The Problem with Foreplay
the sidelining of women's pleasure
One of my favorite things about this Substack is how the conversation evolves as readers bring their own perspectives into the conversation. My last post (Beyond Pregnancy and Penetration) was no exception when journalist Mary Katharine Tramontano (whose interview with Ruby Warrington opened the newsletter) mentioned that the whole concept of “foreplay” is problematic. “Here’s to a world which views clitoral stimulation as real sex and retires the word foreplay to describe acts which engender girls and women’s orgasm,” she wrote in a comment on Instagram.
My mind was completely blown. I had never really thought about how the concept of foreplay belittles much of the stuff that actually gets women off, relegating it to appetizer status instead of the main course. Even the Cambridge dictionary defines foreplay as “sexual activity such as kissing and touching that people do before they have sex.”
But when we stop correlating sex with penetration, foreplay becomes sex. There isn’t a distinction and there is no hierarchy.
Like Al Vernacchio said in the Ted Talk I linked to at the end of the last post, we need a new paradigm for sex, to put to bed (ha ha!) the analogy of baseball and bases, a metaphor that insists we know the script for where things are headed. He thinks we should use the frame of ordering pizza (it’s a compelling idea, I highly recommend watching the ten minute clip here). How sex then becomes a collaborative discussion, and you have to check in with what you’re feeling, and there is no one right way to go.
I’ve noticed this sex=penetration paradigm popping up in a couple of television shows I’ve watched with my 12-year-old daughter. These shows make it seem like sex is something you embark upon after a few seconds of kissing. I’m thinking first of Netflix’s “Ginny and Georgia,” when a boy Ginny has essentially just met climbs through her window, they kiss for the first time, and then all of a sudden they are under the covers and he is penetrating her. I was like: what? Hold up, slow down!
Is that really how it goes these days? Isn’t there one kiss, leading to making out, which can lead to moving to the bed (lying down kissing, which was always verboten in the purity culture Christianity of my adolescence) and then there’s some groping and grinding and finally, you decide if everyone is feeling up for removing clothes and going further? It was like things went from zero to 100 in five seconds flat. And it is clear that it wasn’t a pleasurable experience for Ginny (she admits that it wasn’t). In a later episode, she shows him how to slow down and get her going. Which involves a lot of grinding.