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| By Jack Nichols
Exactly a year ago Oral Sex Stalks the Presidency was the essay in this space. Two newspapers reprinted it but eliminated its singular graphic mention of oral sex. BJ Odd. They also de-oral-ized the title.
Even so, it stands up nicely today, oral sex and all: (See archives)
Oral sex among us has, in the meantime, been blessed with a prestigious human face: the President's. The doomsayers can moan about the current state of our nation but the old song, Look for the Silver Lining, encourages this pundit to say: "Thank you Monica for having such a big mouth." And thank you, President Clinton, for humanizing oral sex, a simple, natural act much in need of the kind of top notch publicity you and Monica have managed to give it. It's still a criminal act in backwater locales, and at Christmas I heard an 80-year-old Southern Baptist lady I know standing squarely in your corner at a party. She said: "It isn't sex in my religion unless you put it in."
She meant "in" in a most specific way. You see, Southern sex can be oddly self-deceptive. According to Florence King's classic, Southern Ladies and Gentlemen, (Ms. King is the world's funniest bisexual Republican) Southern women, in fact, are often self-rejuvenating virgins. And since you, Mr. President, are a Southern gentleman, I'd assume you have your own way of dealing with these sex things just like the ladies do. But I note that in one speech you referred to your consensual trysts with Monica as "my shame." You and all those other sex-guilty-millions. You're excused though, Bill, because you're a Southern gentleman. And here's why:
Ms. King notes of certain Southern ladies: "To recycle her pearl beyond price, certain ground rules had to be established. First, premeditation was forbidden. The self-rejuvenating virgin never planned ahead; she was always 'swept off her feet.' If she could not make herself believe this, she engineered bizarre sexual encounters that were never quite the real thing, so that the next morning she could tell herself, "'It didn't really happen because…'
There were other reasons too, says Ms. King, those given by self-rejuvenating virgins after their holidays. When at home, she notes, this group is goodie-goodie. After vacationing, however, they return home telling themselves "it didn't really happen because:
Every red-blooded Southern hunk in Clinton's day managed—though the receptacles were of any gender and any species—to enjoy watching his dong devoured. Cornholing was also quite prevalent. But that this incorrigible penchant for oral pleasuring should, at the end of the century, leap onto our national stage in such a fascinating manner—provoking, in fact, a continental catharsis—is what we get for being human.
But lo! And behold! Fate knew what the human species still needed to know, that cocksucking is A-OK, and that a poster boy to give it class would help bigtime. Fate raised up out of Hope, an Arkansas toddler who became the President of the United States, "the most powerful man in the world." And as soon as he'd been around a while and everybody knew who he was, Fate chose him—in the Oval Office—for one of the most important presidential tasks of our present day, namely to show all guilty oral sexers everywhere, homosexual or heterosexual, that even the president, yes, even the President….
New York Times columnist Frank Rich, whom OUT magazine honors as one of our great straight allies, says that the fault lines in this battle remain those that were prevalent in the counterculture rebellion of the 1960s. Richard Nixon, in those days, actually said that eliminating pornography, for example, was every bit as important as the preservation of earth's environment. The finest advocate for philosophy in our time, Richard Rorty (now professoring at Stanford University, I'm told) tells in Achieving Our Country what right-wingers hated about the 1960s counterculture, something he explains, that the great poet Walt Whitman truly would have loved: "casual, friendly copulation which is insouciant about the heterosexual-homosexual distinction." The counterculture uprising didn't succeed in taking every step to sexuality's utopia. Sure, there were buttons that boasted: "Cunnilingus Spoken Here." And there was a divine epoch—short-lived --of bisexual chic. But these behaviors had only a few real heroes and heroines, known mostly to the in-groups. So you see, oral sex, once regarded as a filthy perversion, never had a poster boy in the 1960s like Bill Clinton has become thirty years later. And why is The Coming of Bill Clinton the cat's meow? Because he's the president and the self-righteous Republicans think he's disgusting. Such self-righteousness, like the Pied Piper, is leading hysterical Republicans right over their own political cliffs. The voters are waiting to stone them at home. Great steps—like this one furthering America's sexual revolution-- are taken sometimes when we're unaware. Anti-homosexualism is in great part caused by anti-sexualism. Enjoying consensual oral sex or other Kama Sutra possibilities, is like enjoying the fullness of someone's appreciative smile for you, not something, Mr. President, that's "my shame."
Sexual guilt easily ruins sexy expressions replacing them with that haunted look. Therefore, humanity's spicy varieties of sensual stimulation—never seen, certainly, on The Fox Files--must be treated like we treat other human differences: as part of the show. And to drive home the continued existence of oral sex to a public which wants desperately to pretend it doesn't exist, a two or three day story ain't gonna do it. And Hugh Grant, England's pride, lasted little longer than that. Fate knows how we human beings, just like kitties and doggies, sometimes need our noses rubbed in things before we learn where they are.
This hit home with me when, in the 80s, I saw the first episode of ALF on TV. The furry little alien had just fallen from the skies and was out cold on the coffee table. The little boy asked, "Can we keep him? Huh? Can we?" His mother said no. "Why not? They got to keep ET." "ET was fiction," retorted Mom, "This is real. This is on our coffee table." And so, you see, so is oral sex. As much as the nation screams for it to go away, it won't. Right in the living room, thank you. No plain brown wrapper. Just the facts, mamm, the marvelously human facts. But there's another dimension to this soap opera that's also mystical —besides oral sex and besides having to explain to the many the actual location of the President's pecker in proximity to Monica, thereby validating from the top down mass oral behaviors. In this emerging dimension, come the millenium, we will de-throne those lunatic-loser fascist-Republican Re-Puritans. A new perspective is already being born, one that cares about ecological survival and has a sudden empathy for the deprived. Yes, instead of worrying who gives blow-jobs to Bill Clinton, or about the porno menace once feared by Dick Nixon, which issues ought to matter most as we look to the future? Earth's survival. Here. Now. And how humaneness and earthiness matter more than elitist ideologies. Even so, our awareness grows. One useful understanding we're already gaining—thanks to Monica and Bill: is knowing—as a people-- that non-rational oral orgasming among even the most uniquely positioned members of our hormone-driven species isn't likely to bring the world to an overly abrupt end— that is if that Pope will only agree to OK oral sex to hold population growth down and maybe advertise flavored condoms on The Fox Files or something. |
Speaking of big mouths ... Monica and "friend" in better times 
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