Closer to Free

[omorka]

With all respect to George Clinton (and, for that matter, En Vogue), free your ass and your mind will follow. Good, hot sex that breaks a taboo is the best mind-expanding trip there is. Even better than sleep deprivation, caffeine, and too much sucrose, good as that is.

So someone said in an IM conversation:

It was very hard to be pro sex when I was surrounded by so many stories of women who couldn't enjoy themselves anymore. Or never could.

Of course, that precise situation is why I am rabidly pro-sex. The myriad tiny sexual assaults that every woman experiences every day, and the larger sexual assaults that so many of us are scarred by, are not what I mean by sex. Sex is a duet (or trio or quartet or . . .), an activity that can be merely as fluffy fun as a game of Scrabble or badminton, as simultaneously wild and structured as a jazz improv group, or as transcendent as the interaction between worshippers and their God/dess/e/s. But it is a verb, an action, and it requires multiple participants. One person using another as a sex toy is not sex, although it may be masturbation if the user successfully gets off on it and isn't just using it for the power thrill. And the best way to combat that is to promote good sex in all its forms. (Note, by the way, that I'm not in any way anti-masturbation; I'm opposed to using people.)

Sex is not an object, any more than dance is an object or jogging is an object. It is certainly not something that women 'own' and men can take by force, or even something that women give to men or men give to women or lesbians give to each other. Making sex an object seems very clearly related to making women objects, especially since the worst historical patriarchal cultures seem to associate women with nothing except sex and its consequences.

We need a better word, though. 'Sex' is in common usage a noun, and 'sex up' has the same failing as 'fuck,' 'screw,' 'boink,' 'shag,' and all the other rough terms and euphemisms - it's transitive. Subject fucks object. That won't do, either; that all too easily implies a power differential, and while I'm all for nice, sane, consensual* power differentials, I want that to be something explicitly negotiated, not a default assumption and certainly not one coded in the language. 'Copulate' is intransitive, but it's terribly clinical. 'Have sex [with]' looks okay, but if you poke at it, it's making sex an object again, albeit in this case one that one shares like a food item. Dick had a large pepperoni pizza with Jane, and then Jane had sex with Dick. Nope, still don't like it. 'Coitus' is too clinical and it's a noun. That makes me mad, as if it were a verb it would be great and a multilingual pun; the source is Latin, coire, from the co- prefix meaning 'with' and the verb (in this form, the infinitive) ire meaning 'to go' or 'to come' depending on context. I'm all for coming, obviously ;-) , and that with-ness is part of the meaning I want (although the original implication in the Latin is probably a john going with a prostitute up to her workroom - not quite the image I had in mind).

This is the oppressor's language. These are the master's tools. Yet I refuse to believe that we cannot use them to dismantle the master's house; a hammer is a hammer is a hammer, morning or evening. Is there a word we can use? We have a few already - polyamory, polyfidelity, compersion - that the Down-Presser-Man's language didn't have before. Can we come up with a good one, an equal one, for sex-as-a-verb?


*Note that I'm trying to avoid the term "consent" for non-power-exchange sex. Again, language issues: to "consent" to something implies that it is being done to you, not with you. Highly appropriate for Dom/sub relations, and possibly top/bottom ones, but not for egalitarian ones.

Comments

[altamira16.livejournal.com]

make love with as opposed to make love to

[awbryan.livejournal.com]

Second the motion, along with the equivalent sleep with and go to bed with. The Latin equivalents for all three (analogizing) would be conamoro, consomno, and concubo. English verbs would then be {conamore, conamoring}, {consomne, consomning}, and {concube, concubing}. Since English is a language with many shades of meaning, it is well to have synonyms that slightly different connotations can attach to. Conamore sounds the most beautiful to moi as it associates with all those Romantic (and romantic :-)) usages of ami in French and Spanish literature... I have some other associative ideas but I'll withhold for now so as to 'let a thousand flowers bloom'.

P.S.: Well, I'll point out one: concubo- now where have I heard THAT root before? ;-) ;-)

[princejvstin.livejournal.com]

Which sort of disqualifies Concubing as a possibility.

I do agree that finding a nice latin word that can be hijacked for the purpose might be a good thing.

[quantumduck.livejournal.com]

I've always been a fan of the phrase 'we made love'. I would hasten to add that this verbal construction easily includes acts which fall short of coitus. That's just fine with me.

I'm also a big fan of hopelessly Byzantine constructions which involve metaphors from the long history of obfuscation of sexual acts. Many of them have a clear sense of involving two people equally in something bigger:

Make whoopie
Tickle the ivories
go three rounds with
ring the bells
rolled in the hay

My personal phrases are usually more obscure, and I choose not to share them here. My desire for obfuscation, and my love of oddities are all too clear to me when I speak of such matters. If some better language comes along I will be among the most vocal in using it, I assure you.

[quantumduck.livejournal.com]

I've always had trouble with 'sleep' and 'go to bed' as phrases for sex. This is because actually sleeping with someone in a bed is an exciting thing in itself. It is a separate act, and many young people don't get to enjoy it until years after having had sex.

[awbryan.livejournal.com]

But that's exactly why we need multiple verbs!

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I've occasionally found the somewhat-obsolete term "to bed / bedding" to be useful. It doesn't strongly imply being-done-to, and either gender can be the initiating party.

[omorka.livejournal.com]

I have two objections to that:

1) It's euphemistic. While in a polyamorous culture, one might have sex with most of the people one loved who were not under incest taboo, it's certainly not the case in our culture now, nor in any historical culture I can think of. I also don't think it's necessary to love someone in order to have good sex with them, although liking them is prerequisite. If we're going to talk about sex, I don't want it couched in terms of the normative attendant emotional states.

2) It makes sexualove an object again. I agree that the imagery of making something together is better than having something, but made or had, it's still a thing. And at least love is still properly used as a verb.

[omorka.livejournal.com]

I like conamore. The other two are too euphemistic for my taste, but I can see them being useful for people who prefer obfuscation. (Although concube might be useful, drawing from its more current meaning, for describing what secondary lovers in poly networks do. ;-) )

[omorka.livejournal.com]

"Making love" deals with the transitivity problem but is both hopelessly euphemistic and suffers from making sex a noun again. "Go three rounds with" uses the metaphor of sex as a fight, which I hate hate hate. I've never heard "ring the bells" as a sexual metaphor; I've heard "ring my bell" or "I rang her bell," which gets us back to transitivity (and I'm not sure I think the idea of the male member as a clapper isn't also tainted with violence).

And of course I think euphemism is a tool of the patriarchy to begin with - half of us can't think about it, and all of us can't communicate about it, if we don't have good and proper words. To shame us into not talking about sex to begin with, and then encouraging us to use belittling or 'clever' metaphors for it instead, makes it all the much more difficult for us to truly liberate our sexuality from their expectations and suppressions.

[ghostdogmeta.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm.


Tricky.

I shall make grunting and barking noises, and cogitate upon this
conundrum of consummation. More later, perhaps.

Haven't done much bell-ringing, have you?

[awbryan.livejournal.com]

As a member in good standing of the North American Guild of Bell-Ringers (http://www.nagcr.org/) I can speak with some degree of authority on this subject. Bell-ringing is not a violent act at all; people who try to pull a bell hard may get one swing out of her (or him for tenor bells) but inevitably fail to maintain a rhythm. On the contrary, it requires more finesse than strength. The bell weighs more than you do, and is therefore counterbalanced; ringing is a matter of feather touches, of tiny adjustments, of paying careful attention with eyes, ears, touch, and mind every second to the bell, to her timing and the sounds she makes, and exactly how hard she's pulling at your rope (or not) at any moment.

Please note that I have utilized technical terms at all points in the preceding paragraph. However, I believe the appropriate metaphors are sufficiently obvious as to defy further attempts at elaboration. ;-)

My .02

[lady-valkyrie.livejournal.com]

In my household, due to the feline nature of all of the inhabitants (M removes the last of his things tomorrow) pouncing is the verb form we use. It does not necessarily mean intercourse, though it often does and it can be used as x pounces y or y pounced x or we pounced each other...it denotes the playfulness with which such an act is often approached, at least in this house...because in sex, sometimes one partner initiates, sometimes another, and sometimes there is this spontaneous mutual moment of passion...

Kris

Re: Haven't done much bell-ringing, have you?

[quantumduck.livejournal.com]

What I most love about bell ringing is the progression through all the combinatorics of the individual bell tones.

[quantumduck.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I agree there's a problem. I'm not sure I'd call metaphor a tool of the patriarchy, but it's also not ideal.