REDEFINING FOREPLAY

This is a topic that’s plagued me sporadically over the years. I mean, penetration can’t be the marker, because not all lesbians do it or allow it. I didn’t myself for quite a while and who cares what the dildo thinks? Also, there are degrees of penetration, just to complicate matters even further. A tongue, a finger, more fingers, a whole hand and also toys every shape and width and length imaginable. Vegetables too, apparently.

Applying logic, what’s next? Maybe it’s contact with the vagina. If it is, do we include everything – fingers, mouths, assorted other body parts, toys? As far as I’m aware, us Sarf Efrican lesbians don’t use that first, second, third etc base system so beloved of American high school movies.

Clothes can’t be the magic mark either, for the single and blatant reason that it is possible, regardless of sexual orientation, to have sex with your clothes on. I’m pretty sure you can even have clothes with your sex on too.

So I turned my thoughts to “foreplay” as opposed to “sex,” since, for the purposes of this debate, both need definitions. Foreplay can start with a look in the proverbial crowded room and it can last forever, but at what point is it consummated? When does the sex begin? At which point I realised that I’m about as clear on what lesbian sex is as I am on the definition of lesbian foreplay. It makes me wonder what I’ve been doing for the past however many years and explains a long line of disappointed exes.

Sex doesn’t have to culminate in an orgasm, right? Right. That means the end of a sexual encounter can also be pinpointed many ways. The moment you light the cigarette and ask, “How was it for you?” The moment one of you falls asleep and the other one grinds her teeth. The moment you both fall asleep/pass out drunkenly. The moment the phone rings. The moment your pet leaps on to your head. The moment your mother walks in. The options are endless, so perhaps the same holds true for the start of sex. That logic doesn’t really work so well though, because regardless of how the coitus ended or was interrupted, it’s clear that something stopped happening.

At that point in the pondering, my eyes began to bulge, my head started aching and I decided that foreplay doesn’t exist at all. I thought, perhaps it’s all sex, lovemaking or whatever you’d like to label it. It then became a whole philosophical journey into the nature of labels and whether or not we need them. To cut a long and tedious story short – labels are bad when bigots are shouting them at you, but extremely handy when ordering a beer.

For myself, I think defining lesbian foreplay or even proving its existence is about as likely as proof of whether or not the Yeti exists. I love sex, I don’t want to kill it for myself by intellectualising it to this level. I have decided to pretend not to care, while secretly hoping that one of you has the answer.

ABOUT ULLA KELLY
Ulla Kelly is all over the internet like marmite. Find more writing from Ulla at getyourqueeron.wordpress.com excloset.wordpress.com

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