Monday, August 31, 2015

Having Sex: The Case for Embracing a Wider View




I sometimes wonder where in the world some of us got the notion that the term, “having sex” describes only one single act – that of penis-in-vagina penetration. Taken from this narrow and reductive view, a term that ought to embrace a rich and wide-ranging diversity of pleasurable sexual behaviors has been shrunken and winnowed down in ways that minimize, even exclude, a panoply of exquisitely delicious acts to instead valorize one, single, supposedly ultimate, activity.

Moreover, it’s really rather sad that many of us never even contemplate how limiting, narrow and obfuscating this kind of thinking really is. But it's a very common notion, one that points to a larger social issue that seems to be at the soul of our considerable backwardness concerning exactly what’s meant by the term “having sex.” And as one might expect, our apparent unwillingness to expand our working definition of the term has created some rather unfortunate misconceptions, not the least of which is the erroneous notion that other pleasurable, empowering sexual activities somehow fall short of qualifying as actually "having sex."