The criminality of oral sex
Eyeless in Gaza update at end
An offhand comment earlier about the relaxation of the law against oral sex in Montserrat set me off thinking: perhaps there is more to this than I thought.
Get yourself seated comfortably, and we’ll start with the USA.
Oral sex was once illegal in the following US states: Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Virginia. While still remaining on the books in some states, the laws were declared unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment after the 2003 Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas by 6 votes to 3 and can no longer be applied. The judgement stated:
The present case does not involve minors. It does not involve persons who might be injured or coerced or who are situated in relationships where consent might not easily be refused. It does not involve public conduct or prostitution. It does not involve whether the government must give formal recognition to any relationship that homosexual persons seek to enter. The case does involve two adults who, with full and mutual consent from each other, engaged in sexual practices common to a homosexual lifestyle. The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives. The State cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime.
Which seems to be a fully adult opinion. I cannot understand the thinking of people who find it necessary to interfere in what two sane adults consentingly do together in private.
Let’s move on now to the legacy of the British Empire.
Although the act of sodomy was sometimes prosecuted in England under British common law, it was first codified in the British Empire as Section 377 in the Indian Penal Code "carnal intercourse against the order of nature" in 1860. Drawing on the then Victorian, Christian puritanical concept of sex, its main target was homosexuality, but the law was also used to prosecute people engaging in oral and anal sex. It was then exported to other colonies and even to England itself, providing the legal model for the act of buggery in the Offenses against the Person Act (1861). It states:
Unnatural offences: Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine. Explanation.— Penetration is sufficient to constitute the carnal intercourse necessary to the offence described in this section.
Apparently, then, it was OK to have intercourse with an animal if it was not against the order of nature: the missionary position, perhaps.
Section 377 remains in force in the following countries: Bangladesh, Malaysia, Myanmar, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. It’s a religious hang up, Muslim and Buddhist majorities in those states. My wife and I have taken a number of holidays recently in Malaysia, and it never occurred to me that I could be arrested there for licking her quente, as Chaucer delicately put it, but navigating now through my eighties I much prefer ice creams. Anyway in Malaysia, it turns out curiously that the situation is more complex: consensual fellatio is an offence, consensual cunnilingus is not. The person who receives fellatio is punishable by imprisonment for a term of up to 20 years and mandatory whipping. The other person who performs fellatio is not.
Attitudes in some other countries:
Oral sex is not explicitly illegal in Russia. However, Russian laws regarding sexual behavior can be complex and are influenced by broader social and political attitudes. For example, laws related to "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relationships" could indirectly affect public discourse and perceptions of sexual behavior, including perhaps oral sex.
Oral sex is not explicitly illegal in China. The country does not have specific laws criminalising consensual sexual acts between adults in private, including oral sex. A grown up country, then.
Oral sex is legal in the United Kingdom. The UK has no laws that criminalise consensual oral sex between adults in private. The Sexual Offences Act 2003, which governs sexual behavior in the UK, focuses on issues such as consent, age of consent (which is 16), and protection against sexual violence, rather than prohibiting specific consensual sexual acts. But note that homosexuality was illegal in the UK until 1967 when the Sexual Offences Act legalised it for the over 21. Fourteen MPs voted against it including 12 Tories, and 48 in the other chamber: the Earl of Dudley had said that "[homosexuals] are the most disgusting people in the world ... Prison is much too good a place for them; in fact, that is a place where many of them like to go — for obvious reasons.“ Even proponents of the bill did not condone homosexuality, but instead argued that it was not within the responsibility of the criminal law.
Oral sex is legal in Canada. Consensual sexual activities, including oral sex, between adults (the age of consent in Canada is 16) are not prohibited by law. The Criminal Code of Canada focuses on issues such as consent, age of consent, and protection against sexual exploitation or violence, rather than criminalizing specific consensual sexual acts.
Oral sex is legal in Japan. There are no specific laws in Japan that criminalise consensual oral sex between adults. Japanese law generally does not regulate private, consensual sexual activities between adults, as long as they do not involve exploitation, coercion, or violations of public decency.
Oral sex is legal in South Korea as long as it is consensual and involves adults. South Korea does not have specific laws that criminalise consensual sexual acts, including oral sex, between adults in private. The country's legal framework focuses more on issues such as consent, age of consent, and protection against sexual violence or exploitation. But take care: the age of consent in South Korea is 20.
What do the major world religions have to say about oral sex?
Christian Forums says oral and other sex before marriage is a sin, something contrary to God’s plan for sex and marriage (they know this, how?) They say that the Old Testament includes prohibitions about sex referencing Leviticus 18, but nothing there bars specifically sex outside marriage, only normal stuff about sex with relations, animals, etc. Curiously it is addressed entirely to men (leave your neighbour’s wife alone, and don’t screw both a mother and her daughter too). What is interesting is the following entry at 18.22:
Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable.
Wikipedia says:
Various mainline Protestant denominations in the USA, Canada and the UK now view same-sex behaviour as equally valid and allow clergy to perform same-sex marriages.
So for Protestants, Leviticus 18 then is nothing more than a menu and you can choose from it. Take your pick. How about breaking this one?
18.21. Do not give any of your children to be sacrificed to Molek, for you must not profane the name of your God. I am the Lord.
Leviticus 19 has some interesting things to say, notably this:
If a man sleeps with a female slave who is promised to another man but who has not been ransomed or given her freedom, there must be due punishment. Yet they are not to be put to death, because she had not been freed. The man, however, must bring a ram to the entrance to the tent of meeting for a guilt offering to the Lord. With the ram of the guilt offering the priest is to make atonement for him before the Lord for the sin he has committed, and his sin will be forgiven.
So, guys, feel free to have sex with your own female slaves. God seems OK with that. Not sure about your wives, though.
The only references otherwise quoted are not from God but from letters written by some guy called Paul. Within marriage they offer no bar to a bit of variety provided it is consensual. But the Catholic church is adamantly against that, particularly fellatio, since it’s the male orgasm that’s inherently linked with the possibility of new life, so the husband must never intentionally ejaculate outside of his wife’s vagina. That also presumably means he must never, ever, er ….
No wonder confessions take a long time.
Some theologians claim that the Song of Solomon contains a religious encouragement to oral sex, but the more general opinion now is that it is a simply an erotic secular work. Judge for yourself. The core is in the fourth stanza which concludes:
He: A garden locked is my sister, my bride, a spring locked, a fountain sealed. Your shoots are an orchard of pomegranates with all choicest fruits, henna with nard, nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense, myrrh and aloes, with all choice spice; a garden fountain, a well of living water, and flowing streams from Lebanon. Awake, O north wind, and come, O south wind! Blow upon my garden, let its spices flow.
She: Let my beloved come to his garden, and eat its choicest fruits.
You can read all eight here:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Song%20of%20Solomon%201&version=ESV
The country of the Philippines is possibly the most hung up on sex in the world, utterly dominated by the Catholic church which doesn’t even belong in east Asia, it should have been invited to pack up and go home when the Spanish who imposed it on the natives were driven out, leaving them to return to something healthier like paganism or whatever they had before. Even the most poverty stricken village in which people live in sheds unfit for keeping chickens will have a palace of a church. The Philippines is the only country in the world apart from the Vatican, if you can call that a country, which bans divorce, except for its Muslim population. Its attitudes are rammed into people’s faces at every opportunity, for example this:
and this:
and here’s that pair of nuns again, protesting about the provision of contraception for normal people:
I was going to remark that they’d be unlikely to need contraception under any circumstance but that would be cruel.
This next just takes the biscuit. Some prude has taken offence at the bare breasts on a statue of a mermaid at Carmen, Cebu and painted a brassiere on it.
And Moslems? I think the clue was in the list of nations still holding to article 377. There is some variation of opinion, some regarding it as merely shameful - using the organs which recite the holy Qur’an for filthy and dirty things - others permitting it, but all agreeing that on absolutely no account should there ever be any transfer of, er, fluids.
Buddhism? In 1997 in San Francisco the Dalai Lama in a public address reiterated his opposition to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and his commitment to “full human rights” for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. But then the discussion turned from the general to the specific — from what is acceptable in society at large to what is acceptable in Buddhist tradition. Relying on a detailed text from the fifteenth-century Tibetan scholar Tsongkhapa, he explained what the work has to say about “sexual misconduct”. Among other things, Tsongkhapa’s formulation prohibits sex between men, solitary masturbation (!), oral or anal intercourse, and even sex during daylight. On the other hand, it does not prohibit sex between women, or men employing the services of prostitutes, and it permits heterosexual men up to five orgasms per night. Go for it! Similar formulations are found in important Tibetan texts written before and after him, and every element in Tsongkhapa’s formulation has a basis in the Indian Buddhist sources.
And finally, Judaism. Oral sex is legal in Israel. As an authoritative work, Penenei Halakha is a series of books on Jewish Law (halachah) by Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, Rosh Yeshiva and Rabbi of the community Har Bracha. It has nothing to say specifically about oral sex as such, but plenty about the conditions in which it or other sexual practices may or may not be performed.
“It is forbidden to have sexual relations during the day, as it is forbidden to do so in the light. Similarly, it is prohibited to have sexual relations at night where there is light. This does not mean that the room must be pitch dark; rather, if moonlight comes into the room, sexual relations are permitted as long as it does not truly illuminate them. In a darkened room, since it is nightlike, sexual relations are permitted even during the day. In a time of need, when it is impossible to make the room dark, a Torah scholar may have relations with his wife during the day, provided that they cover their bodies and heads with a blanket. At night, if a couple is in a room with lights on or a lit candle, they may not have sexual relations even if they cover themselves with a blanket. Rather, they must put out the light. Even on Friday night, when it is forbidden to put out the lights, they may not have sexual relations even when completely covered by a blanket. If the light is coming from outside the room, then the law is the same as during the day; in times of need, a Torah scholar may be lenient and rely on the darkness provided by a blanket, and under pressing circumstances, anyone may rely on this leniency.”
All laid down by some regimental maniac to please an imaginary being. Little wonder so many of them are psychopathic.
I guess it’s an oxymoron but: thank God for atheism.
Eyeless in Gaza - Preface: update
More serious matters.
The bank transfer got through to Palestine but a repeat has been difficult, I changed to the Hong Kong bank after China seemed to block it. That didn’t seem to work so I used the Philippine bank, that seemed successful but we’ll see next week. If so I will set up an account there for donations.
The WeChat group is set up! Now Gazans can join, take video clips and tell us their stories. The first two videos are up on next week’s article, I hope to have a lot more by then. If we get supporters/donors I’ll set up a separate group for that.
Don’t know exactly what’s happening there right now but WSWS said recently that Israelis are rounding people up into concentration camps prior to shipping them elsewhere (Sinai desert) or even another country. That may be just wishful thinking. But nobody seems to be telling them to think on. Egypt and Jordan have already said no, so any attempt to push them over the borders will result in mayhem. Anyone reading this having any further information please post it below.
Here are the last messages Diana got from Raghda. Unfortunately Raghda’s phone is too old to operate WeChat.
More, hopefully, next Sunday.
Latest Friday May 9
Community kitchens shut down in Gaza as food runs out
Dozens of community kitchens in Gaza were forced to shut down Thursday due to lack of food amid the ongoing Israeli blockade aimed at starving the Palestinian population and annexing their land. Amjad al-Shawa, director of the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations Network, told Reuters on Thursday that most of Gaza’s 170 community kitchens had shut down.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/05/09/wegq-m09.html?pk_campaign=wsws-newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws-daily-newsletter
I want to add an off topic note here because if I put it where it belongs, on a past post about the Philippines, nobody will see it.
I have mentioned before how the Philippines is a corrupt, failed state. There are elections here this morning. One of my staff just mentioned in passing (like it’s something quite normal - well it is here) that she had received 2,000 pesos from two candidates and another had received 3,000. That’s 36 and 54 dollars. Consider that multiplied up for the electorate. Where do they get the money? From bribes accumulated since they were last elected. What a country.
Walt:
This is, on both counts - oral sex and the plight of Gaza - another example of your efforts to expand the boundaries of what people are "allowed" to think about, to believe.
Sexual mores - and many other aspects of cultural dictates about what one is allowed to be and do in "polite society" are spun out of whole cloth, by people whose motivations, knowledge and general competency to make such judgements is very questionable.
Consider all the modifications to "polite company conduct" that have happened here in the U.S. over the past century:
a. Black people are now regarded as "real people" that have earned and deserve to be treated with the respect and dignity that white people occasionally exhibit toward one another
b. Women are legitimate, full-status members of society. They've escaped the confines of the household and child-bearing and subservience to men (mostly, and if indeed they prefer to; they do have a choice now)
c. We aren't nearly as compelled to stay within the religious and cultural bounds set by our ancestors and family. We often leave our families to venture to different parts of the country, and seek out, and embrace, and find a home in a culture different from our upbringing.
These are fairly momentous social changes; they've all have major impacts on what we are as a people, and the full effects - good and not so good - will be felt for a few more generations.
We used to be prevented from doing these things, and now we're not. We evolved, in spite of immense repression. We did it anyway.
And on to Gaza.
The cultural psychosis of Zionism is now clear for all to see; it's been veiled and hidden before, but the murder - the slow asphyxiation of the Palestinians, and now the quickening slaughter by starvation - is clear everywhere except those few places where Zionists and the fellow-traveling opportunists can control the information flow.
Here in the U.S., a bill was recently introduced that criminalized the criticism of Zionism, with heavy livelihood-ending penalties. This is how far the desperation to control information flow has proceeded, and again, it puts the cultural psychosis of many Jews and nearly all Zionists of all stripes on clear display.
Interestingly ... a) the bill was actually introduced, which is both shocking and horrifying, and b) the bill was promptly withdrawn, because even in the Zionist-controlled charade that we call our Congress - even there, with every conceivable coercive tool at their disposal, the Congress knew it was a bridge too far, and that the very act of introducing the bill and voting on it would serve to break loose the few remaining bulwarks that impede the incipient fit of revulsion toward Zionism and the Jews that fund and perpetuate it.
It's probably too late to prevent that tide of revulsion from breaking loose; the bill was an act of desperation, and it's well-known across the country to be desperation. As the consequences of our country's naivety in the face of a long, well-orchestrated and highly predatory corruption of the body politic becomes better-known - and it's becoming better-known rapidly - the other story - not just the exhaustion of the U.S. empire, but also the end of mind-control by the globalist-Zionists is now in sight. The two are linked; the philosophy of the predator is strong in both camps, and that's what binds them together.
Keep up the good works, Walt. While some won't initially see the connection between sexual mores and the genocidal predation of the Zionists. There's a link, and here it is:
Other people control your mind; they do it by controlling what you talk about, by criminalizing those of your actions that operate against their interests.
And "these people" ... just happen to have one form or another of cultural psychosis. It's _why_ they're in power, and it's _why_ they do the perfectly awful things they do. They're psychologically sick.
Free yourself from the clutches of these horrible, twisted people: authorize your own volition - the power to pick out what you think is right, what is best, and act upon it.