[quote]pat wrote:
Sex is typically understood as vaginal penetration. The meaning can change with context, but usually if something else is meant a prefix such as ‘anal’ or ‘oral’ is used to clarify.
It would be really painful to talk about it if the word ‘sex’ didn’t really mean anything and type of sexual contact always had to be specified.
“I had sex last night” would turn in to, "I had penis in vagina sex last night’. If somebody tells you that they had sex and you didn’t know what they meant by it; that would suddenly make simple conversations suddenly very hard, for no reason.[/quote]
If a lesbian says to you “I had sex last night,” you wouldn’t require a prefix. Nor would you require it of a gay man. In either case they could have engaged in a variety of sex acts that all count as “sex” for them. On the one hand, you’re right that it is fairly common to closely associate the word “sex” with vaginal penetration.
That’s a natural consequence of the fact that heterosexuals are the majority. One could also argue that there is a hierarchy of sex acts, ranging from light petting to vaginal penetration, and that this hierarchy reflects the ordinary progression as well as the natural investments and consequences of each act. Then one would have to consider whether it is fitting to build those kinds of unacknowledged and unchallenged assumptions into an ostensibly simple word.
But it also seems that the word “sex” is a kind of indirect speech anyway, so your conversations shouldn’t be any more difficult than they’ve ever been. If someone says “I had sex last night,” are you really looking to that statement for a clear indication of the specific sex acts performed? Do you really care exactly what your friend did with his penis?
Usually not; we’d say it was “too much information.” Even in the ordinary usage, some people might mean “we had sex” to cover the whole sexual experience from first grope to afterglow. Others might say that it wasn’t properly sex until vaginal penetration. It seems that this discussion is off track by focusing on the ordinary use of the word.
The value of the distinction is that when one has sex, it is often accompanied by a variety of acts. Many women can’t orgasm from penetrative sex alone, for example. When you start having that conversation, you need to be specific: one sex act is more likely to cause orgasm than another. You could say “engage in oral sex instead of sex,” I suppose, but that seems contradictory because the term “sex” seems to be the genus and “oral” seems to be the species. So, all of this to say that when we’re talking about sex specifically and not generically, it only makes sense to make our language more precise.
