Can two people disagree on whether or not they’re having sex?

Do I count how many people I’ve had sex with differently than I used to?

Can we define sex with gray areas, in something other than simple “yes” or “no” terms?

Do we even need to define what “sex” is at all?

Every now and then, I get surprised and tickled by where my writing is ending up and who’s reading it. And to this day, nothing surprises and tickles me more than the fact that my piece Are We Having Sex Now or What? is regularly studied at colleges and universities around the country — in sexuality courses, of course, but also in philosophy courses, women’s studies courses, sociology courses, and more.

I recently got an email from a student at UCLA who’s reading “Are We Having Sex Now or What?” in her Philosophy of Sex course, and who asked to interview me about it for an essay she was writing for the class. I said yes, on the condition that I could post the interview here on my blog. (Actually, I stupidly gave the interview and then asked if I could post it on my blog — but she very kindly said yes.) Here is that interview.

1. Would it be selfish, immoral, animalistic, or even unromantic in any way, if one were to make the determination of a sexual experience to be an act of sex without the agreement of the participant(s)?

No. I think that different people having different definitions of sex is a reality of life, and I think that, within reason, people have the right to decide for themselves how to define sex. Even if that means that one person in an experience says, “Yes, we had sex,” while the other (or another) says, “No, we didn’t have sex.”

What I DO think would be immoral — or if not immoral, than certainly unkind and insensitive — would be to insist that the other participant(s) share your definition. Or to put it more conversationally: It’s okay with me if my partner says we had sex and I say we didn’t, or vice versa — but it’s not okay with me if that partner insists that they’re right and I’m wrong. (It IS okay with me if they try to debate it — I’m almost always up for a good debate — but ultimately, I want them to respect my right to define sex my way.)

2. So now that you have exposed and exploded the definition or the defining of sex, what have you done with your count of past sexual partners?

I’ve definitely dropped the count. I now have a rough estimate of about how many sex partners I’ve had, but I gave up the list long ago. It’s just not that important to me anymore.

I do, however, still tend to define my “first time” the same way I did when I started keeping the list. I could, of course, revise the list according to how I define sex now — and if I did, my “first time” would be a lot earlier, since (like many people) I was experimenting with other kinds of sexual play before I had intercourse. But that’s not how I experienced it emotionally at the time. The earlier experiences didn’t feel to me like “my first time” — they felt like “fooling around.” And in general, when I do think about the count, I tend to define who counts and who doesn’t by what I thought of as sex at the time — not what I think of it now.

3. In post-definition, how do you now, or how should anyone define an act of sex?

I don’t think sex has a hard and fast definition, with all acts clearly either inside the line or outside. (Of course, that’s true even for less loaded concepts. Who was the linguist who pointed out the difficulty of clearly defining the word “chair”?)

Personally, I generally go with the definition I came up with in the essay: “the conscious, consenting, mutually acknowledged pursuit of sexual pleasure.” But mostly, I don’t worry about it very much. If an experience is in the gray area, I let it be in the gray area.

And I don’t care all that much how other people define it — as long as our definitions are close enough for us to be able to talk to each other. (I’m very much a usagist when it comes to language.)

What I DO care about is that people acknowledge the difficulty and complexity of this question, and the fact that so many people have different answers to it. That, I think, IS an ethical issue, and one with real-world consequences. In the sphere of public health and sex education, for instance — how can you do effective safer-sex education if you don’t know how people are defining “sex”? If you’re trying to teach teenagers to use condoms when they have sex… well, lots of teenagers think oral and even anal don’t “count” as sex, so they may not be protecting themselves when they should. A safer-sex message for teens needs to make clear that, as far as disease transmission goes, oral and anal sex definitely “count” — regardless of whether you think they make you not be a virgin or whatever.

And of course, there are legal repercussions. Example: When Queen Victoria was signing a law prohibiting homosexual behavior, she struck out all references to female homosexuality — because she believed it was impossible. So there were decades in British law when male homosexuality was illegal, but female homosexuality wasn’t.

I could go on about this for pages. The upshot: I don’t much care how exactly other people define sex. I do care about whether people understand that “sex” is a flexible concept, that it means more than simply penile/ vaginal intercourse, and that different people have different definitions of it.

4. The yes, it was sex, or no, it wasn’t sex binary, is typical of crude human thinking, would it be progressive, or practical, for one to adopt an elaborate spectral system to understand or keep track of personal sexual activities?

I don’t know how elaborate it has to be. Personally, I find “yes,” “no,” and “borderline/ maybe/ gray area” to be sufficient. But I do think a spectral system can work. In order for it to work, though, people need to be okay with the borderline/ gray area, and not care quite so much about having every act be either a “yes” or a “no.”

5. Can you conceive of a system that is superior or more accurate than a spectrum system regardless of practicality? In other words, what is beyond a spectral system, no categorization or defining at all?

I think “no defining” is impractical and unlikely. We’re verbal animals, we talk to each other, and we talk to each other about sex. (A lot.) And in order to do that, we need to have something resembling a definition, with enough overlap and common ground to understand each other.

What I DO think would be superior… well, see above, re: me caring less about what the definition of sex is, and more about whether people understand that the concept is a flexible one, and act accordingly.

But in addition to that:

I would like to see people let go of worrying so much about whether any given act or experience counts or doesn’t count as sex, and pay more attention to questions like: Is it pleasurable? Is it consensual? Is it ethical? Is it safe? Is my partner enjoying it? Is it something I want to do again?

That’s one of the main reasons I care about making our definitions of sex more flexible. I think if we’re less fixated on whether what we’re doing (and what other people are doing) counts or doesn’t count as sex, we can focus more on questions about sex that I think are a lot more important.