Tabby’s Deep Dives

Did We Just Have Sex?

Don’t take it for granted that he thinks you did

The good news is that in America, only 22–25% of married men and 11–15% of married women have cheated on their partner during their relationship. The bad news is that that is the optimistic estimate — the figure for married guys may be as high as 40% and for women it could be up to 25%.

And those numbers are only for sexual infidelity in marriages. If you throw emotional infidelity into the mix, 63% of men and 47% of women have broken their vows. The figure for couples who are cohabiting are similar, which is where this article really opens up, because whether you have cheated depends entirely on how you define what sex is.

But we all know when we just had sex with someone, don’t we?

Defining sex

Presidential impeachments have swung on the difference, as I am sure you will be all too well aware. In January 1998, Bill Clinton stated on television that he ‘did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms Lewinsky’. The uproar that ensued revolved entirely around whether oral sex counted as sex.

‘Of course it does, why else would it be called oral sex?’ I hear you say, except that it isn’t, it is called fellatio, giving a blow job, or playing the pink oboe. In a survey of students undertaken in the year the news broke, only 38% of the girls and 44% of the guys would have seen themselves as having had sex with Clinton if no more than a blow job had been involved. A dozen years later, another survey of students found that those figures had dropped to only 17% and 21%.

So, in theory, at least two-thirds of young women shouldn’t have a problem if the man in their life lets another girl give him a blow job, because it isn’t sex. Leaving aside everything to do with the Clinton-Lewinsky case apart from the fellatio, the majority of women in college would — at least in theory — have regarded it as just one of those routine things that happens in the course of an ordinary day in the Oval Office.

Where it fell apart for Clinton was that when he was presented with a list of activities regarded as sex by the legal profession — the famous deposition 1 — he replied, ‘I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky’, and the whole case crash-landed in a swamp of arguments around whether he had ever had sex with her, or she had ever had sex with him.

What can we take away from it? Don’t ever touch a lawyer.

Does sucking my nipples count as sex?

Okay, so, how about you suck my nipples? We say hello, and we like each other a lot, so I encourage you suck my nipples, because it feels nice. A mere 1% of female students regard this as being sex, and only 6% of the guys, so it must be okay.

However, deposition 1 gave the following definition of sex as including ‘contact with the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks of a person with an intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of that person, any contact of the genitals or anus of another person, or contact of one’s genitals or anus and any part of another person’s body either directly or through clothing’.

Basically, if a lawyer brushes up against me in a lift, all I have to do is say he was trying to arouse me, quote deposition 1, and his career is toast. No wonder those people are so neurotic when they are drawing up contracts in my office — one touch and it is all over for them. However, my attorney tells me there is a let out, because as long as he sucks my nipples without intending to arouse me, then it isn’t sex, so he has a cast-iron case.

I am still not going to take my bra off for him, but I like his style.

If my lawyer fondled my breasts, there would most definitely be consequences, unless I had given him the okay, of course. Would I think of myself as having had sex with him, though? Probably not. He is quite hunky though… He knows I am teasing him now.

I am interested in that 2% vs 6% thing. It suggests that the guys weren’t anywhere as good at sucking nipples as they thought they were, because the girls don’t appear to have noticed it.

Does foreplay count as sex?

In the 2010 student survey, around 15% thought that masturbating someone counted as sex, so if my lawyer was married, and hadn’t read deposition 1, then he would have a credible technical defense against a suit for infidelity by pointing to the numbers if he whiled away the time by fingering my clit while I was reading the fine print on a contract. Also, if I masturbate him, then only one student in six would count it as sex. This is looking better and better for the legal profession.

Now for a real eye-opener. We were discussing porn the other day, and a friend of mine, who has a PhD level education in medicine, talked about a movie we had watched together and said, ‘…of course, when the sex started, it went to a whole new level.’ What she meant was ‘when the penetrative sex started’. Elaine is a psychiatrist, and even she doesn’t think of foreplay as being ‘proper’ sex.

Elaine is also bisexual, and I point out to her that this attitude seriously undermines her position as a radical feminist, by betraying her subconscious support for the orgasmic imperative. I get a withering look.

Does anal sex count as sex?

The real surprise comes with anal penetration. Every one of the student surveys show that only four out of five would regard that as being sex, which means that if I let some ravishing young lawyer take me that way on my office desk, he could still regard himself as a virgin. Technically anyway…

The idea that anyone might think that anal sex wasn’t sex — whether or not the guy was a lawyer— sounds crazy, until you have talked to a few women who think that way. I knew a girl who had real reputation when we were younger, but who told anyone who was prepared to listen that she was still a virgin. The justification, in her mind at least, was because she only ever had anal sex, and she was a walking encyclopedia on the subject at an age when the rest of us were only just about getting our heads around blow jobs. It was really important to her that she could think of herself being a virgin when she got married, which she did. To a vicar. We don’t think he has any idea.

Similar cases are discussed in the papers linked in the beginning of this piece, so this line of reasoning is definitely a thing. The cause? Virginity pledges are clearly part of it, but some women appear to believe that if they are born again, it wipes their sexual history. Confused? This kind of thing makes my head spin too.

Is it actually possible to have sex?

So what do students think of sex, if it isn’t fondling breasts, sucking nipples, masturbating, giving head, having an orgasm, or (in 20% of cases) anal sex? The answer is vaginal penetration. Once you have done that to me almost everyone in all the surveys would be pretty certain that we would have had sex.

Except for women who have sex with women, that is. By the standards we have been talking of up to now, no lesbian couple throughout history has ever had sex. This is too confusing for words.

As always, the numbers have an extra dimension to them, and that is that what someone thinks of as being sex depends very much on whether their experience is limited to oral sex or not. If that is as far as they have got, then there is a 75% chance of them not rating it as being sex, compared to a roughly 60% chance after they have started having vaginal sex.

In other words, once we start having penetrative sex, we are less inclined to count oral sex as not being sex. This is called hanging on to your virginity by your nail extensions.

If he didn’t come, was it sex?

Gee, I never realized how complicated sex was. For instance, if we were married, and I caught you sucking my best friend’s nipples, I would definitely have something to say about it, assuming we were consensually monogamous, whether you came in your pants or not. And if you found me being penetrated anally by the pool guy, you would probably take exception to that too — unless you fall in the group who reckon it isn’t sex if the guy doesn’t come. This has all kinds of implications for STIs, not to mention our marriage.

This notion really is unhelpful, and if you want to see how widespread it is, look no further than the porn industry, where it is common for actresses to discourage actors from coming inside them because of the risk of STI. In practice, after up to 15 minutes of oral and penetrative sex without using a condom, they are only reducing the risk.

Where do we go from here?

If people in the 21st century still define sex as having to involve a guy coming after having penetrative vaginal sex, then we are missing something, aren’t we?

If in 2020, we still believe in the statement above, then the sexual revolution might as well never have taken place. If it is true, then women are doomed to disadvantage where sex is concerned, because the majority of us don’t come with vaginal sex alone. When you start looking at what college students don’t believe to be sex, like breast play, nipple sucking, and cunnilingus — all of which are activities that help us towards our orgasms — it casts an interesting light on how conservative sexual attitudes remain today.

No wonder guys still talk about ‘giving us’ orgasms; deep down, a lot of them still believe that the only thing that counts as sex is a cock coming in a pussy. It goes to show how strong sexual scripts are, how long they hang around, and how much their diktat continues influence people, even when it is a century out of date.

The dark side of this light-hearted take on what we think of as sex is that we still haven’t freed ourselves of Victorian attitudes towards sex. Still, we are making some kind of progress.

Consent and fidelity

A big impact of ‘what is sex’ is on consent. For instance, if you are in a relationship with one of the 20% of young guys who doesn’t think that anal sex is sex, then he may not see any need to ask your consent first. Just try working through that one after the event. Equally, with the majority of young people not thinking of blow jobs as being anything to do with sex, some obvious problems in that area raise their heads as far as the under 18s are concerned.

Outside of consent, I have already mentioned STIs. The twisted logic here is that if you can only pass on an STI by having sex, then you can’t catch anything if you aren’t having sex, and so a blow job, or anal sex, or penetration if the guy doesn’t come doesn’t count in some folk’s heads as an STI risk. No risk, no condom.

Finally, back to sexual infidelity. Most of us think we know what cheating is, but only in our own heads. What we don’t know is what our partners think, because we have no idea what they think counts as sex. Plus, don’t forget that in a situation where they have everything to gain by giving themselves the benefit of the doubt, they will give themselves the benefit of the doubt.

So those headline figures are almost certainly too low, and infidelity could easily be an order of magnitude higher than the surveys make it out to be.

Which means that it might be a good idea to ask your partner what they think is sex the next time you think you are having it.

Tabby

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