So how was it for you? Did the earth move? These are, traditionally, the questions couples ask each other in the languid aftermath of sex. Now, thanks to recent events in Washington, another and more urgent query needs to be added to the lovers’ lexicon. Have we just had sex according to commonly understood and legally sustainable definitions of the word?
This is not as redundant a question as it sounds. President Bill Clinton’s tortured explanations of what constitutes sex, designed to permit him deniability over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, have brought into the public arena assumptions about penetrative sex that are very widely held – and not just among married men seeking to avoid committing adultery.
In the movie Clerks, a young man questions his girlfriend about an apparent discrepancy in what she has told him about the number of her previous sexual partners. The confusion, it turns out, is about oral sex, which he counts and she doesn’t. In the film, this is a good joke, but it exposes an anomaly in our attitudes which Clinton, as a trained lawyer, has seized on and used to full advantage. Vaginal penetration, according to this view, is the sine qua non that defines a sexual relationship.
There are echoes here of the dating codes that governed adolescent sexual behaviour in the 1950s, particularly in the United States, where increasing degrees of sexual contact were permitted – touching the breasts through clothes, touching bare skin above and below the waist, right through to masturbation – as long as intercourse did not take place, and the girl could still claim to be a virgin.
Many heterosexual men and women, when they try to add up the number of partners they have had, still use precisely this standard without giving its implications much thought. Lovers are people with whom they have had full intercourse; if the act has not been completed, so to speak, it doesn’t count.
But what does this definition mean? Has it got anything to do with orgasm? Clearly not, or some women who have had numerous sexual partners would find themselves excluded from the elite group who have had “proper” sex. But why place such emphasis on vaginal penetration when some women – and indeed some men – take more pleasure in sexual acts that don’t involve coitus? Where the definition really begins to crumble is when we think about homosexual sex.
Homophobic groups routinely characterise gay sex as rampantly promiscuous. They regard gay men as seeking out far too much sex with too many partners. Leaving aside the unacknowledged envy that informs this fundamentalist outrage, it remains the case that some gay men, according to the definition we have been talking about, have never had sex at all.
In the 1970s, the women’s movement was aware of some of these anomalies and blamed them on the phallocentricity of most sexual discourse. “Sexuality is much more than intercourse,” argued the British edition of Our Bodies Ourselves in 1978. “Sexual feelings and responses are a central expression of our emotional, spiritual, physical selves. Sexual feelings involve our whole bodies.”
If this formulation sounds unduly nervous now, it’s because the discussions women were having about sex in those days were trying to tread a very fine line: challenging the defining role claimed for the penis by sexologists, doctors and psychoanalysts, without ignoring the fact that many women get a great deal of pleasure from penetrative sex.
Clearly the old definitions would no longer do, not just because they excluded lesbians but because they came perilously close to characterising women, in Germaine Greer’s famous phrase, as “female eunuchs”. There was another paradox here, in that Freudian discourse had persuaded many people who should know better to regard women as wounded, castrated, lacking the absolutely vital sexual organ – and yet so sexually powerful that they posed a danger to men, who were all too easily aroused by women’s bodies and their behaviour.
This argument has raised its ugly head once again in recent weeks, with Clinton characterised as the victim of a young woman who was fresh out of college and had not yet had her romantic fantasies tested in the real world.
Clinton is a Southern Baptist. And here, I think, lies a clue to the origins of his view that only vaginal penetration counts as “real” sex. All the other acts – fellatio, cunnilingus, even anal sex – are to do with pleasure rather than procreation, while the Christian view of sex, particularly the fundamentalist view, is that it is permissible only if conception is the likely outcome. That is why the Roman Catholic church remains implacably opposed to contraception, while several US states in which religious affiliations are particularly strong maintain legal prohibitions on oral and anal sex.
Yet the vast majority of sexual acts do not result in procreation. For most of us, this is a deliberate decision, even if it flouts the tenets of organised religion. Indeed, the invention of effective oral contraception is widely seen as the culmination of the long struggle to break the link between sex and conception, allowing women to enjoy coitus without a monthly panic about whether or not they are pregnant.
Not everyone is happy about this, as I discovered when a well-known scientist interrogated me recently about something I had written. Why, he demanded, do I have sexual relationships with men when I don’t intend to have children? The obvious answer – for pleasure, like almost everyone else I know – disconcerted him, confirming that the old puritan ethic dies hard. We can discern its traces not just in our own lives and unexamined attitudes to sex, but in dramas like the one currently being played out in Washington.
Clinton’s reluctant admission that he did have sex with Lewinsky is a victory not just for truth but in the struggle to substitute a wider definition for one that fails to acknowledge the diversity of human sexual experience. Public opinion, unlike the president, already seems to be heading in this direction, with polls demonstrating that most Americans consider his definition of sex absurdly narrow.
One of the most bizarre aspects of the Lewinsky affair is that the president, desperately trying to maintain a fiction about the sanctity of his marriage, has dealt a mortal blow to a definition of sex that is puritan in origin and unworkable in practice.