"Oral Sex" Difficult to Antedate

[Page Stephens]

Wilson,

I quit blushing long ago as is obvious from my uploads.

You have to be our age or older to remember the days when folklorists
passed dirty stories and songs among themselves but would never think of
getting them into print.

I would welcome any information anyone is able to find about the first time
an academic journal broke the taboo. I do remember the time when a
folklorist friend of mine told me about the Kinsey Institute at IU and the
wonders it held which, of course, could not be published, and I have a tape
of a friend of mine singing Curly Fletcher's "Castration of The Strawberry
Roan" for a female folklorist and had problems getting through it because
of the presence of a woman.

I have spent the past 40 or so years attempting to find  texts of folk
songs which it is obvious have been expurgated prior to publication. In my
fieldwork in Arkansas men would take me aside out of the hearing of
womenfolk and tell me that the song they sang for me in public or for my
tape recorder was incorrect because when they, ie. the men, got together
they sang entirely different words to the tunes. It was much more difficult
for me as a male to learn much about the same kinds of information from
women but occasionally I could get glimpses of it.

The result of this prudishness is that we have far less information about
songs, jokes, etc. as they existed in the underground than we should have.
This still exists because a couple of years ago I sang "The Big Rock Candy
Mountain" for a friend of mine who told me that she used to like the song
as a children's song until her husband and I informed her about its homo
erotic undertones.

It is still both a good song and one of my favorites as a children's song
but like so many blues from the '20s until today it hides or at least
obscures its message.

This is a study in and of itself because the social pressures especially in
terms of the recording industry certainly had a major influence on the
lyrics of songs as we know them today, and it is obvious if you listen to
such performers as Tampa Red and Georgia Tom (Thomas Dorsey) who later
became one of the most famous writers of gospel songs that the underground
and above ground cultures existed side by side.

The question is where did one end and another begin. My late friend The
Reverend Gary Davis recorded his most innovative guitar accompanied songs
after he had become a preacher and considered the blues no matter how
innocent to be sinful although he could be enticed to occasionally sing a
blues or two.

The same thing was common among white singers who were converted to
religion and quite often quit playing music entirely after their conversion
on the grounds that it was sinful. This does not mean that they had
forgotten their sinful ways because I recorded many of them both before
after they had back slid and left the church. The common denominator of
this quite often was the date they got married and came under the influence
of their new wife who disapproved of their life style and music. They
still, of course, kept passing jokes, stories, songs etc. among themselves
but never within earshot of their wives or other women.

Oh well. Enough is enough, and it is obvious that I am an anthropologist
and that my primary interest is not when a word came into existence
although it is useful information but its socio-cultural etiology.

Page Stephens

PS. We owe more to Legman and others like Ed Cray in terms of bringing
honesty into the study of folklore and culture than we can ever thank them
for because without them such books as Vance Randolph's Pissing in the Snow
(University of Illinois Press) would never have gotten into print. The
taboo still exists, however, because a close friend of mine annotated Eat
Beans, They Make You Astute under the pseudonym James Withers a book which
was written by Sue D'nymph.

My friend did not mind having his name attached to it so my wife who is a
librarian exposed his true name in library catalogue records but I have no
idea who Sue D'nymph is or was since my friend would never tell me.

Ah prudery I love thee.

> [Original Message]
> From: Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Date: 1/5/2006 10:54:46 PM
> Subject: Re: "Oral Sex" Difficult to Antedate
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "Oral Sex" Difficult to Antedate
>
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>
> 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
> >
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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
> >
> >
>
> 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