Going down: oral sex stories - book discontinued by Cleis Press Inc. - review by Jenny Swallows

Okay, confessions time. First, I love the subject; and second, one of my own stories appears within. And no, I'm not going to tell you which one, but I promise I won't be mentioning it again. Which may still disqualify me in many peoples' eyes from writing a fair review of the rest of the book, but I promise I'll try because... because I love the subject. And with just a couple of exceptions, I loved the stories within.

It's funny; it really doesn't seem that long ago that oral sex was considered one of those subjects that polite conversation would never embrace, and which polite girls had never even heard of. Even during my own schooldays, which came to an end in the mid-late nineties, blowjobs were something you whispered about... and reciprocal behavior (why has our language yet to come up with a single, simple word for that?) rarely even got mentioned. That's how far we've come in fifteen years; imagine how far we've come in fifty! I once read an early 1950s FBI description of a recently busted stag film. The fellatio scene was described as a deviant act, and one of the first stories you'll find in Going Down, Sylvia Lowry's "Etiquette," kind of dances around that same subject matter with its own narrator's questions regarding the nature of good manners.

The words (and I quote) "can you shoot your fucking come in my mouth" probably don't quite fulfill those requirements. But the upshot maybe does. "The damp blast of semen cascaded from my lips and onto my tits like vanilla creme anglaise descending onto succulent white cake."

Well, at least she wasn't wearing her work clothes. We probably have President Bill and Monica to thank for bringing going down up into the bright light of day, at least in as much as that seems to have been the moment which finally authorized TV stand-ups and sitcoms to start making jokes about it, and I have to admit I do sometimes regret that something so magical has been reduced to that. Because it is a special act, and a beautiful one as well, a moment of sublime intimacy that both deserves and demands a far better place in our language than the demeaning status to which it is usually consigned by a bunch of ignorant cocksuckers. Oops.

Going Down leads the revolution. Twenty-one stories are more or less balanced between fellatio and cunnilingus, and a few of them are just as well poised in themselves. We could also note that there are many more female writers than male, which may also say something about contemporary attitudes - although this probably isn't the place to discuss them. Let's just say, so far as these writings go, that the girls write a lot more engagingly about giving head than the guys write about getting it.

Barriers fall. Several unscientific surveys of erotica readers and writers suggest that far more women fantasize about swallowing than actually do it on a regular basis. There is no such squeamishness here, or very little anyway, although Mary Borsellino's "Blush" will fascinate with its descriptions of fruit-flavored condoms, dental dams and so on; and Tenille Brown's "Trimming" is one of several tales that comes alive not with the naughty stuff, but with its attention to the other rituals that can become part and parcel of a good oral session. Shaving, for instance.

Occasionally, a story does seem to lapse into the realms of those awful "How To Give Head" books that too many publishers seem to think we girls need... Annabeth Leong's "Getting Something Out Of It" heads off in that direction, although it recovers before the end. Because that's the other thing about writing good oral sex stories. It's a lot more like "the real thing" than less subject-specific forms of erotic story telling. If it doesn't come naturally, then you should try something else.

"Going Down," on the other hand, will probably leave you wanting to do this forever.