Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Hmm. I react a little allergically whenever the word “should” appears in the same sentence as any sexual act. Including the idea – which is lovely without the normative wording – that “intercourse itself should be employed as ‘foreplay.’”

There’s also a real inconsistency here. In one post you argue that porn is absurd and impoverished because the money shot cliche ignores the fact that masturbating into the air doesn’t feel nearly as nice as working together with a partner toward a climax. But here you’re suggesting that PIV with male ejaculation (presumably in the vagina) should even be challenged as “desirable.” That seems to be substituting one rigid norm for another.

Decentering this as the default is one thing, but disparaging its importance risks ignoring many people’s lived experience. I’ve never once had a partner who wanted to ejaculate on me. Granted, all but my current partner predated the ubiquity of porn, and I’m sure women 20 years younger than me are having very different experiences. But just because some men are fetishizing the money shot and carrying it back into their own bedrooms doesn’t mean a facial actually feels better than coming in a wet, warm welcoming space.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t most men get far more pleasure out of ejaculating inside a woman than on her? Which of course is why withdrawal is significantly less reliable than condoms! Worse yet, it leaves a woman’s reproductive fate totally at the whim of her partner at a moment when he’s not clear-headed. (Nor should he be, if they’re doing it right! Any sexual act where one partner has to remain that detached is one where I’d rather not be in the room.) When you say you’re sanguine about withdrawal, it sounds like a purely intellectual exercise, totally detached from your own ethical system as I understand it.

As long as there’s no danger of pregnancy, at least some of us women actually enjoy the sensation of our partner coming inside us. There’s the wonderful sensation of him growing just a little larger in the moments before climax. There’s the physical and emotional pleasure of being still joined as he bucks and shudders and cries out. Even the slightly messy aftermath feels nice, if only because it’s a palpable reminder of earlier delights.

So I’m all in favor of us broadening our ideas of sexual pleasure. But I don’t see why this would have to mean rejecting the particular pleasures of “conventional” PIV sex. Nor am I even convinced that you would want to reject those pleasures yourself, figleaf – anymore than you, personally, would ever rely on withdrawal.

[E-oh! All good points, of course, Sungold. And I’d be the last person to say “you shouldn’t do that” regarding almost anything two adults decide to do together. I am questioning though, as I have in the past, whether that should be the default definition, or even practice of the end of sex. In other words, yes, it would be just as dumb to say sex shouldn’t end with PIV intercourse to ejaculation as it has been, for the last 2000 years or so, to say it should. —fl]