We are experiencing an epidemic of straight men who listened to Mac Miller in high school and now understand giving head to a girl to be the greatest act of feminism since the suffragettes, and it’s getting harder to ignore. It’s a tale as old as time: Men searching for enlightenment in the worship of women and accidentally finding a way to exploit it for social capital.
Two hundred years ago they were returning from the Grand Tour, having learned to make love well enough for mutual pleasure, taught by the soft hands of French women and courtesans; arriving home and taking poor Madame Bovary as their mistress, making love to her without shame, rolling in the moss, and reveling in their worldliness. Now they are drinking craft beer in Bushwick and rolling spliffs in Washington Square Park. And still, like medieval lovers, they perform the rites without understanding the ritual.
It’s not shocking that these men exist, but at a time where there is so much tired discourse around men, I found myself shocked by how gratefully we accept the appearance of effort in place of true achievement. A man can’t wear a tote bag or read on the subway without The New York Times calling it performative, and yet men who make giving head the basis for their gender politics have remained virtually unscathed. My best guess was to attribute this social avoidance to a collective psyche that fears spooking the horse. The rotten child has come down to the dinner table and we would rather not scare him off with reminders to eat his vegetables. Who was I to say? It was just as plausible that I was vastly overestimating the scale, projecting my own poor taste in men onto an entire generation.
I started asking around.
The first woman I spoke to, Mira, told me about her college boyfriend, a gender studies major at Bard. She explained how he was this huge advocate for female pleasure. When she asked if he’d like to go down on her, he broke down. Like to? He’d love to. Unfortunately, he wasn’t so lucky. Apparently, a few years back he developed some jaw tension from chewing tobacco, and had to retire from what he loved most. She understood.
Another, Jia, told me her boyfriend would, but said he could only do it if she shaved her bush, claiming he was allergic.
Lucy, an NYU student, was crying in the Wash fountain when I approached. She told me about a rapper she dated who referenced being a ‘munch’ in nearly every song.
Three months in she asked why he never gave head.
“Don’t I?” he earnestly asked.
She told him no.
“I never heard anyone complaining,” he said, unzipping his own jeans.
Another one of Lucy’s exes stopped giving her head when she went on Prozac.
“He told me it would be too hard for him, psychologically, to give head knowing I wouldn’t be able to finish. He was trying to bond with his shadow self and thought it would be destructive to his work.” She went off Prozac later that week.
“He couldn’t make me finish either way, but it was finals week and honestly it was better for both of us if he thought he could.”
I held her hand and together we deleted her Hinge.
In the age of participation trophies, no one wants to discourage effort.
One woman told me, “If they’re down there less than a minute, I don’t bother faking it. If they make it over a minute, I throw them a bone.”
It turns out every man with a tongue and two minutes of free time expects congratulations for his bravery.
One anonymous woman told me she had received good head, glancing behind her shoulder while she spoke, “but the really good ones… you can’t trust them.” And with that she was gone.
Against my better judgement, I asked a man about it. He told me about a one size fits all method he found on Reddit.
“I guess you could say I hacked the female body,” and when it couldn’t get any worse he winked.