What is it we get
from giving a little head?
A good few drinks into a night out a guy starts to dance with a girl on a busy dance floor. It gets a little steamy and eventually she leads him outside for some “fresh air”. In a quiet corner she gets down on her knees, pulls out his cock and sucks him off. They return to the dance floor, drift apart and never see each other again.
It seems most guys either have one of these stories or know someone who does. Even PPW, a lamentably unattractive example of a man, has a couple of unsolicited BJ stories in his past.
Few guys would be surprised by the above story.
And few guys would understand it.
What’s in your jeans
You could dismiss this particular case as being down to alcohol. Women’s testosterone levels increase with alcohol consumption and they become more sexually forthcoming. But even if you do want to dismiss this example as an ill-judged mistake, what motivated it? What did she get out of it?
In Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels he tells of how the big hairy bikers would accept blowjobs from gay men on the condition that the gay guy paid them for it. Clearly the giver is getting something for themselves.
Where are the reverse stories? Where are the guys going down on women and then disappearing into the distance expecting nothing in return? You could argue that women are far less likely to accept an offer of a casual tonguing, but I know of few men who would be motivated to offer it outside of foreplay or within a relationship. They enjoy it not for the act itself, but for the enjoyment it gives their partner and as a precursor to their own.
It’s always a little dangerous to generalise based on personal experience, but here it really does seem that eating some wiener gives back something that dining at the Y lacks.
Sexual pleasure is a carrot that evolution dangles in front of us to serve its wants and needs rather than ours. And if you think about evolution’s wants and needs, this difference actually makes a lot of sense
What’s in your genes
You probably know why men masturbate. Masturbation clears out older, weaker sperm from the front of the queue and makes sure the next load we fire has a better chance of fertilising an egg. Our male ancestors who discovered masturbation where more likely to get their partners pregnant, therefore had more children, therefore propagated that tendency on to a greater proportion of the next generation. Hence men have a strong, instinctive drive to do it.
Oral sex on a man has exactly the same effect. Any woman who developed a tendency to go down on her partner would be more likely to get pregnant when she did have sex with him, more likely to have more children and therefore pass that tendency on to a greater proportion of the next generation as well. Hence women could have a strong, instinctive drive to do it.
The correlation is weaker of course since there are other ways of achieving the same effect – just having more sex with him would do the trick. Nonetheless it’s entirely logical that a woman who wants to give head for her own pleasure would have more success getting pregnant and therefore that instinct would spread wider in subsequent generations.
There is a weak correlation between men going down on their partners and improved fertility too; if she’s more likely to orgasm when you have sex with her, she’s more likely to get pregnant. It’s a weaker connection so it makes sense that it’s a less prevalent, less strong drive, and also one specifically attached to foreplay.
What’s in a stranger
But why would a woman get pleasure from doing it to a complete stranger she was never going to sleep with? For this case you need to bear in mind that what serves evolution doesn’t necessarily serve the individual.
If a woman finds a guy attractive and wants to give head to that guy she improves his chance of fathering a child the next time he has sex, whoever that’s with. That means that the attractive (and therefore genetically “superior”) guys are more likely to father more children and that improves society’s gene pool. Throw in a few prehistoric battles for survival between communities and it’s not hard to see why women, or men with female sexual predilections would have evolved a drive for this too.