Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

150 Forbidden Words
professional medical instrument was dropped by the retail catalogues when it
began to be featured in porn films like Widow’s Delight during the 1920s.
When the vibrator reappeared in the mid 1960s, it was marketed as a sex aid
and personal care appliance. Vibrators were always available in the United
States in the between years, and presumably in other countries as well. 14
When oral sex is not having sexual relations
There are no true euphemisms for oral sex; give me oral pleasure (used by a
woman in the film Pulp Fiction) is possibly one. For oral–genital sex, the
most orthophemistic terms are fellatio and cunnilingus, whose colloquial
counterparts (which may count as orthophemisms in the sex industry) are
give head; give French; sit on someone’s face; get/go down on; eat (out); give/
do a blow job; soixante-neuf/sixty-nine (‘Wine me, dine me, sixty-nine me’);
suck off; tongue, etc. There is also anilingus (‘oral–anal sex’), probably more
common among homosexual males than other pairings. The colloquial counterparts
are rim job and rimming. Oral sex may be included in foreplay or
replace copulation; it is subject to similar taboos. If Kinsey’s figures are
anything to go by, there is less of a taboo on fellatio than there used to be:
he found that 29 per cent of wives born before 1900 practised it, compared to
57 per cent of women born in the 1920s. 15 Among male homosexuals, it is
normal for trade – who normally regard themselves as straight – to offer their
cock for sucking (as they would say). Of course, other queers engage in oral
sex, just as heterosexuals do.
On 26 January 1998, US President Bill Clinton famously said ‘I did not
have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky’ despite the fact that
he did finger her genitals and she fellated him. In his autobiography, Clinton
writes:
the definition [of sexual relations] covered most intimate contact beyond kissing by
the person being asked the question, if it was done for gratification or arousal. It
seemed to require both a specific act and a certain state of mind on my part, and did not
include any act by another person. (Clinton 2004: 773)
The definition Clinton refers to was the one offered by Paula Jones’ legal
team and accepted by Judge Susan Webber Wright: 16
For the purposes of this deposition, a person engages in ‘sexual relations’ when the
person knowingly engages in or causes –
1. contact with the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks of any person
with an intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person;
2. contact between any part of the person’s body or an object and the genitals or anus
of another person; or