Starter sex: what's what?
Sex @ Brock #2: The Great Debate
Anastasia Biberhausen
Issue date: 3/2/04 Section: Opinion
I have a friend who's only slept with four people, he says. Unless you count blow jobs, in which case the number skyrockets to the mid-20s.
It's a pretty freakin' big discrepancy, but apparently where he grew up, giving guys a blow job in a bathroom at a party was totally OK, but girls who participated in full-on intercourse too early were a bit "skanky."
He is incredibly bright, politically progressive, and apparently in the majority on this particular issue. A University of New Brunswick study published in the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality last Saturday indicated only a quarter of university students considered oral sex to be, well, 'sex.'
C. attributes his belief to the climate he grew up in, a working-class Scarborough neighbourhood, where it was common among his friends to begin sexual activity at 12 or 13.
"It's very aggressively blue collar and kids are bored and drink a lot."
He attributes the preference for oral sex to fact that there's less of a chance of disease and zero chance of pregnancy.
"In many ways, it was the safe alternative," he says. "Even if you start to realize it [the distinction] is a bit silly, it sticks in the back of your mind as you enter adulthood."
Put that way, it seems almost rational, like training wheels for sexuality. It's not exactly risk free, however. Oral sex can transmit diseases including chlamydia, human papillomavirus, gonorrhea, herpes, and possibly even HIV. As well as disease, the whole concept is scarier when you consider that major decisions about sexuality are being made by 12-year-olds. Particularly in regards to the emotional consequences, does it really make all that much difference what sexual organ gets put in which orifice?
And not everyone concurs. L., who has walked into the room during our interview, makes a face when asked to explain why he disagrees.
"It's sort of obvious," he says. "It has the word 'sex' in it."
Rather than a precursor to 'real' sex, oral sex was considered risqu, even taboo well into the 20th century. While the Kinsey report said that 45 per cent of married women circa about 1950 had performed fellatio, as recently as 1963, the judge in a famous British divorce case said of a woman who performed oral sex on her lover: "She was a highly sexed woman who had ceased to be satisfied with normal relations and had started to indulge in disgusting sexual activities."
It's a pretty freakin' big discrepancy, but apparently where he grew up, giving guys a blow job in a bathroom at a party was totally OK, but girls who participated in full-on intercourse too early were a bit "skanky."
He is incredibly bright, politically progressive, and apparently in the majority on this particular issue. A University of New Brunswick study published in the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality last Saturday indicated only a quarter of university students considered oral sex to be, well, 'sex.'
C. attributes his belief to the climate he grew up in, a working-class Scarborough neighbourhood, where it was common among his friends to begin sexual activity at 12 or 13.
"It's very aggressively blue collar and kids are bored and drink a lot."
He attributes the preference for oral sex to fact that there's less of a chance of disease and zero chance of pregnancy.
"In many ways, it was the safe alternative," he says. "Even if you start to realize it [the distinction] is a bit silly, it sticks in the back of your mind as you enter adulthood."
Put that way, it seems almost rational, like training wheels for sexuality. It's not exactly risk free, however. Oral sex can transmit diseases including chlamydia, human papillomavirus, gonorrhea, herpes, and possibly even HIV. As well as disease, the whole concept is scarier when you consider that major decisions about sexuality are being made by 12-year-olds. Particularly in regards to the emotional consequences, does it really make all that much difference what sexual organ gets put in which orifice?
And not everyone concurs. L., who has walked into the room during our interview, makes a face when asked to explain why he disagrees.
"It's sort of obvious," he says. "It has the word 'sex' in it."
Rather than a precursor to 'real' sex, oral sex was considered risqu, even taboo well into the 20th century. While the Kinsey report said that 45 per cent of married women circa about 1950 had performed fellatio, as recently as 1963, the judge in a famous British divorce case said of a woman who performed oral sex on her lover: "She was a highly sexed woman who had ceased to be satisfied with normal relations and had started to indulge in disgusting sexual activities."
