Poly, sex and emergence

[slipjig3]

figmentj has written an amazing piece on emergence, relationship entities, and the misnomer “having sex.” Go check it out over here.

Comments

[intuition-ist.livejournal.com]

i want her brain. :)

[magnifelyn.livejournal.com]

Very good, and I agree with her!! :-)

[captain18.livejournal.com]

I agree with the whole entity creation aspect, and how that adds additional dimensions to things. I would like to explore an aspect of the "better sex" aspect just a little though.

Certainly every sexual relationship will be unique, just as every platonic relationship will be unique. And every sex act will be different, too -- sometimes one participant needs/wants it more, or one participant wants to focus on the other's pleasure, etc. Over time then, the relationship entity is going to develop its identity and flavor from the sum of these encounters.

Hopefully, almost no one keeps a spreadsheet tracking the ratio of how often someone gets oral to how often they want it and so on. But certainly the relationship's personality is colored by the trends of how sex plays out. So you could have different relationships which push different buttons (to use a metaphor) but all have a similar level of satisfaction in and from the relationship.

So my thought is this: Say you have one sexual relationship which you've been okay with. Then another sexual relationship comes along and you discover that on balance the first relationship isn't as attentive to or aligned with your actual needs/wants as the second relationship. Doesn't that mean -- over time -- that there comes to be a quantifiable (if still qualitative) difference in the relationship entity?

[rain-herself.livejournal.com]

I'm going to jump in on this since I was the one arguing it. :)

Yes, I think you can say that this relationship is better for me on the whole than that one. I think you can say that the sex I have with this person meets more of my needs/is more gratifying whatever. But what you're really comparing is this really long complex thing about how your interaction with A produced this and that emotional response which resonated with you that way and had a long lasting effect because of the way it meshed with your personal constructs and your sex with B felt this other way and had less impact because there was less entwined in the middle between you and you weren't as invested in it, so the implications of A had more consequence than the implications of B and has more benefit to you long term.

Really it has nothing to do with comparing performance on some measure and getting a better score with A than B. It's a much more comprehensive thing made up of what you're putting in and what they're putting in and timing and compatibility and hormone levels and on and on.

You're not comparing two things on the same metric, the same objective continuum. It's not that A is better at "sex." It's not even that the sex is better. It's that the entity provides you more benefit as a whole, and part of the quality of that entity is the sex between you. And the quality of the sex is affected by the quality of the entity, too. In fact, if I had to pick a causal direction I'd pick that one - that the sex is better because the relationship is better, not vice versa.

I don't think I can take the position that you can't quantifiably compare two dissimilar things, because we do it all the time. But I think the way we normally talk (and hence, think) about it makes it seem like it's a quantitative comparison between two same things. Like two different scores on the same test. And that is what's so totally wrong, and so threatening to us. Because anyone can score better than me on a test. But no one can do better than me at being me or better than us at being us.

So if some thing comes along that better suits the partner, it's going to be way more complicated than they had some better sex techniques than I do, and is far less likely to occur by chance on some one-off sex encounter, because for it to beat me out, it would probably have to contain at least as much investment as the entity with me does, and that's a lot rarer and more involved.

(Wow that was long. Sorry.)

[captain18.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the thoughtful response -- and forgive me for choosing to engage the discussion here rather than in your space directly! And no need to apologize about length -- I appreciate that you're willing to kick the peanut around on this because I find the discussion fascinating.

I agree with you that the normal construction of the topic does not seem to take the full relationship entity into consideration, and it ought to. The simple analysis of "Guy X will steal my partner away because his penis is 3 inches longer" is childish and if that's the guiding metric I think that person is simply having serial hookups with the same person instead of a relationship, especially as we're defining it here.

In my initial response I was primarily thinking about comparing a relationship where one person is more giving to the other and another where where one party is less giving (and the recipient wants the level of the former). So thinking about it, you're right, that's actually a function of the sexual relationship than a dynamic of the sex act itself.

As I keep turning this facet over in my mind though there's something that keeps nagging the back of my mind about it. Certainly, the event of "sex with me" is going to have unique characteristics every time with every person so you can't compare act to act between different partners.

But this leads me to ask -- aren't there objective measurments we can apply to the body's response to the sex act, if one was willing to wear diagnostic gear? Average peak arousal, level of dopamine output, number of milliseconds that you were cross-eyed and/or number of toes curled during orgasm?

Again, if what you have is a relationship as an emergent entity, you couldn't compare such stats on an act-for-act basis because by definition the relationship is going to transcend the individual act. But over time, wouldn't that give you an objective measure of "sex with me" within the relationship construct?

I freely admit this is on the border of absurdity but my mind enjoys the exercise of flirting with that line. So I guess what I'm suggesting at the end of the day is that at some (admittedly pedantic) level I disagree at face value with the notion that "sex with me" cannot be objectively measured or compared when some aspects of it clearly can be.

That having been said, I agree with the underlying concept that using "sex with me" as a yardstick out-of-context is potentially harmful.

At first, I wanted to add that using "sex with me" as a yardstick in-context is useful only if you work for the Kinsey Institute and/or you have a medical fetish. But now I'm back to your idea of the sex act being emergent, which makes it about more than just what some splashes of color are going to show on a brain scan. So although parts of it could be measured, it can't be measured as a whole construct.

Huh. I'm going to have to think about this some more. :o)

[rain-herself.livejournal.com]

Hm. I think those things can be measured and compared, but I don't know that that would be an adequate comparison, as you said. There are so many variables, and so many different needs that are met by sex, that even if it's more arousing or the orgasm is objectively better in some physiological sense, maybe it's less emotionally gratifying, or it made you feel empty afterward, or it was the first time with someone you're crazy about so it was less physically good but more awesome, or whatever. I'm just not sure it can be boiled down enough to make a comparison.

[archangelwells.livejournal.com]

I think the argument doesn't even need to be that absurd, to say that one can compare sex with one person to sex with another. Granted, it's going to depend on how you think about "sex", and whether you're talking particularly about an act or set of acts or the general, broad concept that people talk about as sex. But it's definitely the case that I can say *regardless* of how I feel about it as an interaction, sexual experiences with people have been different in ways that I can quantify, based on technique. Some of them just *feel better* to me, so that particular technique of sex is *better*, so sex with the person who uses that technique is *better*.

That doesn't necessarily mean I find it preferential to someone I'm more emotionally connected to, because the emergent interaction from the whole experience could not line up with the one aspect of "it feels better", but I still disagree that I can't say "sex with A is better than sex with B" and mean only the particular act that we are defining as "sex".

[stagger-lee77.livejournal.com]

i really liked this.