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Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion_of_Saint...
Why is a blowjob called a job? Who named it? Was there originally a salary? Annual leave? A pension? And at what point did women agree to unpaid overtime?
My answer
Holy crap. I've just resurfaced following some serious Deep Diving. And it turns out the word "blowjob", meaning oral sex penisly, wasn't really a Thing until as recently as the 1960s.
Now yes there indeed exist numerous totally-legit historical meanings of "blowjob" that aren't even slightly penisey. https://www.etymonline.com/word/blow-job claims that: "As recently as the early 1950s, military pilots could innocently talk of their jet planes as blow jobs according to the 'Thesaurus of American Slang.'" Crumbs.
Though I should clarify: it's in written-word literature specifically that "blowjob" demonstrably wasn't a Thing. I thought I'd do a deep-dive into the word's history and etymology. Check out Google Books's Ngram Viewer trends on "blowjob,blow-job,blow job".
Three things jump out at me:
- Wow! Popular modern usage doesn't kick off until as recently as the late 1960s.
- Its post-'60s usage remains yet tiny until the 1990s. Only in the 2000s does it explode into mainstream vernacular.
- What the hell happened in the years straddling 1900? A penisey elite apparently enjoyed a slurpy decade of oral stimulus! Or at least they wrote about it. And then zilch for another sixty years.
Words aren't everything though. Street slang moves like lightning. Today's Internet famously never forgets. But prior to our current global supercomputer network recording every goddamn brainfart in the goddamn universe, two of the few ways for a given historical period to record mountains of contemporary graffiti was to either piss off Zeus and perish horribly beneath a volcanic eruption and bury entire cities of wall art, i.e. Pompeii, or, live in a bit of the world home both to unusually parchment-friendly biomatter and an incredibly arid and papyrus-preservation-friendly climate, i.e. Egypt. Otherwise, loads of slang and other verbal-only comms just gets lost in the mists of time.
Even within living memory. Ever heard of Kenneth Williams? If you're not a middle-aged-or-older dude and/or dudette from the UK, then I'll introduce Kenneth Williams to you as a particularly campy National-Treasure-level comedian and actor. And the star of a great many subsequent comedy documentaries.
I was watching one on YouTube a while back: Heroes Of Comedy. This particular TV-recording was uploaded way back in 2009, when YouTube's video length limit was a measly ten minutes. And one particular contemporary colleague of Kenneth Williams chats about blowjobs. The relevant quotation:
In the '60s, we were performing a theatre sketch about hairdressers, and the latest trendy hairstyles. Kenneth was supposed to say "you need a blow WAVE", but this particular night, he made a mistake, and he said: "what you need is a blow JOB"!
The audience was in hysterics, because it was almost forbidden to use it in the '60s. But we got away with it! None of the newspapers picked it up! ... I'm not sure if it was a mistake. I think it was an ad-lib. To see what would happen.
Wow! Google Ngrams belies this dollop of anecdata. Turns out Kenneth Williams's "blow JOB" brought the house down. In the 1960s. That early. A dang shame this doco couldn't be more specific regarding the year.
So the fact remains: it seems "blowjob" was already common '60s parlance. Literary frequency soon followed suit.
But why then? The '60s specifically? What the hell kicked off in that decade to catapult literary blowjobness to match the performance of its linguistic twin?
Well. I think my blowjob-Deep-Diving has unearthed me some Answers.
Ever heard of Vatican II?
If not, it's the common-or-garden name of the 21st and most recent Ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church, between 1962 and 1965. Ecumenical Councils are basically extra-ginormous conferences, with the goal of encouraging thousands of Catholic priests, bishops and other church functionaries to debate and hash out the issues of the day. The then-Pope, John XXIII, summed-up this one with the Italian word "Aggiornamento," meaning "bringing up to date."
Vatican II spanned four years. It splurged forth four Constitutions, nine Decrees, and three Declarations, 16 total, and no, I'm not all that clear on these doohickeys' differences either. These 16 docs covered, among other topics, the Catholic Church's relationship with the modern world.
In the Swinging Sixties. Oh dear.
They make fascinating reading. One of these nine Decrees is titled "Inter Mirifica". It addresses, quote, "the concerns, problems, and potentials of 'social communication'", which the doc IDs as 20th-Century media: newspapers, magazines, cinema, TV, and so on.
Modern media. In the Swinging Sixties.
The Council's thousands of attendees found this doc really controversial. Each of Vatican II's 16 candidate documents required a majority-approval vote before official release. Just you get a good gawk at those voting stats. Most passed with overwhelming majorities: 2,201-to-2, 2,134-to-10, etc. Inter Mirifica's vote was 1,598-to-503, easily the most-opposed vote of all 16. Oh sure, that's still a thumping majority, but opposition that strong, sustained and specific to just that doc? That just ain't a good look. Several additional weeks of politicking and editing saw its finally-final vote strengthen to 1,960-to-164.
Why such negativity? Official commentaries blathered about "inadequate", "too conservative", "failing to provide new or different thoughts", blah blah blah. Oh dear. I'm a veteran of a gazillion hideously dreary committees, I am. The urge sometimes takes me to inject interestingness into the dreary lives of committee drones. Official docs sometimes promulgate a committee's actual real diction and motives. And sometimes they promulgate sanitised friggin' bullshit.
A surefire tell for the latter is tactical vagueness. Usually it's to cloak or conceal behaviours the committee would rather die than see escape to the wide world. And I think I know what.
The '60s were a crazy time, man. Everything was fab and groovy. Uptight squares were Out. Flower Power was In. If you were carefree and wild and bursting with heart, then nothing was impossible. No idea was too crazy. Come on. Live a little! Why not give your secret passion the ol' college try? Our world contains Cockney Bibles. Why not also your heinous Bible variants?
Like, for instance, the Book of Job. If you've been living in Plato's Cave's Basement's Drip-Tray and never heard of it, it's an explanation of the Problem Of Evil: how to reconcile the existence of suffering and evil with an allegedly omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God. Hah. God basically tortures Job and wrecks his life to Test His Faith.
In the early '60s, alternate interpretations of Bible stories were as ubiquitous as alternate Shakespeare plays. Turns out there's an extra-sexy variant of the Book of Job. In it, God rewards Job the finest and most illustrious oral sex ever performed in the history of the world. But in practice, his underling/side-bitch Satan sweet-talks his way into performing unto Job a prolonged series of oral-sex-es so heinous and dreadful that it annihilates Job's piety.
The problem is, it's written by renegade yet celibate Catholic priests. And they're trying to come across as cool. To 1960s hippies. At the height of Flower Power.
I managed to snag this snippet from the Vatican Library's section on "Inter Mirifica's Hilarious-est Bloopers":
Book Of Job
In the land of Uz there lived a man named Job. Of all the Uz-ites, Job was wealthiest.
But Uz measured riches by not gold, nor wine, nor livestock. Oh jinkies no.
The people of Uz were, like, totally groovy and chill, man. Can you dig it?
The Uz-ites were so groovy, and so chill, that yea, man did lay with man,
As of Sodom and Gomorrah. But the Uzfolk were such G-Dang Cool Cats
That the LORD did smile on them, and He blessed their oral orchestrations.
And the Uz-ites were known throughout the peoples of the East as Totally Rad Dudes.
For ’twas said: whomsoever could SUCK nine camels through the eye of a needle,
The fame and Good Word of the Uz-ites thus spread to the corners of the Earth.
And of all the Uz-ites, Job was the most blessed with the wealth of lingual SUCTION.
Job brought, like, totally rad vibes to seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels,
Five hundred oxen, and five hundred donkeys. And he HAD a large number of servants.
Job was the mightiest and wisest fellator among all the peoples of the East.
The LORD said unto Satan, “Yo m’bro check out Job! My finest servant! Amazing, yeah?”
Satan replied: “You witless dingbat! Have you been at the Wacky ‘Baccy again?”
“Watch your mouth or you’ll get a knuckle supper,” admonished the LORD, “fatso.”
“Listen. It’s obvious. Job enjoys his oral splendour and renown only because YOU grant it!”
“What do you mean?” asked the LORD. “And for the millionth time, stop scoffing toast in bed!”
“Sorry. But come on. It’s obvious why Job shouts OH GOD OH GOD every time an Uz-ite SUCKS him off. It’s because YOU surround him with oral wealth and splendour! It’s EASY to praise God when life is all sunshine and lollipops!”
“I hate it when we quarrel,” said the LORD.
“What? Last week you told me you keep picking all these fights just for the make-up sex! But all right. Tell you what, snookums. I shall un-ruffle your feathers somewhat. Do you genuinely believe that Job is your most faithful and unshakeable servant? Adamantine piety?”
“You’ve got that gleam in your eye again! What are you planning, you ol’ scoundrel?”
“Perhaps a bet? Let me have a crack at our Jobsy. I’ll plague Job with the worst and most diabolical oral in the You-Damn universe. For years! I’ll hit Job with the OPPOSITE of an exquisite suck-off. I’ll go from SUCK to BLOW. Job will loathe it! Let's see how long his allegedly uncrackable piety lasts, shall we? I, SATAN, shall BLOW JOB.”
No wonder Inter Mirifica's voters lost their shit! But at last, we have our answer 😘
~~
PS Holy shit this article gobbled my time and energies. As tremendous fun as it was to autodidact-ify myself on (1) the history and etymology of "blowjob", (2) Vatican II, and (3) the Book of Job, and it really really was tremendous fun ... it also damn near wrecked my article-writing/publishing frequency. Far too long!
Henceforth: snappier and more frequent TERRIBLE Advices.