The L-Word - 1/21/10

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how other people perceive sex. Perhaps naïvely, I assumed that people with shameful or other negative feelings about physical intimacy simply avoided it, but sexual satisfaction is a need that must be met somehow, and I do know that it is all too easy to give in to desire. There are lots of people, then, who have intimate interludes and then feel really awful about it. This seems really obvious, of course, but since I formed my current understanding of sex, I have forgotten that I used to, and many people do, get intimate without it.

My understanding is that sex is natural — perhaps the most natural thing humans do next to breathing and eating and sleeping. Sure, unlike those other things, you can live without intimacy, but why would you want to?

In my early days as a sexually active young person, my ideas about kissing, oral sex, intercourse — the whole gamut, really — went through many different stages.

When I was 13, long before I was more intimate than even quick kisses, I actually believed that you couldn’t physically have sex unless both parties were in love with each other.

I was utterly in love with my first partner, my high school boyfriend junior year, but by the end of our relationship, sex had become my only indication that he still cared about me, even though there was no love in it. In the months after we broke up, I tried to reaffirm my self-worth through sex — never, ever a good idea.

We are taught simultaneously that sex is an expression of deep affection, but that it can also be a meaningless way to meet physical needs, and, though I have since discovered that sex can’t both mean everything and nothing at the same time, I employed both of those ideas in trying to rebuild my self-esteem.

I took any interest in sex with me as proof that my partner cared for me very much, and I felt a sense of control over my partner in that I had something he or she wanted, and I was “cool enough” to offer it, no strings attached. It took a loving relationship for me to realize that unless sex is in the context of other caring interactions, it’s rarely an expression of emotional attachment, and I didn’t have any more power over my partners than a hamburger does over a hungry person.

In college, especially in those non-relationships I’ve discussed before, I’ve still been guilty of taking continued intimacy as a reaffirmation of my value to a specific person, but I’m beginning to get away from that behavior. It has taken a lot of discovering what sex isn’t to help me figure out what sex is, and my definition isn’t complete yet, but I’m getting there.

So far, sex appears to be what I said it was in the beginning: a normal act of human nature. We are all programmed to get physically close to other human beings and reproduce — no denying that.

What complicates the perception of sex are the many hats we force it to wear. It’s a physical urge without a rational explanation, marking us as no better than animals — thus it wears the hat of the taboo and debauchery. We’ve tried to elevate it by turning it into an expression of love — thus it wears the hat of meeting emotional needs instead of just physical ones.

I think problems arise when we’re faced with the disparity between what sex is and what hat we’ve made it wear, and my life has become remarkably less complicated since I started reminding myself that sex by itself has no meaning but what I give it, and it’s the context that helps me make meaning. Being wary of and honest with myself and my partner about the context has made sex much more empowering and enjoyable for me, and I hope your own path to understanding sex, dear reader, is helping you achieve the same thing.