Until about a month ago, I thought very little, if ever, about men sucking their own penises. Self-sucking, also known as autofellatio, has all but been written off as a tale told to disgust or delight at teen sleepovers, and I assumed no one ever really did it—until the act came up in a conversation I was having with two men I know, and they admitted that they had both tried it.
“The classic pillow-humping strategy had started to feel a little passé,” one of the men who has, yes, asked to remain anonymous, later tells me. He was 11 or 12 at the time, and had heard the urban legend that Marilyn Manson had a rib surgically removed in order to do it. This man, however, found surgery wasn’t necessary. “I guess I was a natural,” he says. “I just did a seated forward fold.”
I can now confidently say that there are two types of men: Those who have attempted to suck their own penises at least once, and liars. That’s my conclusion after a weeks-long investigation, one that began with a benign curiosity but developed into a desperate chase as I tried and failed to speak to sex therapists, fetish experts, doctors, and enthusiasts who either politely declined or flat out ignored my attempts to interview them. But just scroll through Reddit, or ask a man who won’t block your number, and you’ll likely find that yeah, they’ve made the attempt. They just don’t want to tell Gentleman’s Quarterly about it.
Public information about self-sucking is extremely limited. You’ll find histories which point to its earliest mentions in texts, including in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1938. A decade later, in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues wrote that, “[a] considerable portion of the population does record attempts at self-fellation, at least in early adolescence.” But most of the literature and research published in the decades since categorize self-sucking as some kind of deviancy or symptom of mental illness. In a history of self-sucking for Slate, psychologist Jesse Bering observed that most researchers treated self-sucking as the behavior of someone “sexually maladjusted, stuck in an infantile state of suckling dependency, or even motivated by repressed homosexual desires.”
Today’s self-suckers seem far from repressed. The r/SelfSuck subreddit is over 100,000 members strong (and should not be opened on a work computer). It features pictures and videos of self-suck enthusiasts showing off their techniques and earning praise and suggestions from the community members. They are also, despite their transparency in other departments, extremely difficult to get a hold of for an interview.
Right now, though, Reddit is one of the few easily accessible places where one can learn anything practical about self sucking. But to visit is to throw yourself directly into the deep end of the topic; I might never recover from watching the first video I was brave enough to hit “reveal” on.
