I Believe in Sex the Way Some People Believe in God

Someone asked me once if I believed in God, and I went into a frantic, undignified search for an answer, flipping through years of half-formed doubt, looking for something solid enough to say out loud. I never found it. The question kept giving birth to smaller questions, and none of them had the decency to resolve.

Not long ago, someone else asked a different question. A cleaner one, as it turns out. She asked if I believed in sex, and I said yes before she’d even finished the sentence. It didn’t occur to me until later that the question was ambiguous: gender, or intimacy,  and that I’d answered the ambiguity out of existence. She meant intimacy. I meant it too. For once, an answer arrived on time, no search or research required.

Which is, when I think about it, a strange thing to be more certain of than God. But there it is. I believe in sex. Draw whatever conclusions you like about what that says about my relationship with the divine. I’ve considered a few myself and none of them are flattering.

The only leash I’ve ever accepted
I believe in sex for a long list of reasons, not least because of how I was first introduced to it: a story I’ll get to sometime later in another essay, maybe, because it explains more of my current positions than I’d like. The only thing standing between me and unlimited enthusiasm for the subject is loyalty. A single, stubborn variable holding back an otherwise ungovernable appetite. I mention this not as confession but as context, because loyalty is the lens through which everything else here gets measured; the one leash I’ve ever agreed to wear, and I put it on myself.

My sign that a relationship is over isn’t a fight, or silence, or someone leaving their socks on the floor one too many times. It’s when the sex stops being recognizable. When it starts belonging to someone else’s idea of what sex should be, instead of ours. Everything I’m about to argue is downstream of that one instinct.

I have limited patience for men who love pornography, and I’ll admit the patience shortage is personal, not theoretical. The first time I saw it, I was on the phone of an adult who was close to me,  not mine; I borrowed it, the way children borrow things they shouldn’t. I didn’t know what sexual relations were yet. 

That didn’t stop my body from reacting anyway, moving in ways I hadn’t authorized and didn’t understand, and I was so frightened I nearly dropped the phone. Fear should have been the end of it. It wasn’t. I got curious instead, the particular curiosity that survives being scared, and I carried it for years until I had my own space and could indulge it without an audience.

When I finally did, alone, and older, in control of my own schedule, I understood immediately that I wasn’t a fan. It behaved exactly like alcohol; it just takes over, and once it’s finished with you, it leaves you feeling dirty and slightly less than you were before it started. I didn’t have a word for that at the time. I have several now.

Years later, I started coaching teenagers, and the subject came back around, this time as material I had to study rather than survive. I read the research expecting to find nuance and instead found confirmation. It makes ordinary sexual intimacy with another person feel unsatisfying by comparison, because it trains the body to chase a memory instead of a partner. It leaves behind exactly the kind of residue I’d felt as a child without the vocabulary for it. It is a private reel that plays on command, is portable, requires no one’s consent but your own, and is replicable anywhere, including, apparently, in places where replicating it becomes everyone else’s problem. I won’t spell that part out. You’ve lived in a city. You know what I mean.

So no, anything that makes a man sexually satisfied without needing me in the room is, structurally, a rejection dressed up as a private hobby. I didn’t arrive at that position from nowhere. I arrived at it from a phone I shouldn’t have been holding as a younger girl.

For the same reason, I’ve never fully signed on to the modern gospel of sexual liberation for women. I know how that sounds. I know exactly how that sounds. Say it in most rooms, and you’ll be handed a pamphlet and a stern look, and I’ll take the pamphlet, because I don’t think the impulse behind it is wrong. I think the destination is lonelier than advertised.

Women can, now, more than at almost any point I’m aware of, build a sexual and emotional life that requires no negotiation with anyone else. Content creators will tell you this is liberation, and cheerfully, because cheerfulness sells. I believe some of them mean it. I also believe some of the people living it are not, in fact, okay, and that the format doesn’t have a slot for saying so out loud. We are, all of us, built to need each other. A world efficiently redesigned so that nobody has to is not a utopia. It’s just a very well-lit waiting room for loneliness, and loneliness doesn’t care how independent you were on the way in.

Once I read a piece about knowing your own body, what pleases you, how to find it, and how to name it without embarrassment. It was well-argued and warmly received, and I don’t have the expertise to fight it on its own terms. So I won’t. I’ll fight it on consequences instead, because I’ve watched them play out: it quietly dissolves the reason two people needed to find each other in the first place.

If I can achieve satisfaction alone, expertly, on my own schedule, with fingers that know exactly where to go and, later, toys precise enough to make the fingers redundant, why would I ever go looking for someone to know me? I already have the answer key. Why show up for the exam?

Here’s the part the article left out, and the part I think matters more than the technique it was teaching: we are complicated people, and relationships survive on the promise of being continually, imperfectly, freshly known. The day you stop learning your partner: their body, their week, and their weather is the day the relationship starts dying, long before either of you notices the funeral. So take the time. Teach them. Let them get it wrong a few times first; that’s not the failure, that’s the actual content of intimacy. And if you’ve become so good at relying on yourself for this one thing, I hope, sincerely, that you’ve built the same self-sufficiency for everything else in your life too, because you’re going to need it. You’ve been rehearsing for it.

A man who can’t finish without his own hand isn’t mine, and can’t become mine. A man who’d rather please himself than be with me is, definitionally, not choosing me; he’s choosing his own convenience, and convenience has never once been romantic. This is why I notice things. Why I’d sooner scoop the evidence out of a toilet bowl myself, examine it for consistency and smell, than let something unaccounted for pass without comment. It sounds unhinged written down. It isn’t, from the inside. It’s just me or anyone else refusing to pretend I don’t know what unaccounted-for means, and refusing to let convenience rewrite the terms while I’m not looking.

A doomed, well-furnished life
Here’s the part everyone skips past: the reason two people stay together, underneath whatever they’re calling love that week, is need. Actual, structural, inconvenient need. And we have spent the last few decades optimizing need out of existence and calling it progress. If I have my own money, my own cooking skills, my own house, my own hobbies, my own toys for the nights nobody else is required. Ask me, honestly, what I need another person for, and watch how long the silence lasts before I invent something to say.

That’s not independence. That’s a beautifully furnished, extremely lonely, and entirely voluntary doom. We built ourselves out of any reason to stay, and then acted surprised when nobody did.

I still don’t know if I believe in God. But I know what happens to two people who no longer need each other for anything: they stay in the same house, technically together, spiritually filed under self-sufficient, and call it modern. Someone’d rather inconvenience me. I’d rather need badly, visibly, a little embarrassingly, than optimize my way into a marriage of two people who’ve already solved each other out of the equation. Sex, at least, I’ve never had any doubt about. I only wish the rest of it came with the same certainty.

ENYO DINTA, AUTHOR