Sex

The defining but secondary feature of intimate relationships

Our sexuality is a universal experience that we insist on making private. Although we all face the same challenges in becoming sexual and sustaining our sexuality, as a culture we do not support a single public forum where we can explore this most basic human trait as a community. Young people in particular are expected to fill in the blanks from elliptical courses on STD's and marriage. And married folks have only therapists for private exploration of their distress.

And it is no surprise that we have more misinformation and myth than insight. Listen to our language around sexuality and sex. If we say someone "got fucked" or "got the shaft", we are not talking about caring and pleasure. Calling someone a "prick" or a "cunt" would be some of our harshest put-downs. Sex is a metaphor for our best and our worst; it symbolizes love and hate. It is not surprising that we sometimes wonder afterwards whether we "made love" or something much less.

These few articles explore some of the more perplexing and more obscure aspects of sexuality.

Because sex is overwhelmingly a private experience with little feedback, we often wonder whether we are within range or not. Are we having it too much? Or too little? Is it as good as it might be? Or am I being short changed?

In any other domain of life we can benefit from critical feedback from a large group of peers or mentors. In sex, we more likely just stumbling blind. These two articles help define a baseline (good sex) and a goal (great sex).
 

The apparatus for having sex is given to us by genetics; the capacity for making love is something else entirely.

This article considers the shift in the nature of our sexuality as we go from the simplest (and single) encounter to the elaboration of sexuality in a multi-dimensional relationship.
 

The activity of being sexual may seem well defined, but the essence of the activity is not. This article attempts to define the themes that ripple through any sexual encounter. The purpose is not to be overly analytical, but just to suggest the outlines of the terrain so we can pick a path more easily.