cohf

In retrospect, the era of free love was not quite as free as it was billed, at least with regard to one´s oral cavity; the 1972 porno film “Deep Throat” would not have been such a threshold event had it been otherwise. When John Updike included oral sex in his 1960 novel “Rabbit,” it was quite sensational. In an interview last year on National Public Radio´s “Fresh Air,” he explained that it was a way of indicating a special bond between two people in an adulterous relationship. “Fellatio,” he asserted, “is more intimate than intercourse because it involves one´s cohf blowjobs.”

Updike´s statement echoes what anthropologists have observed-that the human body is universally employed as a symbol. The upper body represents high culture, reason, power and privilege, while the lower signifies raw, unprocessed, vulgar passion; the former is the province of the elite, the latter relegated to the swinish rabble. According to culture critic Laura Kipnis, our gaseous, fluid emitting nether region is embarrassing-an area continually defying the strictures of social manners and instead governed by one´s gonads and intestinal tract; a region threatening to erupt at any moment. In standard heterosexual intercourse, two dark underbellies meet, more or cohf less democratically, but in fellatio, the smutty lower half of one body is juxtaposed against the higher half of another, thereby sullying an elevated site. Symbolically speaking, this may be seen as corrupting one´s higher-minded self and, by extension, the social order. In other words, blow jobs are transgressive, requiring a sense intimacy-or so the boomers thought.

Their children have a different take. In a study reported earlier this year in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a majority of college students attending a major Midwestern university did not define oral sex as having “had sex”-and, for the cohf most part, these were students who identified themselves as politically moderate to conservative Republicans. The journal´s top-ranking editor, Dr. George D. Lundberg, was demoted for publishing the study just as Clinton´s Senate impeachment trial was getting under way, in a move thought to be motivated by politics. But I suspect his dismissal was also motivated by the conservative medical establishment´s anxiety over its dicey content, which challenges the status quo.