What flashed through my head head was "Seven!" Doing this had some interesting resuts. 'd look for patterms in the numbers, I had a theory for a while ing re every fourth lover turned out to be really great in bed, and would ponder what the cosmic signnany people what the cosmic significance of the phenomenon might be. Sometimes I'd try to determine what kind of person I was by how I'd had sex with. At eighteen, I'd had sex with ten different people. Did that mak make me normal, repressed, a total slut, a free-spirited bohemian, or what? Not that ant pohd my numbers with anyone eise'sI didn't. It was my own exclusive structure, a game I plaved in the privacy of my own head. or what? that I compared my num

Then the n he numbers started getting a little larger, as numbers tend to do, and keeping track became more start difficult. I'd remember that the last one was seventeen and so this one must be eightee must be eighteen, but then I'd having doubts about whether I'd been keeping score accuratel rately or not. I'd lie awake at night thinking to and.. no, wait, myself, well, there was Brad, and there was that guy on my birthday, and th and there was David and... n I forgot that guy I got drunk with at the social my first week at college so that's seven, eight, nine and by two in the morning I'd finally have it figured out. But there was was always a nagging suspicion maybe I'd missed someone. ed someone, some dreadful tacky little scum I tacky little scumball that I was trying to forget about having little scumball, I wanted invited inside my body. And as much as I maybe wanted to forget about the sleazy litt more to get that number right.

It kept getting harder, though. I began to question what counted as sex and what didn't. There was that time with Gene, for instance. I was pisseo stance. I was pissed off at my bovfriend, David, for cheating on me. It was a I been discouraging him. went see him that night to gripe about Davi crisis, and Gene and I were friends and he'd been trying to get at me for weeks and I hadn't exactly beer and he gave me a backrub, and we talked and touched and confided and hugged, and then we started kissing, and then we snuggled up a little closer, and other, you know, and e started fondling each other, you then all heck broke loose, and we rolled around on the bed groping and rubbing and grabbing and smooching and pushing and pressing and squeezi ueezing. He never actually it in. wanted to too, but I had this thing about being faithful to my boyfriend, so I kept saying, "No, you can't do that, Yes, that feels so good, No, wait that's too much. Yes, yes, don't stop. No, never even got our clothes off. Jesus Christ, though, n, it was some night. One of the best, really. But for a long time I didn't courn didn't count it as one of the times I'd had sex. He never got inside, so it didn't count.

Later, months and years later, when I lay awake putting my list together, I'd start to wonder: Why doesn't Gene count? Dos he not count because he never got inside? Or does he not count because I had to preserve my moral edge over David, my status as t status as the patient, ever faithful, cheated-on, martyred girlfriend, and if what I did with Gene counts then I don't get to feel wounded and superior?

Years later, I did end up fucking Gene and I felt a profound relief because, at last, he definitely had a number, and I knew for sure that he did in fact count. Then howdy, did that ever shoot hole holes in the system. I'd always made my list of sex partners by defining sex as penile-vaginal intercourse-you know, screwing. It's a pretty simple distinction, a straightforward binary system. Did it go in or didn't it? Yes or no? One or zero? On or off? Granted, it's a pretty but it's the customary one, with an an ancient and respected tradition behind it, and when i was just screwing men, there was no compelling reason to question it.

But with women, well, first of all there's [generally] no penis, so right from the start the tracking system is defective. And then, there are so many ways women car sex with each other, touching and licking and grinding and fingering and fisting-with dildoes or vibrators or vegetables or whatever happens to be lying around the house, or with nothing at all except human bodies. Of course, that's true for sex between women and men as well. But between women, no one method has a centuries- old tradition of being the one that counts. Even when [cisgender women] do fuck each other, there's no dick, so you don't get that feeling of This Is What's Important, We Are Now Having Sex, objectively speaking, and all that other stuff is just foreplay or afterplay. So when I started having sex with women, the binary system had to go, in favor of a more inclusive definition

Which meant, of course, that my list of many people I'd had sex with was completely trashed. In order to maintain it I would have had to go back and reconstruct the whole thing and include all those people I'd necked with and gone down on and dry-humped and played touchy-feely games with. Even the question of who filled the all-important Number One slot, something I'd never had any doubts about before, would have to be re-evaluated.

By this time I'd kind of lost interest in the list anyway. Reconstructing it would be more trouble than it was worth. But the crucial question remained: What counts as having sex with someone?

tant for me to know. You have to know what qualifies as sex because when you have sex with It was important efonship changes. Right? Right? I's not that sex ite x itself has to change things all that someone your relationship much. But knowing you've had sex, being conscious of a sexual connection, standing around making polite h. But knowin conversation with someone while thinking changes lieved. And if having sex with a friend can confuse or change the friendship, think how thinking to yoursell, I've had sex witth this person," that's what ch things. Or so I believed. things. C bizarre things can get when you're not sure whether you've had sex with thern or not.

The problem was, as I kept doing more kinds of sexual things, the line between sex and not- sex kept getting more hazy and indistinct. As I brought more into my sexual experience, things were showing up on the dividing line demanding demanding my attention. It wasn't just that the territory I labeled sex was expanding. The line itself had swollen, dilated, been transformed into a vast gray region. It had become less like a border line itself had and more like a demilitarized zone

Which is a strange place to live. Not a bad place, just strange. It's like juggling, or watchmaking, or playing the piano-anything that de anything that demands complete concentrate entrated awareness and attention. It It feels feels like cognitive dissonance, only pleasant. It feels like waking up from a compelling and realistic bad dream. It feels like the way you feel when you realize that everything you know is wrong, and a bloody good thing too, because it was painful and stupid and it really screwed you up.

But, for me, living in a question naturally leads to searching earching for for an an answer. I can't simply shrug, throw up my hands, and say, "Damned if I know." I have to explore the unknown frontiers, even if I don't bring back any secret treasure. So even if it's incomplete or provisional, I do want to find some sort of definition of what is and isn't sex

I know when I'm feeling sexual. I'm feeling sexual if my pussy's wet, my nipples are hard, my palms are clammy, my brain is fogged, my skin is tingly and super-sensitive, my butt muscles clench, my heartbeat speeds up, I have an orgasm (that's the real gi having sex with them. Good Lord, if I called it sex every time I was attracted to someone who the same as having sex returned the favor I'd be even more bewildered than I am now. Even being sexual with someone someone isn't the same as having sex with them. I've danced and flirted with too many people, given and received too many sexy, would-be-seductive backrubs, to believe otherwise.

I have friends who say, if you thought of it as sex when you were doing it, then it was.

That's an interesting idea. It's certainly helped me construct a coherent sexual history without being a revisionist swine: redefining my past according to currer current definitions. But it really just begs the question. It's fine to say that sex is whatever I think it is; but then what do I think it is? What if, when I was doing it, I was wondering whether it counted?

Perhaps having sex with someone is the conscious, consenting, mutually acknowledged pursuit of shared sexual pleasure. Not a bad definition. If you are turning each other on and you say so and you keep doing it, then it's sex. It's broad enough to encompass a lot of sexual behavior beyond genital contact/orgasm; it's it, then it's sex. I distinct enough not to include every instance of sexual awareness or arousal; and it contains the elements I feel are vital-acknowledgment, consent, reciprocity, rocity, and and the pursuit of pleasure. But what about the situation where one person consents to sex without really enjoying it? Lots of people (myself included) one have had sexual interactions that we didn't find satisfying or didn't really want and, unless they were actually forced on us against our will, I think most of us wou

Maybe if both of you (or all of you) think of it as sex, then it's sex whether you're having fun or not. That of think clears up the problem of sex that's consented to but not wished-for or enjoyed. Unfortunately, it begs the question again, only worse: now you have to mesh different people's vague and inarticulate notions of what question again, worse is and isn't sex and find the place where they overlap. Too messy.

How about sex as the conscious, consenting, mutually acknowledged pursuit of sexual pleasure of at /east one of the people involved. That's better. It has all the key components, and it includes the situation where one person is doing it for a reason other than sexual pleasure-status, reassurance, money, the satisfaction and pleasure of someone they love, etc. But what if neither of you is enjoying it, if you're both doing it because you think the other one wants to? Ugh.

I'm having trouble here. Even the conventional standby-sex equals intercourse-has a serious flaw: it includes rape, which is something I emphatically refuse to accept. As far as I'm concerned, if there's no h is something I consent, it ain't sex. But I feel that's about the only place in this this whole whole quagmire where I have a grip. The longer I think about the subject, the more questions I come up with. At what point in an encounter does it become sexual? If an interaction that begins nonsexually turns into sex, was it sex all along? What about ex and the other sex with someone who's asleep? Can you have a situation where one person is having sex and the othe isn't? It seems that no matter what definition definition I I come c up with, I can think of some real-life experience that calls it into question.

For instance, a couple of years ago I attended (well, hosted) an all-girl sex party. Out of the twelve other women there, there were only a few with whom I got seriously physically nasty. The rest I kissed or hugged or talked dirty with or just smiled at, or watched while they did seriously physically nasty things with each other. If we'd been alone. d been alone, I'd probably say that what I'd done with most of the women there didn't coun re didn't count as having sex. But the experience, which was hot and sweet and silly and very, very special, had been created by all of us, and although I only really got do got down with a few, I felt that I'd been sexual with all of the women there. Now, when I meet one of the women from that party, I always ask myself: Have we had sex hot woman.

For instance, when I was first experimenting with sadomasochism, I got together with a really hot wo We were negotiating about what we were going to do, what would and wouldn't be okay, uld and wouldn't be okay, and she said she wasn't sure she wanted to have sex. Now we'd been explicitly planning all kinds of fun and games spanking, bondage, obedience which I strongly identified as sexual a sexual activity. In her mind, though, sex meant direct genital contact, and she didn't necessarily want to do that with me. Playing with her turned out to be a tremendously erotic experience, arousing and stimulating and almost unbearably satisfying. But we spent the whole evening without even touching each other's genitals. And the And the fact that our definitions were so different made me wonder: Was it sex?

For instance, I worked for a few months as a nude dancer at a peep show. In case you've never been to a peep show, it works like this: the customer goes into a tiny, dingy into a tiny, dingy black box, kind of like a phone booth puts in quarters, and a metal plate goes up; the customer looks through a window at a little room/stage h a window at e a guy came into one booths and started watching where naked women are dancing. One time, a guy came into one of the booths and started watching me and masturbating. came squatted in o sta each other and watched each other and masturbated, and we both had a fabulous time. (I couldn't believe I out somebody has to do it...) After he left I thought to myself: was being paid to masturbate-tough job, but son time. (I couldn Did we just have sex? I mean, if it had been someone I knew, and if there had been no glass and no quarters, there'd be no question in my mind. Sitting two feet apart from someone, watching each other masturbate? Yup, I'd call that sex all ri tsex all right. But this was different, because it was a stranger, anger, and and because of the glass and the quarters. Was it sex?

I still don't have an answer.