By Margo ScottPLAY Writer
As I was grabbing a quick bite at Lisa’s between classes one Friday, I overheard the loud conversation of a few suspected sorostitutes at a not-so-nearby table. Due to my tremendous lack of sleep, my brain just seemed to fixate on their conversation and I overheard what they were discussing. Fuck that – they were loud and even if they weren’t, I eavesdrop all the time anyway. They were talking about all their lurid sexual encounters that had transpired last night at, where else?, The Duece, a cab and then their rooms. One was talking about how her number has “like doubled” since before NSW and they all laughed in what I am assuming was understanding, and possibly agreement. But what “number” was she referring to? How many people she had made out with? Let touch her boobs? Blew in the back of a cab? (Don’t act like you haven’t done it.) This got me thinking as I stumbled to yet another discussion section (seriously, why do we even have classes on Fridays?!) that there really is no universally understood answer to the question, “When does sex count?”
All you straight people out there may be going, “When a penis enters a vagina, duh!” But does that then mean same sex couples never have sex? Does sex depend on who we’re fucking? That’s a kind of definitional relativism I am not prepared to accept. Do we then just throw in oral sex to be PC and call it a day? Luckily, I had some time during my microeconomics lecture to probe further: Can we exclude previous partners or encounters because they’re ugly, we’re drunk, they’re attached, we’re on vacation, they’re on the rebound, we’re having “a fat day” and need some sexual reassurance, etc? So, perhaps the question of when sex counts requires more of us than what a simple definition can provide.
How does our sex criteria/definition change the way we look at ourselves? If we include more people/experiences to that list, do we feel more, in the words of Timbaland, promiscuous? Is that so bad? If we say fuck the system, sexuality is too broad and can’t ever be confined by narrow definitions, does that then lessen the meaning of some more choice experiences versus others that weren’t, ahem, so much? Can sex be a smile, a look, involve more than just touching, or less than just touching? Does it count masturbation – it’s sex for one after all. (O.K., if we are counting masturbation my “number” goes up by like 3,000 and I’m not sure I can handle the count after all my other recent inclusions.)
However you define sex, or don’t, examining these questions challenge our deeply held beliefs about sexuality, communication, language, heteronormativity, and a host of other scholarly words I could use. For whatever it’s worth for you to think about, in the very least, it may allow you to see the world a bit differently – and maybe help you to feel like the sexy superstar you are.
SESP senior Margo Scott is a PLAY sex columnist. She can be reached at [email protected].
