File 30: Sex Beyond Either/Or

Charlize Theron has spent the past month on an unavoidable promotional circuit. From the numerous clips I’ve seen, she comes across as both inspiring and interesting; vulnerable but self-possessed. There’s one clip that I found less straightforwardly empowering though. You may have seen it. It’s where she’s on a show called SubwayTakes with Kareem Rahma, and when Rahma asks the gimmicky, very 2020s question he poses to every guest — “So, what’s your hot take?” — Theron’s spicy opinion is that the phrase “making love” gives her “the ick”. It dries her up. I don’t want a lover to make anything with me, she says. I want them to do something with me.

Predictably the episode has sparked a debate among women about whether it is off-putting when a man says he wants to “make love” to you. And at least on the Subway Takes page, at the time of writing, a clear majority say it is.

But I’ve also seen hot takes arguing the opposite — that something has gone fundamentally wrong when a generation of women say they would rather be fucked than made love to.

But why accept the premise at all?

When it comes to conversations about sexual behaviour, few are as obediently binary as this one. The debate assumes that female pleasure travels in mutually exclusive destinations: romantic or animalistic, emotional or physical, lovemaking or fucking. Female desire is much more kaleidoscopic than that.

Desire does not fit neatly into an either/or box. It is like insisting a holiday can either be a beach holiday or a hiking trip. Other types of holidays exist.

And even beaches and hikes come in countless forms, to stay with the euphemism. Patriarchal religions, capitalism, and pop culture have cloned sexual narratives into a formula, but in actual real life we all know that lovemaking does not have to mean cheese — champagne, chocolate, cherries. Yes, when sex is intimate, vulnerable, tactile, emotional, and connected sex it can fittingly be described as making love. But lovemaking can be fierce, unruly and wild too. It defies categorisation.

Equally, fucking does not have to follow a script of detached indifference. Fucking can feel selfish, yes, but it can also feel safe and uninhibiting. It can be playful, devoted, transgressive, affectionate, urgent, experimental, consensual. You can make love to someone you barely know. You can fuck someone you have loved for twenty years. You can fuck someone while feeling deeply connected, and you can make love while feeling distant. What you can’t do is make a neat formula out of it.

So the real question is not whether Theron is right or wrong. The question is why we keep thinking about sexuality through a dualist framework.

We are shaped by a dualistic education largely devoid of complexity, and it also shapes how we speak about desire. We think in oppositions: mind vs body, reason vs emotion, sacred vs profane. And we apply similarly rigid categories when thinking about sex.

Dualistic thinking shapes so much of our thinking, but this is one debate worth refusing. Sex can be beyond either/or. It can be both/and. And it can be neither/nor. It can move from one mode to another in the space of a single encounter, and it can span, shift, and surprise us in endless ways.

Sure, even biologically, there can arguably be fluctuations. Studies suggest that women attracted to men are often drawn to different traits depending on where they are in their cycle. I can relate to this. Someone slowly kissing the back of your knees, or softly caressing the nape of your neck when you are PMSing, can feel like trying to quench a fire with eye drops. But on days when you desire tender caressing and eye contact, urgency and roughness might not be your menu choice.

Even our bodies seem to show precisely the ever-shifting nature of female desire. So ultimately Theron is right about lovemaking and wrong about lovemaking at the same time. The hot take lacks nuance. Which is, of course, the point.

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