SEXIS WRONG

He scrutinized proverbs across languages: “a woman kissed
is a woman half-fucked. (Italian).” And from more recent
sources, joking euphemisms for cunnilingus: “‘Eating at the
Y,’ ‘Box lunches’—Texas.”
1940. Appearing under an anagrammatic French pseudonym,
Oragenitalism: Oral Techniques in Genital Excitation: Part I:
Cunnilinctus presented the fiction that it was a fragment of a
disorganized manuscript left behind by the deceased author.
He made notes on the way contemporaries spoke: “I bet
she’d bounce like a rubber ball...”; “he sure was a piss-cutter,
an old word according to Jake Brussel.” Although the dictionary
was never published, he worked on it for decades, with
the dedication of one draft reading:
To William Dunbar (1467? — 1530?)
who first said fuck
By busily contacting anyone and everyone who might be able
to help him, he met major intellectuals. He corresponded with
men who had written outrageous books—Robert Briffault,
author of Europa was one; Henry Miller was another—often
asking them the meanings of terms or how they came by
their knowledge of erotica. He met Columbia University professor
Allen Walker Read, a lexicographer who had attempted
to catalogue all the words purged from the Oxford English
Dictionary, but found him “repressed.”
He was able to transmute the dream
of being “a perfect rabbi” into the
goal of being a total expert on sex.
There was Zora Neale Hurston, trained in anthropology at
Columbia University under the great Franz Boas. Her brilliant
folklore collection Mules and Men was published in 1935,
a few years before they bumped into each other in Greenwich
Village. Legman described his childhood joke-collecting
habits and his longtime interest in slang and graffiti—“obscoena,”
as he called it—to her. As Hurston knew from her
research in Florida turpentine camps and juke joints, Legman
was wading in a very big river. She assured him there was a
whole world of such wild stuff out there. It might be beneath
the consideration of the literary world and too impolite to be
considered by most scholars of culture, but it was there nevertheless,
waiting for someone who could bring it to light.
Now he had a name for his dreamlike project: erotic folklore.
Another part of this great work was a prospective Encyclopedia
of Sexual Technique. In New York in 1936–1937, Legman
was researching this proposed book for Dr. Robert Latou
Dickinson, dean of American gynecologists, and was being
aided by a number of enthusiastic girlfriends. In theory, the
Encyclopedia was to be an illustrated catalog of every sexual
possibility—mostly heterosexual, although Legman also
collected the lore of gay and lesbian sex. As it turned out,
only the first part of the projected whole was published in
For this work, Legman drew on every source of information
available to him, from art history and medical textbooks to
French postcards and accounts of friends’ sex lives. His research
files from the 1930s and 1940s are full of tracings,
diagrams, and jottings. But mainly the work was an exploration
of his own sexual preferences, and his insistent nineteen-year-old
libido was his best source of information. The
energetic researcher rushed from bed to desk, pencil in hand,
to write down his fresh impressions. Documenting his own
sexual experiences on 3x5-inch notecards and scraps of paper
was his habit, as much a habit as all his book and folklore
collecting. In a sense, Legman collected himself, or at least
his own experiences, for future reference and display. In the
process he identified and outlined the themes that would preoccupy
him for the next five decades.
This first work, rare and ill-remembered, is a key to Legman.
At 67 pages, it is a thorough and analytical
treatment of oral sex, sometimes heavy with
anatomical description and scientific language.
But under this remote style is a living, breathing
author. This was his favorite sexual practice,
he told friends, and he presents himself as a jocular virtuoso
in an important art. Cunnilinctus is an older variant of
the Latin term cunnilingus. Wordsmith that Legman was, he
knew that cunnilinctus means not only the act of licking female
genitals but also refers to the person who licks. It is hard
not to think that the book’s subtitle is eponymous: At least
during his twenties, Cunnilinctus was Legman.
Oragenitalism is a bold and peculiar book, certainly from the
perspective of the 1930s, even today. In many ways it is typical
Legman. He had chosen, as he acknowledges, a taboo
topic, “the most misunderstood and the most maligned”
practice, one many women and men refuse to acknowledge.
It was illegal in some places and often treated as grounds
for divorce. Taboo-smashing was all Legman: If he sensed a
cultural barrier, he looked around for a rhetorical bulldozer and
opened throttle.
The book had just been printed and bound in red cloth when
its New York publisher, Jacob Brussel, was arrested for sending
obscene materials through the mail. His entire stock and
all his records were seized; Brussel pled guilty and was eventually
imprisoned. Legman got wind of the pending raid and
caught a train to Washington, DC.
It’s rumored that the whole first print run of Oragenitalism
was burned, although the story may be circulated by book
64 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG