ABSTRACT
Greta Christina, a freelance writer who writes about sex, grappling with the question of what sex is, writes the following:
I’m having trouble here. Even the conventional standby – sex equals intercourse – has a serious flaw: it includes rape, which is something I emphatically refuse to accept. As far as I’m concerned, if there’s no consent, it ain’t sex. But I feel that’s about the only place in this whole quagmire where I have a grip … At what point in an encounter does it become sexual? If an encounter that begins nonsexually turns into sex, was it sex all along? What about sex with someone who’s asleep? Can you have a situation where someone is having sex and the other isn’t? It seems that no matter what definition I come up with, I can think of some real-life experience that calls it into question.
