Definitions

Anonymous [probably not the same Anon. (it’s a big family) who said I had to open my heart or else I’d always be a bachelor] asks me to define “sleep” and “sleeping with.” It’s a fair question. We have so many euphemisms when it comes to nookie. Consider, after all, that we say love is blind. But we also say that we are “seeing” someone.

I’ve slept -- that is, spent the night in bed with -- with women who I haven’t had sex with. I did it a week ago with the Cooperator. (Not that I got much actual sleep, since I never sleep well with somebody new... my heart’s not open enough, evidently.) We snuggled together in her bed ol’ bed. I can report that she shudders in her sleep. And that Friday she said she was going to call me Saturday but didn’t, but that’s for another post. But there was no genital interaction, so I wouldn’t say we had sex. Sure, it’s a continuum, sex, from frisking about at first base to going into orbit, but that night was rather chaste in my book even though we kissed (besos atan las bocas) and my hands (lately a trio of commentators have remarked on the softness of my hands, FYI in case you've been dreaming of being manhandled by me) caressed G-rated parts of her. And lest you think I’m being unduly phallo/penetrative-centric, here, I definitely count my night with the Photographer as sex even though my phallo did not penetrate her centric. I actually prefer the metaphor of envelopment rather than penetration, but then, I like messing about in boats, too:

"There is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. In or out of 'em, it doesn't matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that's the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don't; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you've done it there's always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you'd much better not." -- Ratty to Mole, in The Wind in the Willows.