The assertion that “sex is like any other action and only societally constructed hangups make it so different, and there’s no good reason to treat it so differently”

and the assertion that “sex is a uniquely intimate and vulnerable type of action that has higher potential to hurt people than other actions do, and that’s why theres a good reason for the taboos that society has about it, especially regarding consent”

…Are both true in ways, but both also missing the point in ways.

Because neither of them tries to define what sex is.

And you can’t. Not really. You can just outline a vague sort of spectrum of things that tend to be considered sexual acts between people.

And it’s not even necessarily a spectrum in any exact order.

I mean, you can try and arrange it– for example, in order of more contact to less contact. But at some point it starts to break down even there:

- penis in vagina or anus

- intracrural, frottage (…does clothed or unclothed affect this placement in the list?)

- mouth stuff (blow jobs, cunnilingus)

- hand stuff (handjobs, fingering… fisting?)

(Okay it feels like that last one doesn’t go with the rest of the hand stuff. Does it go higher up? Below or above putting a penis in there? Is the number of fingers what makes the meaningful difference between fingering and fisting? Is there an exact number that’s the threshold?)

- Stuff that doesn’t involve touching the genitals, but still involves touching someplace else (like if you can get to orgasm just by having an erogenous zone touched)

- Stuff that doesn’t actually involve contact with someone else at all (like masturbating in each other’s presence)

(does using a toy on someone go in this category, if only the toy actually touches them? Does it depend what kind of toy? Where do remote control toys go? ….On the list, I mean.)

- Stuff that doesn’t actually require being in each other’s presence (phone sex, sexting, masturbating together over a video call)

- Stuff that doesn’t even require communication during the act (masturbating to a naked picture that your partner gave you a while ago)

….where on this scale do the taboos change?

…if sexual taboos aren’t societal constructs… if sex really is an innately intimate and vulnerable act with unique potential to harm a person regardless of what culture it’s in… is that because of the risk of pregnancy? or the risk of disease? or because the genitals are just a uniquely bad place to get hurt? or because there’s an inherent, universal risk of mental and emotional trauma that’s part of the very nature of sex, unrelated to cultural influences?

Each of those assumptions would put the acts on this list in a different order. But we probably still couldn’t agree on what order.

And somewhere around the end of that list the way I arranged it… it starts to shade into “these are no longer two-person sex acts at all,” and the usual rules about consent kinda stop applying.

Like, a while back there WAS a little flare-up of people arguing that it was a violation to masturbate while thinking about someone without their permission. But after giving it some very basic thought, most people came to the agreement that it makes no damn difference as long as you don’t tell them you’re doing it (and that “asking for permission” would be the obvious act of sexual harassment here).

…And in the previous area– communication but no contact– the usual rules about consent are still THERE but they no longer seem to carry the same weight. Like, if I’m on a phone call with a friend and he starts masturbating during the call without my permission, that’s creepy and uncomfortable, but it’s not the same thing as if he touched me. Also, does it ethically make a difference whether he does it completely without me noticing? And does it make a difference whether he’s jerking it to me specifically or just to something else he’s looking at or thinking about while talking to me?

And what about the presence-but-no-contact acts? I mean, watching each other masturbate is definitely a two-person sex act when it’s between two consenting partners. But if a guy masturbates in front of me without my permission?… well, that’s bad, but on a sexual-harassment level, not a sexual-abuse level.

And there’s…. probably situations where it isn’t even that, legally speaking? Like….. what if I’m married to him, and we’re home alone, and I haven’t given consent to do any sex stuff right now, and we aren’t in some backward society where marriage legally counts as unconditional blanket permission for sex at any time forever, so he’s still doing this without my consent… but also? he’s in his own house.

…and people do have the right to get off in their own houses, and if I don’t feel like being a part of it then I can just go into another room. (Does it matter what room he’s in when he starts? Does it matter why I was in the room in the first place? Would it matter if I was the one who started masturbating, and he was the one who had to leave the room? Argh. My brain hurts.)

And yeah, in established relationships the general rule is just that partners should respect each other’s stated boundaries, no matter what those are. But, society still agrees some boundaries are more reasonable than others. Like if a guy has an expectation from his wife of “no extramarital blowjobs,” and she goes and gives her boss a blowjob, she’s in the wrong for crossing that line. but if his expectation from her was “no extramarital being alone in the same room with another man for any reason ever,” and she breaks that boundary and he gets mad at her for it, then he’s just an abusive asshole.

Where would nonconsensual masturbating at home in front of your partner fall on that scale?

And what about the aforementioned erogenous-zone sex? Like, that’s not even past the no-contact threshold…. but it has the potential to be less clearly sex than some of the stuff that is past that threshold. (I saw a fanfic about a guy whose hands were so sensitive that he could get to orgasm from shaking hands with someone. In the story he did this without the other guy even having any idea it was happening. And the fic was tagged as non-con, which was entirely fair. But from the other guy’s perspective it wasn’t even sexual.)

(And I mean, yeah, okay, in the story the main character was from the planet Vulcan, and so his freakishly sensitive hands and also his freakish level of control over his facial expressions while climaxing were in a realm that’s probably not often reached by mere humans in the real world. But it’s not impossible.)

Is orgasm even required in order for something to qualify as sex? I don’t think so, because there are penis-in-vagina sex acts where no one gets all the way to climax, and that’s still considered sex. Is arousal required? Is arousal by itself enough to make something a sex act? How is arousal defined?

There was that case of the guy in some fucked-up cult who forcibly impregnated his stepdaughter using a turkey baster or something. And if I remember correctly, it couldn’t get prosecuted as sexual assault at the time because it didn’t meet the criteria for being sexual – since it was done for reproduction and not to get anybody off. Yeah it involved touching private parts without consent– but, since it was non-sexual, and on an underage kid whose willingness or unwillingness wouldn’t matter anyway– there was no legal way to classify it as any different from, say, taking a baby’s temperature rectally.

But then (and again I’m remembering this only vaguely, and might be wrong) they later fixed that loophole in the law, perhaps by changing the wording to something like"it’s ONLY okay if it’s done for necessary health reasons" instead of “it’s okay as long as it ISN’T for sexual pleasure.”

Which I guess raises the question of whether the risk of psychological harm from such an act depends on whether it’s medically necessary? That seems… improbable? Especially since children who rely on their caregivers for information have zero way of knowing for sure whether something really is medically necessary, even assuming they did care.

And so on.

If I have any point in all this, it’s that yeah, sex is different from other acts. But… the question of just HOW different, and whether it’s different because of societally constructed hangups or because it’s a uniquely intimate and vulnerable act by nature?

….That all depends on the specific act. And on where it falls on that disorganized scale that I just basically failed to make because there’s no actual way to arrange it in an order that makes sense.