Julie of What’s your pleasure? asks how we define sex.

Can sex be a whole lot of different things (penetration, oral, foreplay, spanking, kissing, licking, sucking, fucking) with just one or two things in common that make that activity sex? Like the orgasm?
If an orgasm is mandatory for an act to be sex, then for years I was not having sex while my partner was.

What if I roll on over and give my partner a hand job, is that sex? He came, I didn’t, but I liked it…so….

Read her entire post here

I’ve tried to tackle this question a couple of times but I never feel like I’ve got it quite right but I’m going to try again.

I think it’s anything that knowingly produces arousal in each other whether or not you go any further. Thus just flirting or holding hands counts in my book, as does cybersex or phone sex. There are other threshholds to cross along the way but at least for me they seem to be more about degrees of risk (getting caught, transmitting illnesses, conceiving a child) and reward than about whether, at this point or that, you’re now having sex while a moment before you weren’t.

The problem with other definitions, at least for me, is that there’s no clean line that applies to everyone regardless of age, fertililty, gender preference, or kink/convention. At least to me it feels like there’s a continuum one steps into very, very early on in a relationship. An “outside” way to think about it might be to ask at what point a third-party observer would say you and a partner have stepped on the sex escalator, not whether or not you you ride it to an arbitrary top floor. Another way to think about it is at what point a third party would begin to feel jealous or hurt if they were involved with one or more of the involved parties. Finally, it could be said to be the point where a reasonably discrete third party seeking sex would say “oh, he/she/they’re not currently available.”

Yes, I agree my definition might also be a bit arbitrary but I think it’s more honest, and no more arbitrary, than hair splitting at the other end where one must quibble about whether this orifice touching that, in which position, and how extensively is really sex and not just “fooling around.”