This is a post about exercise, sex, and pleasure, but I wouldn’t be writing it if I hadn’t once worked on regulatory policy for trucking. In that former life of mine, my trucking project made me intimately acquainted with the concept of fungibility – the idea that certain goods are equivalent enough that they can be easily exchanged or substituted for other goods.
So anyway, this post is about sex, not trucks, and it’s only barely about exercise. Maybe it’s just that I really never understood the appeal of running (and feel okay with that ever since my brother-in-law told me that injured runners keep his physical therapy practice in the black). But I just can’t get on board with the idea that good sex is comparable to a good run, or to anything else either, though figleaf makes as good a case as possible for their comparability:
My big epiphany this evening, by the way, is that sex feels really, really good but it’s not the only activity, not even the only physical one, that feels that way. And now eight or ten hours after running I’m still feeling a warm endorphin rush. Eight hours after even the best sex and I’m… mostly ready for more sex.
Again, that’s not to say sex isn’t pretty darn nice, and I’m actually a little worried that you’re going to read this and say “he’s saying sex isn’t that great.” But it isgreat. It’s just there’s other stuff that’s really, really great too. And I think, or at least I’m considering, that we overweight sex with so much other significance that we (ironically) feel guilty and/or crazy and/or maybe even “kinky” about admitting there could be anything that could compete with it.
It’s definitely blissful to be in the flow of making music, writing, even teaching – to inhabit that space where I know and feel that everything is right my whole self engaged in something I love and do well.
Meditation. Very dark chocolate. The aroma of lilacs in my back yard.
But I wonder about the wisdom of comparing any of these things. Yes, they’re all embodied experiences that give us a chance to transcend the everyday. But I see no need to claim (as figleaf did in his post’s title) that “there are some things that feel better than sex.” Why rank them? Is it just that those other things can be done on our own, without a partner, whenever we feel moved? Because the only reason for ranking that I can see is the intense pressure to sublimate our libido into other projects, whether that pressure comes from society or from a reluctant/unavailable/nonexistent partner.
Of course, sublimation isn’t the same as fungibility, either, and it never pretended to be. The whole point of sublimation, after all, is to transform libidinal energy into work or other endeavors that society deems more important than sex. Sublimation isn’t the same as repression, and some of it is absolutely necessary. We can’t all spend every day rutting. Freud was right that civilization depends on it. And yet, I can’t help but think there’s no shortage of sublimation, at least among my friends and acquaintances. If anything, we’re shorting ourselves on pleasure.
As for the overloading of sex, I think it’s helpful to distinguish between generally harmful aspects of this and benign or potentially enriching ones. The harmful freighting of sex usually has very little to do with pleasure; it comes into play when, for instance, a woman’s “purity” or experience or looks determine her worth, or a man’s “conquest” determines his status. It’s toxic, as well, to say that sex must *always* be wedded to love. That assumption undergirds abstinence-only sex “education” and leads too many people (women, especially) to feel emotionally bruised when a hookup doesn’t evolve into a relationship.
And yet. We sell sex short if we insist it has nothing to do with love. The potential for deeply connecting with someone – and not just getting off – is a pretty important one. Otherwise we’d all be perfectly content with solo sex. Otherwise couples in sexless marriages would be as happy as any other; but on average, they’re not. Within a relationship, sex helps us stay connected, be more forgiving, find more delight.
Speaking as a woman, I’m also wary of playing down the importance of sex, which is what we do if we treat it as fungible. Much of my time is spent in ordinary activities that give me deep satisfaction – mothering, reading, writing, teaching, discussing – but their rewards are quite different than the pleasures of sex. We’ve spent over 10,000 years subordinating female sexuality to patriarchal imperatives, and only about the past 40 trying to claim it as valuable and autonomous. (Okay, if you count Victoria Woodhull, that bumps it up to 140 years – still a nanosecond in human history.) Calling sex just one pleasure among many not only denies the particularity of sexual pleasure. It also neutralizes the radical potential of unfettering women’s sexuality. And yes, here I might be overloading sex a bit, myself, but I also think it’s true that people can’t be truly free if they’re sexually repressed. Still: women’s sexual pleasure is a feminist issue.
As for endorphins that last eight hours? Well, as cool as that sounds, I’m not likely to experience that for myself. I’m going to stick to my trusty bike riding; no running for me. But I’d say being ready again for sex after eight hours isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
Good writing.
Thanks! I’m always happy for a compliment.
I’m probably just being paranoid (heck, look a the title of my post!) but I really, seriously wasn’t trying to diminish sex when I wrote that post. (That was the part I was afraid about, that it would seem like I was saying it’s overrated. Overloaded, yes, overrated, definitely not!)
Instead I was saying something a whole lot closer to we underrate other things that bring us separate, non-fungible, but equally pleasurable things in life.
I’m not sure if it’s hilly near you but heck, there’s something awfully underrated about flying down a long, gentle hill on a bike on a warm, sunny day.
figleaf
Of course it’s hilly here – I live in Appalachia, after all! But most of the streets are bumpy brick, so flying down them risks flying off them. There was one great downhill slope in my old Berlin neighborhood, but it’s never been the same since I realized during my first pregnancy that I risked more than myself if I didn’t ride the brakes …
But anyway, figleaf, it was precisely the title of your post that started ranking these things! And I still don’t understand why you inserted “disloyal” into your title. Disloyal to whom, or to what?
And yes, ranking diminishes not only the (potential) goodness of sex, but also its specificity.
I know very well that you like sex. I wasn’t suggesting otherwise. But I don’t feel like you’ve responded to what I actually did say.
For instance, I think the question of how we freight sex with meanings beyond simple pleasure is really complex, and I tried to open that up in this post. Not all of the freighting is bad. Sex is about more than pleasure. It’s also about how we relate to our partners. Portraying sex as only about pleasure almost inevitably leads to seeing that other person as a mere means to an end. Even in a short-term or “unserious” liaison, the other person is still a full-fledged person. Defining sex as one pleasure among many can short-circuit that recognition.
Running, for instance, doesn’t have this potential for interpersonal enrichment – or harm. If you hurt your knees running, it’s only your knees. But running is also unlikely to seriously deepen your relationship with your partner.
And finally, I’d agree that we underrate sensual pleasures across the board. We live in a society that commodifies sex (and food, and many other things) while simultaneously disparaging the pleasures they bring us.
Hey, here from Feministe, and I loved this post! I think the fungible-commodity model of sex that you reject also has a lot to do with the Nice Guy phenomenon, where guys consider paying for dinner/ taking you out/ listening/ whatever equivalent to sex and treat dates like an exchange of commodities.
Thanks for the kind words. Yeah, the post doesn’t really address sex-as-commodity, but it’s a related issue for sure. It doesn’t enter into this post because I was responding to something figleaf said, and he absolutely would not endorse the commodity model; he has spent a lot of words arguing very strongly against it.
That said, I think the non-fungibility of sex goes some way toward explaining why people can feel and act rather desperate when they’re not having any sex. I have no sympathy or patience for the “Nice Guy” behavior you describe. Ditto for the pick-up artist/seduction community approach. Both express an idea that they’re entitled to partnered sex – which of course no one is, because there’s that little matter of one’s potential partner wanting it too! But I do have quite a lot of sympathy for the deprivation these guys feel, underneath their entitled behavior. As a woman, I’ve had dry spells too, and they are painful and lonely when they drag on and on. If sex really were fungible, one could just tell these guys (literally!) to take a hike. If sex really were just an avenue to pleasure and orgasm, solo sex might do just as well. But it isn’t, and it doesn’t.
Dropping in from Feministe.
Sex is not fungible, no. Replacing sex with other units of physical/emotion/relational activity is a no-go for the vast majority of people. But I do disagree that pleasure cannot be ranked.
See, food items are also not fungible. If I want chocolate, I want chocolate, and eating an apple is not going to satisfy me. On the other hand, it’s completely possible that most of the time (just not in this hypothetical instance) that I prefer apples to chocolate, and that eating apples, in general, makes me feel better than eating chocolate. Most of us juggle these preferences in our diet and also will say things like “I like apples better than chocolate”. So I don’t really see a problem with saying things like “Running feels better to me than sex” because I see that as a generalized statement about long term preferences, not one that says that given every opportunity for sex, I’m going to go get dressed and grab a pair of sneakers.
The problem, I think comes in when societal messages tell us about what we ought to prefer, and why I think I made a strong connection with Figleaf’s statement. Both he and I are men, and one of the messages that gets sent to men in our culture is that sex is physical activity that ought to give us the most pleasure, the apex of the pleasure pyramid, superior to all things all the time. (Well, maybe not quite that exaggerated, but occasionally it feels like it.) And that’s what I read as the “disloyal” in the post title. And I’d say, hell yeah it’s disloyal—but disloyal in the best of ways, disloyal to patriarchal notions of what sex means to men.
Women, in our culture, are not sent that same message, but are sent a whole other constellation of other fucked-up messages about pleasure from sex. And so, I think, claiming that some things feel better (to a particular person) than sex AND claiming that sex is a particular pleasure than cannot be swapped out for other things are both statements that lead toward greater sexual freedom and honesty.
I’m not sure the food analogy quite works for me; chocolate and apples are a lot more alike than chocolate and sex, though women in particular get a lot of messages that they ought to be interchangeable, or even that women ought to like chocolate more than sex!
Your point about the messages men get is well taken, and yet I think it’s useful to break it down further. Men are told that sex is the greatest of pleasures. But even more, they’re told that sex is a means to achieving status. Neither message is really integrated with the idea that sex is always relational – even if one isn’t in a “relationship” with a partner.
So yeah, I’m all in favor of breaking down the idea that men’s status and worth hinges on their sexual activities. I can even agree that a prescriptive ideal that says sex ought to give more pleasure than anything else might actually, paradoxically, reduce pleasure.
However, I wouldn’t want to sign on to an anti-patriarchal politics that says men must reject sex as a source of great pleasure. I don’t think you’re quite making that argument, but I’ve certainly seen feminist arguments about decentering phallic pleasure that don’t just insist on the equal importance of other pleasures, they suggest that there’s something wrong with enjoying PIV intercourse (for both men and women). I think that’s a politically fruitless and personally frustrating path, akin to promoting matriarchy – instead of egalitarianism – as the alternative to patriarchy.