reflections from 'the philosophy of sex'

I'm not really having any original thoughts of my own tonight, but I did come across a few interesting tidbits in a book I found when someone directed me to the sex stacks in the library during a frenzied book-finding game. Enjoy. (And note the citations!)

"Are We Having Sex Now Or What?" by Greta Christina

The Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings

ed. Alan Soble. 3rd ed. Lanham, Maryland: Rowan, 1997.
Reprinted from

The Erotic Impulse: Honing the Sexual Self

ed. David Steinberg. Putnam, 1992.

When I first started having sex with other people, I used to like to count them. I wanted to keep track of how many there had been. It was a source of some kind of pride, or identity . . . It got to the point where, when I'd start having sex with a new person for the first time, when he first entered my body . . . what would flash through my head wouldn't be "Oh, baby, baby you feel so good inside me," or "What the hell am I doing with this creep," or "This is so boring, I wonder what's on TV." What flashed through my head was "Seven!"

Doing this had some interesting results. I'd look for patterns in the numbers. I had a theory for a while that every fourth lover turned out to be really great in bed, and would ponder what the cosmic significance of the phenomenon might be. Sometimes I'd try to determine what kind of a person I was by how many people I'd had sex with. [Was I] normal, repressed, a total slut, a free-spirited bohemian, or what?

Then the numbers started getting a little larger, as number tend to do, and keeping track became more difficult. I'd remembered that the last one was seventeen and so this one must be eighteen, and then I'd start having doubts about whether I'd been keeping score accurately or not. I'd lie awake at night thinking to myself, well, there was Brad, and there was that guy on my birthday, and there was David and ... no wait, I forgot that guy I got drunk with at the social my first week at college ... so that's seven, eight, nine ... and by two in the morning I'd finally have it figured out. But there was always a nagging suspicion that maybe I'd missed someone, some dreadful tacky little scumball that I was trying to forget about having invited inside my body. And as much as I maybe wanted to forget about the sleazy little scumball, I wanted more to get that number right.

It kept getting harder, though. I began to question what counted as sex and what didn't. . . . It was important for me to know. You have to know what qualifies as sex because when you have sex with someone your relationship changes. Right? Right?It's not that sex itself has to change things all that much. But knowing that you've had sex, being conscious of a sexual connection, standing around making polite conversation with someone while thinking to yourself, "I've had sex with this person," that's what changes things. Or so I believed. And if having sex with a friend can confuse or change the friendship, think how bizarre things can get when you're not sure whether you've had sex with them or not.

The problem was, as I kept doing more kinds of sexual things, the line between sex and not sex kept getting more hazy and indiscreet. . . .

I have friends who say, if you thought of it as sex when you were doing it, then it was. That's an interesting idea. It's certainly helped me construct a coherent sexual history without being a revisionist swine: redefining my past according to current definitions. But it really just begs the question. It's fine to say that sex is whatever I think it is; but then what do I think it is? What if, when I was doing it, I was wondering whether it counted?

Perhaps having sex with someone is the conscious, consenting, mutually acqknowledged pursuit of shared sexual pleasure. Not a bad definition. But what about the situation where one person consents to sex without really enjoying it? Lots of people have had sexual interactions that we didn't find satisfying of didn't really want and, unless they were actually forced on us against our will, I think most of us would still classify them as sex.

Maybe if both of you (or all of you) think of it as sex, then it's sex whether you're having fun or not. That clears up the [above] problem [but] begs the question again, only worse: now you have to mesh different people's vague and inarticulate notions of what is and what isn't sex and find the place where they overlap. Too messy.

How about sex as the conscious, consenting, mutually acknowledged pursuit of sexual pleasure of at least one of the people involved. That's better. It has all they key components . . . But what if neither of you is enjoying it, if you're both doing it because you think the other one wants to? Ugh. . . .

The longer I think about the subject, the more questions I come up with. At what point in an encounter does it become sexual? If an interaction that begins nonsexually turns into sex, was it sex all along? What about sex wth someone who's asleep? Can you have a situation where one person is having sex and the other isn't? It seems no matter what definition I come up with, I can think of some real-life experience that calls it into question. . . .

I still don't have an answer.