Secret Confessions of a Smart Girl

At one point on my date with the subject of my last post, long before any touching had occurred, he randomly said to me. “I’m not that into blow jobs.”

I always wonder, when men say things like that, if it some sort of a maneuver to be non-threatening. If they’re saying “Don’t worry, I won’t push you to go down on me” or something. If that’s it… it’s a bad line for me. I love giving blow jobs. I don’t think I could have regular sex with a man who didn’t like them. I’d be really disappointed.

Still, what I said in response was this, “Why?”

He gave me three reasons.

1. I don’t understand why anyone would want to do that.
2. I feel like I should be doing something.
3. I’m afraid of teeth.

He then admitted that given his personal preferences about what he likes to do in bed with women that he recognizes that the first two reasons are completely insane. It’s good that he recognizes it. It gives a girl hope.

In exchange for his admission of irrationality, I was willing to give him the third reason as legitimate and, since at that point we hadn’t even kissed, I decided not to say to him “well, we’re not likely to end up having a lot of sex if that’s really the case.”  Instead I said that most women I know seemed to be in one of two camps on blow jobs - that they either really REALLY enjoyed giving them or that they would be quite happy never to have to give one again.

(In response to his second objection, I also mentioned a conversation my girlfriend and I recently had about a man of our mutual intimate acquaintance where we had discussed that one of the reasons it’s so fun to go down on him is that he’s such a delightfully active participant. Then I let it drop.)

The irony about the whole thing is that I can also quite happily live without receptive oral sex… it’s just that my reasons for it are completely different.

1. I find that negotiating barriers for cunnilingus  is often so much of a pain that I don’t want to bother.  (There are circumstances in which I am willing to negotiate a lack of barriers. It has been a long time since I was in a sexual relationship where they were applicable.)
2. Oral sex often makes me feel vulnerable, self conscious, or uncomfortable.
3. It’s not something I particularly look forward to or miss as part of sex. Until very recently I had gone, probably, 10 years without it. Although I may be forgetting someone, until a few weeks ago I don’t think I had had receptive oral sex since I broke up with my first sexual partners.  It’s not that I don’t enjoy it (I used to have many, many orgasms from it), it’s just not high on my priority list… like penetration and pain are… or even providing oral sex.

I don’t have a lot of entirely vanilla sex with entirely vanilla partners. The other night may actually have been the only time I’ve had sex with someone who is entirely outside the realm of kink, and who I met in a more traditional manner.  So when we were fooling around and he was pulling off my pants and expressly wanting to go down on me and I stopped him to say “I only do oral sex with barriers,” for the first time in a while I felt like I might actually be missing out on something during a sexual encounter. Still, at 1:30 in the morning I didn’t feel like teaching him how that worked, and  I knew he wouldn’ t be all that interested in letting me go down on him… especially with a condom, so I asked him to fuck me instead… and though he was slightly disappointed (ah, irony!) , he did.

Talking about this with various people the next day**, I discovered that I am quite unusual in the fact that, for me,  intercourse with a condom is less of a big deal than unprotected oral sex with someone whose STD testing status falls into the “acceptable risk*” but not “totally comfortable” range. To me, oral sex is sex. Period. It’s not more or less than intercourse and since I’m not worried about pregnancy… ***. Plus,I like the fucking. I like it a lot. (Although admittedly I have been totally spoiled by the gf and her husband. It’s easy to forget that not all intercourse is that amazing.)

Normally for me, in situations like that - where sex hasn’t been explicitly negotiated in advance, things tend to end up limited to kink and mutual masturbation. But that works better when both people are a) kinky and b)handsy, and while I am… he was not. (Well, normally I am. I wasn’t as much that night,  because of an extremely painful infected cut on my dominant hand that is still making me, literally, scream in pain when I screw up and touch things the wrong way.) We were clearly at a breaking point of “are we going to stop here” or “are we going to fuck” and… I really wanted to get laid. So I did.

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_{*In this case, no recent testing but just came out of a long term sexually monogamous relationship with a clear test before that.}

_{**I have overprocessing disease. Sue me.}

_{***Yes, dealing with an accidental pregnancy with another person instead of an intentional one with test tube would make my life a lot more difficult, but it wouldn’t be the end of my universe. I’d find a way to make it work.}

_{****I honestly have no idea if I could date this guy even if we both wanted to. It woud require figuring out a way for us to interact that isn’t so high energy (mentally and physically) all the time. As a friend and fellow artist, I love that just by being himself he pushes me to be a more creative, faster, and smarter performer in performance space, and it’s a real turn on, but I can’t sustain that level of “on” 24 hours a day. I’d collapse.}