Posted on 2025.11.29
An oral history
I can’t remember exactly when I first heard the term “blow job”, but it was one of the earlier ones to pass through my gentle ears. From the prudish to the worldliest, everyone knows what it means.
But everyone has the same questions: “why ‘blow'”, and “why ‘job’?”
Not long ago, I heard the story that it came from gay slang in the navy: sailors who would couple up while on duty were said to be below decks, doing a job: “I helped the seaman with his below job.”
Ah, it sounds so good!! I felt just that little bit smarter when I heard it. When I decided I wanted to start blogging more, I thought this little gem of a tale would be a great way to start.
Except it’s wrong. All of it!
No researcher seems to have heard about this little bon mot until Christopher Hitchens made the claim in 2006. He wrote a Vanity Fair article about fellatio, titled “As American as Apple Pie”. That is where the “below job” history began.
Someone must have lied to Mr. Hitchens, and he naively believed it because he wanted it to be true.
And so did I. I wanted it to be true. But it wasn’t, so I wanted to learn what was true.
What I discovered in my readings is something much more interesting.
Thar she bellows
“Blow” by its own has a rich history as a sexual slang term since the mid-17th century, and the origin of it is frankly beautiful.
It came from an unnamed song written around 1650, and it had nothing to do with oral sex. It only meant to cum, or to make someone else cum.
Limping Vulcan he came,
As if he had been jealous,
Venus follow’d after him,
And swore she’d blow the bellows.
I suppose rhyming was different in the 17th century, because “jealous” and “bellows” is a stretch.
But hey: Venus, the goddess of love, using a thrustful, fire-stoking instrument as a metaphor for climax is such poetic beauty. They don’t write songs like that anymore.
The term appeared in saucy literature over the centuries, and all that time “to blow” meant “to bust”. Even to this day, many could be said they are out to blow a load.
But never once did it mean giving head. Not until the 20th century, and not from sailors.
Instead, it came from a sex worker.
From a job to a career
Nell Kimball was an American madam who wrote her memoirs in 1932. It wasn’t published at the time and went unprinted until it was rediscovered and published in 1970.
In one encounter, she wrote “The Greek contractor wanted me to blow him in the bundle room.” Not him blowing “the bellows”, but her blowing him. As the story would show, this was an extremely salivatory affair.
She may or may not have been the first to equate blowing with oral sex, but Nell’s manuscript is a milestone. Sex workers, once again, are at the bleeding edge of culture and history.
So, in the early 20th century, “blow” had two slang meanings: one to cum, and to perform fellatio.
The two meanings coexisted among sex workers and civvies alike. But ultimately, that’s a lot to hold in one’s mouth.
My lips to God’s ears
At the same time, small erotic cartoon booklets (sometimes called Tijuana Bibles) were seeing wide circulation. They would parody popular comic strips and make low-brow political commentary and ran from the 1920s to the 1960s. They were underground literature at its bawdiest and most trademark-violating.
Picture it: America, 1948. It’s the height of the McCarthy Era in the United States. A magazine editor named Whittaker Chambers accused State Department official Alger Hiss of being a Soviet spy.
A Tijuana Bible chose to comment on this affair. A drawing of Chambers and Hiss together has Chambers telling Hiss “You give such good blow jobs.”
And there it is. The first time “blow” and “job” had appeared together to make “blow job”, and meaning what we all know it to be today.
Who knows why the author slapped the job on the end. Perhaps it was to emphasize the thorough nature of the exchange: don’t leave to an amateur a job meant for a professional. If that’s the case, it seems to double-down on its sex worker influence from the 1930s.
“Find a job you love to do, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.” Not sure if Hiss felt that way, but it’s an ethos we here at Cupid’s Escorts take seriously.
