Free She Comes First by Ian Kerner

opposed laws that prohibited the sale of pornography.
    Based on these categories, 83.6 percent of those women with a recreational attitude had experienced oral sex in the last year, followed by 73.9 percent of women who were relational, and 55.9 percent of women with traditional views.
    If we look at the numbers in terms of age, 74.7 percent of women from eighteen to twenty-four received oral sex, compared with 73.7 percent of women aged thirty to thirty-four. Women and men aged eighteen to thirty-nine were most likely to include cunnilingus in their sex lives, with 22.3 percent to 24.2 percent reporting having done it during their last sexual experience. Conversely, for women aged forty to forty-four, the rate fell to 12.6 percent. So it would appear that the younger you are the more likely you are to have experienced cunnilingus, and the more likely you are to have experienced it earlier in your lifetime.
    As Nancy Friday wrote of cunnilingus in her 1991 book Women on Top, “Women have finally come of age. Having discovered it, they can’t get enough.”
    Nor, it seems, can men, for that matter. Happily, this adoption of cunnilingus as a regular part of sexual activity is not just a function of young women becoming more confident and assertive in their demand for a level playing field, but is also indicative of a shift in male attitudes.
    As men become more sensitive to the importance of the female orgasm, and recognize the unreliability of genital intercourse in achieving one, they increasingly incorporate cunnilingus into their repertoire of sexual techniques. As Glamour magazine noted in their 1997 feature “Good News About Your Sex Life,” “A majority of men say they enjoy performing oral sex,” and numerous studies report that men describe giving oral sex as very appealing.
    If you think it all sounds too good to be true, you’re right…

…But Proceed with
Caution
     
    I F YOU GIVE or receive cunnilingus casually, in an unsafe, unprotected environment, you are willfully placing yourself in a high-risk category for the transmission and/or contraction of an STD, including: AIDS, gonorrhea, syphilis, genital herpes, chlamydia, genital warts, and hepatitis. (Men also need to worry about nongonococcal urethritis, whereas women should be more than a little concerned about pelvic inflammatory disease.) Of these diseases, gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, nongonococcal urethritis, and pelvic inflammatory disease are caused by the transmission of bacteria and can be cured with antibiotics if caught early enough; the rest are viral and without cure, although in some cases the symptoms are treatable. These STDs are highly contagious and can be transmitted from vulva to mouth and vice versa.
    These days AIDS seems to garner most of the attention, but according to the Sex in America Survey, “The people who are mostlikely to be infected with sexually transmitted diseases are not the same group who are at risk for AIDS—they are a much larger group.”
    That’s not to say there isn’t any risk of contracting or transmitting AIDS via cunnilingus. Vaginal secretions of women who are HIV positive have been found to contain small amounts of HIV (with the amounts rising when she is menstruating), and HIV positive men can also transmit the virus via cuts in the mouth.
    But unprotected cunnilingus places you at greater risk for a far wider array of STDs. Of those participants surveyed in the NSHLS survey, one in six said they had had an STD at some point in their lives, with a significant percentage reporting having had one in the last year. “To put the numbers in perspective, nearly as many said they had had a venereal disease in the last year as said they had been pregnant in the last year.” ( Sex in America Survey )
    Based on the numbers, it appears that women are more likely to have had at least one STD at some point in their lives. They were twice as likely as men to have had genital warts, and more than twice as