In short, if we are to believe today's sociologists and culture mavens, oral sex has become ordinary. But the increased banality of the blow job is perplexing. When I was a teenager, in the bad-taste, disco-fangled '70s, fellatio was something you graduated into. Rooted in the great American sport of baseball, the sexual metaphors of my generation put fellatio somewhere after home base, way off in the distant plains of the outfield. In fact, skipping all the bases and going directly to fellatio was the sort of home run reserved only for racy, borderline delinquents, who enjoyed a host of licentious and forbidden activities that made them stars in the firmament of teen recklessness.

The first blow job I ever gave (after methodically groping my way past all the bases) was an act of faith. After finally figuring out how to manually manage my boyfriend's strange vestigial organ -- how to brandish, manipulate and handle his distended, tumescent pink love shaft -- I now had the daunting task of having to figure out how to manage it orally. Lick? Suck? Use your hands? If only the how-to books that exist today existed back then.

"Put both hands into the L position around the base of the shaft," says "Sex Tips for Straight Women From a Gay Man." "Lick the whole tip and then use your tongue to lick up and down the sides. Covering your teeth with your lips, and keeping your mouth taut, glide the head inside and lick the sensitive spot underneath with both the tip and flat part of your tongue ... proceed down the shaft as far as you can go in one fell swoop." And on it goes. It includes tips on curiosities like dick whipping, hummers and tinglers, plus advice on how to breathe. (Men may fear the cavernous tunnel that leads to the primordial soup of the womb, but women risk death by gagging.)

Clearly even the most rigorous bout of coitus pales in comparison with the intimacy of fellatio, at least for the one giving it: nesting one's face in the musty, doughy pelt of your partner's loins; bringing the full force of your tongue, lips, teeth (indeed, your entire face) to bear on the swollen, supplicant shaft; coaxing the salty swell of seed-bearing spermatozoa burgeoning from deep within the vulnerable, fuzz-laced scrotum; and, finally, partaking in the ultimate exchange of bodily fluids. (For what could be more carnal and, well, in your face than swallowing sperm?) All this is far more complex than the simple act of coitus, where the key fits in the ignition and things more or less just happen. Fellatio is hard labor, in every sense of the word.

Perhaps it's true that attitudes toward fellatio have changed. The infamous stain left on Monica Lewinsky's dress -- as coveted and totemic as it has become in the context of America's most famous blow job -- suggests a sterile, trite expediency that may reflect a general trend in America. In a recent article in the New York Times about teen sex, a source reported that kids "'had oral sex 50 or 60 times ... It's like a goodnight kiss to them.' Dr. Levy-Warren refers to the recent shift in teen fellatio as 'body-part sex.'"

But generational blips -- like empires and economic upheavals -- come and go. As French writer/professor Thierry Leguay notes in his (not yet translated into English) "History of Fellatio," as long as the penis has the power to please, fellatio is not likely to be bumped off the bestseller list of all-time favorite male joys anytime in the next millennium or two.

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