What counts as sex?

[sparkindarkness]

This piece originally appeared at Womanist Musings where Renee has very generously allowed my random musings to appear on her excellent blog

Apparently, I am a virgin.
Now, this rather surprised me, all things considered. I rather thought all the sex I’d had disqualified me. It most certainly surprised Beloved when I told him (though it did paralyse

Comments

[aviv_b]

I think that its more than just homophobia that makes people believe that sex is penis/vagina only. Remember Bill Clinton with his "I did not have sex with that woman." An astounding percentage of people agreed with him either because 1)not p/v or 2)no climax.

And apparently in some circles you can keep wearing your promise ring if you confine your activities to oral or anal sex. This baffles me as much as you being labeled a 'virgin.' Don't get this at all.

[sparkindarkness]

Aye I think it is damaging to gay people, but I don't think overt homophobia is the motivation (though I think heterosexism is a large part of it). I think it's part of the many deluded and foolish things people believe about sex.

Including such a huge amount of denial

[fadethecat]

I suspect this is tied to the whole view of sex as being directly tied to procreation. So sex that doesn't have the possibility of producing kids? Not real sex, apparently! It's tied up with the same weird cultural memes that have abortions being wrong because women who have sex outside of marriage need to be punished with unwanted children. (Which is its own set of nastiness, where pregnancy, birth, and childcare are explicitly called out as a series of horrible things that are penalties imposed on women for doing something wrong...)

[lilisonna]

Yeah. I'm pretty sure this is directly tied to the "If I can't get Pregnant, It's not Sex" idea. Because Not Having Sex is all about Not Having Abortions.

My high school Sunday school teacher never got over the time when he was telling us to "not have sex" and I asked him if the oral sex I'd had with my boyfriend the night before counted. That was a fast topic change.

[sparkindarkness]

I'd have kept puhsing it :)

[touchstone]

I agree, but in a sideways way. It wasn't, when I was a teen, a matter of 'sex is for procreation' as 'an accidental pregnancy carries enormous consequences, and deciding to do something that carries that risk is a more significant step'. And honestly, I think that's rational and not sick at all. It's HEALTHY to be aware of the possible results of your actions and to take them seriously.

Not healthy: the fact that even teens who are aware of unintended pregnancy as a risk underestimate the chances of disease, or the fact that all of those 'not-sex' activities still carry substantial exposure to THAT.

[girlofavalon]

Okay, back.

It's not really a surprise to me, I'm always cracked up when I see articles in teen-female magazines where the girls affirm they're virgins because they'd only gone as far as anal sex/oral sex/mutual mastubation/fingering... It's astounding, and not in a good way!

I don't think it's just a case homophobia, then. It can be, but, like you pointed, it had a great deal of the sickness of our society's morality and self-justification.

[sparkindarkness]

It helps feed into their denial and their false dichotomies

[anitabuchan]

I've always linked these kind of views to the belief that virginity = a hymen (as demonstrated by companies offering 'revirgination'), but how male virginity fits into that I'm not sure.

It reminds me of a friend who had what I thought was quite a good view of her virginity - she had sex three times before declaring herself to no longer be a virgin, because she found the first two times so unenjoyable she decided they didn't count. Which makes sense to me: if virginity isn't something physical, then surely it's something mental/emotional, and who would know her mental state better than she herself?

And I need to remember that lawnmower line :).

[sparkindarkness]

Revirginisation boggles me utterly - the idea that virginity is a desired state - and that it is somehow regained with the hyjmen? Well logic leaves the room.

That's an interesting definition :) not sure if I'd count bad sex as not sex, but I can see the point anfd it makes as much sense as so many definitions

[touchstone]

I think you're looking at selection bias on the survey / an insufficiently specific question at least as much as a hetero-normative set of attitudes. I strongly suspect that if you asked, most of the people who felt that anal sex 'wasn't sex' for a male-female couple would say it WAS sex in the context of a male-male couple. I think they're parsing 'is X sex' as 'is X 'going all the way'', to use the now-quaint phrase, and that's a context-dependent question.

[marsdejahthoris]

I think you're on to something here. I'm asexual, so it's all academic, but part of my brain does priveledge penetrative sex of some kind as "Sex" while the rest is "fooling around." Which is silly, but not that important, as I have no sex life and somebody else's is none of my business to define. Yet it's sort of lurking.

[sparkindarkness]

It's interesting - and, of course, it also shows a strong heteronormative level of thinking. And the idea that a sex act is elevated to proper sex if gay men do it or lesbians do it - because it's odd. And it has the connotation of "well it's sex for them because it's as close as they can get to real sex" Or, this is us going all the way because it's as far as we can go down the sex road - and the end of that road is penis/vagina sexing

All in all, humanity is odd with sex