"Oral Sex" Difficult to Antedate

[Page Stephens]

Fred,

I don't know if this helps but in my southern Illinois dialect which
apparently is similar to Bill Clinton's oral sex whatever you might call it
was in my youth not considered to be sex, that term being reserved for
vaginal copulatiion.

The same thing went for anal sex which was considered to be a separate
category.

These types of distinctions are made elsewhere since an old friend of mine
told me about his experiences in Peru where he said women would allow him
anal sex but not vaginal on the ground that only vaginal sex was sinful.

I read an article one time which said that about 1 out of a hundred men
could could orally masturbate themselves. I mentioned this to a friend of
mine once who said that in his youth he could do it but to his knowledge
none of his friends could.

So it is not impossible.

Page Stephens

> [Original Message]
> From: Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU>
> To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Date: 1/5/2006 7:06:50 AM
> Subject: "Oral Sex" Difficult to Antedate
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
-----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      "Oral Sex" Difficult to Antedate
>
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>
> 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
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 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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