The otherwise sexually magnetic Christopher Hitchens has a bizarre piece in Vanity Fair on how the fellatio is the most American of sex acts. It’s all disturbing, but Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon has a funny dissection of it. (via Majikthise)
Throughout the essay, he makes it clear that he finds women to be contemptous and gay men to be below contempt, and he has the nerve to wonder why “it sucks” is an insult. Possibly for the same reason “cock-sucker” is, cock-sucker.
For many a straight man, life’s long tragedy is first disclosed in early youth, when he discovers that he cannot perform this simple suction on himself. (In his stand-up routines, Bill Hicks used to speak often and movingly of this dilemma.)
The reason for Hitchens’ peculiar hunch becomes all too clear now.
The rest of the essay is more of the same—a pseudo-cheeky, secretly maudlin paean to the growing social acceptance of fellatio, which Hitchens chooses to interpret as American women finally coming down off the high horse and falling on their knees with gay men, where god intended them to grovel in front of straight men. I really hate having oral sex, which should just be a fun way to pass the time, mistreated like this. But there is one really weird passage I have to share.
As one who was stretched on the grim rack of British “National Health” practice, with its gray-and-yellow fangs, its steely-wire “braces,” its dark and crumbly fillings, and its shriveled and bleeding gums, I can remember barely daring to smile when I first set foot in the New World. Whereas when any sweet American girl smiled at me, I was at once bewitched and slain by the warm, moist cave of her mouth, lined with faultless white teeth and immaculate pink gums and organized around a tenderly coiled yet innocent tongue.