on sucking and suckers

The act of sucking hardly gets fair linguistic treatment. When something is really awful, we say it “sucks,” however puerile it may be of us to do so; if it’s really bad, we might add a “dude,” as in the commiserative “Wow, that sucks, dude.” (Although, oddly, when something, really, really sucks, when it sucks beyond all comparable suckitude, we often says it “blows,” unless we just add an intensifying adverb and say that the thing in question “fucking sucks,” a phrase that does have a lovely assonant belly to it.)

When someone is currying favor, that person is “sucking up.” But when a person is gobbling food hurriedly and unmindfully, he or she is “sucking it down.” When person is inept, or when an event fails to live up to our expectation, we might say the person or the event in question “sucks ass.” P.T. Barnum famously said that a sucker is born every minute, less referring to babies, who do in fact literally suck, than those of us who are figurative gullible prats, ready and willing to fall victim to machinations of the wily and the brash, if also the somewhat amoral.

We might, after we’ve fallen prey to a scam, turn around and call the perpetrator of said scam a “cocksucker,” a term usually reserved for men, despite the fact that far more women suck cocks, just speaking on pure empirics. “Cocksucker” interests me not merely because of its often inaccurate hurling—I’m way more of a cocksucker than most of the men I’ve called a “cocksucker”—but also because the word embodies a grudging admiration, even if it also sometimes gestures to homophobia. Most cocksuckers don’t, for example, either suck up or suck ass. Most cocksuckers have a luster about them. I think I’d almost rather be a cocksucker than a bitch, and I actually like being a bitch.

Lots has been said—and said well—about the paradoxical nature of our using “fuck” as an epithet. George Carlin’s bit on the word is probably the best known, but any one of us has most likely found ourselves standing about in public somewhere, maybe heard the word thrown in anger flutter past us like a pigeon and idly wondered how something that we spend so much time thinking about, pursuing and enjoying became the worst of all swear words. “Fuck you, you fucking fuck,” spat Frank Booth in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, inspiring a generation of t-shirts disallowed by high schools across America. Take the phrase more literally, though, outside the borders of vulgar language, and it seems almost a fleshy benediction.

Sucking, though, has escaped this kind of linguistic scrutiny. Sucking we just seem to accept as bad, and we seem to do so without any questioning. Which is kind of weird. I personally find sucking really quite pleasurable, both in terms of my being the suckee and of my being the sucker. I love having my tongue, nipples, neck, fingers, inner elbow, belly, thighs, ass, clit and toes sucked. I also love sucking all of the above, plus cocks, milkshakes, spaghetti, lollipops, ice cream cones and warm pebbles. There’s not a lot more pleasurable than the feeling of a human mouth making a hermetic seal over a part of my body and gently drawing in. And, undoubtedly tied to evolution, there’s also an intense and ineffable satisfaction in making that hermetic seal with my mouth and doing the same to body, beverage or whatever. From either the perspective of the person doing the sucking or the one being sucked, I find it difficult to argue with the act. It gets two wet thumbs up, way up.

I can see both why “sucking up” and “suck it down” mean what they do. For one thing, anytime I’ve been in the position to suck up to someone literally, I do feel somewhat subservient. When, for example, my boyfriend straddles my head with his knobby knees and takes his ambitious cock in his hand and feeds  it into my open baby-bird mouth, I feel pleasurably deferential. When I’ve had women close their warm thighs around my ears, I’ve felt similarly, and any time I’ve been the woman on top, I do feel an unmistakable sense of superiority. Likewise, when my boyfriend is lying below me like a lovely éclair, and I’m gobbling his cock in long slurpy strides, I can see why we use “sucking it down” as we do. There’s nothing polite and everything gloriously gluttonous about the act. It just seems to me that the negative connotation of the phrases is misplaced. Sucking, I believe, is fun.

But perhaps the worst offender in the “suck” pantheon is the phrase “suck ass,” a phrase I often employ as “suck crack,” although I also occasionally modify that to “suck burro crack” or “unwashed burro crack” or some other unhygienic mulish permutation. Sucking ass is a deeply pleasurable activity, I can say from the position of the suckee more often than the sucker. I will sometimes suck ass, but the moon has to be in the right house and a shower has to have just ended moments earlier.

The fact that “suck ass” carries such negative weight speaks to our prurient shame over the act, as no doubt the negativity of “suck” in all its various forms does. We don’t want to own those activities that we cherish in the dark, especially the ones that are so deeply routed in our infancy, those little sucking rosebud mouths, that immediate response to oral stimuli, that necessary evolutionary response. We don’t want to embrace them in the light, and so “suck,” and “fuck” and everything else gets perverted, and not in the good way.

It’s nothing new, I’m not saying anything radical here. I’m just pointing out a linguistic foible, a psychic schism, a little lapse in our great big grey noggins. I’m just observing it, and saying that it, you know, sucks. Big time.

Thank you, Art of The Secret Brain for your comment to my previous post that gave me the inspiration to write this piece. You were a muse.

Comments

[S.C.]

Very true. It falls into the same category as "Fuck you" in my mind. I mean, many people (in fact, many people *HERE*) think of fucking as a highly enjoyable, pleasurable activity, but I've never had someone say "fuck you" to me in a way that suggested it was anything but an insult. Fuck you, fuck off, go fuck yourself, etc.

Then there's "blows". I like being blown, others like being blown, but if something "sucks", then it quite often "blows", which shouldn't be physically possible.

We English-speakers are a crazy bunch.

[ssarah]

Oh man! Just yesterday in my lit survey we went over Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market"--so much (purely literal) sucking!

More on subject: I would say that our use of suck and fuck as insults is somehow telling of some sort of national sexual repression, but isn't "fuck you" pretty much an international insult? Does any language support insults that are a little less sexually-related, like "shit you"?

[BlueStorm]

Chelsea Girl, I have a question......what is the female equivalent of a 'hard on' ?
BlueStorm

[George]

Fucking awesome post CG ... not one little bit of suck to it.

[dirty filthy princess]

I love this! Very creative and interesting. This was my favorite line, "Sucking, I believe, is fun."

Thanks for including my post in the fleshbot thing. I'm honored!

[chelsea girl]

Good questions, one and all. To be honest, I know neither whether "fuck you" is an epithet in all tongues, nor what to call a female hard-on. I'll endeavor to find out.

kissykiss,
chelsea

ps. I love, love, love "Goblin Market," and yes, there is a tremendous amount of sucking in it.

[O]

I'm not as familiar with 'suck it down'. Maybe that is a regional thing? I'm more familiar with the expression, "suck it up and deal".
Another good topic might be biting, as in 'that bites' or 'bite me'. I remember a Russian friend who was still learning some of our idioms, who said to me in frustration, "Ooooh, I'm taking this class, I hate it. Is this how you say it?--It is biting me!"
I don't think she'd have made than same error with 'suck', but we do seem to use 'bite' in the perjorative sense in many of the same ways we use 'suck'.

[O]

That, not 'than'. Dammit.

[Mistress J]

I am glad that I found a mistress like me.

[cwf]

what an insipiring and wonderful written post.