"Hey," I said to my boyfriend. “So I need to do something weird to your dick later.” I thought for a second and then added “It's for work,” as if that somehow made it better. My boyfriend nodded curiously. "It's a grapefruit. I need to put a grapefruit on your dick. I'm sorry."
Why the hell did I need to put a grapefruit on my boyfriend's penis in the first place, you ask? The answer, of course, was: the Internet! Perhaps you've caught some of the recent media coverage of Auntie Angel, a Chicago-based YouTube sexpert and inventor of the "grapefruit blowjob," a fellatio technique supposedly so pleasurable and thrilling that it can induce a heart attack.
Though there was a lot of Internet chatter about the video, and a few interviews with Angel herself, I couldn't find any firsthand accounts of people who had tried the technique. Was it because all of their boyfriends had died of pleasure and/or pulp poisoning? I decided that, for the glory of knowledge and the good of the American people, I had to offer my own boyfriend as a possible sacrifice.
Angel's promise about death beejays reminded me a little bit of when B-movie directors used to hire nurses to stand around the lobby of their horror films, in case you "died of fright." But I will admit that I thought that there was a decent chance that I would die of shame before being able to go through with it.
Food has a long and storied history with sex-type stuff. There aren't a lot of statistics out there about how much Americans use food in their sex lives, but food-related questions turn up regularly enough in sex advice columns that I believe most people have used a donut in a way that the fine people at Entenmann's never intended at least once in their lives.
Given all of this, I was surprised about how anxious the idea of a grapefruit blowjob made me. I usually pride myself on being sexually open-minded and my ability to talk about anything related to my or anyone else's fun parts. In high school, I once got to second base with two dudes at once. See? I just wrote that on the Internet, where my stepmother could easily Google it! Surely, putting some fruit on my favorite boner should be a breeze in comparison. But for some reason, messing around with food in bed has always terrified me. Maybe it’s because I'm a neat freak. Maybe it's because it always seemed too Caligula-style decadent. Maybe it’s because I once found my parent’s bottle of "Chocolate Body Paint for Lovers" when I was a kid. But whatever the reason, I've never had any desire to bring my two great passions together. I’m no George Costanza.
But the grapefruit blowjob seemed so simultaneously wacko AND totally obvious and sensible that my curiosity won out. Would it actually work? Would it be too silly to be sexual? Would citrus juice go up my boyfriend's urethra and make him dump me and then I would have to explain this entire thing to my therapist? I had my suspicions ("yes" on the last one), but had to know for sure.
So I came home, got my boyfriend, and followed the video's instructions: I chopped off both sides of a grapefruit, so that all that remained was a slice of the center portion. The video says to cut a hole the width of your partner's penis, but I just poked out the center of the grapefruit slice with my fingers, and it seemed to work just as well. In her video, Angel recommended blindfolding your partner and springing the grapefruit on them as a surprise. But for better or for worse, I do not live in a Sade song, and do not feel comfortable blindfolding my boyfriend and erotically rubbing foodstuffs all over his baby-maker without prior permission. So I told him what I was about to do, which was probably more for my benefit than his — I was happy to know that, of all the things that might go wrong in this, his dying of surprise would not be one of them.
Then, I laid down a towel. I CANNOT OVERSTATE THE IMPORTANCE OF THE TOWEL. Do not try this without laying down a towel first, unless you're doing it on some kind of tiled floor that you can hose down, because the grapefruit blowjob is, above all else, an enormous mess. Also, don't have sex on a tiled floor; you're going to hurt your knees or something.
I then started giving my boyfriend a regular blowjob, as if there was not a big slice of grapefruit just sitting on the nightstand next to us. After a few minutes, I got up, got the slice, and silently wondered if I was going to end up having to do something really weird to apologize for this later. "Thanks for always being so supportive of my writing career!" I said, then slipped the sucker on, and went back to blowjobbing, rubbing the slice up and down the shaft of his penis the way I normally would with my thumb and forefinger during a blowjob.
So, after all my hemming and hawing, how did the grapefruit blowjob turn out? It went AMAZINGLY well. From the second I put that slice on there, my boyfriend could not get enough of this goddamned grapefruit. It turned a regular, Wednesday night, let's-get-this-boner-going-so-we-can-bang-before-my-Ambien-kicks-in blowjob into a weird, wild, wet blowjob, with grapefruit juice running everywhere and my boyfriend bucking wildly. When my mouth got tired and I needed to take a break for a second, he eagerly requested that I keep the grapefruit going as part of a hand job. I thought back on all my years reading Pinterest, and realized that this was truly the first time any craft project I had found on the Internet had actually worked out.
In the post-show cleanup, the few drawbacks of the technique became clear. Even though he didn't feel anything unpleasant in the moment, my boyfriend reported a "mild burning" from the grapefruit juice in his urethra when he peed afterwards. Also, you are both going to need to take showers, and getting that pulp out of public hair took a few aggressive shampooings. It's a bit tricky.
But cleaning issues aside, the grapefruit blowjob is an absolute winner. My boyfriend described the texture of the pulp as vagina-like, and said that the grip of it on his penis skin felt more "natural" than the standard lubed-up palm that comes with a hand or blowjob. He also found the grapefruit's coolness "refreshing," and the wetness exciting. And I have to admit that, as someone who was so hesitant and weirded-out by the idea of incorporating food into sex, licking a penis that tastes like a grapefruit is kind of more exciting than just licking a penis that tastes like penis. It was really fun.
Cleaning issues aside, the grapefruit blowjob is an absolute winner.
So while I can't declare my food sex hangups completely gone, I can 100 percent recommend the grapefruit blowjob. It's exactly the kind of thing that can liven up an evening for longtime couples who have already worked their way through whatever kinks you brought into the relationship. As Auntie Angel notes at the end of her video, your partner will end the encounter thinking, "I could have been fucking a grapefruit all these years." When I said this to my boyfriend, he nodded sagely, and said, "Yeah, pretty much."
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Images: giphy.com, etallion.tumblr.com
