Last week, I heard an interesting question on my favorite podcast The Read. Crissle and Kid Fury, the hosts of the show, were taping a live broadcast. When they do these shows, instead of answering listener letters, they send the mic into the audience and take their questions in real time.
I personally prefer when they answer letters. They’re just more in-depth and you know how Black people get in a crowd, there’s inevitably somebody who uses the opportunity to try to prove how funny they are. But I digress. The questions were generally unmemorable until one woman stood up and asked what she should do about a particular problem she was having in the bedroom.
This woman, after hemming and hawing, finally admitted that after dating and being married to her husband for the past two years, she’s never given him head. As you can imagine, the nature of this question is delicate. She was asking it in front of an auditorium full of people. She was going against the conventional practice of the day and she was exposing some very personal information about herself that no doubt had half of the room looking at her in shock and judgment.
Her question was, what could she do to get over her reluctance. To their credit, Crissle and Kid Fury tried their best to get to the root of the issue. Was it smell? Was she apprehensive about the taste? Did she have a bad experience before? The woman did mention gagging; but aside from that, she was tight-lipped about why she didn’t feel comfortable performing fellatio on her husband. All she said was that she was scared.
So what was their advice to this woman?
“Suck that man’s d*ck!”
Crissle suggested the woman go to therapy to get to the root issues of why she didn’t feel comfortable performing fellatio.
After emphasizing the importance of a clean penis, Kid Fury advised this woman to start going down on her man before he found another woman to do it.
I wondered about the advice.
Does a preference not to do something sexually mean there’s something wrong? Does it mean there’s a mental block? If there is no real reason why she’s against it, is it enough to say I don’t feel comfortable and I’d rather not?
The conversation immediately reminded me of Joseline Hernandez from “Love and Hip Hop Atlanta.” If you’ve watched even a second of that show, you know that she is a sexpot. From her own admission, it goes DOWN in Joseline’s bedroom. But for all of her experience, with both men and women, Joseline said she does not perform fellatio. The only explanation was that she didn’t like it. And that was the end of the discussion. I remember looking at Stevie J, who was sitting right next to her. He simply raised his eyebrows, shrugged his shoulders slightly and nodded, like “Hard to believe but she’s telling the truth.”
That interaction stayed with me because I wondered if there were other women who would feel that comfortable in stating their sexual dislikes— even if those dislikes contradict the cultural norm. I remember the days when the notion of sucking d*ck was publicly frowned upon in our community. No one really knew what people were doing in the privacy of their own homes, but Black women didn’t admit to slobbing the knob in public.
The same was true for men.
In fact, my friend, MN’s managing editor Brande Victorian, attributes that rise in men giving head to the relatively recent cultural phenomena of Lil Wayne.
Speaking of men though, one of them saying he didn’t want to go down on his wife because he was scared—sends up immediate red flags for me. I think about the idea that vaginas and vulvas have been given such a bad rap in our society. If they’re not being used for the pleasure of a man or the birth of a child, they’re not always considered. Adult films will show you that women’s pleasure is not always prioritized when it comes to heterosexual sex. There are also notions that vaginas are unclean—when they’re actually self-cleaning. Then, there’s the fact that generally speaking, it’s a bit more difficult for women to achieve orgasm from just penetration. Cunnilingus can go a long way in making that happen. A man refusing to do such a thing would just be…selfish, inconsiderate, ignorant, wrong. There are other things to unpack there.
But what if a man didn’t have any of the aforementioned hangups? What if he just didn’t want to, didn’t feel comfortable? Would he be wrong to state his preferences?
So, that brings me back to my original question. Is it enough not to perform a sexual act simply because it makes you uncomfortable? Should a woman or man be obligated to give head…even when they’d rather not?
