River
Active member
I just read a post in another thread where someone said that she does not consider sex to be "intimate" unless she's emotionally intimate with the person. I basically said that makes no sense to me, since sex, to me, is always intimate.
I'll continue along the same vein here. Sexual contact and pleasure, including orgasm, to me, cannot be sharply segregated from what I'll have to call The Whole Person. A whole person cannot be divided neatly into "physical" and "emotional" -- as if these two "things" were separate or separable. Therefore, all sensual relating is necessarily also, partly, emotional relating. If any of these two deserves to be called "intimate," then both must be -- or the person in question has an internal divide of a kind I simply cannot experientially imagine. I can intellectually grasp the concept of such a divide, but honestly cannot fathom or imagine what that might feel like, because I've never felt it.
I speak as a person who has had a whole broad range of sexual encounters and relationships -- all of which, for me, were intrinsically and necessarily intimate.
Yes, intimacy can be thought of as something which shows up on a spectrum of kinds and degrees, but for sexual acts to be considered "non-intimate" strikes me as wildly strange. Unless that sexual act is occurring between a person and a robot, sex toy or virtual reality fantasy machine of some kind (rather than a person).
Maybe what makes me different from those who think otherwise is that I can (and must) see such things in terms of a spectrum, while some see it more like an on/off switch.
Some of the most intensely intimate sex I've ever had has been with a person I had just met ... and in a relationship which, sadly, didn't last through the next morning.
I'll continue along the same vein here. Sexual contact and pleasure, including orgasm, to me, cannot be sharply segregated from what I'll have to call The Whole Person. A whole person cannot be divided neatly into "physical" and "emotional" -- as if these two "things" were separate or separable. Therefore, all sensual relating is necessarily also, partly, emotional relating. If any of these two deserves to be called "intimate," then both must be -- or the person in question has an internal divide of a kind I simply cannot experientially imagine. I can intellectually grasp the concept of such a divide, but honestly cannot fathom or imagine what that might feel like, because I've never felt it.
I speak as a person who has had a whole broad range of sexual encounters and relationships -- all of which, for me, were intrinsically and necessarily intimate.
Yes, intimacy can be thought of as something which shows up on a spectrum of kinds and degrees, but for sexual acts to be considered "non-intimate" strikes me as wildly strange. Unless that sexual act is occurring between a person and a robot, sex toy or virtual reality fantasy machine of some kind (rather than a person).
Maybe what makes me different from those who think otherwise is that I can (and must) see such things in terms of a spectrum, while some see it more like an on/off switch.
Some of the most intensely intimate sex I've ever had has been with a person I had just met ... and in a relationship which, sadly, didn't last through the next morning.