This week’s guest blog is a fabulous rant by Liv Arnold – an erotic author who has a bone to pick with men who expect blow jobs but don’t want to return any oral favours. Perhaps it’s the fact that I’m getting more ‘fuck this’ in my forties than I was a decade ago, but I find it joyful to read stories about people who have realised they no longer want to accept mediocre – or outright bad – treatment from people and have worked out the perfect way to say ‘no’. You don’t have to do things in bed that you don’t want to, and that means you’re allowed to walk away from sex where the pleasure is so one-sided. Take it away Liv…
Why I’m retiring from blow jobs (sort of)
I’ve written more orgasms than I’ve had. Something has clearly been misrepresented.
As an erotic romance author, my heroines take charge. They know what they want. They get it. Their pleasure is never framed as a favour.
Do I care if the guy orgasms? Not really. He’ll cope.
Romance novels are usually written by women for women, and they take pleasure seriously. Agency is the plot. Desire is the point. Writing them made me realise how often real life still expects women to improvise around male satisfaction.
Many men treat blow jobs like an included service. A complimentary bread roll. They think they’re bigger than they are. They’re not. Which somehow turns it into a gift for the giver. It’s not.
“Your orgasm is your problem.”
I once dated a man who thought foreplay was watching me admire him. When I said I wasn’t even close, he rolled over and crossed his arms. “I already told you I don’t like going down on women. Your orgasm is your problem.”
Technically, he was right. My problem was that I was still there.
“You don’t mind giving blow jobs,” he added, “so you have to do it.”
Have to. Like taxes and resetting a password.
He later told me I had a good heart. I think he meant it the way leeches mean it. Women with “good hearts” are the easiest to drain. No suction required.
His pleasure was supposed to be my pleasure. It shouldn’t matter if he took forever. Please don’t take forever. This was less intimacy and more a very strange volunteer role.
“You shouldn’t use a vibrator.”
Another man. Different country. Same emotional range as a mannequin with opinions.
I was nowhere near done. “Should I get out my vibrator?”
He looked horrified. Wounded. “They’re bad for women and give unrealistic expectations. Most women come through sex.”
I sat up. “Eighty percent don’t.”
He squinted, as if I’d just invented that statistic to personally attack him. “Anyway. I’ve never liked giving oral. But can you suck a bit?”
Not a lot. Not properly. Just a bit. Like ‘foreplay’ was a rumour he heard at the bus stop.
The confidence was the kind that can only come from a man who has never once wondered if he was bad in bed. That would require curiosity or basic pattern recognition. I lay there thinking about how some men fear vibrators more than emotional intimacy, and how my mouth was still expected to compensate for his refusal to put his anywhere useful.
The maths was not mathing
Personally, I feel like they don’t call blow jobs a ‘job’ for nothing. My mind drifts during them. Once, I caught myself thinking about something my therapist said: “You lack common sense and survival instincts.”
She wasn’t wrong.
Remember when our parents said, “Don’t make that face or you’ll get stuck like that”?
Blow job face is the fastest way for me to lose the will to live. Add the expectation to swallow and suddenly you’re not having sex. You’re managing his ego.
These men I encountered treated female desire like a scandal. Fine for porn, shameful in real life. Sex was for babies, except when they were horny. Then it was urgent. Mandatory. Very serious.
Their satisfaction was non-negotiable. Mine was optional. I’m done with that maths.
So, am I really retiring?
Please, men already warming up their keyboards, this is not your win.
I say I’m done the same way I once swore I would never eat an entire footlong sub in one sitting again. I probably will. But I don’t pretend it’s good for my soul.
Sometimes freedom is not about saying yes. It’s about saying: “do it yourself” and watching a grown man short-circuit.
You don’t have to give head if you don’t want to, but that goes both ways. If he wants access to my mouth, he had better learn how to use his. His orgasm is not my problem.
