Standing Up for Masturbation: a Critical Summary of Alan Goldman's "Plain Sex"

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. 5^th ed. Eds. Alan Soble, Nicholas Power. Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield. 2008. 55-71. Print.