Deep Throat. 1972 film credited with kicking off the porno chic moment-in-the-sun for hardcore films (although I have to put in a plug - heh - for 1971’s [Boys in the Sand](Boy - Wikipedia in the Sand) which pre-dated Deep Throat by almost a year). Was the act of oral sex or deepthroating really such a revelation to straight people in 1972?
I think it was more about the novelty of seeing it onscreen in relatively mainstream theaters than it was about the act itself. There has always been oral sex. Even apes engage in oral sex.
I thought the appealing premise of the film was not that there was such a thing as oral, which was already pretty well-known, but that here was a woman that obviously enjoyed it so immensely and sincerely. That her pleasure came from such an implausible gimmick, a strangely placed clitoris, somehow didn’t seem to detract from the film. Strange, that.
Granted, I was just a wee lad at the time it came out and my entire aquaintance with the film derives from what our enthusiastic camp counselors told me.
At the time, it was inevitable that one film was going to break through and start the porn-chic phenomenon. Deep Throat stood out from the crowd of other run of the mill porn because of Linda Lovelace’s novelty act. Sure, everybody in the audience was familiar with oral, but few could do what she did.
Stag films had existed from about the moment that motion picture cameras were invented. And fellatio was commonplace in them. You want stats? Believe it or not, they exist.
Dirty Movies: An Illustrated History of the Stag Film, 1915-1970 by Al Di Lauro and Gerald Rabkin quotes from “The History of Sex in Cinema,” a series in Playboy in the 1960s written by Arthur Knight and Hollis Alpert.
I can’t imagine the boredom involved in collecting those stats. Yes, I really do mean boredom. Think about it.
Anyway, IMO, what made Deep Throat break out was that it was a comedy.
The real impact of the 1960s hit the whole of society in the early 1970s. Sexual situations was increasingly commonplace in films, along with nudity. Every prognosticator of the day assumed that real sex would be hitting mainstream movies in the future. Terry Southern published Blue Movie, about the making of the first Hollywood major-name-stars sex flick, in 1970 and most people thought that despite the satire, he was just being ahead of his time, not writing something impossible.
Filmed sex just needed an excuse to break out. Deep Throat provided that excuse. Although most of it is about as sleazy as other “big budget” porn films of the time, the comic performance of Harry Reems with Linda Lovelace made it possible to look at Deep Throat as a commentary on sex, on the difficulty women had with orgasm, on medicine and psychiatry, and all the other rationales that people dragged out of it. You needed something on the sunny side of sex to allow mainstream audiences to cross the threshold, literally. Having a great gimmick helped, having Linda Lovelace not look like a stereotypical hooker helped, having a relatively big budget to make the cinematography reasonably good helped. None of it would have mattered if they hadn’t hoked it up enough to remove the “threat” that sex films posed.
That explains how Zira and Cornelius convinced Dr. Zaius not to press charges against them for helping Taylor escape (and that was in 1968, years before Deep Throat).
I’ve mentioned before on the boards a story my grandfather told me: during WW1 my grandfather and other members of his unit were entertained by the grateful ladies of a French bordello in a village they had liberated.* Mustang (my grandfather) would have been about 24 or 25 at the time and was a bachelor but not a virgin- in fact he was a bit of a rake (which has to do with how he got the nickname Mustang) and had ample experience with prostitutes (in Alabama) and with “good girls”. Nevertheless, when the French prostitute bathed him and then began performing oral sex on him he was so shocked he ran out of the whorehouse stark naked (save for dog tags). When his corporal (or sergeant, or some higher rank) was furious at him for running around naked he explained about the “crazy whore” who had tried to bite his penis off** and before he finished the non-com/officer was so convulsed in laughter that he just explained and escorted him back to the whorehouse.
Anyway, the point is that in 1918 Alabama my grandfather, who was sexually experienced, did not know what a bj was, and I’m guessing it was something just not commonly practiced by “decent folk”. Eighty years later when Monica Lewinsky was in the news I remember a lot of older women especially just shaking their heads and remarking how it’s hard to believe “people actually do that”- and they weren’t referring to adultery but to the actual act.
Of course a friend of mine pointed out something interesting when we were discussing this very subject: remember always that before most of the houses of the nation had plumbing and gas or electric heat, most people didn’t bathe as often or as thoroughly as we do now and most men didn’t use skin care products or body wash or the like, so it was probably a much more disgusting proposition to women then than it is now.
That said, Deadwood was set in the late 1870s and mentioned bj’s on almost every episode (and incorporated them into Al’s great monologues) and I’ve read that in the Civil War fellatio (which was called “black kisses” or “Spanish kisses”) was very common in whorehouses because
1- it was quicker
2- it required less space
3- (most importantly) so many prostitutes and soldiers had “the clap” and it was considered safer for both
Perhaps there was a window for a couple of decades in the late 19th century where it was known, but then the window closed again as the Civil War (which had a very prominent sexual sidestory) faded from memory and things returned to normal. It’s also possible that those who did know about it associated it only with lower class “crib” prostitutes or- well, Linda Lovelace and her ilk.
Does anybody know when oral sex was first alluded to in mainstream films? (There’s the suggestive element of Peter Lorre and his cane handle in Maltese Falcon, but I’m wondering when the first clear and “no innuendo but flatout referencing” occurred in non porn.)
*According to my grandfather they had not so much liberated it as the Germans fled without a fight a day before they got there, but were still hailed as liberators without having to fire a shot [from a rifle anyway].
**Even 90 years after the fact it’s odd writing about one’s grandfather’s penis, especially in a sexual context.
To add to the above, the first clear reference I personally know of was in Deliverance (1972) (“This un’s got a purty mouf, Uncle Jed!”) where of course it was non-consensual man-rape (and never happened). Does anybody know of any earlier references or any contemporary references to it as a consensual practice in mainstream film?
I was a wee lad too and remember trying to get the family to see this obviously awesome film. Why was it “obviously awesome” to my 7 year-old self? Because the ads kept plugging (heh-heh) the fact that it ran for “247 weeks at the same location!” Then the next week the ad would say “248 weeks at the same location!”
Obviously a film with that much staying power was worth seeing!
Not exactly a mainstream film, but Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (1963) deserves a mention if only for the directness of the title.
I can’t speak for others, but in 1972 I’d certainly never heard of such a thing.
1967’s I Am Curious (Yellow) (warning: one mildly NSFW image) included a shot of its heroine kissing her boyfriend’s flaccid penis. Astonishingly, the film was referenced in of all places an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man (Mary Jane suggested it to Peter for date night and invited him to cover her eyes during the naughty parts).
Even more astonishingly, there is a still shot of the peener kissing scene in the wikipedia entry.
The Boys in the Band (1970) featured Harold being given “Cowboy,” a hustler, as a birthday gift. The original ad campaign featured photos of Harold and Cowboy, captioned “Today is Harold’s birthday.” “This is his present.” I don’t recall how direct the dialogue is but certainly the film acknowledged gay men as sexually active and consensual participants.
The aforementioned Boys in the Sand from 1971 acheived some mainstream crossover success (it made back almost its entire production budget in the first hour it played).
Difficult to say. When Lita Greay divorced Charlie Chaplin in 1928, part of her complaint was his insistance that she perform oral on him.
His famous defence of “but all married people do that!” (sounds like one of those courtroom remarks made in astonishment “But alll married people do that,” he ejaculated) was met by the general public with “Well, WE certainly don’t” to “Wow, we do, but didn’t think anyone else did” and “Hey, why aren’t we doing it?”
What’s astonishing about that?
I’ve never seen porn on wikipedia before.
It’s not porn. It’s an image offering illustration and commentary on the article. If you think that’s porn, you better stay away from this article. It has an actual erection in it!
Odd. Even though neither is offensive to me morally, I too did not know wikipedia included pictures of actual naughty bits in their relevant articles. Dare I click on their rimjob or vagina entries at work? 
It’s an article that includes a pornographic image. A mouth on a cock is porn. How is that not porn?
And I don’t have a problem with it. I don’t need to “stay away” from anything. If anuything, I’ll just go looking for more porn on wiki. I never knew they allowed it. I’m off to look up “doggie style.”
Midnight Cowboy had an oral sex scene in 1969. Rather subdued – nothing was shown – but it’s pretty clear what’s going on. The film was a huge hit and an Academy Award winner.