If your partner wants to perform oral sex with you, and you feel there’s something bad about sex or your genitals, please tell them so they don’t feel hurt by your rejection of their desires. Or if you’re shy, try handing them a chapter of this book.
Perhaps you’re the one stressing—about receiving oral sex. Anxiety can be no laughing matter when you’re about to have a lover touch, look at, and taste your genitals. Get to the bottom of your stress by finding out what’s interfering with your willingness or ability to receive pleasure. Are you unsure about the notion that your partner wants to put their face between your legs, let alone put your penis in their mouth? Take my word on it—our collective discomfort with our genitals is not limited by gender. Everyone worries about appearance, comparisons, and performance. Whether you’re a newcomer or an experienced recipient of oral pleasure, you might be concerned about how you look, how you respond to the sensations, or what your partner might think about you. So get comfortable, and read on.
How Do I Look?
One absolute fact about the way men’s genitals look is that every single set is different. No two penises are alike, nor do they get hard in the same way. However, the standard operating equipment is more or less the same: a penis (circumcised or not), a scrotal sack containing two testicles, and pubic hair that generally covers the mound over the pubic bone, the very base of the penis, the testicles, and the perineum (from the base of the balls to the anus). The skin on the pubic mound, the perineum, and the anus is similar in texture to the skin on the rest of the body, but usually a different shade. It deepens and changes in color as it reaches the base of the penis and the scrotum, and colors can range anywhere from light pink or peach to a tawny brown or dark chocolate. The texture is soft, and the skin is thin. If you think you may have a problem with your penis, you spot unusual bumps or lesions, there’s a discharge from your urethra, you experience pain during or after sex, or your penis bends sharply upon erection, you should consult a doctor.
Penises come in a variety of shape and size combinations too vast to catalog, and there’s no predicting what a soft penis will look like when erect. Long and thin, short and squat, curved up, down, left, right—it’s all normal. The variations make a man average. And average size? Average depends on whose statistics you’re looking at. A 1993 University of Toronto study of 63 men measured unerect penises along rulers placed at the base, and stretched them to get a range of 2 ⅜ inches to 5 ¼ inches, with 3 ¾ inches being the average. But soft means little when talking about average erect size. Almost forty years ago, Masters and Johnson found that smaller unerect penises grew more than the larger softies—showing that soft penises are no barometer for size. The truth about penis size is that there’s a lot of erection variation out there. But don’t forget—your cock is as big as your brain, meaning that the real measure is the size of the pleasure you give (and receive).
If you want to compare how you look to men in porn movies, guys in Playgirl, or gay male mags, you certainly can—but it won’t give you an idea about what’s really out there, and more important, what your partners are seeing. Are you worried about how you look? Do you think that your penis, testicles, anus, or pubic area are too hairy, or not enough? They don’t look like the ones in porn? The cocks you see in magazines are airbrushed (often heavily) and lit, angled, covered in makeup, shaved, and positioned just so. In porn movies, makeup and shaving is standard, and as with the magazines, it’s only the guys who are larger than average that make the grade. You won’t see any regular penises in porn, period. And seldom any soft ones, for that matter.
The huge market for penis enlargement gadgets, injections, operations, and pills neatly serves to reinforce your insecurities and sexual shame. It’s a business like any other, though it’s a kissing cousin to the diet industry and the breast augmentation industry—sleazy, and offering impossibly quick fixes to get you to “fit in” to unrealistic, invented, and often impossible standards. Penis enlargement is a bad idea. Vacuum pumps work only temporarily and can cause lasting damage if used improperly; also, the erections they provide are big but soft. No pill will make your dick bigger. And remember that any surgery you have on your urogenital system will cut through nerves, fibers, and erectile tissue—things you need in order to enjoy sex. Plus, silicone implants often need to be replaced, can become infected, and look lumpy. Liposuctioned fat eventually melts back into your body. Why put yourself through any of it when you could be enjoying a blow job instead?
Do Vegetarians Taste Better?
For men who worry about odors and flavors their partners may encounter, rest assured that your genitals smell and taste exactly like you—your skin, actually. The obvious answer to any cleanliness dilemma is to shower daily, and for men who have a foreskin, to be sure to clean under the hood—any buildup will lend a funky odor. If you’re wanting to impress your partner by emitting less odor, you can shower shortly before your encounter. If your partner is anxious about your flavor, showering together before fellatio can allay fears—they may even want to participate in getting you “squeaky clean” or might enjoy beginning oral sex in the tub.
If you plan to ejaculate in your partner’s mouth, you might wonder if you taste okay. An obvious answer to this question is to taste it yourself first—for some, no big deal, but for others, this is something they’d rather skip. Whatever you decide, there are a few things you can do to make sure your come tastes and smells neutral. Things that can make the flavor of your semen strong or pungent are vitamins, asparagus, beets, coffee, cigarettes, and garlic. Strong substances like these can influence your ejaculate in much the same way they do your urine. To keep it smelling and tasting neutral, avoid these substances at least twenty-four hours before oral sex, and drink plenty of water. Carnivorous men tend to have stronger-tasting semen than those who stick to vegetarian diets, though whether this is unpleasant to the person doing the tasting is debatable.
Sweetening your come is a whole different matter. Conventional wisdom on this subject (if there is such a thing) states that if you want to make your ejaculate more palatable you should drink lots of citrus, pineapple, or celery juice, and eat a lot of sweet melon. However, the jury seems to be out on the results, and it will probably be around eight hundred years before someone does a real study on the effects of cantaloupe on the taste of come.
There are a few products on the market that claim to enhance the bouquet and zest of semen, most notably Seminex and Cum-So-Sweet. Both products claim not only to make it sweeter but also to impart it with a citrus flavor that “women will love.” Seminex is a powder that comes in packets; you mix it with water and drink before you go to bed for two to three days before you want to be tasty. Cum-So-Sweet is a sublingual tablet (it dissolves under the tongue) that both partners use just before oral sex to change the taste of whatever fluid ends up in your mouth—sadly (and mistakenly), it’s assumed by the manufacturers that pussy is also an undesirable taste and that both partners are heterosexual. No products that make these claims have passed any sort of clinical or safety trials, so buyer beware, and read the ingredients of any product that makes these claims before you ingest it.