Alan Goldman’s Plain Sex argues that a philosophical
understanding of sex should be one that does not think of sex as having a goal.
He says that essential,
plain sex can be defined as momentary tactile pleasure experienced with another
person.
If physical contact is the result of a desire to
touch for the sake of pleasure, those who are touching are having sex. Sexual
stimulation by the other senses merely serves to lead to touching (57-58).
In declaring that an
activity is not sex until touching begins, Goldman is setting a goal for sex similar
to that which he says is imposed by those who define sex as copulation or orgasm.
In dismissing the role of the other four senses in sex as either foreplay or
mere enhancements to touching, Goldman may be subtracting vital ingredients
that should be included in the definition of sex.
On the other hand,
touching is the most common sexual experience, and of course, orgasm and
copulation do not always occur during sex. In defining sex at its simplest as the
act of touching, Goldman points out the common denominator between the usual
forms of sex. Also, because the loss of the sense of touch is an extremely rare
occurrence compared to sight and hearing impairment, to include hearing and
sight as vital to the definition of plain sex would render it philosophically
exclusive.
Self stimulating while fantasizing about sex is
not real sex. Masturbation is a fantasy substitute for the absence of a partner
rather than a way of rehearsing sex with a partner (58) (64).
Masturbation may be
a substitute for sex when the practitioner is envisioning sex with another, but
not everyone who masturbates does so while fantasizing and not always with a
goal in mind. This then can be seen as a type of plain sex with oneself. As for those who use fantasy while
masturbating, ideas that arise during the act can be brought to play when one
is sexually engaged with another. So masturbation is a legitimate rehearsal for
sex with a partner.
Goldman’s quick
dismissal of masturbation belies a prejudice against it. In defining
masturbation as an act of anticipating possible future scenarios, and then
comparing it to plain sex, which in his definition does not involve fantasies
or goals, he makes an unfair scrutiny. It would be more appropriate to compare “plain
sex”, which, as Goldman says, is someone simply touching another for the
sensation of contact, to someone touching oneself for the sensation of contact. Such masturbation could be called “plain
asex”.
It is very likely that almost every
child that first experienced an orgasm did so accidentally and without the
assistance of erotic scenarios conjured by the imagination. Later when the
child had tried to recreate this pleasant experience the mind may have begun to
draw on images to enhance the now contrived manipulation. But in most cases
these would not have been fantasies imitating sex, but rather innocent imaginings
perhaps of the face of someone the child was attracted to.
Because the first
sex that a child experiences is a very intense asexual orgasm, subsequent
encounters with other people, though they come about as a result of attraction
to those individuals, can not help but be haunted by the spectre of that
initial solitary pleasure. So rather than masturbation being an imitation of
sex, I would argue that sex is an imitation of masturbation in that it attempts
to achieve the same intensity of original self touching through the touch of
another human being. If this is true, then masturbation as experienced first at
puberty is not simply a lonely substitute for sex, but rather the plainest sex
of all.
Work Cited
Goldman Alan. "Plain
Sex." The Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings. 5th ed. Eds. Alan
Soble, Nicholas Power. Plymouth:
Rowman & Littlefield. 2008. 55-71. Print.
