quizzical pussy

Sex tips are an odd institution. They’re like body mass index or the census: not necessarily useful for individuals. They’re often more just rough indications of averages, helpful tools to know what to expect in the general population. But despite what I may have said in moments of anger, I’ve never had sex with average. No one’s tastes ever perfectly match all the sex tips you’ll find. Hell, not even all the sex tips match up with one another. It’s confusing.

This is why when I write about sex I talk a lot about myself: what sex is to me, what I like, what I think and feel about it all. It isn’t my narcissism (okay, it could partly be my narcissism) so much as the fact that I can’t realistically say “guys like this” or “girls like this”. I often feel uneasy declaring “Laramy likes this” or “Edwin liked this” because how can I get a good enough grip on these things to be comfortable saying I know them to be true from my outside, insecure, biased-as-fuck perspective? I like “Laramy seems to like this” or “Edwin said he enjoyed that” better.

This doesn’t mean I’ll never write a “How to Succeed at Reverse Cowgirl Without Really Trying” manifesto, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to take myself seriously enough to pretend it’s going to be widely useful.

Which brings us to blowjobs. A specific thing about them, really. From time to time I’ll run across a list of oral sex tips or some guy’s account of what makes a blowjob great for him, and often you see the same things come up again and again: lots of saliva, using hands, engaging balls, stroking the perineum. These are all things that have usually enjoyed warm receptions and glowing approbation from my barely-random-at-all sample of the population (read: guys whose dicks I’ve had in my mouth). Often, though, I pause when I read what may be the least-sexual all-star highly agreed-upon oral sex tip ever: eye contact.

I have no problem kissing, fondling, or fucking with eyes open and clamped onto my partner’s. Eye contact can add to the experience. It’s intimate, but doesn’t have to be emotional; sometimes it’s just deliciously intense. But for some reason I feel completely weird about establishing much eye contact when I’m giving head. For a moment of “this is fun, isn’t it?” camaraderie? Sure! But eyes locked on his for a substantial portion of the fun? It seems awkward to me. I’m not saying it should; it just does. I hope it doesn’t make me a bad feminist. I hope it doesn’t make my oral skills too inferior.

Here’s how I see it: I enjoy giving blowjobs, and part of why I like them is because they’re so entirely about pleasing the guy I’m with. I get off on how I’m making him feel in addition to the sensory pleasures of actually performing fellatio. But the point is mostly that I’m focused on him. That’s what many guys appreciate about it (although I’ve heard rumors that it feels kind of good also).

This might be way too neurotic, but I feel like in that sense I should be almost invisible. Or at least unobtrusive. If I keep pulling his attention back to me I’m intruding on his blowjob, even though I’m the one giving it. My mission is to turn my lips, my tongue, my hands, my throat, my larynx, into a chimeral machine of pleasure. This is not the time to make it about me. It’s not even the time to make it about “us”. It’s about him and his cock.

Also, I wouldn’t want either of us to feel bound by this eyelock thing. Looking down at me might get tiresome when maybe he wants to close his eyes and enjoy, or at least stop straining his neck to look at me. And I’d rather concentrate on what I’m doing, frankly. I want to be able to choose position and trajectory based on things like comfort, pleasure, and accessibility, not visibility.

Eye contact personalizes oral sex, of course. It might be a huge turn-on for a guy, seeing the dilated pupils, the raw cocklust pulsing in the eyes of the face with the mouth that’s currently housing his penis. Maybe it makes blowjobs romantic and sweet to extremes they otherwise seldom reach. I don’t know. I’d feel presumptuous. I don’t want to decide how personalized a blowjob needs to be. Maybe he doesn’t like me all that much; maybe he’s closing his eyes and thinking of England and the last thing he wants is me looking up expectantly, all like “aren’t we sharing quite the moment!?”

Now, if a guy tips my chin up gently and instructs “Look at me,” the whole thing becomes insanely sexy and I will fucking lock eyes like it’s my prime directive in life (until such time as the blowjob ends, at which point I go back to my usual prime directive, which is [classified]). But otherwise, eye contact’s not even on my radar.