לפני 14 שנים. 3 במאי 2010 בשעה 8:51
אוקיי, אז הלילה ישבתי וכתבתי... וחשבתי וערכתי וכתבתי...
כל-כך כיף לי לכתוב ככה!!! XD
אבל על מה כתבתי?
נתקלתי בבלוג של astaro, קראתי שם להנאתי קטע מעניין וכתוב היטב, ואז, היות וביקש שם ביקורת, ביקרתי 😄
הנה קישור לפוסט המקורי:
http://www.thecage.co.il/blog/userblog.php?postid=228252&blog_id=45026
כתבתי את התגובה באנגלית מטעמי נוחיות שלי, ובעקבות זה שהקטע המקורי הוא גם באנגלית.
למי שמתעניין אבל מתקשה בשפה, קבלו את התנצלותי הכנה.
עכשיו, הנה התוצאה - מקווה שהמתעניינים יהנו:
Ok, 5th paragraph (3rd in English):
"Saying you love sex is like saying you love food, it doesn't really have meaning until you have tasted many different dishes."
I disagree, and since I feel this is an important point (in the text and in general), I'm going to be quite pedantic analyzing it. Indeed, this entire criticism revolves around this one sentence, as I will explain.
Now, to the point:
Saying "I love sex" shouldn't inherently translate into "I know from experience that I love many types of sex", which is what it seems to me you implied.
For the sake of simplicity, and because it is more than a little reasonable, throughout this text I’m going to assume that sexual experience is the only valid way to give support to the statement “I love sex”. This is as opposed to giving support through, say, thought experimentation (well, fantasies) or common sense (e.g. “I’m always horny and love having sex”, which implies basic biological support for the claim).
Rather, the problem I’ll be dealing with is the idea that one would have to have many types of sex in order to confidently say that he or she loves it.
[At this point I’ll note two things:
The first is that I am allowing myself to write a lot about this matter without first asking you for clarification on your intention. The reason is that, regardless of what you specifically may have meant (which I am certainly interested in knowing), many people in general, as well as many sexual experimenters specifically, seem to share this idea which’s validity I’ll be arguing against. As such, it already deserves to be written about.
The other is that while I was going to run a little with the food metaphor, saying “I love my mother’s cooking” in this context gave me the willies. What I would have otherwise said, but am certainly not saying right now, is that knowing I love her cooking is enough for me to know that I love food.]
There are many things “I love sex” can imply and I’ll deal with a few major cases, all of which revolve around loving more or less types of sex.
If saying "I love sex" implies "I love [many types of] sex", then you indeed needed to have had many types in order to say it factually. In this case, that original sentence is correct.
If "I love sex" implies "I love [some types]" or "[all types] of sex", then you either only needed to have tried a couple of kinds, or needed to have tried all different kinds of sex, respectively, in order to say it factually.
Since the third case ("all") is logically absurd, as trying all types of sex is realistically impossible, I'll stick to the other two as the ones usually being implied. However, this third option may be the one which makes the statement “I love sex” inherently ambiguous, as I will now try to explain. “I love sex” would, I think, be regularly taken to mean “I love all sex” if it weren’t a logical absurdity – I don’t know what would be the linguistic proof for this, but “sex” and “all sex” are both very strongly related (and since I find this to be a reasonable axiom, I’ll rest much of my argument on it). As such, most of us immediately take “I love sex” to imply something else – something still relatively close to “I love all sex” – without giving it a second thought. (Note that I didn’t write “I love all types of sex” now – this will become relevant much, much later.)
And since the statement "I love sex" is inherently ambiguous, generalizations about it are prone to be broken. Therefore, it should be asked "what do you mean by 'I love sex'?" before any judgment about the statement’s validity is made.
For example, is it wrong for a man to say "I love sex" while meaning "there is literally nothing I like better than having missionary position sex with my wife every night", despite it being the only type of sex he's had? Granted, broadening his horizons might positively or negatively affect his position on sex in general, but is it not true that he currently certainly "loves sex"? Is he less entitled to saying this than a person who has had countless different sexual experiences, while taking slightly less pleasure in them than our missionary man? As I implied, I would say the missionary man not only “loves sex”, but also happens to love sex more. Furthermore, if our missionary man said “tried doggy, was horrible, went right back to missionary”, has he lost his right to loving sex, as half the types he tried he also hated? I wouldn’t say so.
However, I am willing to assume that, by analyzing it one way or another, it can be shown that any person who has had sex more than a few times has also had at least a few types of sex. As you said, changes in position, partner, scenery, mood and what kind of day you were having all count when judging the dish. As such, I find that it is relatively easy for even the most sexually boring but active person to correctly say that he loves “some types of sex”, and by extension has more support for saying “I love sex”. What really matters might be how many times he’s had it – it simply makes for better empirical evidence.
(I am aware that your 2 sentences following the one at the center of my criticism express almost exactly the same idea as my last paragraph. However, I strongly feel that they do not stress enough how much even the most routine vanilla sex life is still a complete sex life, a fact which some of us lovable perverts often forget.)
From a different angle, an ad absurdum (because I love and can’t resist an ad absurdum 😄 ):
Let’s take the (presumably valid) example of a woman with severe OCD, who very much enjoys what sex life she has. First, would you expect that having more varied sex would help judge whether or not she loves it, rather than just making the answer less clear by mixing sex with mind-blasting lack of routine? Then, would you say that she has no way of telling at all (since she presumably can’t vary her sex life), despite her very much enjoying her very much routine sex life? Since it seems to me that having OCD doesn’t preclude being able to attest to loving sex, but may certainly preclude a varied sex life, I’d say that the ad absurdum works.
On a less ad abs side of it, I believe that many (though certainly not all) people’s feelings towards sex would only be made a little more confused, and less easily judged, by mingling them with the anxiety caused by the change of routine, i.e. spicing up their sex lives more than a little. The fact of the matter is that humans are creatures of habit.
In a quick summary of it all, I’d say that many people with routine sex lives can nevertheless be trusted to have much conclusive meaning behind the claim that they “love sex”. To support this, I’ll propose that saying “I love sex” implies not necessarily that “I love [some/many/all] types of sex”, but is rather just as likely to imply that “I love [most/all] sex I’ve had”. Now, reaching back to the beginning of this text, I’ll take the statement “I love all sex” and compare it with “I love many types of sex” and with “I love most of the sex I’ve had” – both appear to be rational statements which can be easily validated, and quite equally close to the statement they were derived from.
My conclusions? Leave the poor vanillas alone - all they said is that they were having fun… 😄
There is, of course, much more that can be written here, such as of the critical difference between saying “I love sex” and “I don’t love sex”, but this has been more than enough for me for one day.
I hope this was helpful and interesting.
Criticism is of course entirely welcome 😄
Good day 😄
