photo credit: exterface.com

This one question has been plaguing me for the last part of this summer. And now it is even appearing in my philosophy class. What is sex? How do we define it? How do I define it? I just read this article by Greta Christina called "Are We Having Sex Now Or What?" and it pretty much sums up everything that's been flying around in my head since a date I had with a guy a handful of weeks ago.

The numbers game came up as we were lying together post-coitus, and then I said something like the last few guys I had been with didn't count. He asked me to explain, and so I told him that since there had been no penetration, it didn't count. He then went on to say that he counted getting naked with someone and lying with them, touching and kissing and groping, whether there was penetration or not, that that was sex to him.

Right then and there my head started spinning. For if that's the case then I can hardly consider myself innocent by any means now. My number instantly multiplied to the point where I felt like I could give Samantha Jones a run for her money. Am I a slut? Have I been careless and promiscuous? Have I not been following my own standards of safe sex if all those times when I had previously thought we were "just fooling around" all of a sudden counted as sex?

I guess what it really comes down to is - what do I consider sex? And should I acknowledge a difference between "sex", "sexual acts", and "having sex?" Would I get upset with a lover who performed a "sexual act" on somebody but had not "had sex" with them? You're damn right I would - I've broken up with guys because of that. What do all of these things mean and how can I keep them clearly divided and defined? Are they even meant to be so?

Until I figure that out, I'm just going to try and be more aware and think about what Greta said:

"Perhaps having sex with someone is the conscious, consenting, mutually acknowledged pursuit of shared sexual pleasure. . . Maybe if both of you (or all of you) think of it as sex, then it's sex whether you're having fun or not. . . How about sex as the conscious, consenting, mutually acknowledged pursuit of sexual pleasure of at least one of the people involved. . . But what if neither of you is enjoying it, if you're both doing it because you think the other one wants to? Ugh."

"When I was first experimenting with sadomasochism, I got together with a really hot woman. . . Now we'd been explicitly planning all kinds of fun and games - spanking, bondage, obedience - which I strongly identified as sexual activity. In her mind though, sex meant direct genital contact. . . Playing with her turned out to be a tremendously erotic experience, arousing and stimulating and almost unbearably satisfying. But we spent the whole evening without even touching each other's genitals. And the fact that our definitions were so different made me wonder: Was it sex?"

"For instance, I worked for a few months as a nude dancer at a peep show. One time, a guy came into one of the booths and started watching me and started masturbating. I came over and squatted in front of him and started masturbating too, and we grinned at each other and watched each other and masturbated, and we both had a fabulous time. (I couldn't believe I was being paid to masturbate - tough job, but somebody has to do it . . .) After he left I thought to myself: Did we just have sex? I mean, if it had been someone I knew , and if there had been no glass and no quarters, there'd be no question in my mind. Sitting two feet apart from someone, watching each other masturbate? Yup, I'd call that sex all right. But this was different, because it was a stranger, and because of the glass and the quarters. Was it sex? I still don't have an answer."

Are you ready?