Slate’s recent article about the challenging act of auto-fellatio may just as well be called, “Everything You Wanted to Know about Auto-Fellatio, But Were Afraid to Ask.” Instead, the article title is somewhat of a teaser: ”So Close, and Yet So Far Away” with “The contorted history of auto-fellatio” as the attention-grabber. 

I’m not a male (obviously), so have no truthful idea how enticing the idea of auto-fellatio is actually to a man. Before reading this article, the only time I really pondered the topic was when hearing what has to be one of the oldest jokes on the planet: 

Q:  Why does a dog lick his balls?

A:  Because he can. 

According to Slate writer Jesse Bering for the purposes his article (and for the purposes of my own little blog post), auto-fellatio should best be described as: “the act of taking one's genitals in one's mouth to derive sexual pleasure.” The author cites a Kinsey study which states that although “a considerable portion” of men and adolescent males try to do the impossible, “only two or three males of 1,000 are able to achieve this feat.”

The stories surrounding the (lucky?) men in history who are known to have successfully completed auto-fellatio are intriguing to say the least. One subject described in the article finally succeeded to auto-fellate himself in 1923 an undisclosed amount of time after a “cripple boy” had first told the then 14-year-old about the many splendid wonders of oral sex. 

The man continued to auto-fellate himself--it became his absolute fave solo act--and noted that whenever the man was aroused, he also felt his throat constrict. According to the psychiatrists who were treating him for other “deviant” behavior, the man attempted to satiate himself using either a banana or a broom handle. 

Again, I am not a man, so can only speculate as to how much envy a man might feel when reading this post. 

An interesting theme that Jesse Bering observes in the Slate article is that many of those on record as actually being able to perform oral sex on themselves had closeted gay thoughts; one such man was actually in the military in the 1940’s. (I’m sure this would not have been an easy time to have been a gay man or to have sexual attractions to other men.) 

One of the saddest parts of the article--there are many---is when the writer observes that every man who gave himself hand jobs in the 1940‘s must in fact have had an extreme love for penises. His conclusion is based on an absolutely ridiculous report from two Majors who seem as they could have been characters from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. The authors wrote that "Sexual self-sufficiency either by masturbation or autofellatio, is tantamount to having an affinity for one's own sex."