Action: A Book About Sex (17 page)

HOW TO GIVE A HAND JOB

Place your non-dominant hand around the base of a penis, making a ring with your index finger and thumb. With your main hand, loosely make the “OK” symbol with your thumb and forefinger as you read this. That’s the grip you want to use, just with your other three fingers closed, too. Tighten your hold gradually as you go, but avoid a manual stranglehold.

Shift your hand, and the firm-feeling subcutaneous part of your partner it’s closed around (you will be able to tell the difference—skin/dick are in two utterly separate tactile zones on both ends of this act), down just a few centimeters. Hold your hand taut—although not TOTALLY immobile.

You don’t want to dead-hand anybody, so, be very gentle as you alleviate the pressure you use here, then increase it again. As you massage the top more vigorously with your other hand, with very minimal gestures and movements, stroke and massage the base with that non-dominant hand every so often.

This might sound complicated, seeing as you’ll have swifter actions in motion with your other hand, but… you can type, right? Do you understand how much more complex and involved that is, comprehension-wise, and yet, you do it by memory every day? Hand jobs are functionally simpler, and, instead of boring-ass emails about the time of tomorrow’s meeting being rescheduled, you are making someone come.

With your dominant hand closed, slowly massage the length. Once you’ve gone up and down a few times, focus on the top for a minute, keeping the movement consistent, but a little gentler, and over a shortened distance, where the shaft meets the head.

The ultimate showstopping move is cake. Try another right-now demonstration: Hold the palm of your dominant hand out
with your fingers open. Close your hand so your fingers meet your palm. Count to three as you drag your fingertips along your skin, up slowly to the ball of your hand, stopping at their bases. Imagine imitating that soft, rolling touch around a penis. Or just go do that to a penis, if you have one handy. (Stop looking at me like that. I know what I just said, and I apologize.)

HOW TO GIVE A BLOW JOB

Giving a blow job is far less laborious than that name for it implies, but that wasn’t always as true for me in the past. Here’s an approximated transcript of some long-ago trepidation on this front:
I’m supposed to give head? Do I do anything with my tongue? ARE TONGUES DISGUSTING? Ugh, this mouth-piece is like half sponge, half larvae… and it’s a part of my anatomy?
“
Sorry, I have TMJ. It just happened just now. I think I caught it at the bank; they never sanitize those pens.
”

Maybe you aren’t exactly salivating at this idea for some similar reason, but I hope you are. I was missing out when I let primness stop me from deep-throating someone I was into. That’s right: Believe in yourself and inhale that dick entire. Hold on a sec as I embroider this on a folksy/decorative sampler as a reminder to stay positive—good things can happen when you rise to life’s challenges.

I would imagine self-confidence about giving this type of head is more accessible if you are also in possession of a penis and know how a mouth applied to that appendage feels stupendous and how it doesn’t. It’s still pretty basic, though. There are fairly trusty dicktates that can aid you in doing this well.

If you’ve watched porn that depicts a blow job, you could have all kinds of wild notions of what’s expected of you and how to execute that, but at least one thing about BJs in skin pictures is true in reality: There is nothing hotter than someone looking up at you while you’re getting head. Make eye contact for at least
half of the time you’ve got a penis in your facial vicinity! (If this feels overly ambitious, shyness-wise: Your recipient’s eyes may be closed for a lot of this anyhow.)

Looking up means that you’ve got some perspective about how someone is responding to each thing you do. It’s also improving upon that, since it’s slutty and porn-reminiscent, but doesn’t look like a sham, and because it telepaths the hot transmission that this is about
them.
It opens both of you to enjoying it in your own interconnected, impossible-to-counterfeit mutual presence, whereas closing one’s eyes feels more anonymous and avoidant of that. (However! If a person closes their eyes while they’re getting head, it doesn’t mean they don’t want to look at you because what’s happening isn’t sufficiently hot—it’s probably because it is, but they’re trying to make it last longer by not staring at you.)

You can change the warmth, intensity, and friendliness of your expression to match the mood of the sex you’re having. I like keeping my head tilted down, eyes fleeting up to meet the other person’s. When my vision is met by the other person’s, I nonverbally endeavor to say one of three things, or sometimes all of them in unison, from where our sight lines intersect:

1.
I can’t believe I’m doing this and am having more fun than I knew was possible.
This face-place is a kind of innocuous, wide-eyed thing that has effects on any hunky simpleton—especially if they consider you an astoundingly proficient, authoritative person in areas beyond sex. But you are a precocious novice that they’re teaching how to take a dick! You’re so grateful to them! And so committed to doing the best possible job! HAAAAA. This is distinctly entertaining and slutty because of how separate it is from reality… otherwise known as how having imaginative sex works.

2.
You are so goddamn lucky.
Okay, imagine (or maybe recall) that this person had long been watching you, and wanting you, and barely daring to hope that you might someday be in
this position with them. They know you know that they tried not to look at you so obviously and did a terrible job at that. Imagine feeling that power over them, and then deciding,
You know what?
You’re bored and they’re cute—it’d be fun to grant them this… not that it means anything, as far as you’re concerned, smirk smirk. I spontaneously looked up and winked at a dude I was kneeling in front of as I acted out this droll routine once, and though we’re platonic bros now, he still brings it up as one of the sexiest things he’s ever borne witness to. I have since made a practice of it.

3.
I’m going to get you harder than you’ve ever been, okay?
This one is direct and unabashed. Hold your eyes to theirs for as long as you can. Raise an eyebrow if it doesn’t feel like too much of an affectation… says the person who just made an impassioned case for winking with a dick in your mouth, HAR! This is more declarative and sincere, though—and a lot louder and handsier, on your part (and so probably theirs too).

A few other things to consider:

•
Make sure your mouth isn’t dry.
There’s nothing more uncomfortable than trying to stuff a mouth that feels occluded with wool. Truly great blow jobs are palpably wet for both parties. You want to work up double the spit you’re normally packing, and then veneer your partner’s whole penis with your tongue. I keep a seltzer going while I’m giving head: Making noise, sucking, licking, and so forth have the tendency to dehydrate you with a quickness.

•
Pay attention to each part of your mouth’s textures and capabilities.
You use your mouth for frenching, talking, and licking ice-cream cones/lollipops/other delectably phallic digestifs, if you live a life worth a damn. Adapting those movements to work with head can rule. Draw a line up from the base of a D with your tongue, softly kissing and breathing as you go. Press parts of the length of the dick into only the outermost areas of your lips.
Close… not your whole entire mouth, but most of it, on your partner’s dick. Ease it back into your throat. Repeat. I mostly keep my teeth out of this arrangement by making my lips into a gentle barrier over them. Giving dome sans chompers might seem like a non-negotiable rule of head, but there are exceptions if you’re fastidiously cautious: Some people like super-tender dental action if the majority of their penis is outside of a mouth. Don’t chew with your mouth full (unless someone asks you to, which has never come close to happening to me).

•
Pretend you’re starring in a stop-action blue movie.
When I was a blow-jobber on the make, I behaved like the body-double—or, I guess, head-double—of Ms. Pac-Man: I used to get so into how MUCH of a person’s cock I could take into my mouth in the fastest possible sequence. Giving oral sex had become one of my favorite things, and since it was new to me, I was a bit overeager. After some careful meditations on the responses I was getting from my partners and the ancient wisdoms foretold in video smut, I realized that it was probably worth trying out pacing myself. While Ms. Pac-Man is one of my style/life icons in so many ways—we have the same beauty mark and affinity for elegant hair bows and soft pretzels—she’s not a good model for how to suck a dick. It’s easy to slow down: How good a dick feels in your mouth often indicates that your mouth feels good to that dick. Acting on how the giving-of-head is nice
for you
is better for your partner, too.

•
Try using just your tongue for a moment.
Hold your partner’s penis inside your mouth, curve your tongue around it, and use the tip to massage the base of your partner’s dick. Slide the top of your tongue up along the center vein on the bottom of the penis as you go. The wide flatness of your tongue creates a pleasant suction and some of the filthiest sound effects known to your thread count. Don’t bear down TOO hard with your tongue—it shouldn’t feel like you’re trying to PUSH the person’s dick with it—or too wimpily. Laconically wind your tongue around the head—try clockwise, then reverse your circles, then back again.
Since this is the most sensitive area, the more you touch it, the more expeditious your partner’s orgasm might be. If you’re treating head as a precursor to penetrative sex, it’d serve you well to keep this in mind so that you can fuck for longer than about seven seconds.

•
Use hands to assist.
Whether you’re running them along the length of a person’s body, reaching up to touch their chest, or using them to apply light pressure or stroke their lower genitalia, like their testicles or perineum (the flat inch or two of skin between the front and back), don’t forget that your hands can enliven sexual acts focused on another. If you prefer to concentrate on what you’re doing with your mouth, gently hold their hip bones or place your palms on their waist and forget about them. To use them with super-low effort, press a knuckle against their perineum. This is an extra-delicate part of the body, so using your fingertips might mean leaving behind accidental scratch marks, which isn’t the kind of tactile sensation we’re after today. When it comes to testicles, you can very softly hold them with one or both hands as you go, and/or swap your hands with your tongue and lick very softly as you stroke the top of your partner’s penis.

•
Deep-throating is optional (but advised).
You aren’t obligated to do this (or ANYTHING ELSE, obvio)—just see what you’re comfortable with, depending on how long the penis in question is. Inch as much of it is feasible into the back of your throat, then see if you want to go faster after your first few efforts. I like to have my partners thrust, too. If you feel you could be into it, try it out.

•
Be loud.
If you’re suppressing noises, don’t bother. Once upon a time, I had a boyfriend to whom I had been giving head for a few months before I thought to ask him, “Can I do anything to make this better for you?” This was when I was tentative about what I did during sex, so when he said, “It seems like you’re afraid of being messy or making noise. I
like
it when I can hear you!” I was taken aback. I thought that preserving my neatness and decorum was paramount to seeming hot while fooling around. (It was
nearly as surprising when this was further debunked to me earlier this year, when a different dude said, “Smeared makeup is sexy—it means you’re really into it.” Turns out what I thought read as “disheveled” was perceived as “erotic as heck.” (I wish this were true in every last arena of life: “My closet is alluringly devil-may-care.”) He was right: Good head can come with spitting, occasional gagging, and other sound effects. You can even audibly half hum, half moan while the whole, or majority, of a person’s penis is in your mouth. Pass the noise through your tongue, letting it vibrate against your partner’s skin, as you do what you normally would. The sound track you provide might come with less premeditation. Or you could always talk, one of my preferred ways of making noise during sex.