Vanity Fair has published (popup warning) a sort of literary history of the blowjob, overwritten by Christopher Hitchens in his erudite but often-annoying cult-crit style:

“The magic and might of her own soft mouth ? ” Erotic poets have hymned it down the ages, though often substituting the word “his.” The menu of brothel offerings in ancient Pompeii, preserved through centuries of volcanic burial, features it in the frescoes. It was considered, as poor Humbert well knew, to be worth paying for. The temple carvings of India and the Kamasutra make rather a lavish point of it, and Sigmund Freud wondered if a passage in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks might not betray an early attachment to that “which in respectable society is considered a loathsome perversion.” Da Vinci may have chosen to write in “code” and Nabokov may have chosen to dissolve into French, as he usually did when touching on the risque — but the well-known word “fellatio” comes from the Latin verb “to suck.”

Disappointingly, I really only learned one new thing, and that was only a hint, archly delivered in a word-to-the-wise-is-sufficient sort of way:

…gay men like to keep their tonsils for a reason that I would not dream of mentioning…

Oh really?