What is Sex?

Sexual Double Talk & Verbal Timidity

Oral Love Making

An old survey that shows American women and men have at best fuzzy and confused ideas about what having sex constitutes.

And:

A second survey in 1996, asked “Is oral sex ‘real’ sex?”

About 52 percent of the men said yes, but only 46 percent of women did.

The disparity may reflect different expectations and feelings about fellatio vs. cunnilingus. Heterosexual men have often been depicted as fixated on the former. (Presumably because it hasn’t been as freely available as they desire. You don’t see the same obsession in gay men for whom orals sex is simply, ahem, normal.)

American sexual culture has evolved these past thirteen years. Women expect cunnilingus and many men strive to become proficient at it. The earlier disparity might be minimal were the survey repeated.

At the very least it seems that an act that results in orgasm is sex. Masturbating alone in your room is sex. Honestly I find the requirement of an orgasm too limiting. Some people experience sexual satisfaction through the satiation of a kink or fetish. And I will always remember the lover with whom foreplay was so extended we sometimes fell asleep after hours of mutual enjoyment with neither of us actually orgasming.

The bias to restrict the word sex to traditional heterosexual penetrative coupling partly reflects a desire some people have - e.g., teenagers - to pretend that they sex they engage in doesn’t count. That they haven’t “sinned.”

And some American males and females find anything other than the most banal sexual experiences disturbing if not disgusting.

Sex is … well … sex.