Heather Corinna of Scarleteen provides a cool answer to a fairly troubling question from a young man who says he can no longer have intercourse with his partner because, he says, “I think about what I’m doing I feel like I’m stabbing her, or performing some kind of violent act on her.”** In the process she introduces what I think is a really, cool, really effective new euphemism for intercourse.

I think it might help if you made some adjustments to the way you think about intercourse and sex as a whole.

You use the word penetration, and talk about what you’re doing as stabbing or a kind of invasion. I also hear you saying that sex is something you are doing to your partner or on your partner rather than with your partner, or as something you are doing together. You frame sex — as many people do, unfortunately — as something you have, rather than as something people actively and jointly do or create.

Physically, metaphysically, and often emotionally and intellectually (sometimes even spiritually), sex is about people and their bodies interlocking in any number of ways, and about BOTH sets of genitals (or other parts), both bodies, both people being actively engaged, doing something together, not about one person doing something to, on or at the other.

I know that can be quite the mental headstand when there are so many ideas and presentations of intercourse as men forcing themselves into women, as vaginas or vulvas as somehow passive and only penises as active, and with heterosexual sex, as what men do to women, how men dominate women, but those ideas come more from political agendas and sexism — and reactions to inequality and those agendas — than they do from what is really happening with intercourse or other sex when any two (or more) people are sharing an experience that is mutually wanted, about mutual pleasure and real connectivity.

She said it here.

Interlocking, huh? It’s a really great alternative to the someone-has-to-be-topping-the-other ways of saying it like penetration or engulfing.

Another nice thing about “interlocking” is it’s not heteronormative. Nor, for that matter, is it particularly genital-specific. One can interlock any number of ways.

Mmm, interlocking. The word of the day is interlocking.

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See also:

- the rest of Heather’s post for the rest of her gentler-than-he-may-deserve attitude adjustment. – an earlier Scarleteen post about the Etiquette of Entry

[** Buying into the idea that penetration is by-definition injuring doesn’t seem that different from not caring whether or not it hurts. —fl]