It’s an age-old question that women and men have pondered, debated and wrestled with since time immemorial: When you go down on a dick, how long do you have to stay on that thing? Reality suggests it’s whatever it takes. But common sense suggests that it should take no longer than the amount of time one would spend preparing a Hot Pocket.
But to truly solve this ancient riddle, we must first define our terms. When I’m talking about a blow job, I mean exactly the mouth-to-dick contact required until he launches his wad and you can let off the gas pedal and dismount. I don’t mean to make it sound clinical and perfunctory, but we lead busy, complicated lives here.
When I put the question out on Facebook as to how long a beej should last, our own Tierney Finster replied, “12 to 14 mins.” Aghast, I told her this was easily double the going rate of blow jobs, which as recent as this week, women’s site The Frisky argued should never exceed seven minutes. “It’s a true meditation,” she replied.
Sure, it’s a meditation… On how quickly you can come so we can get to dinner.
The Frisky argues that seven minutes is their hard-stop (excuse the pun) because five minutes is when all that motion and interpretation about what is and isn’t working starts to wear a girl down. Next comes boredom, then comes annoyance. What isn’t coming is you, and that’s the problem.
“If blow jobs only lasted seven minutes,” they write, “more women would enjoy giving them and men would receive them at a higher frequency.”
Meanwhile, sex therapist Ian Kerner told Glamour that ideal blow job length is “not as long as most porn makes it out to be,” and notes that most intercourse for men lasts about five to seven minutes. Meaning under seven minutes makes solid sense for a beej.
Another sex therapist cited by Glamour, Debra Laino, added that 10 minutes is ideal for sealing the deal, but not 10 minutes of single-minded head bobbing. “That’s 10 minutes of teasing, licking and sucking,” she said.
In my view, the math here is easy. A blow job should split the difference between how long he wants it and how long the other person wants to give it. If most men want seven minutes because that’s normal come time, but I’d prefer to only go for two, five is our best midpoint.
I realize it’s a tad more complicated than this, because there are other factors. Things I’m not counting in the tally:
- Sweet talking that thing and romancing it into attention
- Lighting a woodsy candle
- Putting on some sports game
- Doing an interpretive dance
- Kissing
- “Making out”
- Crotch-grinding
- Rolling around naked in an ayahuasca-induced trance
- Pausing to silence your Twitter alerts
Then, there’s all the stuff that makes it take too long:
- Drinking
- Drugs
- Nerves
- Got off earlier
- Lack of skill (low-energy; teeth)
- Too much saliva
- Too little saliva (aka, dry dick)
- Preference (tantric vs frantic)
But if you get lucky and none of this stuff is working against you, and you haven’t ended up down on your knees to blow someone who thinks sex is an art project where two mammals shed a molten skin together before re-emerging as a single-celled amoeba, then your math gets pretty easy.
Blow jobs, to me, are the oral equivalent of a quickie. Like pop music, they should be fast, urgent and high-energy. Sure, you can draw it out to be playful and fun, but it shouldn’t be a chore.
This isn’t just to the advantage of lazy women everywhere. Men feel a lot of pressure during penetrative intercourse to outperform their last time trial, so theoretically, the quick blow job should be a win-win for men and women everywhere, because it’s the only place where being a minute man is a good thing.
Still, men who answer this question online say they want it to last anywhere from two minutes (correct) to an hour (ludicrous). More amazingly, a few years ago, a guy on Reddit claimed he had the perfect blow-job formula:
The most basic Blowjob Formula = S — (D + E)
Where S = Stamina of the one giving the blowjob, D = Duration required to reach orgasm and E = Time spent edging. If the values of D and E exceed the value of S, and the final answer becomes a negative, the blowjob has failed, and its length is the value of S. Therefore, higher values of S (gained by enthusiastic practice sessions) allow for higher values of both D and E. As long as S outweighs the combined time of D and E (the lowest E can always be 0), then the length of the blowjob is simply D + E.
I’m absolutely not able to understand any of this, but in my defense, neither could anyone else on the thread.
Most other answers on my Facebook poll, from gay and straight men, were well within the five to seven minutes range. Though one gay man said that while six minutes was realistic, 15 was preferable.
The real issue here, though, is that just because that’s what men want doesn’t mean that’s what they should get. A blow job is a two-way street, the result should be something intensely pleasurable to get that’s also intensely pleasurable, albeit in a different way, to give. In other words, it takes two to tango, which means it takes two to get your dick hard enough and worked up enough to come. You wanna come, right? Respect the hand (and mouth) of fate guiding this along.
If a true compromise is two people leaving equally unhappy, five minutes is more than enough to leave the receiver wanting slightly more, and the giver to feel proud of a job well done while wishing for slightly less. It allows both people to show some enthusiasm in a genuine way with no loss of honor. After all, the last thing you want to offer the person who has knelt down to blow you is the equivalent of an endurance sport.
To that end, earlier this year, another guy on Reddit said he’d soon be getting his first blow job from his girlfriend and wanted to know from the women on the site how long he should last. The first woman up to bat knocked it out of the park. “As little time as possible, please,” she wrote. “I want to feel that I’m so insanely fantastic that you cannot help yourself but carnally react super readily.”
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.
