How does Rick Rosner explain the historical normalization of oral sex, pornography, and changing sexual norms across cultures and time?

In this conversation, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner examine sexual behavior as a historically shifting but biologically persistent human force. Rosner argues that oral sex, pornography, contraception, fertility decline, venereal disease, and same-sex categories are best understood as changing patterns of visibility, normalization, access, and classification rather than sudden inventions or extinctions. Jacobsen presses him on demographic change, historical evidence, and whether any sexual practice truly disappears. Together, they explore how technology, medicine, religion, public art, and cultural repression reshape desire’s social pathways while leaving sexual drive itself as a durable constant across civilizations, generations, and eras.

The Rise of the BJ and Sexual Norms

Rick Rosner: All right, I have a topic. It is a phase change in human behavior, not as significant as smartphones, but still fairly astonishing if you think about it.

That is the rise of the BJ. I looked this up and also thought about my parents’ generation. It would not be accurate to say oral sex was unheard of before 1970; it has a long recorded history across cultures, going back to antiquity. A more accurate way to put it is that it seems to have become far more openly discussed and more normalized in mainstream U.S. culture over the late twentieth century than it had been in earlier generations.

Now, if you are in any kind of relationship, or even casually dating, oral-genital contact is widely understood to be common. In U.S. survey data, roughly four-fifths of men and women ages 15 to 49 report ever having had oral sex with an opposite-sex partner, so calling it pervasive is much closer to the mark than saying it is universal.

It is still a striking cultural shift. I used that as an excuse to look up the history of sex. Sexual behavior and sexual norms change a great deal across history, and we mostly do not talk about that in ordinary public discourse. There is a great deal of scholarship on sexuality, from ancient works such as the Kamasutra to modern sexology, but it is not usually part of everyday conversation.

The Pill, Marriage, and Childbearing

One phase change people are generally aware of is the arrival of the pill. The first oral contraceptive was approved in the United States in 1960. But access did not suddenly become universal by the mid-1960s. Legally, the major steps were Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965, which protected access for married couples, and Eisenstadt v. Baird in 1972, which extended that protection to unmarried people.

The pill, along with other social changes, helped decouple sex, marriage, and childbearing. A great many people no longer feel obligated to marry before having children. That much is historically defensible, though the causes are broader than contraception alone. Research on the pill’s social effects suggests it contributed substantially to changes in women’s educational and career trajectories as well.

Low Fertility and Demographic Change

There is another phase change, which is very low fertility. The replacement level for a stable population is commonly estimated at about 2.1 children per woman in low-mortality populations. In the United States, the total fertility rate in 2023 was 1.621 births per woman, well below replacement. Japan is also well below replacement, and Israel is unusual among high-income countries in having a comparatively high fertility rate.

By 2050, it would not be accurate to say that Africa will be the only continent not shrinking. The United Nations projects that Africa will account for by far the largest share of global population growth, while Northern America and Oceania are also projected to grow, though much more modestly. Europe is the region most clearly associated with population decline, and parts of Asia and Latin America face slowing growth and eventual decline as well.

Disease, Cities, and Sexual Behavior

When you look at this historically, I ran into claims about very high rates of venereal disease in early modern cities. I would not put too much weight on a precise number like “20 to 30 percent in seventeenth-century London” without a stronger historical source. The safer point is that syphilis and gonorrhea were long established in Europe, and fear of venereal disease clearly shaped sexual norms in later centuries.

The historical record also does not support a simple story in which respectable people in cities avoided premarital sex while rural people did all the experimenting. In Britain, premarital sex was probably common among everyone except elites, and many couples who conceived before marriage later married, sometimes with the bride already visibly pregnant. London itself was not simply a place of unusually high illegitimacy by British standards; some evidence suggests relatively low non-marital fertility rates there compared with some other regions.

Disease environment and hygiene obviously matter in sexual behavior and in people’s willingness to engage in particular acts. Another major phase change is not that pornography suddenly appeared—erotic and pornographic material has existed for centuries—but that the internet made it abundant, cheap, private, and effectively continuous.

So yes, we are going through a great many changes in sexual behavior. Pornography use is common among men and not uncommon among women; one U.S. nationally representative study reported intentional use within the previous week by 46 percent of men and 16 percent of women ages 18 to 39, while lifetime exposure is much higher.

Sexual Desire as a Constant

Jacobsen: As a final question, if you had to represent these changes geometrically over time, would you show new behaviors appearing and spreading? Or do you think the set of behaviors is more or less the same in the long run?

Rosner: What stays the same is that sexual desire is a durable human constant, though I should not overstate that. There is evidence that testosterone levels have declined in some male populations over recent decades, but the causes are contested. Microplastics and related pollutants are plausible endocrine disruptors, yet the human evidence is still incomplete, so I would not want to reduce changes in libido to one clean explanation.

Certainly, there is much more competition for attention now—entertainment, information, screens, everything—which may squeeze out sex for some people. In the 1970s, I have said this before, everything seemed to suck except the possibility that you might get laid if you were cool. But sex remains a major drive.

That is the constant: a powerful force expressing itself in ways that are culture-dependent, technology-dependent, and health-dependent. If I were ranking changes in sexual behavior, I would not say we went from nobody giving BJs to everybody giving BJs, because that is historically false. But I would say the mainstream normalization of oral sex in recent decades is one of the brighter lines of change. In recent U.S. survey data, a little over 82 percent of men and women ages 15 to 49 reported ever having had oral sex with an opposite-sex partner.

People have long sought out erotic material when it was available. What changed is the scale, speed, privacy, and sheer quantity. That is less a change in the existence of porn than a massive quantitative change in access.

Extinguished Behaviors or Reclassified Behaviors?

Jacobsen: Is there any sexual behavior that has genuinely been extinguished in history?

Rosner: I am hesitant to say that any sexual behavior has been fully extinguished. More often, behaviors persist but are reclassified, relabeled, suppressed, or made more visible.

When discussing same-sex behavior, for example, the categories have varied greatly across time. It is broadly true that in ancient Greece and Rome, sexual relations between males were not understood in the modern framework of a fixed gay identity. Status, age, and sexual role mattered more than modern orientation categories. Some male-male practices, including intercrural sex, are described in ancient sources, but Roman sexuality should not be reduced to a simple stereotype.

Before the late nineteenth century, it is also fair to say that “homosexuality” was less widely treated as a formal social or medical identity than it later became. That does not mean same-sex desire or same-sex behavior was absent; it means the classificatory system was different. In more repressive societies, people may engage in less openly visible same-sex behavior, or they may conceal it more carefully.

Erotic Art, Morality, and Sacred Settings

Jacobsen: I can think of one possible example. Several thousand years ago, there were certainly erotic religious sculptures with highly sexualized bodies and scenes. I do not know whether people literally used them for masturbation, but they may have served as erotic stimuli or could have stimulated the minds.

Rosner: That is possible as speculation, but we should distinguish speculation from evidence. Khajuraho and other Indian temple sites do include erotic sculpture, yet scholars interpret those works in several ways—symbolic, ritual, aesthetic, didactic, or connected to tantric traditions. That is not the same thing as evidence that viewers were literally using statues as pornographic aids.

That does suggest another area where sexual behavior changes: the moral framing of sex. In many Christian traditions, sex within marriage is treated as legitimate, and often as good, even if Christian communities differ sharply on what is permissible, desirable, or holy within marriage.

What confuses me personally is that sexual fantasy does not usually present itself to me as especially wholesome. The dirtiness, the transgression, or the impropriety often seems to be part of what gives fantasy its charge. So I find it difficult to imagine a fully sanctified erotic psychology in which sex is experienced as a straightforward celebration of biblical values. That may exist for some people, but I would treat that as a psychological question, not a settled historical claim.

When you mentioned India several thousand years ago, what struck me was not just erotic imagery, but the possibility that sexuality might have been represented more openly in public sacred art than it often has been in Christian societies. Even there, though, I would be cautious: temple patronage does not automatically mean the state or the culture was broadly endorsing sex in the modern sense. It means sexuality had an acknowledged symbolic place in at least some artistic and religious settings.

Disease, Myth, and Human Rights

Another sex-adjacent behavior that changed dramatically involved disease and attempted cures. Before modern antibiotics, syphilis was treated for centuries with mercury, which was highly toxic and of questionable efficacy. Untreated syphilis can later affect the brain and nervous system, so people were dealing both with the disease and with dangerous treatments.

And yes, people still engage in terrible nonmedical attempts to cure illness. But that needs to be stated carefully. In parts of Africa, documented attacks on persons with albinism have been driven by dangerous myths: some involve beliefs that body parts bring wealth or power, while separate myths claim that sex with a person with albinism can cure HIV/AIDS. Those are real human-rights abuses, but the claims should not be collapsed into one story or pinned carelessly on an entire country or continent.

The River Metaphor

In general, I would still say that sexual desire is a constant force in humans, and in animals more broadly. Because it is such a powerful drive, it will always find expression through the cultural, medical, religious, and technological landscape of a given era.

So if you want a metaphor, horniness is like a major river. The force is persistent, but the channel shifts. The banks move. The surrounding terrain changes. New technologies, new diseases, new moral systems, and new media reshape the path. That is why you see so many changes in sexual behavior over time.

It is not like some weaker or more trivial impulse. A drive such as picking at your skin or popping zits may vary in style or cultural meaning across the centuries, but it does not have remotely the same civilizational force as sex.

Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is a Writer-Editor for www.rickrosner.org with more than 2,000 collaborative short-form and long-form interviews with Rick Rosner. He is the Founder and Publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343; 978-1-0673505) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN, 0018-7399; Online: ISSN, 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), Humanist Perspectives (ISSN: 1719-6337), A Further Inquiry (SubStack), Vocal, Medium, The Good Men Project, The New Enlightenment Project, The Washington Outsider, rabble.ca, and other media. His bibliography index can be found via the Jacobsen Bank at In-Sight Publishing comprised of more than 10,000 articles, interviews, and republications, in more than 200 outlets. He has served in national and international leadership roles within humanist and media organizations, held several academic fellowships, and currently serves on several boards. He is a member in good standing in numerous media organizations, including the Canadian Association of Journalists, PEN Canada (CRA: 88916 2541 RR0001), and Reporters Without Borders (SIREN: 343 684 221/SIRET: 343 684 221 00041/EIN: 20-0708028), and others.

Photo by Daniele Franchi on Unsplash

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