After my column about pussy-eating, a number of men asked, "Why don't you write about blowjobs?" Um, let's see—because I don't actually have a cock? (Unless you count the ones in my toy cabinet.) But all right, in the spirit of fairness, let's talk about cock-sucking.

Blowjobs are a wonderful thing. The trouble is, for women, they're so heavily laden with cultural baggage. For a woman to take pleasure in cock-sucking, she must first be able to recognize and then disregard sex-negative blowjob dogma. For example: I don't feel that putting my mouth on someone's cock is an inherently submissive thing to do. It can be, but everything in sex is about context. If I tie you up, put an electrical butt plug up your ass, and hang weights off your balls, you will not be feeling very dominant, even if I then choose to grace you with a caress of my lips and tongue. However, not every woman wishes to demonstrate her nonsubmissiveness like me—nor should she have to.

Aside from the assumptions that "my cock in your mouth" equals "I'm dominant," there's also the idea that men always want blowjobs and that getting a blowjob is the single best experience any man can have, period. Some of my personal experiences, however, contradict that. So I asked some male friends their candid opinion: Is getting head always the Holy Grail of sex?

The majority of the answers were variations of "It's very nice, but it's not necessarily my favorite thing." One man replied: "I prefer giving to receiving, as I am a reaction junkie." And one man did smilingly admit, "Okay, yeah—they are the peak sexual experience." However, most of the guys said they never or rarely come from cock-sucking and they almost always want to switch to intercourse at a certain point. That's in line with my own observations. So why, then, the cultural veneration of the blowjob?

Jason: "Blowjobs get hyped up through a self-inflating cycle. Guys think women hate giving them, and so getting one is a reflection of their domination or sex appeal. When they receive one, it reinforces all of those images about themselves and the legend grows."

Mark: "The blowjob in mainstream vanilla culture is all about patriarchal power and casual misogyny. [I don't mean] oral sex between lovers, but the porn and comedy-circuit obsession with sucking big cock."

Worshipping the Platonic ideal of the blowjob has a downside for men: It neglects the importance of skill and emotional engagement in real blowjobs. As noted by Jason: "Girls go through the motions, thinking just putting their mouth on your dick will automatically cause fireworks. Repetitive motion without any enthusiasm? No, thank you." It would serve straight men better if they disassociated cocks and mouths from the unsexy kind of power dynamics. They'd get so much more than just lip service that way.