Sex is… what now exactly?

Airial January 29, 2011 Parenting while Sex Aware, Sexuality, Single Parenting while in Graduate School

In my program we get asked to define ‘sex’ on a pretty regular basis. It’s not an easy word to define. Really, we’ve chosen three letters to represent a huge wide ever expanding list of actions, feelings, instincts and observable phenomena. Orgasm? Ejaculation? Penetration? Identification? Stimulation? Infatuation with a particular body part? Reproduction? Seduction? Consent? Conquest? Addiction? Complex hand/mouth/genital rhythmic combinations?

As soon as you think you’ve got it scaled down to a sentence, you realize you’ve excluded something super relevant, and obvious, so you expand to a paragraph, then you recognize the need to qualify some descriptor, so you’re now in essay format, still then context, both historical and social, needs to be given, so now you’re writing your thesis. You see?

Defining sex is like singing the song that never ends, it goes on and on my friends.

And you know, my friends do tend to go on and on about sex. It’s what we do apparently… And we do it well… Both the doing and the talking. I’m happy for the semester to have started. Happy to be in the community I’m in. Though right now, I’m missing the Good Vibes Downtown SF Store Opening Party, can’t be everywhere all the time now can I?

Today I hosted E’s 11th birthday party, which after the night I had, I am particularly proud to have pulled off.  Nothing like creeping into your own front door at 4:30am stone sober except for the intoxication induced after hours of running your hands and lips over the supple body of a beautiful woman…uh… hmmm… yum… well… kinda lost track of what I was saying there didn’t I? Yes, ahem, birthday party… multi-tasking… mmm… multi… dammit, did it again. Priorities, I have many. I’m grateful for them all.

I have a book to finish reading today, and a bunch of meta research articles to get through tomorrow so that Monday feels like a good day too. Anna is coming over for dinner tomorrow night, and I’m excited to cook for her.

I am reading about the pharmaceutical obsession with female orgasms, the neurochemistry of love, the moral dilemma’s in past and present sex research, intersections of race, class and gender in the honest telling of our stories.

So let me offer a definition of sex with the definition of another word:

Ethics: code, morals, morality, values, rights and wrongs, principles, ideals,standards (of behavior), value system, virtues, dictates of conscience.

Sex is ethics. Each individual’s set of values played out by their very body. I participated in the most amazing display of ethics last night. Ah-maz-ing.

 

 

Sex is… what now exactly?
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  • Pablo

    So, you’ve probably read it already, but we’re having a lot of fun reading Mary Roach’s book Bonk, all about the science of sex.

    I liked your definition at the end, there. It works. And I’m glad you had yourself a good time. 🙂

  • http://airial.wordpress.com airial

    It’s an interesting read. I’m glad you’re enjoying it.

    and ya, I tend to have good times 😉

  • http://www.literateperversions.com Chris Hall

    It might be more accurate to say that sex is politics, which comes from the Greek for “citizen” or “people.” It’s a particularly intimate and intricate negotiation of rights, privileges, and boundaries between two or more people.

  • http://airial.wordpress.com airial

    Ah, I see your point, thanks for offering that up.
    I am now thinking that my definition is more about the individual. The internal processing of sex, what exists in the self before communicating or exchanging with others.

    Thank you for reading!