Cunnilingus: A Short History

"Should we . . . should we try another scene?" asked Dorothea nervously.

"This one isn't finished yet," said Elizabeth, staring at Dorothea's small breasts. "Tell me thy name, dearest. Thou'rt not Cesario."

"My name . . . my name is Dor- . . . I mean Viola." Dorothea gathered her wits with some effort. "How do I know that thou art what thou sayest?"

"I know not what thou meanest, my love."

"Prove thou art not a man. Let me see thy lady parts."

"Anything for my true love." Elizabeth started the long process of undressing - removing jacket, gown, stomacher, overpetticoat, underpetticoat and panniers. "Unlace me," she directed. Dorothea helped with the stays, Elizabeth kicked off her shoes, peeled down her stockings and pantlets, and stood before Dorothea wearing only her shift. An enormous pile of clothing lay on the floor behind her.

Dorothea started to pull her shirt up to cover herself. "We don't have to . . ."

"We've seen each other naked before, in the dressing room," said Elizabeth, "and I must prove to thee what I am." She pulled her shift over her head. "Sinuous curves" was the right description. She was tall and generously proportioned, with red hair, full, sensuous lips, and laughing eyes. Of course Dorothea had seen Elizabeth naked, but she'd never looked at her. Not before now.

"I, um . . ."

"Dearest Viola," said Elizabeth, "Thou art overdressed. Let me help thee." She unfastened Dorothea's breeches, pushed them down together with shirt and coat, and knelt to take off her shoes and stockings. Dorothea stood quietly as Elizabeth undressed her, rigid with fear; but her rapid breathing betrayed her excitement.

Still kneeling, Elizabeth let her fingers curl around the waistband of Dorothea's drawers. She looked up into her eyes, smiled, and wrenched the drawers down.

Dorothea was slightly built, almost angular, and lithe, as Elizabeth had said, with dark hair and eyes and strong, almost masculine features. And certainly she was a woman, too: the evidence was right in front of Elizabeth's eyes - the feminine hips, the smooth stomach, and the neatly trimmed patch of black pubic hair. Elizabeth leaned forward and kissed that patch.

"Oh God," Dorothea breathed. "Are you . . .?"

"No, never before," said Elizabeth, whose fingers were exploring between her friend's legs, other hand resting on one hip. Dorothea moved her feet a little apart without knowing quite why she was doing it, and one of Elizabeth's fingers slipped into her, then another.

Dorothea looked down at Elizabeth, who was working with an air of great intensity, fucking her with two fingers. Lightheaded, she steadied herself with one hand on Elizabeth's head, the other grasping the bedcurtains.

It was hard to draw a breath - harder every moment, with Elizabeth thrusting deeper and faster, the scene so strange, the desire that was overwhelming her so disturbing. When Elizabeth kissed her patch again and inserted a third finger, Dorothea fell back on the bed, nearly in a faint.

In an instant Elizabeth was beside her, stroking her face with a hand that smelled of sex. "My dear, are you all right?"

"Quite well, I think. Would you . . . would you do that again?"

Elizabeth smiled. "I'll do more than that." Dorothea trembled as Elizabeth kissed her mouth, her neck, her breasts . . . she lingered over her navel and the flat of her stomach, grazed in her pubic hair and, kneeling on the floor by the bed, kissed her where she was opening, pink and fragrant. Elizabeth wondered at everything: how beautiful was this zone of a woman's body to which she had always been indifferent before; how instantly responsive was Dorothea's body, which torqued and writhed as her hands at her sides spasmodically clutched the bedclothes; how arousing were her cries of "Oh!" and "Ah!"; how delightful the feel and flavor of Dorothea's wetness on her lips.

Elizabeth knew, as she drank the clear heavenly liquid from her friend's sex, that in this spot she had admitted gentlemen for their money, Members of Parliament for their power, and officers of the Guards for their dash. Barristers and judges, barons and bankers had penetrated her here with their dripping cocks; and yet now, panting, Dorothea was like a virgin, experiencing this new kind of love for the first time.

And Elizabeth's own lips had kissed the lips of so many gentlemen and slid over so many foreskins, but she had never felt anything like this silky, warm wetness on her lips, and this mysterious communion with a woman's soul.

Lost in her thoughts and sensations, Elizabeth was taken by surprise when Dorothea wound her fingers into her abundant hair, pulled hard, and screamed, arching her back and thrusting her pelvis upwards. Elizabeth could sense the pulses of her lover's orgasm in her lips and tongue: her excitement grew with every spasm.

Dorothea lay still, lost in her body's quiet after so much stimulation and such a violent orgasm. It was as if she had blacked out, brought around only by Elizabeth's kiss. The odor of her own sex was strong in her nostrils, her body still languid, mind hazy, aware only of her own pleasure and the desire in her lover's eyes.

"Yes," she whispered.

"Yes what?" asked Elizabeth, though she knew.

"Yes," Dorothea repeated.

Elizabeth kissed Dorothea again, petting her hair as full consciousness slowly returned to her, and after consciousness arousal - torso tightening, nipples swelling, breath quickening.

"Yes?" Elizabeth asked.

"Yes, anything," Dorothea breathed, and lost herself in her sensations: the cool on her face as Elizabeth stood, the way the mattress sank beneath the weight of her feet, starched linen crinkling, the awareness of her calves on either side of her head, the sight of her sex above, pubic hair red, thighs freckled, pale pink parts so close now, the smell of her passion so powerful. She opened her mouth, heart pounding with love and passion, and met Elizabeth's open, wet sex with fervent lips and tongue.

The two actresses played together far into the night, and often during that theatrical season, and they remained friends for many years. Elizabeth would eventually marry a earl and acquire a title. Dorothea never married, but was mistress to a number of wealthy men, including a future king for whom she bore many illegitimate children.

AD 1972: The sexual evolution

The nameless girl - let's call her Fina - lay on the boy's narrow bed. His body felt strange. Not that there was anything wrong with it - it just didn't feel quite right to be here, in his dormitory room, in his arms, kissing him (and being kissed by him), T already off and only an anachronistic bra between her stiff nipples and the boy's eager fingers.

After all, she'd met him just a couple of hours ago. It was at a private party, so he was sort of vouched for by her friend having invited him. But still.

At nineteen, she thought maybe she was too young for this kind of thing; but then she thought she was maybe too old. Wasn't there supposed to be a sexual revolution going on, freeing her from the constraints of her conservative Catholic upbringing? Liberation was turning out to be a lot harder in life than it looked in the movies. It was confusing.

She'd lost her virginity only a month before, on a third date, to a boy who hadn't called again, and after she spotted him at the student center deep in soulful conversation with a girl she knew damn well she couldn't compete with, she hadn't tried to call him either - not being all that into humiliation.

The sexual revolution was supposed to make it all right that she'd slept with him, and in a way it did. What wasn't all right was the way the act didn't seem all that intimate. How could you lie in bed with a guy, naked in his arms, and feel a hundred miles away from him? How could having his penis inside you feel like, I don't know, sketching a wave across a room?

For Sappho, love was like the sweet red apple on the topmost twig of the highest branch of the tree. You could never hope to reach it. Fina got that, and accepted it, more or less - but she didn't even have a ladder: she was still browsing the lowest branches, where the fruit had already been picked over.

Not that there was anything wrong with this guy. Of the boys who'd hit on her at the mixer, he'd been the most interesting. But she wasn't about to kid herself about him, or herself, or what was going on here. She was the median college girl, neither the economy model nor the deluxe: hair the color of hair, nose very like a nose, body decent if unfashionable, not outgoing or a wallflower. The world didn't revolve around her, but she didn't move through it invisibly either.

The guy had sent out horny vibes but not falling-in-love vibes, and she'd been receptive because . . . because . . . that had been really something, that time before: the feeling of skin on skin, the hands moving over her body, the smooth skin of a penis stimulating her inside. Even the emotional chasm between them had been part of the somethingness of it. She could live with brief flings and one-night stands: at least they felt real.

Now she was glad to be kissing this boy: she wasn't good at conversation, and making out had put a stop to it. She wanted the rest of the night to proceed without words, so when she felt his fingers pluck at her bra strap, she sighed to tell him it was okay. She craved his touch more than his lips or penis: somehow it felt right, the way his hands roved over her shoulders and back and lingered on her hips, exploring all of her instead of going straight for the erogenous zones the way the last one had.

It made her want to touch him the same unhurried way, especially when he broke off their kiss to nibble her ears and nuzzle her neck, and she could touch his chest - lightly haired, strong but not muscular - and run a hand over his shoulder and his firm back, tracing the edge of a shoulder blade.

It was so slow - Her nerves were on fire by the time his lips touched her breasts, and her back arched involuntarily when his tongue probed her navel, so naturally she raised no objection when he eased her pants off. She was half mad with lust when at last he slipped off her panties and kissed the hollow of thin skin at the very top of her thigh.

In 2016, every nineteen-year-old has watched enough porn to know the basic moves, but that wasn't true in 1972, at least till the summer, when Linda Lovelace made porn cool, and suddenly everyone knew everything.

So word had not yet gotten to Fina of what that nameless woman had discovered a thousand centuries before, and what Semiramis and Sappho and Corinna had been up to in the meantime. She knew the pleasure of the boy's kiss in that tender spot was making her delirious, but she had no idea at all where he'd go from there: that his lips would brush over the closed lips of her most private spot, that he'd ever so lightly lick the slightly protruding hood covering the most sensitive part of her.

Her breath was coming in gasps, breasts and belly heaving: it felt like panic almost, because she didn't understand what he was doing or why, and it would have been so easy for him to hurt her there, where she was so vulnerable - though everything in his manner said he'd never, ever do her harm; and his fingers opening her were so gentle, and his tongue entering her so soft and warm . . .

It was reassuring, that softness, and she would have relaxed if his tongue hadn't just brushed that spot and turned on a million nerve endings, which now flashed urgent signals through all her body's wires and switches, lighting up her brain's pleasure centers with a halogen blaze.

His lips closed over her as his tongue played among the sensitive surfaces inside her, softer here, harder there, now circling the entrance to her vagina, now teasing, not quite touching her clitoris.

She raised her head briefly and saw him in the streetlight that sifted through the half-closed blinds: face animated but eyes closed in concentration; and then, as if some sixth sense told him she was looking, he opened his eyes and looked straight into hers.

They held each other's gaze, connected now in an intimacy somehow closer for the distance they had to look across, closer than if they'd been kissing or he'd been inside her with his face an inch from hers. She couldn't begin to explain it, but she knew this was more than sex, more than two overheated strangers getting off: this was lovemaking.

The stimulation had something to do with it, but it was the connection that made her come right at that moment and that made her orgasm run so gentle and strong in her, a river bearing her, long and long, on its warm current, till it softly deposited her safe on a distant green bank.

And on that bank they made love, the girl and boy, all night long, till, when the sun came up, they realized they'd exhausted themselves and decided to sleep the morning away.

* * *

Many years later, as Fina and her husband sat reading together on New Year's Eve, she said, "Honey?"

"Hmmm?"

"You remember our first night together?"

"I think about it all the time."

"You know what it felt like when you ate me out that night?"

"You've always said it felt good."

"I mean the way I'd never even heard of cunnilingus before. It felt like you'd thought it up right then and there, and I was the first woman in the world that ever got it."

"I think there must have been one or two before."

"Of course. But somebody has to have thought it up at some point."

"Back in cave man days."

"Let's pretend nobody's ever done it before, and we're figuring it out for the first time."

He smiled. "That and cocksucking."

"Fine. Cocksucking too."

"So how do we start? Do I drag you upstairs by the hair?"

"That's not the way they did it, silly." She scooched forward in her chair, lifted her dress, and slid her panties off. "A woman had to attract a man. First I display myself." She slouched backwards and spread her legs. "Then I touch myself to get the pheromones going."

"I like it," he breathed, staring as she laid a finger on her clitoris.

"And I speak an ancient word, one of the first words ever spoken . . ."