It’s good sex if you feel as good or better about yourself and your partner(s) as you did before.
It’s bad sex if you feel bad or worse about yourself and your partner(s) after than you did before.
And that’s it. Orgasm count isn’t part of it. The specific type of relationship isn’t part of it. Whether it’s for or not for reproduction only isn’t part of it. Neither is age, or gender, or interest or orientation. Neither is skill nor experience. Nor what you actually do, or could do, or won’t do.
So those are very high-level definitions. And you can choose different ones. But that’s what I mean when I use those terms.
(Note: I’m aware that the spirit of the definitions could be lawyered or otherwise subverted, but then so can, say, the Geneva Conventions Against Torture. And I briefly considered changing them to the form “It’s good sex if you and your partner(s) feel…” But that introduces its own complexities and besides, no amount of qualifications will stop someone sufficiently determined to violate their spirit.)
First thought: that kinda
Submitted by SnowdropExplodes (not verified) on Sat, 2010-03-06 16:19.First thought: that kinda sucks for any woman who’s internalised your “2 rules of desire”, doesn’t it? It seems to rule out her ever having good sex, because automatically (it would appear) any sex she enjoys makes her (in her own eyes) a failure of a woman, no?
I’m also interested, based on this – would you then characterise some “moralist” approaches as essentially being attempts to make a lot of sexual encounters into “bad sex” rather than “good sex”?
I think these are perfectly
Submitted by Sungold (not verified) on Sat, 2010-03-06 20:49.I think these are perfectly reasonable definitions that I’m happy to embrace. Agreed, orgasms aren’t a necessary part of it, nice as they are. Maybe that’s easier for women to stipulate, since many of us don’t have a sense of entitlement about orgasming, and many of us have had lots of sex that didn’t include climaxing, at least not from straight PIV sex.
But if that’s your definition, then it’s also clear why you’d state you’ve had more “bad sex” in relationships, because frankly most of us don’t invest much into our feelings about ourselves or our partners in casual situations, and so it’s hard to “fail.” It’s also really sad to have a lot of bad sex in relationships, where the stakes are much higher. That’s not a value judgment on the worth of casual versus committed relationships. It’s a statement about how painful bad sex is when you love someone deeply. I’ve had some abysmal sex in a LTR but only as part of a fierce attempt to reclaim good sex as a raison d’etre for staying together as a couple. If bad sex felt like a life sentence? That is just soul-killing.
[Thanks for your thoughtful reply, Sungold. And yes, it occurred to me in the earlier post that I must not have been using a common definition of “good” and “bad” sex. With the result, perhaps ironically, that yeah, I do think there are more opportunities for and (possibly) greater risk of the negatives that are associated with “casual“sex inside long-term and (especially!) “traditional” relationships. The assumption by the Laura Ingrahams and Laura Sessions Stepps of the world, and numerous parsons and Popes, and of course Phyllis Schlafly is that a marriage certificate just magically negates all that. I say that’s at least a… mistake on their part. —fl]
Yes, those sound like
Submitted by Lynn Gazis-Sax (not verified) on Sat, 2010-03-06 22:02.Yes, those sound like reasonable definitions.
because frankly most of us don’t invest much into our feelings about ourselves or our partners in casual situations, and so it’s hard to “fail.”
The other thing is that, if you do feel worse about yourself after casual sex (such as, for example, because it doesn’t fit with your self-image), you tend not to repeat the experience, as it’s not that hard to delay sex until you can form some sort of relationship (relative to, say, not having sex till you can get married, which might mean waiting a decade or more). But if you feel worse about yourself after relationship sex, you may keep trying for longer, because you’d already invested yourself in making it work. And, probably, since you got into the relationship, at some point in the past it did work, and you can spend a lot of time trying and failing to recapture that.
(There are some vocal exceptions, people who report that they had tons of sex that they now consider too casual and say they felt miserable doing. And I’m willing to believe them, because particular people can have particular experiences that send them in dysfunctional directions; I just tend to think they’re the exception, and most people don’t keep having sex that feels too casual and empty to them, over and over and over.)
[“if you do feel worse about yourself after casual sex … you tend not to repeat the experience…” As Chingona, above, suggests this may not always be true. But I agree that’s going to be the strong trend. One that for the reasons you outlined may not feel available in long-term ones. This still doesn’t mean that long-term relationships aren’t as good as short ones. (More like the opposite, that short-term ones aren’t automatically as bad as often advertised relative to long ones.) Thanks, Lynn. —fl]
Responding mostly to your
Submitted by Geekgirl (not verified) on Sat, 2010-03-06 23:34.Responding mostly to your parenthetical, I wonder if there are more men doing this than we might think. In general, you’re probably right. And certainly the “Oh No, kids these days are hooking up” alarmist types are going to focus on the narrative of a young girl who has too much empty casual sex and regrets it. But the societal messages being what they are, young women who find casual sex empty frequently can fall back closer to the virgin side of the virgin/whore dichotomy and avoid it.
But I wonder if a lot of guys, facing the cultural idea that they should always want sex, with or without any emotional connection, end up having casual sex they don’t actually feel that good about just because it’s what guys are supposed to do. And given that part of the cultural meme about masculinity involves suppressing emotions I wonder if there are guys who never really consider if they feel good about the sex they’re having.
I don’t know. I’m not a guy so most of this is total speculation, but there’s been a lot of discussion about how sexism hurts men too on this blog lately, so I thought I’d throw it out.
[Thanks for raising the point, Geekgirl! You’re right that the gender wedge built for women at least gives you a choice. Young men’s choice is to be either a horndog or… gay/broken/“impotent”/unmanly. And not to put too fine a point on it, but if sort of like the Pope men being sexual is defined as correct… the internal conflict surely ups the probability that they’re going to approach the people they have sex with with detachment, alienation, and even malice. Definite food for thought. —fl]
Yep, the fact that I can tell
Submitted by Dw3t-Hthr (not verified) on Mon, 2010-03-08 22:54.Yep, the fact that I can tell that casual sex would be bad for me means I have never had any. Which makes the whole “where is there more bad sex, casual or committed-relationship sex” come down to a division-by-zero error in my case.
“It’s bad sex if you feel bad
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 2010-03-07 12:40.“It’s bad sex if you feel bad or worse about yourself and your partner(s) after than you did before. “
What if someone’s depressed, and generally don’t feel good about herself, but still would enjoy some sex, even if it wouldn’t resolve that person’s problems? If it isn’t making that person feeling worse about herself, than before, but the problems doesn’t disappear either? Do you mean, that depressed people shouldn’t have sex at all, just because it won’t be ideal anyway?
I’m not attacking or being ironic, just trying to understand. (You have written about some anti-depression-pills that you had taken, so I guess you had a depression at some point of your past – how did these rules apply to that period, if you happened to have sex then? If I’m not too indiscrete asking this. )
[Hi Anonymous. Dang it all, I knew that saying “if you feel bad or worse…” instead of just “if you feel worse…” could be confusing. I put it in as sort of a clause against someone saying “yeah, so if you already feel bad about a partner it counts as “good sex” no matter what you do to them.” In other words it doesn’t cover the case you have in mind where you just feel bad, period, from depression. It’s there to keep people from being exploitative and thinking they’re getting a way with it. Good question though.
As for the period when I was taking an anti-depressant, that actually really informed my definition of “good sex.” It pretty much completely killed my ability to have orgasms, but, perhaps surprisingly, it didn’t reduce my interest in or enjoyment of sex at all! Yes, it would have been even nicer if I had been, for both me and my partner. But it did make me feel very good about both of us, and didn’t make either of us feel bad or worse. Hope that helps, and let me know if it doesn’t. Thanks for asking. —fl]
thanks. I was also having
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 2010-03-08 23:52.thanks. I was also having problems with english (as a second languag) and understanding the inner life of non-asperger-istic people, so if I didn’t understand it well, that doesn’t mean, that the thing is not clear enough in itself.
:)
same anon (I don’t think, that my comments here deserve a Strong Identity, but I might invent a name one day, it seems more polite).
[Your comments are welcome with or without a strong identifier, Anonymous, but another name (even, say, Anony for short) would make it easier for other people, including me, to tell which anonymous commenter you were. :-) Thanks. —fl]
So simple but so
Submitted by Lilith (not verified) on Sun, 2010-03-07 13:58.So simple but so true.
“It’s good sex if you feel as good or better about yourself and your partner(s) as you did before.
It’s bad sex if you feel bad or worse about yourself and your partner(s) after than you did before. “
I find this is very true because just due to biology I in particular don’t cum as often as my parnter (thus an equal O ratio doesn’t count as good sex) but lately I’ve been finding sex to be a lot worse. It was hard to put my finger on it because not much had changed physically, but I guess I just started to notice a lack of euthasim from my partner and THATS what made me feel bad and the sex bad.