January 21–28, 1999

loose canon

Got Sex?

by Bruce Schimmel

Had sex? That depends.One of the sillier routines in the seamy comedy now running in Washington has been the president's rhetorical dance around this very question.

But can anyone really give this simple question a straight answer?

For one, your answer might depend on if you are straight. Or if you're married.

Or if you're a young college student, as the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) suggests in a Kinsey Institute study published this week.

For daring to raise this question, JAMA Editor-in-Chief George D. Lundberg lost his job. Such is one man's profile in courage—but that's another woeful tale.

In the study, about 600 college students were asked in 1991 if having "oral sex" meant that they had "had sex."

Fifty-nine percent answered no.

Beyond the obvious implications for the farce in Washington, the students' answers must surely surprise (and maybe even delight) some gay men and lesbian women.

As in, who has the right to say what sex is? And even if 99.9 percent agree, would that be correct?

A correct answer would have been easier to reach 50 years ago, when the morals of the majority were used to suppress the rights of the individual.

Fortunately, our widening of definitions has benefits for everyone—straight and gay, young and old.

In the court of sexual politics, Coitus is no longer King. Sexual love is indeed a many-splendored thing, and thankfully not reducible to a single question of who put what, where and why.

For a female virgin, not having had sex might mean possessing an intact hymen, and a lot of cultures in the world might concur.

For a lonely cybernaut, onanism is sex. Maybe.

For an elderly couple, a long glance and some simple caresses might be as sexually fulfilling as a riotous romp through tangled sheets. Maybe even more so.

Is phone sex, sex? Vivid wet dreams? How about virtual sex?

Who's to judge?

Some might even consider intense prayer as a form of sex, the ecstatic moment when the word transcends the flesh.

That "having sex" resists definition is an ambiguity worth celebrating.

We can say this, though: At its best, great sex invokes a mystery that plays the scale, if not all the chords of human emotion.

Even the stodgiest of churches declare sex to be a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

But do the certified uprighteous understand just how mysterious and various sex can be?

I think none of us do. And to declare what having sex is or isn't for someone else strikes me as foolish and arrogant to try.