In 1958, Jeanne Moreau couldn't even say the word. When asked by journalist France Roche about a "daring" scene in Les Amants (The Lovers), by Louis Malle – presumably the one in which the camera explores her face, arm, and hand as she is receiving cunnilingus off-camera – the actress speaks of "love," "purity," an "encounter." But she doesn't speak of the act itself, which is considered to be one of the first instances of cunnilingus depicted, albeit in a very suggestive way, in non-pornographic French cinema.

It has not been lost on the contemporary viewer: The act, once a rarity outside of TV shows whose main subject was sexuality, has become almost standard in recent series – Irrésistible ("Irresistible"), Tout va Bien ("Everything is Fine"), Alphone, Slip and Split, season 3 of The Morning Show, for fall 2023 alone. And that's not counting those we've seen on the big screen. Perceived as a feminist practice because of its inversion of the usual codes of a woman giving and a man receiving – head has become considerably popularized, to the point of becoming a sort of rite of passage for anyone wanting to film sex and not be seen as a dinosaur.

The change comes at a time when sex on television has become increasingly rare. The old ways of doing it have gone, and sex scenes placed here and there to excite the viewer – the famous Freudian "scopic drive" – are no longer relevant. Now there's fast internet connections and Pornhub. A few weeks ago, a much-publicized study by the University of California, Los Angeles, showed that the younger generation was turning away from romances and increasingly favoring friendship stories and "asexual" characters on screen. So, cunnilingus is flourishing in a land that's on the verge of desertification and, above all, six years after #MeToo, this terrain no longer welcomes just anything: a sex scene, sure, but from now on, it had better serve a precise purpose.

If the proliferation of cunnilingus jumps out at us, it's because it's been fairly rare until now, and generally left off-screen. The fall of 2023 marked a milestone in just how normal seeing oral sex performed on women had become: Jennifer Aniston receiving cunnilingus from Jon Hamm in a staging that was sanitized but left little room for doubt (The Morning Show, season 3, Apple TV+); Théo Navarro-Mussy pleasing Camélia Jordana in the romantic comedy Irrésistible (Disney+)...

In the excellent American series Slip (written by  Zoe Lister-Jones), the heroine changes dimension every time she has an orgasm, making cunnilingus an effective machine for traveling in the metaverse. Not to be confused with Split (France.tv), a French series about a young woman in a heterosexual couple discovering that she is attracted to a woman and a new form of pleasure, in which cunnilingus plays a key role. In the French miniseries called Tout Va Bien (Disney+), actress Virginie Efira receives cunnilingus from her partner, while thinking about something else, ultimately leading her not to derive much pleasure from it – one of the rare sex scenes anchored in reality.

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