Updated on 5/30/2022
Men have a lot of questions about their girlfriends. A search of “What would you do if your girlfriend…” autofills with a few fun searches, the top three of which are:
- What would you do if your girlfriend bled on your bed?
- What would you do if your girlfriend cheated on you?
- What would you do if your girlfriend died?
Yeesh. Luckily, such questions aren’t always quite so macabre. On Reddit recently, a man asked a whopper: “What would you do about your girlfriend eating herself out?” Uh… pardon me?
He explains:
Been seeing a girl for a month or so and the other day we got into a conversation about sex. She was telling me about how she masturbates pretty often but that she also eats herself out sometimes. I was confused and didn’t believe it but she even showed me. I don’t know whether to find it hot or strange. Have any of you ever experienced this?
If only! In the lore of goin’ down on yourself, there’s autofellatio — when a man can suck his own dick. Based on the existing coverage of this feat — including our own cultural history of guys sucking their own dicks — you’d think, anatomically speaking, people with penises have the monopoly on going downtown to Dick Town.
In our exploration, we found, at least anecdotally, that most dudes at some point or another see if they can suck their own dick. Most of them also fail spectacularly. Some men have pulled it off, and Alfred Kinsey noted way back in 1949 that their own research found that lots of men at least give it a shot as horny teens. Autofellatio shows up around the world throughout time, at least for men: Ancient Egypt, Germany and Victorian England. And on occasion, men find dick-sucking success. Adult performer Ron Jeremy did, among others (though that’s really the only good thing about him). And there are jokes a-plenty about men trying, which usually involves yoga, perseverance and extreme optimism. Or removing ribs!
But women? That’s tough, man. All we know is it’s believed to be far less common, far less likely, and there aren’t any studies. From a Slate piece on autocunninlingus, Jesse Bering wrote:
Given the even more serious anatomical hurdles in lacking a protruding reproductive device, such behavior in women may not even be possible. I confess I don’t know; and there’s no mention of it in the scientific literature. The closest female comparison to autofellatio I stumbled upon is the case of women who suckle from their own breasts, for sexual or other purposes. One therapist writes of an especially self-sufficient female patient who had a habit of doing this. When he asked her why, she merely replied, “I’m hungry.”
As he notes, the clitoris extends a mere half-inch outside the body, so reaching it is far more difficult than sticking your tongue out far enough to touch the tip. What’s more, licking maniacally to the center of that Tootsie Pop would be more than just a contortion, it’d be a Herculean feat of patience, dedication and, it should be noted, the sort of constant, straining motion that is begging for a neck crick.
Of course, a girl can still dream. But what’s the reality? Is it possible with, for example, a gymnast’s flexibility? A few years ago, someone asked on Reddit how many women could perform autocunnilingus. A woman asks:
Obviously, a high level of flexibility would be required but I get the feeling that there are more women out there that are capable of it, than most people expect.
When I was younger, I was insanely flexible. I used to be able to kiss my own arse in various positions. It was a source of endless laughs with my sisters.
I didn’t really know or care about my vagina back then, so I never really tried to eat myself out. Then I gained a lot of weight and lost a lot of my flexibility. I remained overweight for a long time and only lost weight five years ago. Since then, I’ve taken up yoga as a means of keeping the weight off. I’ve recovered a lot of my flexibility and I can get pretty close but I can’t reach my vag or even kiss my arse anymore.
So, any self-munchers here? Anyone ever tried but failed?
No one cops to being able to achieve it. Someone calls bullshit on the claim, noting that, with 20 years of experience on contortion, that the two women that are the best in the world can’t even get close to kissing their vaginas.
The original poster comes back with a since-deleted YouTube video of a man kissing his own butt. But a vagina kiss is not cunnilingus — any more than this ass kisser above is actually performing anilingus.
So how about the internet’s underground of smut? Rule 34 of the internet dictates that if it exists, there’s porn of it, so surely if one woman has accomplished it, it’s in a grainy video clip floating around 4chan somewhere.
But even the allegedly existing video evidence of autocunnilingus is highly, highly dubious. This GIF of a woman apparently performing it shows that, at best, she appears to be able to briefly make mouth contact with her vaginal area for about a millisecond before pulling away. If a woman could cum from that, well, there wouldn’t be an orgasm gap.
There are loads of porn videos claiming such feats, all equally bullshitty, too. In “Trashy Amateur Eats Herself Out,” “eats herself out” merely means she uses a spoon. In “Flexible Bitch Eats Herself Out,” the autocunnilingus performer is clearly lying on top of someone else. And so on.
Why, you might ask, is the Flexible Bitch a bitch? As MEL’s former deputy editor Alana Levinson put it when I shared that video title, “She’s THAT bitch — who eats her own pussy.” She then joked, “If you can’t eat your own pussy, you’re not a feminist.”
It’s true: Think of the self-sufficient confidence that would arise from complete, total oral satisfaction of the self. Can’t get a man to go down on you? Today’s woman can do it herself, no vibrator necessary. Any woman really can have it all if she’s baller enough, and that means giving herself the ultimate self-care, her very own mouth-to-clit orgasm. Autocunnilingus may be the holy grail of female pleasure, but like the grail, it’s still a myth.
At best, bumping your face to crotch is a fun party trick.
Back at the original Reddit thread with a man claiming his girlfriend can do it, the original poster was prompted to explain how, exactly, she pulls it off.
“I don’t know if this is how she does it normally but when she showed me, she simply sat on the bed with her legs out in a V. Then she used her arms to push her knees and legs towards her body with her elbows and bent down completely and used her hands to pull her butt and vagina slightly closer to her face/mouth.”
Okay, that’s not oral sex. That’s brief contact. Still, assuming some woman out there can actually do it, let’s answer Google’s burning question: What would you do about your girlfriend eating herself out?
You have a few options. You could applaud. You could make it into a fun sex thing. You could back away slowly and give the girl some privacy. You could take video for posterity.
Or, as Reddit’s the_internet_clown puts it, you could just “Enjoy the show.” It’s a truly rare, spectacular, once-in-a-lifetime sort of thing. It’s the Blood Moon, it’s seeing Haley’s Comet, a man who can piss inside the toilet. Besides, do you really want us to be able to eat ourselves out? If we could, a lot of dudes would be out of a job.
Tracy Moore
Tracy Moore is a staff writer at MEL. She covers all the soft sciences like psychology, sex, relationships and parenting, but since this is a men’s magazine, occasionally the hard ones. Formerly at Jezebel.
