This month’s myth is "having sex" means penile-vaginal intercourse. And what I mean by that is that everybody seems to believe that when you say "did you have sex," "can we have sex," "should we have sex," that we’re all talking about the same thing. Now this may seem like an unimportant myth, or an obvious idea, but in fact I think it’s very significant, and I hope by the time I’ve finished you’ll agree with me. It’s important in a lot of ways. From my perspective, it’s important to conducting meaningful sex research. It’s important to getting meaningful medical information from a patient, and to communicating meaningfully with your physician. It makes an essential point about communication between intimate partners. And it almost lost the White House for a president, so it has some political and social importance.

The phrase "having sex" or other phrases that are like it, like "having sexual relations" is used by many people, including sex researchers and physicians, as if everybody understands what it means; that is, that it means penile-vaginal intercourse, which by the way is a clear way of saying it. I and my colleagues at the Kinsey Institute were very concerned about these misinterpretations and misunderstandings as we conducted our research. We were very concerned about what these euphemisms, particularly in this age of AIDS, meant. And we decided that it was really important to know exactly what people meant by these phrases, particularly at a time when what people exactly mean could be the difference between life and death, in research and in medical situations. So we decided in 1991 that we would investigate this particular question. At least we could ask how American college students defined having sex. So we collected data from a large, random, stratified sample of college students in the Midwest, attending a large Midwestern university, and we asked them this question: would you say you "had sex" with someone if the most intimate behavior you engaged in was…and then that was followed by a list of eleven behaviors. The behaviors were described by both the giver and the receiver, in random order. And here’s what they were.

- A person had oral sex – that is, mouth contact – with your breasts or your nipples
- You touched, fondled, or manipulated a person’s genitals
- You had oral or mouth contact with another person’s breasts or nipples
- Penile-vaginal intercourse – penis in vagina

You see how careful we’re being, so it’s very clear what we’re talking about.

- You touched, fondled, or manipulated (manually stimulated) a person’s breasts or nipples
- A person had oral (mouth) contact with your genitals
- You had oral (mouth) contact with a person’s genitals
- Deep kissing – "french" or tongue kissing
- Penile-anal intercourse – penis in anus or rectum
- A person touched, fondled, or manipulated/stimulated your breasts or nipples
- A person touched, fondled, or manipulated/stimulated your genitals

Now the subjects were asked to mark either "yes" or "no" for each of these behaviors – that is, was it sex – would they say they had sex with this person if they were asked, or wouldn’t they? Now before I reveal to you what we learned, I want to tell you a little more about who these university students were who answered the survey, so you’ll better understand who they were and how average and American they were. And again, you always have to evaluate who subjects are in a study before you can decide what those findings really mean. That’s part of evaluating any research that you read about anywhere. These students originated from 29 states in the United States, although the majority were Midwesterners. 96% ranged in age from 18-24 years old. More than half of them came from cities of less than 100,000 – so they weren’t urban. And nearly 2/3 came from cities of less than 200,000 – so they weren’t from big giant cities. When they were asked about their political perspective, 78.5% classified themselves as moderate to conservative, and the majority of those who were registered to vote were Republicans. 96.5% were self-labeled as heterosexual, 2.3% as bisexual, and 1.2% were gay or lesbian. Now – in analyzing the data I’m going to tell you about just the 545 of them who labeled themselves as heterosexual, so that we have a more homogeneous group. We can now say that we have some objective data on what people really mean – at least, what heterosexual people really mean – or don’t mean when they say that they "had sex." And by the way, we were very right to be concerned – very concerned – about what people mean when they say this. It appears that people basically don’t necessarily mean the same thing when they use these very vague phrases to describe their behavior.

This question is particularly interesting because, as I said, some physicians and even some sex researchers ask questions like "with how many people have you had sex?" and they think they know what people are referring to when they answer three, five, six. That is, they believe that they’re asking, politely – but it never, ever, in these kinds of situations, pays to be polite or to be euphemistic – they think they’re asking politely about penile-vaginal intercourse.

Here’s what we found out. First of all, as I think all of us would probably agree and not be surprised, 99.5% of the students agreed that having vaginal intercourse qualified as having sex. And I can’t tell you about that other 0.5%. 40% counted oral-genital sex as having sex, but 60% of this sample, that is, the majority of this sample in 1991, did not include oral-genital sex in their definition of having had sex. And by the way, they were in agreement with one of our former presidents and his friend. And these data were collected several years before Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp had their phone conversation. So Monica Lewinsky was in agreement with the majority of kids her age at that time. More than 1 out of 7 said they would say they’d had sex if the most intimate behavior they engaged in was manual manipulation of the genitals by a partner. 3% considered breast contact to be having sex. And 2% said that even deep kissing constituted having sex for them. So when someone says they had sex, you can’t be sure that you know what they are referring to. And perhaps the most surprising to us as researchers was that although 80% said that anal intercourse was having "had sex," 20% did not consider anal intercourse, that’s penile-anal intercourse, as having had sex. Now just imagine the effect of this kind of euphemistic languages on interviews or questionnaires – what effect that could have on the research, such as addressing high-risk sexual behavior or the transmission of AIDS or the transmission of other kinds of sexually transmitted diseases. And you would think now, that after all the publicity, worldwide publicity about whether oral-genital sex was really sex or not, which happened throughout the impeachment of President Clinton, that the English-speaking world at least would be in agreement about the definition of what the phrase "had sex" means. But that appears not to be the case. And I’m going to give you one example – actually, there are several, but I’m going to give you one from a study in England conducted in 2001. This was a convenient sample of students, 190 female and 224 male undergraduates, using our measure form that we developed at the Kinsey Institute. And this study demonstrated that 1/3 regarded oral-genital sex as having had sex, and 2/3 felt that oral-genital sex was not having sex. Very similar to our findings. 17% said that touching the genitals constituted having had sex, while 6% considered oral or other touching of the breasts and nipples as having had sex. This is in 2001. The researchers in England agreed with us that specificity about talking about sex is essential, and I would add that it’s important to your private life as well, your personal life as well. It’s essential, if you want to have a great sex life, to learn to talk to your partner clearly and honestly about sex. Not just about sex in general, or your sex life in specific terms, but what you enjoy, what you’d like to try, what you’d prefer not to engage in, and also about your feelings and your emotions. It’s often best not to do this, by the way, in bed, because for most people they’re at their most vulnerable in bed and in the bedroom. So it’s a good time to practice things and to make noises that tell your partner what’s good and what’s not good, but it’s probably not the best time to really discuss sexual preferences and likes and dislikes. It’s better to do that in some other place – in the living room, over a glass of wine, on a blanket in the park, cuddling in the backseat of the car – someplace where you can talk about it and there’s as little demand as possible in the environment.

By the way, I want to remind you as I do and perhaps have done before – criticism never works well when it comes to sexuality. You’re not going to get what you want and you’re not going to have a happy partner if you’re criticizing them in the context of what you need and want sexually. It’s always better to say "oh, this is ok but you know, this other thing I like – it’s really great, this I really enjoy." It’s best to say "you know, I thought about trying this, how does this sound to you?" or "how would it make you feel if we tried something like this?" If that’s hard to do, get a book and read it together and talk about what the different things feel like. One of the great old books, but it’s still great, is The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort. It’s an old book but it’s a wonderful book – it has lovely drawn pictures in it that hardly bother the most sensitive person, and they really give you the most wonderful ideas of things and you can talk about what looks good and what doesn’t look good, what you might want to try and what you might not want to try, and we’ll list some other ones on Love and Health that are good books for expanding your sex life or checking things out with your partner to see what might be interesting or what might not be interesting. If talking is difficult, you’re going to say "I’m going to put a book by the side of the bed and I’m going to put some markers in the pages – see which ones might be interesting to you and put a check mark on the post-it that I put on those pages, if they’re things you might want to try." In other words, sometimes it’s hard to talk about these things when you’ve never done it – but you’ve got to work towards that. Watch a video – and there are some nice videos which have been made just for this purpose, and in fact we’re working on a set in Love and Health that will be ready in the next year or so, and it might even be ready by the time this video comes, that will be helpful in this regard. But you can watch a video together – preview it to make sure that it’s not something that will be uncomfortable for your partner – and then watch it together. That can be helpful. And we’ll list some for you. Have fun! You know, sex is not supposed to be such serious business. Yes, there are times when you’re being very romantic and so forth, but there also should be times for laughter. Sex is supposed to be pleasure-full – it’s supposed to be joyful and have fun and laughter too. It’s not supposed to be deadly serious – that’s not what sex is about. It’s supposed to make you feel good. It’s a time to get close, it’s a time to communicate. It’s a time to communicate affection, both physically and mentally, and even spiritually for some people. So our job here on Love and Health is to open you up and give your life more pleasure and more fun and to make sexuality an integrated part of your life, and something that’s good. And that’s the end of this myth for this month.

© 2005