I’ve never found that the people in my life are afraid of talking about sex. If anything, it’s the opposite—we frequently philosophize on all aspects of those inner desires. And we certainly don’t have to try hard to talk about it—sex is an almost universal object of fascination for young adults, whether they are active, curious, or utterly disengaged.
But for something everyone seems to think so much about, it’s striking how no one can agree on what sex actually is.
Ask ten people on campus what counts as a “body” and you’ll get ten wildly different definitions. For its part, Merriam–Webster’s dictionary defines “intercourse” as “physical sexual contact between individuals that involves the genitalia of at least one person.” This already feels woefully inadequate: Under the Webster rule, even so innocuous an act as a handjob definitively counts as sex. After all, it’s physical contact involving at least one person’s genitals. Even more confounding is its implicit assertion that physical contact involving genitalia could be anything but sexual.
And the uncertainty around what constitutes sex isn’t just a problem for dorm room conversations. In cultures that prohibit sexual activity before marriage, acts that “aren’t sex” serve as loopholes that allow people to act on their desires while maintaining a kind of “purity”—think, for example, of the Mormons soaking at Brigham Young University. At the level of public health, definitions of sex that privilege penis–in–vagina intercourse can inadvertently come to make other sexual acts seem safer or less taboo in comparison. These definitions, however, don’t always line up with reality, and they often serve to push out other ideas of sex that don’t fit heteronormative standards. While sex is a private act, the concept of sex is a social one, something that both enables interpersonal communication and shapes the way we view ourselves.
One of the most common definitions of sex is what we can loosely call a “vibe” theory of sexuality. Like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart on pornography, some people are content to say they know sex when they see it. The idea—and it’s not altogether a bad one—is that if it seems impossible to rigorously define what acts are and aren’t sex, we can at least come to a consensual view on what constitutes a sexual act by appealing to our basic intuitions. This seems not just unsatisfactory, but totally wrong. For one, what constitutes a sexual or suggestive act is already a point of real contention—how often have you been told you were being flirty toward or leading on someone you had no intentions to sleep with?
More damningly, though, knowing what “sexual” means actually aids us very little when it comes to how we should act in sexual situations. It’s a problem that extends to our initial question; why talk about sex at all if our conversations don’t help us do it? It doesn’t matter what sex is, definitionally—what we care about is how we feel about it.
What’s most revealing about our conversations over sex is how they showcase that our disagreements are more than mere problems of definition. Where we really differ is in our deeper, more fundamental beliefs about how we live our lives. Take the supposedly scientific debates that surround abortion. A belief that anti–abortion activists often rely on—and pro–choice advocates try to refute—is that human life begins at conception. But what life really refers to here isn’t a certain arrangement of cells or point of development. It is the attitude we are supposed to have towards other human beings—because most people share the basic belief that human life has value, debates over the term “life” are really debates over whether the fetus deserves a certain kind of treatment from us. The logic follows after the conclusion—conservatives believe a priori that abortion is baby murder, and thus shift the beginning of life earlier in the gestation process. The fight over the word “life” is a proxy for disagreements over broader moral disagreements. It’s easier to argue over definitions than to give voice to those deeper, differing fundamental beliefs.
The same logic applies to love and sex. Sex isn’t just any object, like a fire hydrant or a dishwasher. It’s so core to our shared human identity that defining it is ultimately downstream of our deepest moral beliefs. If, following Ludwig Wittgenstein, the world is a set of every imaginable state of affairs, then our differing definitions of sex give us an oft–illusory logical grounding for how to act when confronted with a specific scenario. The easiest place to see this is discourse around virginity and premarital sex—when people’s sexual desires conflict with their values around purity, they often warp their definitions to excuse certain kinds of sexual activity. For stricter moralists, purity is a more fragile thing, and an expansive definition of sex is necessary to prevent premarital sin and keep people righteous. More totalizing definitions of sex, those inclusive of oral or anal, treat these acts with a certain level of seriousness that narrower definitions are able to shrug off. Our disagreements over sex reflect deeper disagreements about the way we want to live our lives.
It’s also impossible to talk about sex without talking about its position within relations of social power. In Ancient Greece and Rome, there was no blanket condemnation of homosexuality but instead a judgement on those who assumed the passive role—the dominant, penetrating male could retain his social standing because topping was perfectly compatible with a masculine position of power. The labeling and classification of sexual activity, as well as outright prohibition of certain forms of it, has always been a way for institutions of power to assert their will over populations.
And this power doesn’t confront us as something outside us, but as something within. Social forces impact the way we view our sexuality by shaping us as subjects, altering how we understand ourselves in relation to the world. Take the concept of virginity as an example. While young men—explicitly or implicitly—are often taught to view their virginity as a mark of shame that they should shed at the earliest opportunity, young women are taught the opposite, to guard their purity and stay virgins, usually until marriage. Power doesn’t just prevent us from acting on our desires—it alters what those basic desires are, shaping our attitudes towards sex and pushing us to have more or less of it.
The different significance and moral value that sex and sexuality holds between populations is what really breaks down our communication. The social roles we receive without choice early in our lives—our race, religion, sexuality, gender—contain within them moral codes that tell us what it means to be good. Not necessarily good human beings, but good men or women, good straights or gays. Sex can’t be grounded in a shared logical framework because our value frameworks around sexual activity diverge wildly by social position.
This is part of why the worst definition of sex is the one that, at first glance, feels the most palatable—sex is whatever you make it. While it’s self–evident that people from different walks of life have different ideas about sex, what this position really amounts to is a rejection of the idea that we can find common ground with others. If sex is whatever an individual says, any social understanding of its importance goes out the window. If my definition of sex is holding hands and yours is anal, how are we supposed to have any intelligible conversation at all? Worse than just being a bad definition, this definition destroys the power of language entirely, transforming sex from a set of shared ideas into a vast complex of private acts that prevents us from ever speaking of it.
Thinking about sex is so daunting because it takes us to the point at which logic and communication break down entirely. It forces us to accept the role that seemingly arbitrary social forces have in our individual lives. In our discourse, we have to rely on vague social attitudes rather than empirical observation or logic to talk about it. In our reflections on ourselves and our sexual lives, it’s impossible to escape from the gaze of society as it judges us for how we have sex, with whom, and how much. Getting through this impasse, then, is far harder than just defining our terms more precisely. It involves giving up our individuality, or even our capacity for logic, and accepting the fact that we are always already products of broader social relations. Shared definitions require shared values—so long as our social structure remains utterly split on who should have sex and when, logical communication on the act remains a near impossibility.
That doesn’t mean, however, that the problem of sex is unsolvable—it just means you won’t like the solution. In his seminal tract Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, French philosopher Louis Althusser made the point that ideology is more than just what people think. In the end, our beliefs about the world can only be understood through our actions—it doesn’t matter what we think we believe if our actions contradict our supposed values.
While Althusser applies these ideas to analyze the reproduction of capitalism, perhaps they’re useful in a more limited sense to help us on the question of sex. The fact that action, not conscious thought, is what determines someone’s beliefs implies that the way we build consensus around what sex is isn’t by trying to define it, but by studying the way we as a society act in sexual situations. Though our value systems may stand in contradiction to one another, the reality we produce is singular. The answer, then, is clear, if a bit cold: Sex isn’t “what you make it,” it’s what we make it, through our collective sexual practices.
Our crude empirical solution certainly misses the real problem at hand. While it certainly enables clear communication, it utterly fails to capture the individual, mystical value that sex has in the human experience. What it does do, however, is bring us closer to a key discovery: Sex isn’t something to debate, it’s something to do. It’s at the level of practice that our concepts gain their significance and their power. In changing the world, we change our words and what they signify.
Since a descriptive definition of sex that pleases everyone is an impossibility, what we really need is a prescriptive definition that captures what we want sex to be. Conflicts over sex are fundamentally conflicts over values, and the way these conflicts are resolved are never in the realm of discourse: They change as the world does. To try and define sex involves putting our values into action, changing how sex is perceived through the way we act in both sexual and non–sexual situations. Whether it’s changing the way we behave in the bedroom or fighting in the streets against regressive sexual politics, we have the power to remake our world through our actions, individual and collective. Perhaps the question we should be asking isn’t “what is sex?”—it’s “what do we want sex to be?”
