Is it just me or is there a whole load more cunnilingus in TV and film than there ever has been before? Last week, fans of House of the Dragon were left stunned when Daemon Targaryen dreamed that he had sex with his mum in a fevered series of hallucinations.
Casual incest aside, I was thrilled this Freudian nightmare also featured some dining at the Y. And it’s not the first time; House of the Dragon has proudly featured cunnilingus in its raunchier moments. Who can forget Queen Alicent using Ser Criston Cole’s face like a barstool when they should have been sorting out war stuff at a king’s council meeting?
In the last few months, I’ve also seen cunnilingus popping up in Bridgerton, Mary and George, and The Morning Show. I’ve also been lucky enough to see a sneak peak of Netflix’s newest bodice ripper, The Decameron, and it’s in there as well. Hurrah!
Maybe it’s just the shows I’m watching, but I am sure there is a lot more growling at the badger on screen than ever before. And, to quote Lizzo, it’s about damn time. I want to see more cunnilingus on TV! Hell, let’s have it on the Antiques Roadshow! Alright, I got carried away with that one, but allow me to explain why the normalisation of lip service on TV is so important.
Normalising cunnilingus on TV is an exceptionally effective way of challenging such selfish, archaic views around who is supposed to be doing what in bed. It disrupts the narrative that heterosexual sex is all about male pleasure and places women’s right to damn well get theirs front and centre. Showing cunnilingus on TV is a radical feminist act and, in our sexually saturated cinematic world, it is long overdue.
Perhaps the reason I am noticing it so much is because until quite recently it was highly unusual to see cunnilingus on TV, outside of porn. And even then, you’d have to admit, there isn’t nearly enough cunnilingus in heterosexual porn. Blow jobs? Fill your boots. Cunnilingus? Fill a bralette.
It was a mere 10 years ago that the Government proposed legislating against cunnilingus in porn. In 2014, there was a mass “face-sitting” protest outside of the Houses of Parliament against proposed laws around internet pornography which threatened to make various sex acts on film illegal. The Government was trying to make showing “life-threatening” sex acts illegal, and included strangulation, face-sitting and fisting in that definition. Apparently, deep-throating was not considered a health hazard – funny that. In fact, one of the objections protesters had was that the list of sex acts deemed to be obscene disproportionately targeted those which pleasure the vulva. But I digress.
The first time we ever saw cunnilingus on American prime time, network TV was in 2010 in The Good Wife, when Julianna Margulies’s character receives a tongue-lashing in the bathroom from her husband. Cable shows like Sex in the City had been pushing oral sex boundaries since the nineties, but even then, it was largely done through clever cut aways and close ups on a character’s face or thighs.
One of the earliest examples in a mainstream film I have found is in the 1933 Czech-Austrian film Ecstasy, starring Hedy Lamarr, who receives oral sex from a rather dashing blonde chap. We don’t actually see the act itself, of course. What we see is Hedy’s face contorting in, well, ecstasy. Incidentally, this is also the first depiction of a woman orgasming in mainstream cinema.
Cunnilingus is also alluded to in the 1958 French film Les Amants (The Lovers), by Louis Malle. Of course, it’s all off-screen and out of sight, but the act was considered so taboo that when the leading actress Jeanne Moreau was asked about the “daring” scene, she could only bring herself to refer to it as an “encounter”.
That was almost 70 years ago, and yet cunnilingus was still considered quite shocking in 2002, when Willow went down on her girlfriend Tara in season 6, episode 7 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We didn’t even see anything then either! It was just hinted at.
So why all the smoke and mirrors? After all, blowjobs have surely been mainstream ever since Deepthroat (1972) became a cultural smash. Heterosexual humping has been all over our tellies for years, but not cunnilingus.
If I had to take a guess at why this is, I would suggest that it is our old friend the patriarchy. Cunnilingus is an act that is undeniably tangled up in gendered power struggles. To go down on a vulva doesn’t require a man, or even a penis. It focuses almost entirely on clitoral pleasure. It is also the act most cis women require if they are to achieve orgasm. You would think this alone would mean that it would be a fêted, celebrated act that straight men simply couldn’t get enough of because it greatly improves their odds of getting their lover off. But no, quite the opposite. For the longest time, cunnilingus has been viewed as an emasculating act.
That was certainly how the ancient Greeks and Romans thought of it. They joked that only weak men whose penises didn’t work and lesbians ever resorted to such things. For example, the Greek playwright Aristophanes (c.446-386 BCE) insults one of his characters, Ariphrades, as the inventor of cunnilingus: “He gloats in vice, is not merely a dissolute man and utterly debauched – but he actually invented a new form of vice; for he pollutes his tongue with abominable pleasures.” Real men had sex with their mighty penises and that should be enough for any woman lucky enough to experience such a treat.
We don’t need to go that far back into history to see evidence for the idea that to go down on a woman is an act of service and therefore submission.
It was only six years ago when DJ Khaled proudly announced that he never goes down on his sexual partners, despite expecting head himself. “It’s different rules for men,” he explained. “You gotta understand, we the king. There’s some things that y’all might not wanna do, but it got to get done. I just can’t do what you want me to do. I just can’t.”
Mercifully, there were plenty of menfolk who came forward to challenge this rather outdated view of sexual reciprocity, most notably Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who tweeted “Ahem.. *clears throat* as a man, I take great pride in mastering ALL performances.” Thumbs up, all round, I say (quite literally in this case.)
Of course, some people are just a bit squeamish about sneezing in the cabbage and that’s fine, but you really don’t have to look too far into the manosphere to find someone (cough, cough, Andrew Tate) bleating on about how unmanly it is to orally pleasure a woman.
Which is precisely why I am so happy to find so much of it on our screens! Not only is it very hot to watch, but it means that we are finally shaking free of outdated and selfish narratives about who gets what in the sack. Every time I see a face being sat on or thighs joyously being wrapped around the back of some bloke’s head, I want to punch the air. Take that Khaled! This is a clitoral revolution and if you can’t get on board then get out of the damn way.