I wanted to read this article by sex educator and burlesque performer Fancy Feast about her time working in sex toy sales because she billed it on social media as “a rant about sex positivity under capitalism” which is at least a little bit in the ErosBlog wheelhouse. It’s a good and wide-ranging article, too; you should go read it. I’m not even going to attempt to summarize, characterize, bloviate, or respond.
I do, however, want to highlight one paragraph of imagery that holed me below the waterline. We may think that we’ve come a long way in terms of gender equality, but socially? Naw. She’s talking about a point in her career where she was head of educational programming for the sex-positive sex toy store she worked for, mostly selling blow job workshops. But even though people would ask for cunnilingus workshops, they couldn’t sell enough tickets for the classes to make. She explains that most of the classes for the blowjob workshops were women who had been somehow convinced they need BJ skills to get and keep a man. Then she points out that women also worry about the oral sex they receive. But do men worry about giving it? It’s not a question she tries to answer per se, but what she does say is telling:
I try to imagine a bachelor party coming into the store for a celebratory cunnilingus event, the groom-to-be adorned in a crown of stylized, glittery cunts. Each man gingerly entering the room, wrapping a hand around a complimentary craft beer for the comfort of a familiar object. Each of them nervous that there is some secret out there to pussy eating that the other men aren’t telling, each of them worried that their girlfriends and wives or Tinder dates will leave them for someone who sucks clit better. I imagine each participant – the groom’s brother, his fiancé’s best guy friend, his cousins – adorned with vulva necklaces, sucking on ripe peaches and juicy mangoes, sitting on foldout chairs in a room of men, howling with laughter and cheering each other on as they practice tongue techniques. Thinking about this makes my heart ache.
Yeah. That’s like, so not happening. By which I mean, of course, that in my calcified imagination I can’t see it happening in what remains of my lifetime. Although it’s also true that we live in an age of wonders, and I am astonished every day…
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