SEXIS WRONG

dealers as a way of keeping first-edition prices high. But
somewhere Legman had squirreled away a cache of the
books, so, although rare, they exist. At the death of Alfred
Kinsey in 1956, Legman sent one from France to the Kinsey
Institute, inscribed, “In Memoriam.”
In the 1960s, he took up the book again, reworking it by ransacking
the notes he had taken in the 1930s and the drawings
he and friends had made. He expanded his assaults on received
prejudices, reports of folk attitudes, jokes, and sexual
customs, and peppered the slightly grave book with snappy
bons mots and goofy humor. He folded in things he’d learned
from the years, two marriages, and the births of several children.
Now there was a chapter on fellation, collated from the
writings of someone else since his interest in the doer, the
person performing the act, meant he “didn’t have the courage”
to research it himself. He added his own thoughts on
“irrumation,” or mouth-fucking, a variety of oral sex left out of
more polite books. A chapter on the “soixante-neuf” capped
the new edition, which was appropriately published in English
in 1969 and immediately pirated.
Most important, he greatly expanded an original, brief consideration
of the psychological aspects of oral sex, explaining
why it is so misunderstood. Legman takes us on a wild
theoretical ride, posing a Freudian-inflected thesis: To understand
oral sex we must look at why the active party—the
cunnilinguist, as he puns him—performs the act at all. In the
literature of sex, when cunnilinctus can be mentioned at all, it
is treated as a technique by which men generously give pleasure
to women. Actually, Legman notes in an acerbic aside,
husbands (not men) are said to use it to gallantly excite their
wives (not women) on the way to intercourse,
since Americans do not admit that sex takes
place outside marriage. But this is a neurotic
displacement and a cultural lie. Heterosexual
men very much enjoy performing oral sex on women, but
while they joke about it and use jocular terms for it (“Hatsville,
U.S.A!”), they can’t talk about it openly. Why not?
The answer: Cunnilinctus is not a technique; it’s the expression
of a drive, the desire to return to the mother’s breast
and womb, or even to relive the infant’s first oral caress, its
passage down the birth canal. All this is “an encapturing for
neurotic purposes of the perfectly normal mammalian preliminary.”
He points to evolution, noting that genital-licking
and -sniffing preparatory to sex is common in quadruped
mammals. Our prehistoric ancestors may have navigated the
terrain of sex and reproduction by smell and taste as much as
by vision. So the drive to lick and taste is a movement toward
pleasure, and in some sense natural, even while the act is
slurred as “animalistic,” too natural.
Widening to human behavior again, Legman mentions homosexual
fellation as further evidence of a basic drive to oral
pleasure. He discusses the universal bathroom graffito demanding
oral sex (“I want to suck you!”) as expressing this
profound need. So, too, acrobatic auto-fellation. So-called
healthy customs and the behaviors that society describes as
sick or bizarre are not so far apart because, in fact, the same
undercurrents motivate them.
But conflicting with the oral impulse is the psychic potency of
the head and the mouth in all human cultures. People—male
and female, heterosexual and homosexual—practice oral sex
upon each other and find pleasure in being both active and
receptive of oral attention, but they have trouble dealing with
the psychological discomfort caused by the apparent subjugation
of the head to the genitals. Confusing thoughts arise:
Cunnilinctus is seen as domination by the genital partner; a
man may appear to dominate by his oral activity, but at the
same time he seems dominated because of his desire and
willingness. He is pussy-whipped, in a literal sense. This paradox
is at the center of all kinds of oral sex. (Legman soft-pedals
the question of whether all cultures experience the same
psychic tensions, but he suggests that they do.)
Legman was no conventional feminist, but he acknowledges
that women have discomfort about the submission of the
mouth to the penis. Giving a blowjob, he knew, can create a
subtly coerced sensation even in an enthusiastic relationship
(but you would never catch him writing “in the context of unequal
gender relations”). For Legman, women who hold back
on this sexual favor are poorly adjusted to their femininity and
possibly just plain mean. Women who refuse to swallow semen
are deeply hostile toward men.
It’s rumored that the whole first print
run of Oragenitalism was burned.
There it is: hostility, another key to Legman. Hostility would
surface persistently as a theme in his later analyses of humor,
graffiti, and slang, and it was at the center of his analyses of
popular culture. In Oragenitalism Legman suggests that all
sex, even so-called normal sex, expresses a certain amount
of anger and can tend toward violence, although we may not
always allow ourselves to recognize it. Intercourse can be
rough, and people often thrash, scream, scratch, or bite at orgasm.
More important, and a major Legman point, there are
vicious and unpleasant people out there “who wish to wallow
in whatever eroticism seems to them nasty or lubricious.” The
practice—oral, vaginal, anal, or other—is less important than
the deep, underlying attitude. The more important evidence
of hostility, for Legman, is the refusal to participate generously.
This is why oral sex of any variety can be so tricky: It
demands the lovers navigate what is at once “the most sub-
KEY TO THE FIELDS 65