The great fellatio scare: is oral sex really the latest teen craze?

• Author: Young, Cathy

THE TEENAGE ORAL sex panic began in the late 1990S. It is in some ways a part of the Clinton legacy--more specifically, the Clinton-Lewinsky legacy. It was Clinton's most famous line ("I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky") and the subsequent debate on whether receiving oral sex qualified as "sexual relations" that produced the apparently shocking disclosure that a lot of teenagers were not only engaging in oral sex but regarding it as not quite sex.

Worse: According to press accounts, America's young Monicas weren't just having oral sex; they were having it in circumstances that would raise Hugh Hefner's eyebrows. In July 1998, The Washington Post ran a front-page story with the headline, "Parents Are Alarmed by an Unsettling New Fad in Middle Schools: Oral Sex."

Its main example was a scandal in an Arlington, Virginia, school, where a group of eighth-graders would get together for parties at which boys and girls paired off for sexual activities that eventually progressed from petting to oral sex. There were also a couple reported instances of public fellatio, on a school bus and in a hallway, that reached school authorities "through the student grapevine."

From here, it was only a short step to tales of "rainbow parties" where several girls wearing different colors of lipstick would take turns servicing a boy until their lipstick traces formed a "rainbow" of rings. In 2003, this peril was explored by Oprah herself, with the help of O magazine feature writer Michelle Burford, who interviewed 50 girls, some as young as 9, and painted a frightening picture of kiddie debauchery. "Are rainbow parties pretty common?" inquired a rapt Oprah, to which Burford replied, "I think so. At least among the 50 girls that I talked to ... this was pervasive."

Burford did not say whether the girls had told her they themselves had attended such parties, or if they had simply heard rumors. Nor was any proof produced of what was actually said in those interviews.

All these stories invariably depicted the oral sex as almost entirely one-sided, with girls giving and boys receiving. "One more opportunity for male satisfaction and female degradation in the name of adolescent sexual curiosity," harrumphed Baltimore Sun columnist Susan Reimer. In this familiar script, feminists saw girls as victims of male dominance, while conservatives blamed feminists and Clinton, whose bad example supposedly sent kids the message that fellatio was OK.

Now...