The Spinster's Exploits

I just love this response to the question posed and answered in “The Ethical Slut”. And I really did laugh out loud at that last sentence! – Enjoy!

“The word “sex” gets used as though everyone agrees on what it means, but if you ask people what they actually do when they have sex, you’ll hear about a huge range of behaviors and interactions.

We have talked before about sex being part of everything and about everything being part of sex. Now let’s talk about the parts that most people call sex – the parts that involve lips and nipples and clits and cocks and orgasms. Sex may involve these parts, but we don’t think it’s about them; the genitals and other erogenous zones are the “how” not the “what.”

The “what”– what Sex actually is – is a journey into an extraordinary state of consciousness. where we tune out everything extraneous to our emotions and our senses in this very moment, travel into a realm of delicious sensation, and soak in the deep connection that we share in sex. This journey is a voyage of awakening, as if the nerves whose job it is to transmit feelings of delight had been lying asleep but have suddenly leaped to attention, aflame, in response to a nibble or a caress.

Perhaps what we call foreplay is a way of seeing just how awake we can get – all excited attention from our earlobes and ankles out to the ends of our hair – the prickling of the scalp, the tingling in the arch of the foot. The glorious miracle of sexual anatomy is that any of these awakenings can set off the swelling in the loins, lips, nipples, cocks, and cunts, which awakens lots more intense nervous networks buried inside us, till we are all lit up like fireworks.

Sex is anything you do or think or imagine that sets the train in motion: a scene in a movie, a person on the street you think is hot, swelling buds of wildflowers bursting in a meadow, a fragrance that opens your nose, the warm sun on the back of your head. Then, if you want to pursue these gorgeously sexy feelings, you can increase the swelling tension and your sensual focus, with any kind of thinking or touching or talking that humans can devise: stroking, kissing, bitings, pinching licking, vibrating, not to mention erotic art and dance and hot music and silky stuff next to our skin.

So sex covers a much larger territory than genital stimulation leading to orgasm. Sex that’s limited to perfunctory foreplay and then a race down the track is an insult to the human capacity for pleasure.

Here’s a happy way to answer the question of what is sex: if you or your partner is wondering whether you’re having sex at any given moment, you probably are.”