The Ultimate Guide to Fellatio (28 page)

Think about what expectations you’re bringing to your adult video. This will help you make a selection that won’t leave you high and dry, or in the worst-case scenario, angry at the genre. What ideas turn you on—small breasts, big butts, women in charge, realistic plots, blow jobs, two gals and a guy, male anal penetration, group sex? This may not be your list, but you get the idea. Get clear on what you want to avoid by making another list of things you don’t want to see—do you get turned off by fake breasts, hairy men, rimming, toe sucking, facial ejaculation, two women together, or anal sex? These are just examples to get you brainstorming about what you’ll want to look for, and what you’ll want to fast-forward through. You may find more to add to either list as you view tapes—sometimes we find things that turn us on or off that we didn’t even know about.

Knowing what you like and dislike can help enormously when selecting a tape. You can single out many of your preferences before you rent or buy, and then skip the parts you don’t care for. The reviews on Web sites of women-run sex toy stores are very helpful in these matters—I should know, because I’ve been writing these reviews for years. The reviews and ratings can also help you select videos that include things you don’t usually see on the blue screen, such as an all-natural cast (enhancement-free), internal ejaculation, attention to cinematography and lighting, great acting, and excellent plots.

There are certain things in porn that are hard to avoid even if you don’t like them. Facial ejaculation (the man ejaculating on his sex partner’s face) is pretty much a standard. So are boob jobs. I hear a lot of complaints about both of these things, but some people, somewhere, like them. If you want to avoid “facials” in straight porn, look for porn made by women directors such as Veronica Hart and Candida Royalle. Both women make excellent plot-driven movies, and if you want to avoid anal sex, Candida rarely features it in her films. Finding all-natural starlets is a little tricky, but there are more of them now than five years ago. Look for porn made by independent movie companies.

Fellatio in porn is largely performed for the camera’s view, and what the director thinks the viewers want to see—not for either performer’s enjoyment. Typically, the person going down will have their face angled in a way that is not very comfortable or practical for giving head in real life. This is because the camera and lights have to get close to the action, and if it’s a woman with long hair, her head needs to be cocked at an angle that keeps her mane flowing down the opposite side of her head. The techniques the actors use are basic but can be learned from somewhat, if only to see how they use their hand as an extension of their mouth or to stroke him while they back off for a brief rest. Porn is where you’ll see a lot of deep throating and some amazing stamina on the part of both the giver and the receiver of the blow job. Don’t expect to be able to duplicate what the actors can do—they’re pros, and they give head for a living. Also, the scenes are not all shot in one take, and are often edited to make the scenes appear longer, or the activity more varied.

Watching fellatio in straight porn versus gay male porn, you’ll notice a difference in enthusiasm, touch, and comfort with cock. The actors in gay male films know their way around a hard dick, most likely because they own one and understand the sensations they’re delivering intimately. The gay actors usually appear less conscious of what they’re doing and more relaxed; it’s almost as if they didn’t need to think about what they’re doing. And a big overall difference is that the guys touch the other guys more than their female counterparts; the men’s hands touch, squeeze, and roam all over the guys they go down on. But other than these points, there aren’t a lot of differences, and there are certainly women in porn who have the same intuitive connection to and eagerness for the men they give head to onscreen.

Finding individual films can be challenging when there are hundreds of thousands cranked out in a given year. Also, many adult retailers don’t carry every title, not to mention that selection and organization in sex shops can be haphazard. So I’m not going to recommend films; instead, I’m going to give you the names of actors who give drop-dead head and whose enthusiasm for sucking cock will make you weak in the knees. In straight porn, certain women do it right and just can’t get enough: look for Chloe, Jeanna Fine, Linda Lovelace, Missy, Juli Ashton, and Nina Hartley.

How-To Videos

Educational videos can give you great visual references for techniques, though sadly many are dated, or just look dated. Many oral sex instructional videos, new or old, are shot the same ways and have a timeless quality that unfortunately hovers around the 1980s: fireplace and fur rug sets, women wearing pearls and big jewelry, fluffy hair on both genders, talking heads perched on chairs explaining everything—“experts” intended to make you feel comfortable and nonsleazy, though this has the opposite effect on me. Much like with the fellatio guidebook counterparts, it’s pretty slim pickings—for now. At this time, there are no how-to instructional oral sex films that are same-sex oriented; they’re all straight. But many of the films feature real-life couples, and they almost always use natural-bodied actors.

Adult how-to videos are explicit and often contain extra noninstructional sex scenes that make them worth your money. These videos come in two flavors: mainstream adult films made by porn stars or films independently produced by individuals, sex toy companies, or sex organizations. The mainstream films are usually missing some component of accuracy and are packed with porn stars giving eager, though sometimes mechanical, demonstrations. The independents make up for what they lack in budgets and the actors’ on-camera presence by featuring normal folks, usually real-life, clearly loving couples.

In the realm of fellatio, there are a couple tapes that can show you how to do some of the things discussed in this book and can provide sexy inspiration.
Nina Hartley’s Making Love to Men
is one part information, several parts explicit action—and parts of it are quite arousing to watch. It’s Nina’s most recent and her best tape on the subject.
Better Oral Sex Techniques
is a Sinclair Institute video, part of their series of how-to tapes, and like all Sinclair tapes, it features actual couples. However, the sex is broken up by more talking heads, and the video presents the information in an annoying numbered sequence. The
Complete Guide to Oral Lovemaking
has a 1980s feel to it (hair and lingerie, especially) and is full of talking heads. Its information is straightforward, but don’t expect any in-depth descriptions of fellatio, or advanced techniques.

How-to tapes about male sexuality are rare, but there are a few that can enrich and complement a healthy sex life. Joseph Kramer has done some wonderful video work, and you can learn through his spiritual approach how to give a man a great erotic massage in
Fire on the Mountain: An Intimate Guide to Male Genital Massage
. The tone is quite New Age, but the video presents great techniques and excellent mindful breath practices, and the men who practice the techniques onscreen clearly adore each other. Tapes that delve into male masturbation may be your best bet when looking for visual clues on ways men like to be touched and stimulated. Another from Joseph Kramer,
Evolutionary Masturbation: An Intimate Guide to Male Orgasm
, combines Tantra, sex toys (like cock rings and vibrators), and twenty masturbation techniques to show how to make men’s masturbatory orgasms more intense.
Solo Male Ecstasy: An Intimate Guide to Self-Pleasure
is an instructional video on male masturbation that shows five men as they individually masturbate to orgasm, using a variety of techniques. The music is awful, but the men are nice-looking, and they discuss over forty genital massage techniques and ejaculatory control. Nothing advanced here, but it can augment your body of knowledge.

Recommended Reading

There’s more erotica available now than ever, and a lot of it is of very high quality. You can find most anything you’re looking for, if you know where to look, and there is no shortage of fellatio scenes. Erotica written by women provides a female perspective on sex and tends to concentrate on women’s pleasure, which means that when fellatio is included it usually has the female character’s sexual interests in mind. Lesbian erotica doesn’t usually contain fellatio stories, but in some of the more modern, cutting-edge (and S/M) collections you can sometimes find women going down on a strap-on cock. In gay male erotica there’s a lot of top-notch writing, and the stories are chock-full of fellatio scenes that portray the spectrum of scenarios; dirty, sweet, and everything in between. When straight men put pen to paper and write smut that contains fellatio, it tends to be either really good or transparent stroke material that verges on misogyny. Look for higher-quality anthologies and respected editors, authors, and publishers who produce reliably good books.

The
Best Women’s Erotica
series is a combination heterosexual and lesbian anthology of short stories by and for women that comes out yearly and has an always-changing lineup of the best stories the genre produced in a given year.
Herotica
is a women-produced, women-focused anthology series that pioneered the for-women field. Both series contain explicit sex scenes, yet both have distinctively different flavors in their selections—thumb through them both and gauge your response.
Best American Erotica
comes out yearly, and it’s where male and female authors of all orientations write erotica that is also of all orientations.
Black Lace
is a generally high-quality British imprint that features erotic novels written by women, and they occasionally put out collections of short stories that are worth picking up.
Black Lace
is heterosexually focused, though sometimes the novels do contain bisexual characters, and the fellatio in them is fantastic.

Best Lesbian Erotica
is also a best-of yearly series but with only lesbian and dyke stories, and it smartly covers the spectrum and variations embodied in the many permutations of queer identity. Because it’s true to the modern realities of lesbian sex, it occasionally includes strap-on fellatio scenes.
Best Bi Women’s Erotica
is a yearly anthology series that features stories written by and for bisexual women. The stories contain women having sex with both men and women who identify as straight, lesbian, or bi, or don’t identify as anything, and they introduce us to the sexual realities of bisexual women and the heat of bi sex; you get doses of fellatio here and there.

Following are my favorite fellatio short stories in contemporary erotica:

GAY MALE

“Below the Beltway,” by Simon Sheppard. In
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica,
edited by Maxim Jakubowski (Carroll & Graf, 2001).

“The Color Khaki.” In
See Dick Deconstruct,
by Ian Phillips (AttaGirl Press, 2001).

“Plaza del Sol,” by Sean Wolfe. In
Friction 4,
edited by Jesse Grant (Alyson, 2001).

“Tiger Rag,” by J. D. Ryan. In
Best Gay Erotica 2002,
edited by Richard Labonte (Cleis Press, 2002).

“Warm-up,” by Matt Bernstein Sycamore. In
Best Gay Erotica 2001,
edited by Richard Labonte (Cleis Press, 2001).

HETEROSEXUAL/MIXED ORIENTATION

“Adventures in Dick Sucking,” by Bree Coven. In
Best of the Best Lesbian Erotica,
edited by Tristan Taormino (Cleis Press, 2000).

“Do Me,” by Lori Bryant Woolridge. In
Best Black Women’s Erotica,
edited by Blanche Richardson (Cleis Press, 2001).

“Getting Dirty,” by Erica Dumas. In
Sweet Life: Erotic Fantasies for Couples,
edited by Violet Blue (Cleis Press, 2001).

“On the Care and Feeding of White Boys,” by R. Gay. In
Best Bisexual Women’s Erotica,
edited by Cara Bruce (Cleis Press, 2001).

“What He Did,” by Thomas Roche. In
Best American Erotica 1997,
edited by Susie Bright (Touchstone Books, 1997).

Sex Guides

Buying a sex guide is not very different from buying any other how-to guidebook—except that sex is a much more charged subject than, say, furniture upholstery. Though I’d be the first one to collect the
Time/Life Sex Series
(they’d be kept with no small amount of irony next to my ancient
Time/Life
books on plumbing and carpentry), it’s doubtful that a book on sex could ever be so neatly packaged. Human sexuality doesn’t fit into convenient cookbook categories, though many authors try to make it do so—and this is reflected in the sad state of the majority of sex guides that are available. Many guides commit the fatal crimes of being judgmental about preferences, fetishes, and orientations or being ill informed and containing inaccurate sex information. Good guides inform and don’t sacrifice integrity for entertainment. I also don’t like sex guides that lack substance and look like picture books combined with New Age poetry. What’s worse are guides whose adolescent or self-indulgent attitude toward sex puts you off—be they written by men or women who must elevate or denigrate sexuality to make it palatable, or use instant-gratification sports terms. These antiquated attitudes about sex belong in a curio shop, not on your bookshelf.

When buying a sex guide, take a good look at it first. Do you like the tone, or is it too dry or condescending? See when it was published and if it’s been revised recently (within the past five years, at the latest) to reflect current information. Try to look something up. Is the information easy to find? Does it have substance that you can use in a practical situation? Look up something nonmainstream such as S/M to see if the book has a judgmental attitude toward it—even if the practice isn’t for you, the author’s sex-negative attitude may hinder your exploration of other areas you might be interested in. And finally, does it have illustrations or pictures? You’ll need them, so make sure they’re there.