IMPROBABLE SEX: (1) INTRODUCTION, and (2) a Hard, Fast Fellatio and Fellatio-Faker Test?

From the not-yet-published book "Improbable Sex"

Introduction to the Series

These are appreciative looks at scientific research about sex — research so surprising that it makes people laugh, then think.

"Improbable Sex" has a curious, suppressed history. FIRST, it was going to be a regular column running in a top medical journal... but before launch, one of that journal's subeditors quietly introduced month after month after month of delay, and then overtly vowed that he would make sure the journal would *never* publish the column. THEN, it was going to be a regular column running in a top general-readership magazine... but before launch that magazine's editor suddenly resigned, and all new projects were cancelled. THEN a top university press heard about it, and invited me to publish it in book form... but at a late stage one of that university's professors waged an angry campaign to prevent publication (I was told that the professor shouted that this book "would discourage volunteers from taking part in clinical trials.")

All the while, ever more heaps of good material arrive over my transom. So NOW, dear reader, I am publishing bits here on Substack. Maybe some day the book will be published. I hope you enjoy this little sample.)

[THE BOOK’S INTRO: Here's how the book was going to introduce itself: "This book looks at lots of research about lots of sex. It examines what the sex researchers say they did and saw. It savors their explanations of why they did it and why it matters."]

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Is There a Hard, Fast Fellatio and Fellatio-Faker Test?

Everything happens quickly in "The Gag Reflex and Fellatio," a single-page report published in 1950 in the "Clinical Notes" section of the American Journal of Psychiatry. Despite the brevity, Nicolai Gioscia, M.D., late of the US Army, conveys a goodly supply of facts and conclusions. Dr. Gioscia tells how he used a single, simple method to accomplish two tasks. First, determine which soldiers are homosexuals, and thus must be booted *out* of the army. Second, determine which soldiers are *pretending* to be homosexuals, and thus must be forced to stay *in* the army.

Dr. Gioscia tells of testing 1,404 male patients in a neuropsychiatric military hospital, at a particular point during World War II, to see whether each man's gag reflex was "absent" or present.

The 1,404 men had come, or been made to come, to the hospital "for psychiatric evaluation and disposition." All of them had "constitutional psychopathic personalities," their particular cases ranging in texture "from frank psychosis to mild adjustment problems."

The test itself was simple: a doctor "manipulating a tongue depressor around the uvula, soft palate, and pharyngeal vault."

This was a yes-or-no affair. Each man gagged, or he did not gag. In the report, nothing is equivocal. Dr. Gioscia writes: "The study has shown that the test when demonstrated in the absence of an organic lesion, hysteria or paralysis, is a definite indication that fellatio has been practiced."

Twelve percent of the military men he tested "showed no gag reflex." "Normally", Dr. Scoscia remarks, "8-10% of individuals will manifest a negative gag reflex."

He reports that, "the findings having been established," the gag reflex test was then routinely used in that wartime setting. Dr. Gioscia does not say whether anyone other than he used this test in that way.

DR. GIOSCIA'S BIG IDEA

Dr. Gioscia says his key idea — that in healthy men, a missing gag reflex is a sure sign that the man has been performing fellatio — arose, spontaneously, in 1942 when he was examining people who were being inducted into military service. Two years later, he did his big data collection, examining the 1,404 neuropsychiatric military hospital patients.

Dr. Gioscia expresses commanding interest in fellatio. In persons who practice fellatio, he explains, the gag reflex is absent even when a "tongue depressor is inserted well into the vault of the pharynx.... [The] absence of the gag reflex, depends on the desensitization of this area due to conditioning, this being brought about by the repeated control of the reflex during the act of fellatio."

THE FELLATIO ORTHODOXY OF DR. GIOSCIA

In making this explanation, Dr. Gioscia hews to an intensely orthodox definition of fellatio: that fellatio consists of welcoming a penis into the mouth. The mouth is a mere waystation through which the object can press onward — onward past the uvula, onward past the soft palate, onward into the pharyngeal vault. Only there will the object find proper lodging in which it can reliably trigger a gag reflex, if there is a gag reflex to be triggered.

Persons who take only a small portion of one end of the penis only a little way into the mouth — but no further — may not, under Dr. Gioscia's way of thinking, be recognized as conducting fellatio. Such persons are liable, even with years of intensive practice, to lack for sufficiently repeated experience at triggering their gag reflex. Without sufficient experience, those persons would be unlikely to achieve the desensitization due to conditioning (brought about by repeated control of the reflex during the act of fellatio) that is the foundation of Dr. Gioscia's entire schema. Even after an adulthood fairly full of fellating, they could still have a good-as-new, easy-to-trip-off gagging reflex.

THE MISSING FELLATORS

Dr. Gioscia may have failed, in at least two major ways, to identify many of the fellators it was his fortune to encounter.

First, he quite possibly identified a strong gag reflex (which he saw as proof of fellatorship) in many people who did not have much of a gag reflex. Poke a tongue depressor violently enough into anyone's throat, and one stands a good chance of making them react.

Second, in limiting himself to that conservatively exclusive definition of fellatio, Dr. Gioscia would have failed to identify many of the fellators whose standard operating procedure involved only slight intake into the mouth, with little or no involvement of the uvula, soft palate, or pharyngeal vault.

While failing to identify genuine fellators, Dr. Gioscia may have mistakenly certified as fellators some non-fellators who happened to have desensitized gag reflexes.

Dr. Gioscia makes further assumptions about who has a gag reflex, and who does not.

VARIEGATED FAILURE TO GAG

Fellatio is not the sole story of gagging-or-non-gagging in healthy persons. Failure-to-gag can come about in ways other than through rigorous fellatio training. Desensitization is just part of the story.

Some people happen not to have strong gag reflexes.

Dr. Gioscia does not mention how, or how well, he gained his certainty that "normally 8-10% of individuals will manifest a negative gag reflex." That number may be very low. A study called "Pharyngeal Sensation and Gag Reflex in Healthy Subjects," in The Lancet in 1995, found bigger numbers. That involved testing the gag reflex in 70 healthy young adults and 70 healthy elders, in the UK. Both groups included fairly even mixes of women and men. 26% of the young folk lacked a strong gag reflex, as did 41% of their elders. That study found that the numbers were a little squishy — that when different medical personnel would test the same person, they sometimes disagreed as to whether the individual was gagging or not. The Lancet study looks strictly at one, just one, question: is there gagging, or is there not? The Lancet study expresses no interest — none — in any connection between gagging and fellatio.

OFFICIALLY INSIGNIFICANT NON-GAGGERS

Dr. Gioscia appears to assume, in his written report, that there is only one reason to develop mastery over the gag reflex, and perhaps only one way to do it. But there are others.