As a society, we have some very conflicted views about sex.
We, as a species, need sex. Not only is it natural, but it’s also as essential to our survival as eating and breathing. And yet, somehow, it has become a taboo subject. And so, we use coded phrases such as “sleeping with” someone.
And all this does is dilute communication until it means nothing. If I say I “slept with someone”, the only way you can truly know what I mean is through context.
Why can’t we just be honest about what we mean?
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I got to thinking about this the other week when I realised I had “slept with” 3 separate women in a single week; a Friend, a Partner, and a Date.
The Friend
On Saturday, I slept with an old friend of mine.
We were hanging out on Saturday, and she had plans in town on Sunday as well. So, instead of driving in and out of town two days in a row, she crashed at mine overnight. And as we’re good friends, rather than making up the sofa, she slept in my bed with me.
Yes, just that. We literally slept together. We cuddled. We curled up, holding hands and discussing our lives. We kissed goodnight and then spooned as we fell asleep.
We were intimate emotionally, and we physically slept together. But we didn’t have sex.
The Partner
On Tuesday, I slept with my partner.
We’ve been together for about six months, and we were friends for a year or so before that. (Oh, and before you question how I can have a partner and be sleeping with other women, we’re polyamorous.)
There wasn’t anything particularly special about this night. We had simply scheduled a date night together. We had dinner, then went out to see a movie. Then we came back to mine, had great sex, and then curled up together to sleep.
We were emotionally intimate, we had sex, and we physically slept together.
The Date
On Thursday, I slept with a new date.
This was our second date. We’d been for a drink before, and this time I cooked dinner at mine. We shared a bottle of wine, and then one thing led to another, and we ended up in bed. We had an amazing time, and at the end of the night, as she was unable to spend the night, we drove home.
We weren’t emotionally intimate, we did have sex, but we didn’t physically sleep together.
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So, why I’m I writing about this?
Well, it’s to make a point. If I spoke about any of these three encounters separately, and I said, “I slept with someone”, no one would disagree this was an accurate description.
But all three experiences were different. Yes, there were similar beats. And yes, all three involved some kind of physical intimacy. But none of them was the same, and each night would only have worked with the specific person I was with at that time.
So why do we have such a generic phrase to describe them?
Even friends of mine tell me they skip any of my articles where I openly discuss my sex life
I can’t answer the question of why we need generic, vague words to describe sex and intimacy.
Our relationship with these things is a strange one. They have been a vital part of life for as long as humans have existed, and yet we still shy away from them. Even as we, as a society, grow more open about them, we still hide them away. Most people will agree that a healthy sex life is important in a relationship, but we still find it uncomfortable to openly discuss our sex lives at the dinner table. We want our children to be prepared for life as an adult, yet we push back against sex education in schools.
Even friends of mine tell me they skip any of my articles where I openly discuss my sex life, as they find it too “weird” to know that much about what I get up to. And I’m not exactly being explicitly detailed.
It’s almost as if we welcome sex and intimacy in our lives but are afraid addressing them head-on will somehow scare them off, like a startled animal.
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We, as a society, are still very judgemental about sex.
And because we are judgemental about sex, we create vague, nebulous euphemisms that allow us to say “I/You/They had sex” without actually grubbying ourselves with the actual words.
We say “slept with”. We say “a feast for the senses”. We say “The Beast with Two Backs”, “Netflix and Chill”, or “Afternoon Delight”. Anything rather than admitting that we did something as vulgar and aggressive as “we fucked”.
And while poetic language is great and all, perhaps we need to take a long hard look at exactly why we feel we need it so much when it comes to sex. Because we’re never going to have a completely honest relationship with our sexual selves until we’re comfortable talking about it and saying exactly what we mean.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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