By Jennifer Cockhard
It’s Saturday morning and I’ve barely been awake for an hour, but already I’m watching a woman give fellatio to a silver dildo. The group around me is silent and rapt with attention as they carefully watch the woman use the tip of her tongue to flick the dildo’s head. She rounds her mouth into an O shape, wrapping her lips around the fake penis, and begins to slide her mouth up and down. One of her hands grips the shaft while she uses her other hand to mime playing with phantom testicles. All the while, her eyes remain open, making eye contact with her students to ensure they understand the technique she is using.
After a few moments, she’s finished. She sits back, wipes her mouth with a tissue and smiles. “Now you can try,” she instructs, pointing to a plastic container in the middle of the room overflowing with dildos and condoms. Just like a standard first aid class, our instruction isn’t complete until we practise mouth-to-mouth on the dummies, or in this case, mouth-to-genitals.
My fellow classmates range in age from 18 to 50. Some are married, some are single and others are newly divorced. Some want to learn how to swallow, while others want to know how to control their gag reflex, but we’ve all gathered here for the same basic reason — to learn how to give great head. In my case, I’m not here to learn the basics, or even new tricks to please a specific partner. I’m here because I’m a slut, and I’m not satisfied with giving good head. I want to give great head. For the modern slut, blow jobs are the kind of skill you want to perfect.
It’s not hard for me to admit that I’m a slut. When other girls’ Barbies were driving happily off into the sunset with Ken, my dolls were screwing in the backseat. While my pre-teen girlfriends dreamed of falling in love to a soundtrack of Savage Garden ballads, I walked through the school hallways humming Sin with Sebastian’s “Shut Up (and Sleep With Me).” By the time high school rolled around, I was eager and ready to lose more than just my braces.
Slow to start, I didn’t experience my first French kiss until I was 16. But I quickly made up for lost time by losing my virginity less than six months later — to an entirely different guy. Despite the foreboding warnings usually issued by teen magazines, I wasn’t pressured into sex. I had sex because I wanted to. Losing my virginity wasn’t a loss, it was a gain. And besides, I hadn’t lost anything — I knew exactly where it went.
Six years later, I boast a little black book that’s thicker than the Bible, with contents even more sacred to me. Always the fastidious documenter, I’ve kept a list of every guy I’ve kissed, fooled around with, or just flat out fucked. Sure, the list sometimes reads like the script of a Monty Python sketch, with notes like “Australian sheep shearer” and “smoking elephant.” And yes, the list is creeping into the triple digits, but it’s a list I keep with pride and a complete lack of shame. I enjoy being a slut.
I’m not the only one. According to a survey conducted last year by Campuskiss.com, a post-secondary dating website, more than 85 per cent of respondents reported to having two or more partners. And more than nine per cent of women on campuses across Canada admitted to having “too many partners to count.”
This isn’t exactly a new trend. The advent of the birth control pill allowed women in the 1960s and ‘70s to behave sexually in a way that was traditionally reserved for men. But social stigma still prevented them from freely doing so — until now. Today, our media is saturated with images of slutty heroines like Sex and the City’s main characters; women who are both powerful and sleep around. Slang phrases like “bootycall” and “fuckbuddy” have become part of our lexicon. There are even products marketed to sluts, like personal freshening cloths that are meant to be thrown in your purse before a night on the town — just in case.
This is a trend that only makes sense. The traditional arguments for staying chaste no longer apply. Women aren’t devaluing their personal worth by sleeping around because marriage has become a choice rather than a necessity. We’re giving the milk away for free, so to speak, because the cow isn’t for sale in the first place — that and because being milked feels pretty damn good.
That’s not to say that behaving like a trollop has become completely socially acceptable. Sluts are often accused of suffering from self-esteem issues, looking for love in the wrong places or feeding Freudian-esque daddy complexes. I’d argue that they’re not looking for any of these things — they’re just looking for gratification in the form of multiple orgasms.
A lot of negative stereotypes have also been applied to sluts, mainly that of having inherently bad fashion sense. We generally think of a slut as the kind of girl who exposes her thong and adheres to a strict policy of push-up bras only. As a slut, I can assure you that’s certainly not the case. My panty of choice is the classic Grandma style, and cleavage is definitely a weekend-only affair.
But I can’t ignore that, although it’s become acceptable to enjoy having sex outside of a relationship, there are ramifications for indiscriminately sleeping around. Pesky side-effects include unwanted pregnancies, the risk of STIs and worst of all the chance of attracting unwanted suitors, whose affection is sometimes comparable to that of a sexually contracted rash.
When it comes down to it though, the benefits far outweigh the risks for me. Through safe sexual practices and open communication with my partners, I can curb unwanted consequences. Best of all, I don’t have to fear being ostracized for my sexual choices — even if one of those choices is to take a class that involves sucking on a dildo in public before I’ve even had my morning coffee.
At the end of the workshop, I’m slightly disappointed that I didn’t receive a wallet-sized card stating that I am certified in giving head. But I did learn a few new things that made the course worth my while. After all, knowing how to roll on a condom with your mouth is a party trick that never goes out of style.
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