Simone de Beauvoir asked “What is a woman?” in The Second Sex,
and Sojourner Truth asked “Ain’t I a woman?” Before cybersex,
we had touchtone phone sex; before that, suggestive telegrams.
Before we said “gender,” discrimination was on the basis of “sex.”
Anne Fausto-Sterling wrote “The Fives Sexes” to show
that we should “celebrate our subtleties,” that the opposite sex
was seldom a “binary other”—humans points on a spectrum
of biology and desire. Sylvia Plath and Anne Sex-
ton wrote confessional poems of love, shame, and self-pleasure.
Both loved the free potato chips at the Ritz better than sex
with their husbands. Both surely hated condescension like
“Nice hobby” and “Good Girl.” The manual The Joy of Sex
illustrated “gourmet love making” but omitted homosexuality
and The Joy of Gay Sex was only for men who wanted to have sex
with other men. Whispery lore around sexless lesbians abounds--
bed death, snuggling with cats. Only phallocentric sex
gets much cultural airtime--hence, Andrea Dworkin's Intercourse
is still woefully misunderstood. Dworkin actually liked sex
and didn't believe all sex was rape; still, the violence implicit
in penetration has many of us questioning: what exactly is sex?
A karyotype? A stimulus package? 10 points' worth of Scrabble tiles?
A poem made of couplets? A poem made of sextets? Unisex
bathrooms, unisex clothes? A multi-valent orgy, where context
is everything. As Sexton said, The best way to ruin a relationship? Sex.
Editor's note: pictured above are, left to right, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath.
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