Yes, You Can Actually Orgasm From GIVING (Not Receiving) Oral Sex

Back in the 1970s, the groundbreaking porn movie Deep Throat had a silly but effective story line. The heroine, played by Linda Lovelace, could only get off by shoving a large object down her gullet. Why? Because her clitoris was in her throat.

Fast-forward forty years later and what was once a "holy moly" party trick is now something every self-respecting porn actress can do. (And gay porn actors too, I suppose.) We run faster, we swim faster, we jump higher — apparently we can sword-swallow better, too.

Obviously, this is a treat for the person on the receiving end. Duh, right? What's less well-known is that oral sex and deep throat can be a treat for the giver, too.

Because my partner Sheri and I teach about sex and relationships, we spend a lot of time talking with folks about sex. You'd be surprised how many people get turned on by giving head — to the point of orgasm, even!

This is kind of counter-intuitive. To orgasm, you need to stimulate erectile tissue, right? It's the rub-a-dub theory of orgasm. There's more to orgasm than that, though. A lot more. It has a mental component. The idea of giving head can be a turn-on. You can also train yourself to get turned on (and even orgasmic) from just about anything, even if it doesn't take you anywhere near erectile tissue.

Sheri talks about how to learn this in her book Succulent SexCraft: Your Hands-On Guide to Erotic Play & Practice. You can learn to orgasm from nipple play, from thigh stroking, even from just a hot fantasy.

But here's the most provocative notion: What if Deep Throat's storytellers weren't far from wrong?

I'm not suggesting that women have a clitoris in their throat. We can all agree that they don't. There may be erectile tissue there, though. We don't know for a scientific fact that it's there, but we do know that erectile tissue isn't only in our genitals.

The ears contain erectile tissue. So does the nose. Ears, nose and throat — that's a package. It's why we have ear, nose and throat doctors. You've got erectile tissue in your ears. You've got it in your nose. So what's the throat, chopped liver? The neglected stepchild? There's a logic that says if you've got it in the ears and nose, you've got it in the throat, too.

This theory came up during a conversation Sheri had with two other sex geeks, Jaiya and Susan Bratton. These are people with a deep understanding of anatomy and it was interesting enough to inspire a collective "hmm."

If it's true, it makes deep throating a recipe for two-way pleasure. Erectile tissue, meet erectile tissue! Might this be another reason people get off on giving head? Just a hypothesis, folks. An outrageous hypothesis.