While the buffet may be for free, it turns out that many men opt for the à la carte option.  Since when did a guy not want to eat a girl out?

“Nowadays, you have to ask,” says my girlfriend M. “And they’ll do it, but as a favor to you.  Then they won’t even linger.”

Nothing more than a cursory lap, you mean?

Could this be another instance of male sexual privilege, in which a man expects and often demands, employing various levels of persuasiveness, that a woman blow him? And not a perfunctory lick-and-suck that’s over in 10 seconds. No, they want you deep-throating them till kingdom come. Men have even been known to use their hands to keep a woman’s head perfectly positioned so that his dick remains inside her mouth for as long as he wishes. For some women, that can seem like a jaw-straining eternity.

Especially if blow jobs aren’t their thing.

So is it too much to have a man eat a woman out in return?

“Younger guys don’t really like eating pussy,” says G, another friend.  “It’s like they’re grossed out or something. It’s really weird.”

The cut-off point, according to G, would be around age 40. “Guys under 40 aren’t into it unless you ask. Guys over 40 will generally do it.”

Talk about good manners and a generation gap. At least guys over 40 understand reciprocity.

Back in the day, a guy couldn’t wait to go down on a woman. And that was before Brazilian waxes became fashionable. So when a man dove into the enchanted forest, he did it with pure, unadulterated gusto; you didn’t have to ask. And you could tell by the way his tongue lapped at your clit that he was really, truly enjoying it, as thrilled to lick you to orgasm as he was to be sucked off by you. It was a win-win situation.

And, there was an added advantage to indulging in oral sex during those virginity-obsessed times. Though good girls supposedly didn’t, they did blow cocks, and they did allow themselves to be eaten out. It was a way of keeping their hymens intact, and their marriageability quotient high, while they lapped up credits in carnal knowledge 101 without “going all the way.” With the threat of eternal damnation imprinted in their psyches as punishment for premarital sex—and the Holy Spirit supposedly erecting an invisible barrier between a boy’s penis and a girl’s vagina, the prospect of mere purgatory was a small price to pay for the heaven of extended foreplay.

It really is quite a miracle that this divine chastity belt managed to control voracious libidos, including mine. I was already in my early 20s and far away from home when I actually held in my hands—and blew—my very first penis. He was a blond and pale and green-eyed Anglo-German whom I’d met in Paris while still a student, he of the double-barreled name and the beautiful plummy accent courtesy of Sevenoaks. We had a brief puppy-love type of relationship that blossomed, as these things do, about two weeks before he was due to move back to London. So chaste were our rendezvous that we did nothing more than hold hands and kiss and look at each other with longing.

Before him, there’d been some heavy lip-lock action with a couple of boyfriends, but my hands and my tongue certainly never once ventured south, and I certainly never allowed theirs to do so either. How very sheltered Catholic bourgeois of me, I admit.

At any rate, the heat levels intensified with my Anglo-German when I went to see him in London some months after. In his one-bedroom flat we shared a bed and played house. Although it was a week of, well, diving head-first into so many firsts, I actually left London as I’d arrived: a virgin, albeit far more skilled in several departments—fellatio and hand jobs among them.

He, for his part, was quite the gentleman. He partook of the buffet, but didn’t push his way past my hymen for dessert when I told him I wasn’t ready. But I was perfectly content to have him go down on me. If I didn’t know what mind-blowing had meant before his tongue began darting in and out of my pussy, I most unreservedly knew after.

But apparently—and this I find unfathomable—a lot of women are not into cunnilingus.

“You’d be surprised to know,” says M, “that there are girls who don’t like their man taking a cab downtown. Even the wildest girl I know doesn’t allow it. For me, it’s a deal breaker if a guy I’m dating won’t go down on me. It’s the first question I ask.”

“Good for you,” I tell M. “You haven’t however, dated anyone under 40. Remember the cut-off age?”

She shrugged.  “It’s their loss.”

Indeed.

According to G, younger men may be reluctant to eat your pussy, but they’ll happily eat your ass. That, it seems, is the new normal.

B. Wiser is the author of Making Love in Spanish, a novel published earlier this year by Anvil Publishing and available in National Book Store and Powerbooks, as well as online. When not assuming her Sasha Fierce alter-ego, she takes on the role of serious journalist and media consultant.

For comments and questions, e mail [email protected].

Art by Dorothy Guya