Renaissance Woman

Part I

Started Nov 9th 2021, finished May 6th 2023

“Elbow sex! Elbow sex! Elbow sex! Elbow sex!” the crowd bellowed with unbridled fervor as the two Rocky Horror Picture Show characters, Magenta and Riff Raff, turned to face each other during the iconic Time Warp number. This unlikely pair of a seductive maid and a butler who looks like some grime off the road, have their own moment in the frenzy where they lift their arms up together: starting with their hands at waist level, they begin by touching the tips of their fingers to each other, then moving them up in conjunction to touch palms, then finally forearms as their hands come apart. Hence, elbow sex!

But this action alone would probably not warrant this excitement from the crowd. I would argue that, equally important as the coordinated, intimate arm movement in the scene is the unwavering gaze they hold each other in for the duration, until they reach their climax and then tilt their heads back, their faces opening to an (objectively) orgasmic expression.

It also should be noted that the action’s classification of elbow sex becomes even more perverse when we find out that Riff Raff and Magenta are in fact, brother and sister.

This is my chosen starting point for this discussion because of its perceived stupidity. Obviously, elbow sex is not a thing. But then again, what do you know about how physical touch, desire, intimacy, and pleasure mix together inside another person? Especially aliens! With the advent of “sexual liberation” and a widespread understanding and practice of sex that is not for strictly human-reproductive purposes, how do you even start to define sex for yourself let alone every body in the world?

First I’d like to comment on the verbiage. Sex is not something you do, strictly. You must use it with the verb “to have.” So, “we sexed” is not correct, instead we say “we had sex.” Other than “fun” I cannot seem to find another example of this form, where you use “have” to express the action of a semi-abstract concept. What are the implications of the fact that we “have” sex, that the nebulous practice is a “thing” in your possession, at least for a little while? I could go into a Marxist analysis of sex as a commodity but I also want to offer the beauty of this phrasing. It’s kind of beautiful that we “have” this thing that doesn’t materially exist. We somehow (co/)create this non-material thing within a material realm. Sex itself is creative. It exists within boundaries of time and of space, but it also goes beyond those dimensions, finding the infinities lying between discreteness.

Ok, so sex is some non-material thing we create materially, but what does that actually mean? What constitutes sex? If no one comes, is it still sex? If no genitals are touched, is it still sex? If your answer is no, how do you explain elbow sex? Ok, maybe you don’t believe in elbow sex. But what about BDSM, a well established sexual sub-culture? A multi-acronym short for Bondage and Discipline (BD), Dominance and Submission (DS), and Sadism/Masochism (SM), BDSM does not actually require either coming or genitals. Acting like a baby, tying someone up, simply polishing someone’s boot (called Bootblack) is seen as, if not strictly intercourse, then something that brings immense pleasure or arousal, which we as a society have categorized as sex.

I am currently reading A Lady for A Duke, a historical romance with a trans woman as the main character (aptly named Viola, come on Twelfth Night fans!), and as she and her cis-man counterpart start getting into it, she wonders aloud “Is there a way to become one flesh?” She means “Is there a way to have penetrative sex?” but, in a recent project taken on by nahee.app we discover that, in the eyes of AI, people having intercourse actually are becoming one person, one flesh. The project Shapes of Sex takes various porn videos and applies an AI designed to identify the poses people are in (pinpointing where the eyes and hands and neck, etc. are located in the image) and concludes that, often, the AI will think there is one (confounding) body being displayed instead of two. In my mind I hear the echos of the Catholic hymn of my youth:

“One bread, one body, one Lord of all, one cup of blessing which we bless. And we, though many, throughout the earth, we are one body in this one Lord. Servant or free, woman or man, no more.”

If we think of becoming “one” with another person as our definition of sex, what emerges for us? How many ways are there to become one with another person?

How many ways are there to become one with ourselves? Is that sex too?

Finally, I want to offer the idea of sex as play. While I don’t think that sex is falling out of fashion (though there are studies showing younger generations having the least sex of any generation thus far), I do think play in general is becoming a bit of a foreign concept to adults. Working? We got that down pat. Resting? Bit harder, but we still reserve a good chunk of time for it. But play—especially embodied play—seems hard to come by these days. And it’s not our fault! Where are the playgrounds for adults to use during our work-breaks or weekends? And do not try to convince me those constructivist hellscapes called gyms are playgrounds. Play is exploratory. Fun. And, crucially, play does not have an end result in mind. Thinking about sex as a particular form of playing with the bodies of others, can we imagine something beyond certain penetrative positions and the end result of orgasm? Could we ask ourselves, what would we like to explore with someone else’s body (or our own!), and see where that takes us?

I do not pretend to know what sex is, definitively, or what it might yet become (maybe we will learn something from the aliens), but I do know that these things that create it–play, intimacy, pleasure, and embodiment—have not been fully excavated. I am simply proposing we all get a shovel and start digging. Who knows, we might find elbow sex under there after all.