What Sex Is(n’t)
Of the 80+ long form questions in the Sexual Self-Intake questionnaire required for sex therapist training, only one really stumped me. The survey asked about everything — my fantasies, kinks, childhood, firsts, anatomy, gender, past experiences, attractions, trauma, culture, and religion. It’s designed to make you think deeply about your sexual identity and history, and it’s supposed to make you uncomfortable at times. If I had taken the survey 10 years ago, I would have felt a pit in my stomach and blushed all over. But I’ve done a ton of inner work over the last decade and now, as an intimacy/relationship coach and burgeoning sex therapist (i.e. I’m a sex nerd), I thoroughly enjoyed the process.
Ironically, the only question I really struggled with was the most elementary:
How do you define sex?
This question used to be obvious to me. I would have said: phalluses + orifices = sex. Thank you Florida public school sex ed! But as my knowledge and experience has expanded, so too has my concept of what sex is. I’m fascinated by how people define sex because it is such an animating dimension of our lives — it’s something that impacts our self-image, our romantic relationships, our use of money, our pursuit of status and power, our comfort in our bodies, our boundaries and how we interact with other people’s boundaries… and more. People upend their lives over sex… but what the hell is it?! I’m terribly curious about it, so I’ve been asking many people for a while to weigh in. The most provocative answer I’ve heard came during drinks with a group of friends last Spring before we attended HUMP! — Seattle’s artsy, alt, amateur erotic film festival.
A friend with exceptionally spicy appetites said: “I don’t know what sex is, but I know it when I’m having it.” I appreciated her Oscar Wilde-esque aphorism because it subverts the classic line from a US Supreme Court Justice who said, regarding pornography: “I know it when I see it.” Sex stands in stark contrast to porn, because one does not always know it when you see it. I am certain that many people are having sex in ways that are completely indiscernible to an outside observer.
In my work as an intimacy coach, I’m fond of saying: “Sex can start days before the date.” If crafted well, sex often starts with a text message (no, not an emoji — I will fight you on this). Building up the erotic heat with specific words, vulnerable shares, stated desires, inspirational images, instructions/requests/offerings …and more can be done without being in the same area code, much less wrapped around each other. I believe that a sexual experience can begin with a word, a look, a phrase, an exhale. Sex can even involve deliberately deployed denial, or even creatively charged chastity. Sex is profoundly contextual and subjective. I grew up defining sex around entanglements of genitalia. Now, after learning more of the world (and reading Foucault of course), this biologically limited definition no longer matches my understanding of what sex is. Sex does not equal intercourse.
So, what is sex?
There is no one universally true answer, but for those of us who enjoy sex and think about sex, it’s worthwhile for us to create our own working answers. And here is mine:
Sex is the intentional, escalated expression of erotic power.
Intentional … sex is deliberate and volitional. It is chosen. This means that nocturnal emissions (wet dreams) or the bare fact of getting a boner or getting wet or having a fleeting erotic thought, do not qualify as sex. Furthermore, if sex is intentional, then being subjected to a non-consensual encounter would not mean that the victim participated in “having sex” with their aggressor. Maybe the aggressor is having sex, but it’s a one way street. This definition yokes together agency and sex. To be terse: being assaulted is not sex, and having spontaneous arousal is not sex.
Escalated expression … sex is an active manifestation of the will carried out with a personally significant degree of intensity. I conceive of sex as an activity — an action that we do, not an idea that we think, not an emotion that we feel, not a sensation that we experience. For the thing we do to be sex, it must be escalated. That is, it should have a vitality that is elevated beyond one’s normative stasis. “Escalated,” while subjective, indicates that it constitutes something substantive to the parties involved, and is something built up. Sex isn’t a barren plain. Sex has elevation. How high (or deep down) you go depends, but it is much more than a passing thought or a flirtatious wink.
Erotic … references Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic,” in which she writes: “I speak of [the erotic] as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.” As classmates of mine wisely highlighted to me, Lorde’s exclusive focus on women’s power (as well as her jeremiads against pornography and BDSM) should be situated in her context, and are important responses to the dominant discourses of her time. For my definition of the erotic, I would not limit it to women’s lifeforce alone, but to the core generative energy that all beings can access — humans of any gender, and perhaps the more-than-human world as well. This lifeforce is represented in creative, loving, desiring vitiation. Sex is not mechanical rutting. It is artful, attuned embodiment.
The erotic is hard to define specifically because it exists in a place beyond words. The word “erotic,” as Lorde points out, comes from the Greek eros and emerges from the domain of Chaos. Chaos is inherently indefinite. It is dynamic, slippery, experiential. The psychologist Esther Perel says it well: “Eroticism challenges us to seek a different kind of resolution, to surrender to the unknown and ungraspable, and to breach the confines of the rational world.”
Of course, just saying that the erotic defies definition is not very helpful on its own. The value I see in highlighting the ineffability of eroticism is to encourage those seeking the erotic to become intuitive, somatic adventurers. For many, the realm of words and rubrics and well-made plans feels essential for safety. But the erotic is found by venturing outside one’s map of comfort. Complete predictability is anathema to eroticism. I do not want to encourage clients to be reckless, but rather to inspire them to cultivate their intuitive and somatic capacities. This can be done in manifold ways including: meditations that enhance nondualistic thinking, somatic practices, ritual performances, active dreaming, psychedelic integration, artistic techniques, practices to increase distress tolerance, and encouraging playfulness in and out of the bedroom. In a word… getting into our bodies.
Power … sex has an impact. In leftist organizing spaces where I have spent a great deal of time, power is defined as “the ability to make change.” Power can be coercive, but for good sex to occur power must be collaborative. I believe sex is a conflagration fueled by the dancing explosive energy that runs through our bodies. It moves us, it moves others. It moves the earth. Maybe it moves the whole cosmos.
So, that’s my definition of sex: the intentional, elevated expression of erotic power. Sex is a choice. Intense. Active. Fiery. Moving.
How do you define sex?
How did you define it growing up?
How would you want to define, if you were your ideal self?
