The French, unlike the English, have written about anilingus ardently, enthusiastically, and unashamedly for centuries. The most popular term was " faire feuille de rose," or "to do rose leaf," and it shows up everywhere. It's in plays, it's in poems, it's in novels; it's likely the name of an 18th-century French breakfast cereal. Where does it not show up? England. And this is exceedingly strange because in the 18th and 19th centuries, if you could read English, it's very likely that you also read French, and even if you didn't read French, bawdy French works were everywhere in translation.
Still, references to ass eating are few and far between in English literature—neither the premier British pornographic work Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (John Cleland, 1748) nor the infamous Restoration poems by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, mention it. You can find sly references in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and that's about it—at least until Teleny, a deeply pornographic work possibly written by Oscar Wilde, brought "feuille de rose" out to play in 1896. It's almost as if the English were willfully blind when it came to tonguing the brown eye. The English Channel is only 20.6 miles wide at the Strait of Dover, and yet it's a bridge too far. If France is the anus, the English Channel is the taint, and a sturdy one indeed.
Let us return, then, to salad tossing. It came to us, as many excellent things have, from San Francisco gay culture. Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer and author of The F-Word, a book about the word fuck, told me in an email that salad tossing has murky origins but its first known use in print appears in an early 1970s gay-slang glossary. I imagine a bunch of glittery, bearded Cockette-style gay dudes standing around a drum circle, birthing a term to encapsulate the act's pleasure while retaining its delicacy. To toss a salad is not an end in itself; it's a preliminary step before a meal, just as anilingus is so often the precursor to the main sexual event.
So why did this linguistic hole where anilingus should have been inserted persist for so long? Were I to hazard a guess, I'd say first that we as a people folded the act into cunnilingus; second, that we can't quite cruise past the hygiene factor; and third, when the licker is female and the lickee is male, it codes the recipient gay. "Butt lickers" are at best toadying sycophants; at worst, they're homosexuals—and evolving marriage laws aside, we are nothing if not a repressed, homophobic people.
We might look at the recent media attention and hope for widening acceptance of anilingus, but I wouldn't hold your breath. Anilingus may no longer be taboo—it clearly has entered our cultural discourse—but I'd guess that we English speakers are a few decades and many baby wipes away from taking a roseleaf from France's book.
The French, unlike the English, have written about anilingus ardently, enthusiastically, and unashamedly for centuries. The most popular term was " faire feuille de rose," or "to do rose leaf," and it shows up everywhere. It's in plays, it's in poems, it's in novels; it's likely the name of an 18th-century French breakfast cereal. Where does it not show up? England. And this is exceedingly strange because in the 18th and 19th centuries, if you could read English, it's very likely that you also read French, and even if you didn't read French, bawdy French works were everywhere in translation.
Still, references to ass eating are few and far between in English literature—neither the premier British pornographic work Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (John Cleland, 1748) nor the infamous Restoration poems by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, mention it. You can find sly references in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and that's about it—at least until Teleny, a deeply pornographic work possibly written by Oscar Wilde, brought "feuille de rose" out to play in 1896. It's almost as if the English were willfully blind when it came to tonguing the brown eye. The English Channel is only 20.6 miles wide at the Strait of Dover, and yet it's a bridge too far. If France is the anus, the English Channel is the taint, and a sturdy one indeed.
Let us return, then, to salad tossing. It came to us, as many excellent things have, from San Francisco gay culture. Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer and author of The F-Word, a book about the word fuck, told me in an email that salad tossing has murky origins but its first known use in print appears in an early 1970s gay-slang glossary. I imagine a bunch of glittery, bearded Cockette-style gay dudes standing around a drum circle, birthing a term to encapsulate the act's pleasure while retaining its delicacy. To toss a salad is not an end in itself; it's a preliminary step before a meal, just as anilingus is so often the precursor to the main sexual event.
So why did this linguistic hole where anilingus should have been inserted persist for so long? Were I to hazard a guess, I'd say first that we as a people folded the act into cunnilingus; second, that we can't quite cruise past the hygiene factor; and third, when the licker is female and the lickee is male, it codes the recipient gay. "Butt lickers" are at best toadying sycophants; at worst, they're homosexuals—and evolving marriage laws aside, we are nothing if not a repressed, homophobic people.
We might look at the recent media attention and hope for widening acceptance of anilingus, but I wouldn't hold your breath. Anilingus may no longer be taboo—it clearly has entered our cultural discourse—but I'd guess that we English speakers are a few decades and many baby wipes away from taking a roseleaf from France's book.
The French, unlike the English, have written about anilingus ardently, enthusiastically, and unashamedly for centuries. The most popular term was " faire feuille de rose," or "to do rose leaf," and it shows up everywhere. It's in plays, it's in poems, it's in novels; it's likely the name of an 18th-century French breakfast cereal. Where does it not show up? England. And this is exceedingly strange because in the 18th and 19th centuries, if you could read English, it's very likely that you also read French, and even if you didn't read French, bawdy French works were everywhere in translation.
Still, references to ass eating are few and far between in English literature—neither the premier British pornographic work Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (John Cleland, 1748) nor the infamous Restoration poems by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, mention it. You can find sly references in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and that's about it—at least until Teleny, a deeply pornographic work possibly written by Oscar Wilde, brought "feuille de rose" out to play in 1896. It's almost as if the English were willfully blind when it came to tonguing the brown eye. The English Channel is only 20.6 miles wide at the Strait of Dover, and yet it's a bridge too far. If France is the anus, the English Channel is the taint, and a sturdy one indeed.
Let us return, then, to salad tossing. It came to us, as many excellent things have, from San Francisco gay culture. Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer and author of The F-Word, a book about the word fuck, told me in an email that salad tossing has murky origins but its first known use in print appears in an early 1970s gay-slang glossary. I imagine a bunch of glittery, bearded Cockette-style gay dudes standing around a drum circle, birthing a term to encapsulate the act's pleasure while retaining its delicacy. To toss a salad is not an end in itself; it's a preliminary step before a meal, just as anilingus is so often the precursor to the main sexual event.
So why did this linguistic hole where anilingus should have been inserted persist for so long? Were I to hazard a guess, I'd say first that we as a people folded the act into cunnilingus; second, that we can't quite cruise past the hygiene factor; and third, when the licker is female and the lickee is male, it codes the recipient gay. "Butt lickers" are at best toadying sycophants; at worst, they're homosexuals—and evolving marriage laws aside, we are nothing if not a repressed, homophobic people.
We might look at the recent media attention and hope for widening acceptance of anilingus, but I wouldn't hold your breath. Anilingus may no longer be taboo—it clearly has entered our cultural discourse—but I'd guess that we English speakers are a few decades and many baby wipes away from taking a roseleaf from France's book.
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The taint lick was a fancy feast.
Still, references to ass eating are few and far between in English literature—neither the premier British pornographic work Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (John Cleland, 1748) nor the infamous Restoration poems by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, mention it. You can find sly references in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and that's about it—at least until Teleny, a deeply pornographic work possibly written by Oscar Wilde, brought "feuille de rose" out to play in 1896. It's almost as if the English were willfully blind when it came to tonguing the brown eye. The English Channel is only 20.6 miles wide at the Strait of Dover, and yet it's a bridge too far. If France is the anus, the English Channel is the taint, and a sturdy one indeed.
Let us return, then, to salad tossing. It came to us, as many excellent things have, from San Francisco gay culture. Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer and author of The F-Word, a book about the word fuck, told me in an email that salad tossing has murky origins but its first known use in print appears in an early 1970s gay-slang glossary. I imagine a bunch of glittery, bearded Cockette-style gay dudes standing around a drum circle, birthing a term to encapsulate the act's pleasure while retaining its delicacy. To toss a salad is not an end in itself; it's a preliminary step before a meal, just as anilingus is so often the precursor to the main sexual event.
So why did this linguistic hole where anilingus should have been inserted persist for so long? Were I to hazard a guess, I'd say first that we as a people folded the act into cunnilingus; second, that we can't quite cruise past the hygiene factor; and third, when the licker is female and the lickee is male, it codes the recipient gay. "Butt lickers" are at best toadying sycophants; at worst, they're homosexuals—and evolving marriage laws aside, we are nothing if not a repressed, homophobic people.
We might look at the recent media attention and hope for widening acceptance of anilingus, but I wouldn't hold your breath. Anilingus may no longer be taboo—it clearly has entered our cultural discourse—but I'd guess that we English speakers are a few decades and many baby wipes away from taking a roseleaf from France's book.
Chelsea G. Summers writes for Adult Magazine and many other publications. Follow her on Twitter.
http://www.vice.com/read/tongue-twisting-history-of-the-many-euphemisms-for-eating-ass
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