Head Games: The Complicated History of (Straight) Pussy Eating in Film

Early into I Love Boosters (2026), Boots Riley’s latest zany, anti-capitalist cartoon for adults, populist booster heroine and fashion forward philanthropist Corvette (Keke Palmer) finds herself entranced by a gorgeous male model (Lakeith Stanfield) with bedroom eyes and a mysterious accent. Every time she looks at him, the camera literally shakes with soft-focus erotic anticipation.

A friend soon warns Corvette off of sealing the deal, though: A mutual acquaintance hooked up with him recently and found out the hard way that a man this sexy, well-read, and stylish was too good to be true. She rapidly takes Corvette through the other woman’s date beat-for-panting-beat, from a meet-cute over Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children to hot and heavy petting, shot with open relish from her perspective. This man is all about her pleasure, we see, as he eventually slides out of frame and between her legs. She moans with an ecstasy so intense it soon starts to feel off. She floats up off the bed, her lover’s eyes begin to glow as her sighs become wails, and we cut out to a wide that reveals his chiseled physique transformed: He’s a dragon-like bug demon who sucks people’s souls out through their junk. The woman squirts hard enough to give the Shining elevator a run for its money. Her skin cracks and goes pale, and she falls to the bed, supernaturally drained. Corvette sighs. It figures.

There’s been an unprecedented amount of pussy eating going on in the movies recently––to the point where a film like Sinners, the Black vampire horror behemoth that shattered records for the most Oscar nominations ever awarded to a single film, dedicates multiple scenes to just talking about why men should be able to find the clit before enthusiastically putting its mouth where its money is. When sleeping with a woman, “find the button,” Stack (Michael B. Jordan), one of the central pair of bootlegging, asskicking twins tells his little cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), and “lick it like ice cream.” Soon, Sammie does, and it’s shown in detail. His friends, listening at the door, approve heartily.

This wasn’t the only instance of cinematic pussy eating last summer, either: In 28 Years Later, the young lead (Alfie Williams) leaves a party in his honor to find his tortured, cheating father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) letting off a little steam—on his knees, with his head all the way up a woman’s skirt. Keeping the Sinners boys company on this score in the Best Picture category, meanwhile, was Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), who enthusiastically eats out his rich lover (Gwyneth Paltrow) in Central Park only to get summarily rousted by the cops for it.

I’ve long been fascinated by the double standard applied to oral sex on screen. Cunnilingus has rarely been depicted prominently in American cinema prior to this very recent point in history, so when it does appear, how it’s presented, the generic and tonal context of this particular pleasure, carries outsized significance; there’s a lot going on below the belt here. In our erotically ambivalent culture, female sexuality has of course always been freighted with a heavier load of taboo than its counterpart—a tendency very much reflected in how the MPA rates different kinds of sex scenes. Still, though, fellatio (or at least its implication) has long been the stuff of teen movies, boners popped in movies with PG ratings.

Going Down, Looking Back

Historically speaking, the subject of consensual oral sex has always left Americans tongue-tied. It has been treated as a criminal act of sodomy across the West, a crime that led to life imprisonment as a matter of course across multiple states in our own nation all the way up to 1961 when Illinois became the first to legalize the practice between consenting married couples. Drawn from 17th century English common law, these kinds of sodomy statutes, though relatively rarely enforced by the late 20th century—at least compared to an earlier era when Thomas Jefferson proposed altering the punishment for them from the death penalty to castration for men and facial disfigurement for women—were still often used as a privacy-destroying discriminatory cudgel against queer people and other perceived deviants. The Supreme Court only overturned these laws in 2003, and they remain on the books, dormant, in about a dozen states to this day. Even in the legal context, as Jefferson’s proposed tortures attest, disparities abound here: Decades of scholarship show that, much as lesbianism has more often been subject to punishing social erasure than the overt demonization gay men face culturally, cunnilingus in general and sapphic sexuality in particular were notably absent from this kind of prosecution to the point that, under British sodomy law, it went entirely unmentioned.

In the heterosexual context, giving a woman head has an especially strained history. Given the fact that the anatomy of the clitoris was only fully mapped this year (whereas the penis received this same treatment in 1998), and the (straight) orgasm gap remains, it’s unsurprising that women have long given oral more than they receive it, a documented fact since the Kinsey Report in 1953, which, alongside Anne Koedt’s seminal “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” in 1970, highlights women’s shocking lack of sexual fulfillment by their (male) partners. Until very recently, the act has most commonly been associated with perceived weakness or perversion for men, the vulva treated with disgust. Numerous interviews from Shere Hite’s (in)famous and mammoth 1976 Report on American sexual practice speak to attitudes that have lingered on this score: For example, one anonymous wife bemoaning the fact that “[her] man has a mental block here. He thinks the vulva area smells ghastly and gags when he tries. He’s tried, but can’t get over it.” Head for women, then, has always been a cultural blind spot; queer women’s sexuality has undergone regular fetishization or erasure while men pleasuring women this way has been treated as a shameful, lascivious act by nature or as a hush-hush treat for girlfriends and wives at best.

Head on the Silver Screen

American media, particularly film, fully reflects our national discomfort with the subject. Let’s start by setting aside the half-century of Hays Code censorship that forbade explicit sex scenes. As Andrew Sarris once put it, under the Code, “we have all these beautiful people with nothing to do. Let us invent some substitutes for sex. The wisecracks multiply beyond measure, and when audiences tire of verbal sublimation, the performers do cartwheels and pratfalls and make funny expressions.” Long story short: For much of the mainstream artform’s history, cinematic tongue-wagging remained just that. During what’s known as Hollywood’s Golden Age, the most explicit scenes audiences were permitted were relegated to the realm of raunchy dialogue.

There was a brief dalliance with pussy eating during the Sexual Revolution after feminism, the pill, and free love (not to mention Psycho’s famous toilet flushing scene) tore the Code to shreds. In Don’t Look Now (1973), Donald Sutherland’s character tenderly goes down on his wife (Julie Christie) in a sex scene so intense and realistic, rumors circulated that it was unsimulated. This film wasn’t alone: In Midnight Cowboy (1969), the only ever X-rated film to win an Academy Award, Jon Voight’s gigolo makes a buffet of Manhattan’s lonely elite, while later auteurist outings like Coming Home (1978) followed a more somberly romantic suit even after the counterculture died on the vine. Still, these scenes were the exception not the rule, even at the height of this cinematic era.

Antonioni’s ultra-hip, ultra-controversial Zabriskie Point (1970) features an orgy that includes fragments of men servicing women in the background, but its most famously contentious and memorable scene showcases Daria (Daria Halprin) giving her college-rebel lover Mark (Mark Frechette), a (simulated, though rumors once again flew) blowjob. Last Tango in Paris (1973) entered the canon of erotic cinema for a non-consensual act involving a stick of butter. Marilyn Adler Papayanis cites Linda Williams’ classic, Screening Sex, in her own essay on sex in the movies to expand on this point: “In the late 1960s and early seventies when the representation of carnal knowledge in mainstream films was still new and when Hollywood was tentatively devising new tropes for ‘going all the way,’” writes Williams, “female orgasm was either overlooked or assimilated to that of the male. The possibly different rhythms and temporalities of a woman’s pleasure were simply not acknowledged.” In other words, the male gaze and performative feminine eroticism reign supreme in Hollywood—even when everyone should know better. Junior Soprano put it best on The Sopranos when his lover asks him about the “big secret” around men and oral sex: “They think if you suck pussy you’ll suck anything. It’s a sign of weakness and possibly a sign that you’re a finook. What are ya gonna do? I don’t make the rules.”

Let’s not generalize too far, though: This doesn’t mean that no one goes down on women in the movies. Lesbians certainly do, and countless books have been written about the myriad forms of censorship this kind of representation has faced and the complicated ways sapphic sexuality has navigated cinematic hetero-hegemony. In the context of this piece, though, I’ll be focusing more on straight head. Queer women’s sex lives, when not reduced to titillation for the fetishistic heterosexual gaze in films like Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013) or Atomic Blonde (2017), tend to treat oral for what it is: Sex. Once removed from the context of taboo, its representations can be pleasurable, stressful, romantic, funny, or strange. Especially today, then, it appears across genres and contexts, unburdened by much of the discomfort on display in hetero cultural products from The Hite Report to The Sopranos.

Too Good to Be True

As for straight folks on screen, there are a few genres (outside of pornography) where this happens far more regularly, and thinking about why will prove instructive. Picture this: It’s a dark night, full of potential. A young working woman is out with a mysterious and exciting man. Their attraction is wild, her friends intrigued but skeptical. After a leather-jacket-clad evening of impressing her with his knowledge of the “seedier” (read: more diverse) side of New York City, he pulls her into a steam-filled alley. A burst pipe drenches the concrete and soaks them both. Soon, he’s buried deep between her legs as synth-heavy music plays. She writhes in ecstasy, whipping her wet hair into her upturned face. Such is the introductory sex scene in 9 ½ Weeks (1986), Adrian Lyne’s classic erotic thriller about sexual power dynamics gone bad. After Elizabeth (Kim Bassinger) starts her torrid affair with John (Mickey Rourke), a secretive, handsome man whose Brando good looks and bad boy attitude draw her in like a moth to a flame, things soon escalate out of her control. In the beginning, he’s a dream lover: He fulfills fantasies she didn’t know she possessed, introducing her to all manner of “exotic” pleasures in the process, and takes her out of her humdrum life as a recent divorcée with a high-powered job in the arts.

Eventually, though, it becomes clear that these things come at cost: Her autonomy is systematically stripped, her boundaries pushed to their breaking point. He becomes cruel and abusive. Their first night together, with its focus on her satisfaction, is tacitly revealed to be the juicy carrot that leads only to the sharp, bruising stick. A man whose interest lies anywhere but under his own belt buckle is, simply put, too good to be true. His sexual proclivities are shown to be downright perverse and harmful to his female partner (consider on this score Trouble Every Day’s climactic, harrowingly literal “pussy eating” scene). Head here is, quite literally, a slippery slope. Better to avoid it all together.

This pattern has only continued. In Don’t Worry Darling (2022), housewife Alice (Florence Pugh) is distracted from the fact of her incel-enslavement by constant sexual doting from her smarmy husband (Harry Styles). The depths of their passion for each other are established early on in a sequence where he comes home from work for dinner, lays her on their kitchen table, and makes her the main course. She writhes wildly, knocking the side dishes of potatoes and salad to the floor. By the film’s twist climax, we learn that his focus on her bodily satisfaction is a macabre joke in the face of her cybernetic imprisonment at his hands—she’s been tied to a bed, unconscious and intubated, the whole time, and these moments of pleasure are in fact literal fantasy. The much-discussed period head in Saltburn (2023) is another example of this dynamic: Prior to this moment—in which Oliver (Barry Keogan) goes down on the manor’s resident spoiled little rich girl Venetia (Alison Oliver) even though it’s her time of the month, licking his fingers to boot—he has already proven himself a sociopathic opportunist, a social climbing “vampire” who uses sex and charm to worm his way into status and wealth. Cunnilingus here becomes a bloody, direct metaphor for these manipulations and constructions.

This can be equally true of the women who receive head in the erotic thriller, one of the few genres where sexuality qua sexuality is subject as well as sidebar to narrative. That is to say, if she’s type of woman a man wants to eat out, she must be bad news. In Basic Instinct (1992), our alcoholic cop/subject/stooge, Nick (Michael Douglas) is drawn into the web of an aloof widow with a death drive prodigious enough to match her fortune. Catherine (Sharon Stone) is a bombshell blonde bisexual detective novelist with what looks to the police like a penchant for murdering her boyfriends with an ice pick in flagrante delicto. Nick’s plans to bring her to justice after the death of a famous rocker are complicated by the affair the two begin, despite the loose cannon’s better instincts. Soon, he’s following her into queer nightclubs, watching her make out with her girlfriend, and hunting her down in bathroom stalls. He kneels on the floor, her pelvis pressed into his face, angry and supplicant. Here, the danger this dream lover presents is overt from the start, the sex an extension of Catherine’s power over the men around her.

In Black Swan (2010), the famous hallucinatory sex scene between the histrionic ballerina protagonist Nina (Natalie Portman) and her fantasy projection/mysterious bad girl peer (Mila Kunis) is similarly used as a way to highlight her psychological anguish and sexual repression, turning the act into another sign of eroticism’s many dangers for women. Even the lesbian cinematic context, then—an arena typically less overwrought on this score—occasionally reaches for this deeply embedded trope. Oral across the board in this genre is dangerously vulnerable, consistently a head game.

This interplay of pleasure and danger have even taken on an overtly meta quality as the genre has matured. In Gone Girl (2014), David Fincher’s mind-bending marital pas de deux, heiress-journalist Amy (Rosamund Pike) begins her manufactured, unreliable account of her love affair with her two-timing husband Nick (Ben Affleck) with their first romantic night together: They exchange witty repartee and wander through New York side streets, culminating their date in a swooning kiss under a delicate shower of sugar from a baker’s truck; per the script, it’s a “fairy tale.” They go back to her place, and he gets down to business, to her great approval. She pulls his head up: “Nick Dunne,” she says breathlessly, “I really like you.” This part, we eventually learn, is true according to both parties. But as her diary’s account descends into a false portrait of wifely despair, she actively borrows the tropes of the genre in which her media-obsessed story is situated. In her story designed to send him to prison for her murder, her husband drinks, philanders, and eventually physically assaults her. Even outside of the story she’s writing to ruin his life, though, Nick’s conduct has proven him a poor husband. Either way, he was, like the other boys in his generic ilk, too good to be true. As a signifier, feminine satisfaction of this nature has once again proven a kind of bait, the purview of sex-obsessed, unreliable men with daddy issues.

Laughing It Off

So, if cunnilingus played straight (and by straights) in the movies is risky business at best and a path to destruction at worst, is there any venue on screen where it’s acceptable? Where else do we contend with our discomfort at the notion of giving a woman pleasure, and how? As it turns out, we do it the same place we deal with everything else that makes us uncomfortable: in the comedy. Going down on a woman may be intimidating, but not when she asks for it like this: “It’s turkey time… gobble gobble.”

From the arthouse, where Paul Thomas Anderson misdirects the audience from a central plot point in Inherent Vice (2016) by way of the “Pussy Eater Special,” to the frat house where jokes about muffdiving are time-honored. Scary Movie (2001) even features third base on a virgin (Anna Faris) whose bush is so prodigious a weed-whacker is in order. In Harmony Korine’s The Beach Bum, much meaningful exposition is delivered as Moondog (Matthew McConaughey), the film’s titular spaced-out alien-poet, passes the time with his head bulging out from under his wife’s stretchy floral sundress. Cunnilingus is safe enough in the realm of comedy, so that in Annie Hall (1977)—a Best Picture-winning example of the ‘70s boomlet in this kind of representation—Woody Allen’s character spends so much time pleasuring Shelly Duvall’s rock journalist that he complains of jaw pain. For her, a Kafkaesque experience.

In comedy, in a certain sense, we find a glimmer of hope for women’s pleasure. Where in the more traditionally masculinist realm of the erotic thriller this sort of thing is broached with a stiff upper lip, the looser, more self-denigrating machismo of the comedy provides space for goofball men to go down without losing their own self-conceived, Sopranos-style dignity. Here, pussy eating can be safely celebrated as the fun and intimate act it is, if only with a sheepish grin or a broad wink. It’s a sorry state of affairs when considering how toxic a culture has to be for comedy to be the great historical legitimizer for cinematic oral, to be sure, but it’s telling that when the guardrails on on-screen masculinity come down, there’s a lot of pleasure and enthusiasm to be found in diving for pearls. Quoth Seth Rogen: “Just so you know, I eat the pussy!”

Take American Pie (1999). When Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas) can’t convince his girlfriend Vicky (Tara Reid) that they’re both ready to have sex for the first time, on his brother’s advice, he realizes he needs to give her an orgasm, something he’s never done. Aided by a book of sex tips, he gives her head, climaxing in one of the more famously cheesy puns of all time. What was originally a ploy to get her into the sack becomes a warming moment in their relationship, bringing them closer together.

Here, for all their casual misogyny, “bro” comedies foreground a particular kind of masculinity: one that valorizes giving women’s pleasure as a masculine act. “He was a Jedi with the chicks,” Adam Sandler’s character says of himself in That’s My Boy (2012) after his son tells a group of guests that he’d died years before. “He went down on girls for a wicked long time ’cause he was a giver and he wanted to see others be happy.”

“I wish I could have met him,” his son’s future mother-in-law replies wistfully.

A Sexier Future?

We may well have arrived at the high water mark for cinematic pussy eating, but it took a long time to get there. Even after watershed examples of frank discussions of the subject on screen like the “oral injuries” moment in Chasing Amy (1996), Hollywood has still repeatedly self-censored even references to the subject. A manicure wasn’t supposed to be Elle Woods’ go-to activity when she needed to relax, and the world would be a better place if Legally Blonde (2001) had let her say so. In 2013, meanwhile, Evan Rachel Wood harangued the team behind Charlie Countryman for cutting an oral sex scene for fear that it would make audiences “uncomfortable”:

“The scene where the two main characters make ‘love’ was altered because someone felt that seeing a man give a woman oral sex made people ‘uncomfortable’ but the scenes in which people are murdered by having their heads blown off remained intact and unaltered. This is a symptom of a society that wants to shame women and put them down for enjoying sex, especially when (gasp) the man isn’t getting off as well! It’s hard for me to believe that had the roles been reversed it still would have been cut. OR had the female character been raped it would have been cut. It’s time for people to GROW UP. Accept that women are sexual beings … Accept that some men like pleasuring women. Accept that women don’t have to just be fucked and say thank you. We are allowed and entitled to enjoy ourselves. It’s time we put our foot down …”

The good news seems to be that the culture has shifted to accommodate a greater level of artistic sexual frankness on this score over the past decade, spurred perhaps first and foremost by music—namely by women in rap—from Doja Cat’s pussy-eating anthem of a debut to the mass-shaming of DJ Kahlid for refusing to go down on his wife. Even in a sex recession, women are reporting higher rates of head from their male partners over the course of the past decade plus. While there’s not much data on this score since about 2019, this is still a promising trend.

As for the movies, it’s heartening to see that, even as the upper echelons of hyper-corporate filmmaking mandate an increasing level of standardized, market-tested sanitization, pussy eating appears across a far wider range of genres and contexts on screen these days, from horror films like 28 Years Later to romances like Wuthering Heights to dramas like Marty Supreme. Of course, for their popularity, these films are still largely specialized indie products with an air of the naughty or “kinky” baked in. Still, even given the dogged persistence of that erotic thriller trope, we’ve made a lot of progress. In I Love Boosters, Keke Palmer’s character ultimately refuses to date a man who won’t give head. Her idea of a dream lover? “Please tell me he eats ass!”