Well, I have the same problem, and I never sucked my thumb, and as a 14 year old boy, I’ve also never given fellatio. The theory is wrong!
:D;)
In college, I read a fascinating book on the history of prostitution out of the library. I can’t remember the name of it, but there’s one listed on Amazon called Prostitution: An Illustrated History. It’s out of print but available used. I also have a book called Medieval Prostitution, but it’s rather dry (whoduh thunk).
I’ll bet some sold their teeth to make a buck (remember Les Miserables*?). Prostitutes were already in a less-than-desirable position (NPI) for earning money. Why not sell your teeth to a dentist for the purpose of dentures and improve your performance as well?
Sam, the difference between a “Web factoid” and a “fact” is that a “Web factoid” is something that sounds like a “fact” that’s posted on the Web but has no corroborating evidence from anywhere else, like in a scholarly article, or an encyclopedia, or even on CNN. I can’t find either the “fact” that Cape Malay women in South Africa have their teeth pulled to facilitate fellatio, or the “fact” that the South African Cape Malays use fellatio as contraception, confirmed anywhere else on the Web. Neither is there any corroborating source for the “fact” that the BM knocked off all the penises on their Greek statues and put them in a drawer.
It’s like the “yak milk is pink” thing. It’s posted on the Web, but isn’t necessarily true. Just because something is posted on the Web doesn’t make it true.
I’m guessing that you put something like “teeth extracted fellatio” into Google and came up with this one hit. But just one hit doesn’t make it a “fact”, it makes it “something that’s posted on the Web”. To answer a GQ question, the hit needs to be found in several different places, including (hopefully) the aforementioned scholarly articles, encyclopedias, or even CNN.
You also have to look at what kind of source your hit is. Is it a commentary, or an op-ed piece, or is it a scholarly report? And you have to look at why the “fact” or “factoid” is included on the Web page. Does the website have an axe to grind? Or is it a scientific website, like the CDC or the FDA?
A “factoid” is an “everybody knows…” kind of thing. The author of this particular op-ed article simply added a couple of the “everybody knows…” kind of thing to his article in order to reinforce his point about oral sex and British prudery. But that doesn’t make them true. 
Duck You are very possibly correct.
What I’m wondering is, did you just assume that the writer found the two cites in “factoid” form on the web, or did you do a search and find them yourself in “factoid” form on the web? Could you give me a few cites of the factoids from the web?
The writer of the “Op-Ed” piece, Dr. A.C.Grayling, may quite possibly not be qualified to comment on the factual basis of his two quotes under discussion. But he ain’t just some rummy off the street, as witness here. I would think the good Dr. would hardly copy “factoids” off the web to bolster his case. But I could be wrong.
I must admit, the penises in the drawer sounds ULish, though. We need to find out about this.
On your mark, get set, GO!
I’d heard this before as well. When GIs referred mysteriously to the things the French women would do they were talking about oral sex. I can’t remember where I read it, though.
Funny, these days oral sex is usually a lot easier to get than vaginal sex, except in certain cultures. A lot of women feel obligated to give a guy a blowjob even if they have no intention of going on a second date with him.
I doubt that. If fellatio was a contributor to her overbite, then that means that she was exerting a considerable amount of suction pressure onto/against some poor guy’s penis with her teeth. And not against the flat, smooth part, either-- she’d be sucking that penis against the tips and backsides of her incisors. I can’t imagine many guys enjoying that at all, or for very long. Certainly not long enough for it to affect her teeth, that’s for sure.
[many Google searches later, to confirm what I suspected after my earlier foray…]
Okay, I guess I’m not saying that Grayling copied factoids off the Web–I’m saying that he has single-handedly generated three of them, his own self. I can’t find either the “Malay pulling teeth” thing or the “Malay fellatio contraception” thing anywhere else at all on the Web.
And a Google search for “British museum penises drawer” turns up, besides Grayling’s piece, only this, which is also a discussion of British prudery and pornography, but which isn’t quite the same as Grayling’s statement.
Now, this is true. The jokingly termed Witt Collection is a real part of the British Museum, and it really does have an assortment of “restricted” things, like phalluses and chastity belts (it’s now actually in a cupboard behind the scenes, known as Cupboard 55, and you have to apply for permission to view the “collection”).
So I am forced to conclude that Grayling mis-remembered this story (I’m assuming he either saw the series or read the book), and conflated it with the fact that people during the Victorian era sometimes did knock the penises off their Greek statues. Indeed, people have been chipping penises off Greek statues for centuries–the Victorians didn’t invent “vandalism”, you know. But I doubt whether a serious museum like the BM would have deliberately done so. I think it’s more likely that during the height of Victorian prudery, the BM simply removed all the naughty statues down to the basement, where no one would be offended.
So, anyway, he mixes these two stories together and comes up with “The British Museum knocked all penises off their Greek statues and put them in a drawer”. And the reason he would do this might be simply because that’s how the human subconscious mind works. I’m not accusing him of perpetrating a conspiracy, simply of writing an article and using anecdotes to illustrate his point. Unfortunately, the anecdotes in question are not true, but that’s part of what we’re here for at the SDMB, is to find out what’s true and what isn’t.
And, just because he’s a “reader” (professor?) at Oxford doesn’t mean he’s incapable of mis-remembering something, or of using “everybody knows” anecdotes in an article. That whole “Malay” thing sounds to me like the kind of thing that you’d hear in a bar, the way the OP heard about prostitutes having their teeth pulled.
In the spirit of the General Questions board, I respectfully request the means of corroboration of this “factoid” in the form of telephone numbers and addresses
jrd
[sub]and yes, I did read that article in the Washington Post back in '99 (do a Google for <<Washington Post Unsettling New Fad Alarms Parents>> :eek: ) [/sub]
JRDelirious: Consolation-prize BJs sounds something like the “Technical Virgins” thing I’ve been hearing on the radio (Opie & Anthony, if you must know). It’s likely a spoof that someone has taken seriously.
Actually, what I’d like to know relative to the OP itself is this: What would the chances of a woman (or anyone for that matter) of the lower to middle classes in a given period of time --the OP would have the turn of the century (I presume they meant the late 19th and early 20th Centuries)— having a complete set of teeth? Oral/dental health and hygene was probably worse then than now, and we still have a damn high incidence of dental cavities. As I recall, even Geo. Washington lost all (or all but one?) of his teeth by the time he wwas in his 60’s. I would think, but don’t know, that a streetwalker of London, Paris, or New Your of c. 1900 might well have 20% of her teeth completely absent and at least another 20% pretty well hideously rotten.
There MAY be some relevant info in a book that apparently isn’t available here in the US. I think it is called “Bodies of London” and is about bodies from different time periods found in and about London; I think there is a Roman period one, a medieval one, etc. I would like to get a copy. Butanyhow, I don’t know if it goes into specifics about the denatl health of the time periods as represented by the specimens featured in the book.
It would be interesting if someone could corroborate the statement in this piece which opines that:
Even at the start of this century most people believed that losing their teeth was inevitable. It was quite common for a father to make a wedding present to his daughter by arranging for her to have all her teeth extracted and wooden dentures fitted to save on dental bills for her husband*.
- The 20th century presumably.
Well, when Charlie Chaplin was asked at statutory rape trial in the mid-1920s if he performed oral sex on the young woman in question, he said, “Yes, but everybody does.” (this is not an exact quote, but I think it is relatively accurate).
Also I have seen some old-time porn from the turn of the century (not the most recent one) and it sure as heck has oral sex depicted.
Just wondering…In what way being unable to find an information on the web proves this information is made up?
I suppose that more than once, anybody has been unable to find on the web an information he needed. If the fact is obscure enough, you could spend hours playing with search engines without any relevant information ever turning up. So, how could you dismiss an assesment on the basis you’re unable to find another occurence on the web?
responding to the op, yes, and they still do, my last prostitute had her front teeth removed.
I think that you may be a bit too hasty in assuming that Grayling ‘generated’ this particular claim. In Britain at least, the claim that penises were removed from Classical statues is almost invariably linked to the British Museum. This, of course, does not prove that the story is true, although I’m fairly sure that I’ve seen full details given in reputable academic works, including, IIRC, publications of the BM itself. The reason for scepticism is not that it never happened, but rather that it was almost certainly a much more limited practice, even within the BM, than is usually implied and that the penises have since been restored to their rightful place.
You’re presumably thinking of the book published to accompany the ‘London Bodies’ exhibition at the Museum of London in 1998. According to the Museum’s website, it is available by mail order.
http://www.museum-london.org.uk/MOLsite/exhibits/bodies/bodies.htm
Clair:
No, being unable to find something on the Web does not necessarily mean it’s been “made up”. However, if you spend a lot of time with Google, as I do, you’ll soon realize that 99.99% of what I’d term “the body of all human knowledge” is out there on the Web. No matter how obscure the fact, no matter how bizarre the hobby, somebody somewhere has a Web page devoted to it, or at least has it mentioned on his Web page.
And Google searches by the words that you put in, not by “subject”, like Ask Jeeves. So if I put in “British Museum removed penises Greek statues drawer”, and Google comes up blank, and if I then play word substitution games, swapping plural and singular forms, using variations on words (“statuary”, “collection”, “phallus”), leaving some words out, putting other words in, and if Google still keeps coming up blank, no matter how long I spend at it or how I phrase it, I am forced to conclude that if it is indeed a “fact”, then it’s a very, very obscure fact indeed.
So it may be that the BM did do this, but that for whatever reason, nobody, in all the 1,610,476,000 web pages that Google searches, has it posted online.
Or it may be that it isn’t a fact at all.
Lacking any way to buttonhole somebody at the BM and ask him, I suppose there really isn’t any way to find out.
He’s possibly no more reliable an authority than Grayling, but Howard Jacobson happened to discuss a similar question in a recent article, in connection with The Man Who Wasn’t There.
Incidentally, the “even GB” comment caught my eye. Do we have an national reputation (as opposed, of course, to an individual one) amongst foreigners for oral sex?
Except that someone has mentioned the missing British Museum penises on a webpage. This very question was the subject of a discussion in The Guardian’s ‘Notes and Queries’ column (a sort of UK version of the SDMB). Go to the following site, click on ‘Notes and Queries’ and search for ‘British Museum’.
The relevant exchange is as follows.
Um, well, okay. [shrug] However, I’m such a skeptic that what pops into my head when I read that is to wonder whether maybe the person who showed him the phalluses was simply wrong, that what he was looking at was actually the “Witt Collection” of stand-alone phalluses. Tour guides are occasionally wrong about things, especially if the tour guide is some junior flunky who’s been told off to escort Mr. Writer-Doing-Research-For-His-Book around the museum.
But, as I said, we don’t have any way of actually buttonholing someone at the BM and asking him, so the point is somewhat moot, I guess. Thanks for the link anyway, APB. 
The article, if anybody’s interested.
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-1710,00.html
No, of course, Dr. Webb’s testimony doesn’t prove that the story is actually true, but what it does show is that (1) the story is widely known, at least in the UK, and (2) if it is a UL, it seems to be a UL which is being propagated by the BM’s own Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities.
The full URL for the ‘Notes and Queries’ article doesn’t work, which is why anyone who is interested will need to follow the rather complicated set of instructions I gave above. As this particular page is undated, it is impossible to check whether the question was prompted by the Grayling review, although my suspicion is that it’s just a coincidence that both were published in The Guardian.