On changing my mind

In the last two years I’ve posted here a little over 200 times. I’ve posted stories, essays, photos, interviews, and contests. I’ve posted stuff that people have loved, stuff they’ve hated, and stuff they’ve barely noticed at all. I’ve challenged and even scared myself with some of the things I’ve put up here, but I’ve also learned so much about writing, about sexuality, and most importantly of all, about myself.

Among the things I’ve written that seems to have resonated the most was this post, from all the way back in September 2013, on why I don’t like blow jobs. I wrote it at a time when blogging felt a little like keeping a diary: I had very few readers, and certainly didn’t feel part of any sort of sex-writing community. More than anything, I was trying to work through my ambivalent response to receiving oral, and to confront my inability to discuss that ambivalence openly with partners. A useful exercise for me personally, an interesting read for anyone stumbling across it, but really, I kind of thought that would be that.

To my surprise, however, the viewpoint I expressed back then continues to come up regularly in conversation, especially when I enthuse about oral sex to a new partner who’s read my blog, and even from time-to-time when I build a piece of erotica around sucking cock.

“But you’re the guy who doesn’t enjoy blow jobs,” people will say. “I read that thing you wrote. You don’t like receiving head.”

And while I think my perspective was a little more nuanced than that, they do kind of have a point. After all, this is how I concluded that post:

As a stand-alone act, I think I’ll always feel slightly ambivalent about the blow job, and will continue to suffer – with new partners at least – a level of performance anxiety that I’m mercifully spared in all other aspects of my sex life. That makes me a little sad, especially as I know it’s almost exclusively a result of my own failure to readjust and articulate my view of the role it plays in my sexual enjoyment [. . .] Maybe that’ll happen more in the future. Maybe this is one hang-up that will just melt away completely. Until then, I’ll continue to feel just a little bit shy about admitting that when it comes to giving head, I’d much rather be the one on my knees.

Here’s the thing though: sometimes people change.

I’ve alluded a couple of times since that first post to a shift in my attitude to having my cock sucked. I even wrote about the woman who, in the course of one incredible blow job, had me coming harder and faster than I have at just about any point either before or since. Still, for all my dancing around the subject, what I haven’t done is come right out and say it…so here goes…

…I fucking love blow jobs.

That doesn’t mean for one second that I’ve done a complete 180 on everything I said two years ago. I still don’t come often or easily from oral alone. I still (just about) prefer giving to receiving. I will still always get more physical and emotional pleasure from intercourse than I will from being sucked off. However, what I’ve learned since then – what I think I realised just through the process of writing that post, in fact – is that none of those things really matter.

Convincing yourself of that is the key to beating just about any hang-up – and of course, it’s much easier with some things than with others. Worried that your dick is too small? That your tits are too big? That your teeth are wonky or you have hair in a ‘weird’ place? Worried that you can’t come from penetration alone – or that you can only come from it? None. Of. Those. Things. Really. Matter. If you can embrace that notion – that realisation – it will become gloriously self-fulfilling; the more you believe it, the more true it will be.

As amazing as she was, Florence the cock-sucking machine did not make me fall in love with receiving oral. In fact, one of the reasons why she was able to suck me off with such terrifying speed and intensity is that by then I’d already started the process of getting over that mental hump. When I wrote that post, and especially when I put it out into the world, I forced myself to confront my fear, my anxiety, more directly and honestly than I’d ever previously done.

Specifically, I realised that my hang-up persisted because I was clinging onto unrealistic, externally-imposed expectations of how a blow job should be enjoyed; as a result, I often felt unable to communicate my own desires and preferences to my partners, in a way that would help them to give me an experience that I would enjoy. If I was frustrated, it was because I never just relaxed and allowed myself to enjoy what was going on – instead I lay there and worried about why I couldn’t come, or whether I was making the ‘right’ noises, or a million-and-one other crazy, crazy things like that.

99% of us are better at giving advice than we are at taking it. If a friend of mine had come to me and presented all the ‘symptoms’ I described in that blog post, I think I’d have found it very easy to set him on the right track. Relax, I’d have said. It doesn’t matter whether you come. It doesn’t matter what noises you make. There is no predetermined outcome to oral sex. Enjoy it for what it is, rather than what you think it should be, and don’t take it all so seriously! Above all, have a little faith in your partner. Don’t assume that she’s going to be hurt if you actually tell her what you want – I bet you really like a bit of direction when you’re going down on someone, don’t you? Communicate, don’t stress, and everything will be just fine.

Writing about my oral hang-up turned out to be the equivalent of giving myself that pep talk. Once it was all down on paper, I was forced to confront how silly and self-defeating I was being. How unfair both to my partners and to myself. That realisation – even more than Florence – was the first big step towards getting over it.

So yes, these days I’m not only a fully paid-up member of Team Blow Job, I’m basically the Head Cheerleader too.  I’ve come far more from oral over the last 18 months than in the previous 10 years combined; even on the many occasions when it doesn’t lead to orgasm, I now feel happy and confident enough to really enjoy having my partner’s mouth on my cock, and to make it a more natural, sexy, intimate experience for both of us.

I love it when something I write has a positive impact on the people who read it, but like most people I know, I started blogging about sex because I wanted to better understand myself and my own sexuality; when I look back and realise how posts like that one have enabled me to change and improve such a fundamental aspect of my sex life, and to become materially happier in the process, I know for a fact that this has all been worthwhile.