<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" &amp;quot;Maybe we all get dildos and silicone vaginas to practice on,&amp;quot; I tell my girlfriend as we walk the final blocks to our date night: a combination blowjob/cunnilingus class at the sex shop Babeland. She seems taken aback by the idea. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m joking,&amp;quot; I say, but I&amp;#039;m still a little hopeful. Babeland is a sex shop, but we we&amp;#039;re not hit with racks of floppy dildos and rubber fists as soon as we walk in. Most of the sex toys are minimalist, modern, and don&amp;#039;t look like sex toys \u2014 you could probably leave a lot of them out on your coffee table without a guest even realizing what they are. I could run into someone I know here and it wouldn&amp;#039;t be awkward. The class itself, &amp;quot;The Art of Oral Sex,&amp;quot; is pretty much Oral Sex 101, but while we&amp;#039;ve both had oral sex \u2014 with each other no less! \u2014 we&amp;#039;ve never taken a class about it. Our two female teachers (who apparently teach all the classes, most of Babeland&amp;#039;s stock is geared towards women), start by walking us through what their talking points are for the evening: communication, manual stimulation, oral and anal. There are about 20 people in the class, mostly couples. For some reason, I expected to walk into a tittering bachelorette party, but everyone is taking it so seriously they&amp;#039;re just short of getting out notebooks. A couple in their 40s eagerly await the class, the man wearing a Samuel L. Jackson hat that he doesn&amp;#039;t take off the whole time. Otherwise everyone&amp;#039;s in their 20s or maybe early 30s. Most surprisingly, a few people came alone. As someone who would feel like a creep showing up at a cunnilingus class by myself, I salute these people. They really pulled it off. &amp;quot;Talk like a sportscaster,&amp;quot; suggests the instructor. &amp;quot;Say you&amp;#039;re going to do X. Do X. Then say what you just did.&amp;quot; At this, she does a pretty good mock announcer voice and describes a hypothetical finger-in-anus situation as an example, which makes the whole class giggle and nod in agreement. I realize they&amp;#039;re using their own oral strategy on us (communicating to eliminate surprises) and it is totally working. One butthole joke and we&amp;#039;re putty. I&amp;#039;m warming up to the whole situation despite the use of phrases like &amp;quot;throwing up on a dick&amp;quot; (in regard to why they don&amp;#039;t recommend using numbing spray in your mouth), explicit use of an anatomically correct giant vagina and the instructor&amp;#039;s enthusiastic dildo blowjob demonstrations. But just as I&amp;#039;m feeling like this whole thing is way less awkward than I thought it would be, I look over at my girlfriend. She&amp;#039;s gone very quiet. Her only quote of the evening has been to tell me, &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re doing that wrong, idiot,&amp;quot; much to the delight of the middle-aged woman next to us, when I tried to form a rudimentary hand vagina (just a C-shape with my hand, as far as I could tell) to practice licking. After a break for much-needed Prosecco, we jump right back into oral sex and anilingus. They explain that despite how different they look, our organs are very similar. The head of the penis and the clitoris start out as the same tissue in the womb, for example. The prostate and g-spot are also nearly identical. We don&amp;#039;t get fake genitals to practice on, but we do get lollipops, and the other pupils are insistent on getting their favorite flavors (chocolate and blueberry), so much so that only cherry and pomegranate are options by the time the bowl gets to us. They show us a few ways to use your tongue \u2014 flat, pointed, slow circles \u2014 and ask us to demonstrate on the lollipop. I hear a few people just bite into theirs like IDGAF, while the rest of us nervously tongue our pops. Meanwhile, the instructor is going to town on a dildo, making all of our reservations about licking lollipops look tame in comparison. The learning doesn&amp;#039;t stop there. We move on to the Q&amp;amp;A portion of the evening. Turns out, &amp;quot;you can&amp;#039;t stretch out your vagina or asshole, they&amp;#039;re muscles.&amp;quot; One woman who came by herself (no pun intended) asks what to do if her gums keep getting cut up during oral and everyone visibly judges her a little bit, because is she blowing a robot? Another woman raises her hand to ask if butt plugs can go inside a man&amp;#039;s anus. Her husband, presumably the man whose anus will receive her butt plugs, squeezes her hand as she talks. It really does bring us closer. By the end of it, even my girlfriend seems less on edge. When we leave, she&amp;#039;s excited about our only purchase \u2014 massage stones \u2014 and there&amp;#039;s a lot of, &amp;quot;Did you see how into blowing the dildo she was?&amp;quot; and, &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t believe that woman asked about her husbands butt!&amp;quot; talk. Maybe it&amp;#039;s the generous glass of Prosecco, but the conversation we have on the train ride home is vastly more interesting than after we got burritos and caught the 9 p.m. of Non-Stop, and I feel like our relationship is better for it. That&amp;#039;s a solid date night. *Not their real names Follow Frank on Twitter. Photo credit: Getty "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/advice/a6101/babeland-oral-sex-class/>