What sex is like

If I were asked, 'What is sex like?', I would not know what to say. Comparable questions seem equally mystifying: 'What is eating like?', 'What is drinking like?', 'What is breathing like?'. But think about what is good to eat, or drink, and the questions become more manageable.

Good sex is like . . . Well, some good sex is like a conversation, where I say something interesting, and you respond, and what I say next depends upon your response, and you react to me, and off we go, probably to somewhere we did not expect to be, or anyway could not have predicted that we would end up.

But some good sex is more like two lumberjacks setting out to fell a tree with a two-handled saw: we know what the task to be accomplished is, we have the tools, we know how to start, how to continue, what to do at the end. The saw has two handles, and cannot be used by either one of us without the other.

You and I are digging a hole. Perhaps I wield the pick and you shovel out the debris, and then we swap roles for a while. Sometimes we both hack at the ground, sometimes we both clear the ground for the next attack. Some sex is like that.

Sometimes sex is like performing for an audience of one - like singing, I would say, because I do not play an instrument other than my own body. But perhaps it is like extemporaneous oratory for others, or like improvisation in jazz. And sometimes I am the audience and it is you who puts on the show, riding my cock while I provide the post around which you whirl.

Like piling up bricks - you do the same thing again and again, but the pile grows higher and higher. Like quenching a thirst. Like going back to a familiar place and re-touching all the old points of contact. Like entering new territory.

What sex is like is not what sex is. And for the most part, writing about sex is simply writing about what sex is like rather than writing about sex itself. Yet the kind of writing that seems to be about sex itself is just the dry catalogue of acts and emissions that fills most of this blog. That is pointless.

I suspect food writers find themselves in a similar bind. The facts are straightforward, the onions were caramelized, the lemon zest was barely noticeable. The food was good, goddammit! Go try it yourself! But sex is not food, and having sex is not like eating food, for there is really nothing that sex is like except sex.