"Oral Sex" Difficult to Antedate

[Wilson Gray]

On 1/5/06, Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at yale.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- 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
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>
>

My memory of Legman and "oragenital" is the same as yours, Fred. I
blush (take my  word for it) to admit it, but I was once the bored
owner of  Legman's collected works. However, when I moved from Los
Angeles to Davis in 1969, I dumped my Legman books, together with
other books that I was no longer interested in, at a used-book store
on Melrose Place, which was noplace special in those days. I had no
idea that he was a legitimate and respected scholar in any field.

-Wilson