A blowjob bildungsroman
Jacqueline Novak’s 'On Your Knees' is a poetic and hilarious account of a young woman stepping into sex as one steps onto a stage.
At the beginning of Jacqueline Novak’s comedy special, On Your Knees, she slowly walks out from backstage. Instead of pumping her arms above her head and hyping up the crowd, she bites her lip and looks this way and that before stepping up to the mic. “The journey from backstage to a microphone, what it reminds me of, is the journey from someone’s face, down their torso, to their pelvis, to give them a blowjob,” she says. “The whole way there, in both scenarios, everyone knows what you’re headed to do, but you’re not yet doing the thing, so it’s just this question hanging in the air the whole way: Can she do it?”
It’s an apt comparison: the special, which premieres on Netflix January 23, is an hour-and-a-half exploration of the blowjob—and Novak’s own fears, insecurities, and determination around it. Novak’s standup routine has plenty of general riffs on sex and the human body—her nickname for doggy style is “The Hound’s Way” and she describes her vulva as “beautiful in the way that a tattered flag is beautiful”—but the show is driven by her sexual coming-of-age story by way of this particular sex act. It is a blowjob bildungsroman.
Her journey begins at the age of 12, when she gets a crash course on fellatio from an older teenage girl, a self-proclaimed “blowjob queen.” The girl wraps some cellophane around a cucumber (“out of respect for dinner, which I appreciated”) and then demonstrates. “When it comes to the blowjob, you really can’t go wrong,” the girl says. “Well, as long as you don’t bite his dick off.” This sends Novak, an over-thinker extraordinaire, into an internal tailspin over the possibility.
“Could I bite a dick off? If that was my goal, do I have the simple machinery necessary? Because if I could then ‘would’ is one letter away. It’s right there, especially if I’m worried about it,” she says in a fast-talking monologue of her inner thoughts as a teenager. “Don’t bite his dick off, don’t bite his dick off, don’t bite his dick off. What’s the thing we don’t want to do? Bite this dick off. Tell me one more time! Bite this dick off, bite this dick off, bite this dick off. That’s how I’d bite a dick off.”
Novak has lots of these obsessive pinballing thoughts: she talks about reading women’s magazines, where articles warn about the extreme sensitivity of the glans of the penis. “It’s like, ‘Oh god… and that’s the first thing I’m gonna to run into on the penis, like in my approach? I have to land gingerly because that’s the most sensitive part?’” she says. Growing up, Novak is notably without any pornographic examples, instead relying on advice from a peer on how to avoid grazing “the tender penis” with her teeth: slathering her lips with lip gloss and folding her lips over her teeth like a “greased-up muppet.”
Years later, her fears lead her to back out of her first attempt at a blowjob. “I am hesitating, I am not doing it, I am hovering, even,” she says. She decides to try again with a new boyfriend and finds herself “at a dead stop, again.” The problem is that it’s impossible to attempt this act while also signaling to her boyfriend that she knows she’s still figuring the whole thing out. She imagines being able to narrate to him with a second mouth: “Okay, hold on, obviously this is not the ‘blowjob’ yet, I’m just trying to get into a position where… wow, my tooth has already dragged, obviously you felt that, I just want to let you know that we are aware of the problem and we’re working on a solution.”
One of her greatest fears, aside from accidentally biting off a dick, is seeming like a fool who doesn’t know that she’s a fool. (She has a great riff on preferring to call herself a fool: “That way I’m not two fools, I’m a fool and someone who is well aware… then my duo has 50 percent dignity,” she says. “Do you see how the math of self-hatred is unimpeachable?”) The question in her mind isn’t just the aforementioned one of whether she “can do it” but whether she can do it well and maintain her dignity. Eventually, she succeeds at giving her first blowjob, but only because she imagines someone else narrating the whole thing: “And then I’m doing it, I’m doing it, I’m on that dick.”
“It was a triumph,” she says. “I wanted to write my college essay about it.” Then, off at college, in a familiar twist of irony, Novak discovers that her determined wish to overcome her sexual fears and incompetencies actually made her kind of terrifying to men. Then a high school boyfriend—SPOILER ALERT?—reveals that, actually, she gives a “toothy blowjob,” one of the very things she had worried so much about. “The Greeks were right, we can’t escape our fates, I guess,” she says.
Ultimately, though, Novak turns “the tender penis,” and all that teenage and glossy magazine chatter about how to please it and protect it from your teeth, into a metaphor for the expectation that women soothe the male ego. “It’s a thousand things throughout the day just to bolster the male spirit,” she says toward the end of the show. “It’s a vigilance, a child-proofing, a laying down bumpers… making sure that it’s safe for the man to just toddle on through his day like a drunken king, having no clue how many times he came this close to emotionally perishing, if not for my intervention.”
On Your Knees doesn’t attempt a big cultural “take” or a tale of feminist empowerment, which—along with its surprisingly poetic, literary, and philosophical moments—is actually part of what makes it unforgettable. Instead, it offers a subtle and nuanced accounting of the hall-of-mirrors quality of a straight young woman’s sexual coming of age. In Novak’s idiosyncratic relationship to the blowjob, there is the close-to-universal phenomenon of stepping into sex as one steps onto a stage. It isn’t just the pressure to perform, but also the task of imagining yourself in the audience, the feeling of watching yourself while you do it.
It’s the experience of being the blower, the blowee, and the blow-by-blow commentator.
Though I am a male (old at that!), i understood the comparison and enjoyed thinking about it. I will watch her stand up with my wife who I know daily trues very hard to keep sane and on course!
Brilliantly hilarious, thanks for this, needed a good laugh, have to check out her standup!