Fellatio, one of the most intimate acts possible between man and woman was, until recently, an unspoken practice. Today it has become the common coinage of casual sexual exchanges and part of the flirtation rituals of adolescents. What is the need that nowadays so compels men, in Presidential style, to risk their manhood to strangers? Why, when safe sex is possible do they choose couplings so hazardous? And why, in an era of militant feminism, is there such ready complicity by women. Author Abse argues that these are symptomatic of a pathological societal condition which advertises an incapacity to love, a masochism that finds expression in the self-destructiveness now flooding our political landscape and personal lives.