May 18
nocutename commented on
Savage Love.
@EricaP: I agree. Especially as you and your partner age, or are together through different periods of life, it would be frustrating and I think, lead to a lot of disappointment to define "sex" as only meaning PIV.
Perhaps like you, orgasms sometimes elude me, and I can never get them from PIV (nor from oral alone), but I still love the sensation of a P in my V.
As a teacher of critical thinking and writing, I just get irked when someone says something like "to me, anything but PIV isn't even sex," when what I think she means is, "I prefer every sexual encounter to consist only of PIV, and I don't even require or desire any or much in the way of warm-up activities." It's as much that lack of precision and clarity that I object to as it is a sense that I'm glad I'm not limiting my sexual repertoire so strictly.
May 18
nocutename commented on
Savage Love.
@mydriasis: Okay, I get it. I don't tell people every sexual detail if they ask what I did, either. And if I want to indicate that something sexual happened, maybe because it hadn't happened with the particular person before, I might say "we fooled around," or "we hooked up," too (which could include any sexual act from kissing to anal, if I'm using it in that context).
I'm not talking about having an "everything but PIV situation" as if people were rationing their sex, like some do for religious or cultural, or age-related-parcel-it-out reasons, or for fear of pregnancy and lack of birth control, or fear of STIs. There may simply be times when in every relationship, for one reason or another, people hook up, fool around, and PIV doesn't happen.
My point was that when you and tachycardia say you don't even define anything besides PIV as "sex," I think you're not being truthful or thinking it through logically. You may prefer not to have any sexual interaction that doesn't include or isn't mostly PIV, but you have to concede that cunnilingus, for example, is in fact, a sexual act. Right? So if that is what a couple did, it would be inaccurate and misleading to say they haven't had sex, which would lead someone else to think that nothing of any kind of sexual nature had occurred.
I mean, it is that literal definition which leads to the idea that if it doesn't include penetration of an orifice by a penis, it isn't sex, which suggests that lesbians can't and therefore don't have sex. Which is, of course, absurd.
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May 18
nocutename commented on
Savage Love.
@Mydriasis, tachycardia (and why do I feel like I'm typing in The Merck Manual?) and others on the "is foreplay sex" conversation:
I am deeply, deeply committed to PIV--a session of every wonderful other thing leaves me feeling a bit deprived and frustrated if there's been no P in my V. And yet I do find lots, lots of other sexual acts pretty great. I love oral, anal, fisting. I like to give and receive all kinds of sex. For me, PIV is the cumulative sexual act, but not THE defining sexual act.
Therefore, I understand the objection to calling everything else, especially if it precedes the big Moment of Penetration as "foreplay." It's all sex. It's all sexual. And what do you call oral, if it happens *after* the PIV, which happens in my bed all the time (well, when there's sex in my bed, which hasn't been nearly often enough lately, dammit!)? It's certainly not "before" the "sex", it's not a warm-up to the main event. It's another fun sex thing to do. Even the frotting and kissing and breast-play that might precede PIV and which gets me aroused so that PIV is pleasurable and not uncomfortable, is more than mere "foreplay" in the sense that it doesn't just serve as a getting-me-ready activity.
Besides, if you don't consider anything but PIV to qualify as "sex" what do you call it? (It's "oral SEX" after all) Say you, a woman, were out with a straight male friend last night and what you did was kiss and fondle and lick and suck each other, and he fingered you. Maybe at least one of you had an orgasm Another friend asks you what you did last night. Would you say, "we went bowling?" You might characterize it as "hanging out," which, while truthful, is also disingenuous. I hang out with my sister all the time, and none of those activities take place then. You might say, "We didn't have sex; we just smashed our genitals together, put them in each others' mouths, touched each other in such ways as to lead to orgasm. But we didn't have sex." Apparently, you might, but now you're starting to sound like those "virginity-until-marriage" Christians who carefully characterize any- and everything except for PIV as "not really sex." Or Bill Clinton. And do you really want to sound like either one?
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May 18
nocutename commented on
Slog Overnight.
The column has taken quite a turn lately, what with the dog-fucking questions and cat-make-out session videos.
I'm afraid of what I'll find next time I log in.