount of desire to find a way to overcome.
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My girlfriend of a few months is a light smoker (a couple of cigarettes a day), while I’m very sensitive to the smell of tobacco. Generally, this isn’t a big issue: She’s incredibly thoughtful and doesn’t smoke around me, and even makes sure to wash her hair and change her clothes before we meet up. But … I swear that when I go down on her—which I love to do—I can taste the tobacco.