Gerald Summers - The Mouth Merchants

"He pulled his dong out, slowly. It was already softening up. And I was tasting all that goo he had pumped into me. And loving it. Real male taste. The best taste there is.

"Afterward we cleaned up, laughing and enjoying our being naked together, letting the shower water run over our bodies. I didn't dress until I was ready to go home, way past midnight. Jerry paid me for my 'baby-sitting time' though I felt kind of funny taking it.

"That was my real introduction to oral sex. Jerry and I had pretty regular sessions after that, pretending I was baby-sitting. That lasted until I had to go off to college. At our last session Jerry said to me, half seriously, 'When you get all educated, come back and I'll marry you.'

"I never went back. Because at college I had all the sex I could handle, oral and some regular. And I met George. Through sex, naturally. Mostly oral, but some regular. We really hit it off and got married the day we graduated. Later still, after about three years, George introduced me to the oral sex club…"

Until man climbed the ladder of evolution to the "barterting step," his basic drives had been limited to two rational and indispensable ones: self-preservation and procreation. The subject of this case, Eleanor P-, represents a human being who has long passed that "bartering plateau," who has almost abandoned her two basic drives, supplanting them-or willing to supplant them-by the somewhat irrational pursuit of wealth. This is not to suggest that one has no need for a certain amount of cash or property to be able to fulfill one's basic drives; it is rather to show that once a person ceases to consider his needs and begins to concentrate mono-maniacally on his wants, he is more than likely going to ignore his basic drives.

Eleanor P- is a person whose values are centered around her sable coat, her Jaguar, her station wagon, her two Continentals, and her husband's accounts that make the feeding of her greed possible. Her sexuality is a commodity which she uses by renting it out to whoever might bring more cash into her and her husband's coffers. She is, in fact, a prostitute; her husband, George, is a pimp. They are both members of the upper crust of society and are extremely, and hypocritically, proud of their status.

Sexually, they may be considered to be hedonists, although not in the usual sense of the word. They are not seekers of pleasure per se; they are rather exploiters of pleasure motivated by greed. As one reads the subject's narrative, one is convinced that the sexual orgies in which Eleanor P- and her husband participated were, to them, a means to an end, and more work than pleasure.

It is difficult to determine without additional information on the subject whether Eleanor's preference for oral sex is a deep-seated neurotic drive or not. In the course of her narrative she brings up the matter of her barrenness. If she is indeed suffering from an inability to conceive, then there is really no reason for her not to engage in regular coital activities; if she is not, then the chances are that she simply does not want to take the risk of motherhood; although this type of reasoning on her part would be odd, considering the modern methods of birth control that are available.

If one is to believe Eleanor's narrative, she is either almost exclusively orally oriented or she is content, and nothing more, with oral sex, especially since most of the sexual activity she engages in is more in the course of business than emotional involvement It is possible that her juvenile sexual encounter with Al, an exclusively oral one, had impressed her strongly enough so that in subsequent sexual engagements she veered toward oral-genital activity and disregarded genital intercourse because she had found the first both pleasurable and void of the risks of pregnancy. Her subsequent seduction of Jerry, the man she had come to baby-sit for, reveals the acuteness of her sexual urge; her eventual marriage to George appears to have been more a marriage of convenience-the subject must have seen him from the very beginning as an instrument she could use for the material betterment of her own position-and nothing more. It is highly doubtful that "love" ever entered the picture.

There is a theory about sex and love that says the two must be intermeshed in intimate relations for those relations to be satisfactory. Passion, according to this theory, is a blend of both elements, and if passion is missing when one person "makes love" to another, then he will probably acutely feel the lack, and search elsewhere, probably with ill luck, for the thing that will fill that lack. Thus comes promiscuity, Casual sex, and a dalliance with the catalogue of sexual deviations.

One writer who agrees with this general premise is psychologist Rob May, who, in his book Love and Will, discusses sex that had no deep feeling behind it. He believes that for too many of us sex has become a mere brief escape from our fears, rather than a positive, passionate activity.

It is possible to have sexual intercourse without any particular anxiety. But in casual sex, we shut out, by definition, our eros-that is, we relinquish passion in favor of mere sensation; we shut out the imaginative, personal significance of the act. If we can have sex without love, we assume that we escape the daimonic anxiety that is an inseparable part of human love. But if, further, we use sexual activity itself as an escape from the commitments of eros, we may hope to gain an airtight defense against anxiety. Passion and sensual pleasure have been displaced by the reach for identity and security. Sex has been reduced to an anxiety-allaying strategy.

When Eleanor P- agreed to go along with her husband in his scheme to obtain the large J- account, she was well aware that the scheme was a sexual one. She knew that she would have to, in fact, prostitute herself, and she knew that her husband knew of this-more, he had set it up. Consequently, as far as the subject and her husband's marriage went, they were going to reduce sex to what Rollo May above calls "an anxiety-allaying strategy."

What was the anxiety that was at the bottom of it all?

In the case of the subject. it was obviously a dread at the thought of not so much losing the comforts of life-since there was no such threat-but rather a pathological fear that failure of a continuous financial growth was tantamount to a loss of status in the eyes of the other scramblers for wealth. In the case of Eleanor's husband, George, the anxiety could very well have been a double-edged one. To begin with, he had the fear of less of status as was the case with his wife; second, he had the fear of losing his wife, not so much because he felt any passionate love for her but because she-was in fact a convenient instrument that he could Count on using to maintain and constantly improve his financial and social position in the eyes of his social status-climbing competitors.

Finally, in answer to the question of why the so-called "club" in which Eleanor and George P- found themselves involved was almost exclusively maintained on oral-genital activity, rather than on a balanced and variegated sexual activity that is more generally common in such group-sex situations, it can be postulated that it was not because everyone there was an oral deviate, i.e., was arrested at the Freudian "oral phase" of sexual maturation. It was rather because oral-genital activity was found to be both gratifying to the participants and free of potential complications-such as pregnancies, paternity suits, and inevitable subsequent scandals. The entire attitude of the club members might very well have been: use anyone you can, enjoy yourself, make the most of every situation that is presented, but take no chances. Cater, in other words, to your competitor's lower instincts and he will not get away from you.

"Until I met Jerry, I hadn't known there were men like that. Oh, Al doesn't count. He was just a kid looking for kicks. No, I mean men who really enjoy their sex orally, most of the time. For some reason, they don't want to slam a dong into a female's cunt. And get-or seem to get-just as much of a bang out of sucking and being sucked.