Stop "Having Sex" - Start Being Sexual

This coming Monday evening, I’ll be co-leading a workshop on safer sex, and one of the sections I’ll be doing is called “alternatives to intercourse” – and I’m beginning to feel some trepidation. Not the subject, but anticipation of the conversation…

“Oh, you mean ‘alternatives to having sex’?”

“No, intercourse.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“If that were true, then gay and lesbian couples never have sex. Right?”

“Oh. Yeah, I guess so. Still,…”

Given a recent Kinsey Institute study, the debate over what constitutes “having sex” still rages on. Five percent of people interviewed did not consider vaginal intercourse as “having sex”; it gets worse if they’re told the man didn’t ejaculate (eleven percent) or if he used a condom (18 percent of men over 65).

Kind of explains the scores of teens and twenty-somethings, put through “abstinence-only” programs masquerading as sex education, and sincerely believing that they are still virgins because they did fellatio or cunnilingus or anal intercourse – none of which, in their minds, means “having sex.”

In my mind, the very phrase having sex is bothersome. Sex is not something you have or merely do, but something you experience and share. And sexuality is an integral part of who we are. I wonder if thinking about “having sex” in fact contributes to the ways in which we divorce sex and sexuality from our being, making it all to easy to further separate some forms of erotic and intimate expression from the very concept of sex.

So, here’s a rather bold proposal: Replace “having sex” with “being sexual.” Language changes all the time, and with it the way we think. So imagine, instead of saying: “We had sex,” the impact of saying: “We were sexual.” Think of the radical difference – the wonderful, essential difference – between the two, of merely having and actually being.

Some I’m sure would suggest “making love” as an alternative. But that seems almost euphemistic, as if trying to dodge the very question of sex via comfortable couching. I remember a celebrated singer giving a master class to young Julliard students, asking one fellow who’d been singing a torch song what he thought it meant. The young man talked wistfully about longing and yearning, and she simply shook her head, held up her hand, and told him bluntly: “It’s about sex.”

We need to be as blunt. Yet we also need to reintegrate the sexual back into our lives, to see the erotic and intimate not as mere things we can do in dissociated isolation, but as essential to our lives and life stories. We need to stop merely “having sex” and start “being sexual.” Let’s start by saying so, and work our way up from there.