Guy Ramsay’s plaintive refrain about the rarity of oral sex in this column last week reminded me of a survey conducted a few years ago by one of those men’s magazines (read: pornography for straight men). In it, 100% of respondents moaned that they weren’t getting enough head. I repeat: 100%.
Ramsay’s column was the latest in a series on oral sex — thank you Jacob Zuma for, as the old left used to put it, ”stimulating debate”. It certainly occasioned some discussion among my gay friends. Mostly, the talk was of the variety we usually keep to ourselves so that we don’t scare the heterosexuals or their horses. But there is one thing we crow about, and we do feel some pity for our straight brothers, although I’ll admit there’s a healthy dollop of Schadenfreude mixed in. While they yearn for this rara avis ”too highly prized to be received all that often”, we moffies smugly acknowledge that, not to put too fine a point on it, fellatio is our daily bread.
And we’re good at it. We’re good at it, moreover, in a way that few women are going to be good at it, because we give as good as we get. In fulfilment of the basic principle of reciprocity underlying any altruistic act in human society, we do as we would be done by.
But then gay men are, in many ways, living the dream. That’s the dream of the male biological imperative, which is to spread your semen around as widely as possible. Ironic, isn’t it? The gay male liberation from biology (in that we don’t risk conceiving any children during a shag) has allowed us to do what straight men would do all the time if they could. We are not an ”intersex” somewhere between true males and females, which is how homosexuals are often thought of, but instead, as Camille Paglia puts it, a kind of ”hypermale”. We don’t have to plead with our partners for that special treatment; we moffies can pop out for a blow job as easily as one can pop out for an espresso.
Okay, that’s the smug part. The less smug part has to do with wondering why our deputy president is still using words like ”unnatural” when it comes to things that happen in private between consenting adults. And in a country with one of the most liberal Constitutions in the world, nogal. Surely we are a bit beyond the argument from nature? Surely we understand by now that social convention is usually what is meant when people invoke ”nature” as a standard of good behaviour? And surely the state has no business wedging itself between the mouths and the genitals of its citizens?
But then the state does have a responsibility to educate people about things like HIV/Aids, which is why the issue gets confused. I imagine there’s no point in being upset about public servants getting squeamish at the thought that oral sex might actually be a safer activity, in terms of possible HIV-transmission, than genital-to-genital sex.
One must, though, try once more to demolish the ”unnatural” argument. When I hosted a gay talk show some years ago, this line of reasoning was flung at me again and again. It’s not natural! Animals don’t do it! That’s one form of the argument from nature, and it really is nonsense. For a start, as recent research has shown, and the French TV channel Canal Plus broadcast, wild animals engage in all sorts of sexual play (including activities we would call ”homosexual”) beyond the call of reproduction. Male giraffes, for instance, are very fond of same-sex necking.
And then there are the bonobo apes. They use sexual play for any form of social negotiation, regardless of the gender of the participants. If there’s a fight about who gets the last banana, they fondle each other for a while until everyone has calmed down enough to resolve the matter. We share a lot of DNA with the bonobos, so why can’t we do as they do? Then again, I take Ramsay’s point about making these kinds of suggestions to government figures.
Yet even if you cling to the standard of what wild animals do as a way of evaluating human behaviour, though, the ”nature” argument comes unstuck. After all, animals don’t wear clothes, drive cars or go to the movies. So, if you want to avoid any ”unnatural” behaviour, you should really walk to the cinema naked.
And then there’s the other element of the argument from nature. As one caller to that talk show put it with regard to gay male sex, the relevant private parts just ”don’t fit”, whereas God clearly made the male and female mortise-and-tenon joint with great care. To which one can only respond that in that case God must have been thinking of fellatio right from the start, because those parts fit together very well indeed.