The other night my wife was too tired for sex so I offered to go down on her. She said she wasn’t in the mood, It was too much work! What the!? Work? I’d take that “job” any day of the week! Why can’t she just lay back and enjoy herself?

Ian: This reminds me of a chapter I wrote in She Comes First entitled The Cunnilinguist Manifesto, which was a bit of a piss-take on the Marx’s Communist Manifesto – you know: “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” That whole rap. My version in the Cunnilinguist Manifesto: “To her according to your abilities, from you according to her needs.”

Easier said than done. Especially after the birth of a child. A new mom may be deeply conflicted when it comes to receiving cunnilingus, and the experience may be fraught with anxiety. There’s an utter nakedness to cunnilingus - a vulnerability that we need to respect and honor. She is exposing herself to be seen, smelled, tasted, and observed firsthand; she is permitting the exploration of a part of her body that she herself may find newly unfamiliar and mysterious. She may think her vulva is ugly, unkempt, unpredictable in its secretions, odoriferous, and strange. She may insist on making love in the dark, literally and figuratively.

As cunnilinguists we need to be committed, steadfast and confident in our resolve. Only by inspiring trust will you lull her into a deeper, more instinctive zone of the self, a place where she can shed all inhibition and surrender herself to the soft warm wetness of your tongue.

To that end, the Three Assurances of the Cunnilinguist Manifesto are as follows:

• Going down on her turns you on; you enjoy it as much as she does.
  
• There’s no rush; she has all the time in the world. You want to savor every moment.
• Her scent is provocative, her taste powerful: it all emanates from the same beautiful essence.

Heidi: Hold on, Mister! You may be all down with going down, but I know for a fact -- because I asked him -- that if we had a life-like model of a vulva that looked, tasted, smelled, and felt like a real one, JB wouldn’t just hang out there mauwing on it all day just for fun. He doesn’t have any problem getting intimate with my sexy bits, but let’s be honest -- it’s the getting me off part that’s fun for him, not my glorious me-ness. Since oral sex was off limits for me during pregnancy due to certain changes in taste and smell (and the fact that JB felt weird being so “face to face” with the little one), I was nervous about bringing it up again post baby. When he offered, I felt put on the spot, but later, as things got more heated it worked its way right in to the natural flow of things. I was shy...until I saw how excited he was to see (and taste and feel...) my excitement again.