"Oral Sex" Difficult to Antedate

[Fred Shapiro]

I thought the OED's 1959 dating for "oral sex" should be antedatable, but
this is proving difficult.  I searched all the databases I could think of
and spent a few minutes perusing my library's modest collection of books
on sex, homosexuality and prostitution from the 1950s, but found nothing.
Other terms seem to have been used, like "oral copulation," "mouth-genital
contact," "fellatio," etc.  It may be that the specific phrase "oral sex"
is not the important one, but rather the use of "oral" as an adjective
relating to sex, and OED does have collocations like "oral masturbation"
(at first glance a very acrobatic term!) back to 1889.

If anyone wants to pursue this, I would suggest looking at Kinsey and
other medical, psychological, sociological, and legal texts from the 1940s
and 1950s.  I have not looked at Kinsey nor at Gershon Legman's 1941
glossary (although I think Legman favored the rare term "oragenital").

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and     YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
   Access and Lecturer in Legal Research     Yale University Press,
Yale Law School                             forthcoming
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               http://quotationdictionary.com
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