Bill Clinton once tried, without much success, right,
convincing the world that oral sex is not really sex.
And maybe, only genital penetration is sex,
some people still stick to that kind of imagination.
So we have to understand
that physical intimacy actually entails way more than that.
Some people will feel very intimate physically when they are sitting
by the fire side and reading to each other or
like taking a walk in the woods.
Some people would feel like physically
very intimate just by sitting next to each other.
So like the idea of physical intimacy is actually pretty fluid.
And I don't want to say that like sex
is categorically different. No, it is only part of it.
And then of course,
how much physical intimacy is involved in the act of sex itself also varies.
Like when you talk about people who are getting sex from like sex workers, for
instance. They may have sex, but they may not be physically intimate at all, right?
>> Yeah.
So it is important to be able to distinguish between these two concepts.
>> Yeah, I mean, even going off of that,
you can literally not be physically together at all,
but still be engaged in what some people define as sex. So, you know,
People talk about sexting, or cyber sex, or even, you were mentioning
earlier an interesting documentary where people had sex telepathically.
So there really is a range in terms of how we define it, isn't there?
>> Yeah, I think this is actually another good point.
And I don't not want to confuse people, but that's another concept, right,
which is probably not familiar to most people in the social sciences.
It is the idea of presence.
So you can be like in Toronto, you know,
communicating with someone in Ecuador, and there's a huge geographical distance,
but you can feel the person's presence right here.
And for some people,
you can actually say that I actually feel physically very intimate with this person
even though we're just like having a conversation on Skype.
That is totally like comprehensible.
And then when you're talking about people having cyber sex or
sexting, the extent to which it feels physically present also varies.
Like for some people, they are very conscious, we just like this is just the image,
this is just text.
To some people, they actually feel the physical presence.
Some people feel their own physical response.
Some people are better able to communicate a physical response to others through
images and words.
Some people are less capable.
So like the experience, the quality of the experience actually varies a lot.
Yeah, but I think you're pointing out a very important dimension.
So physical intimacy has to be understood within a context,
which is more than physical distance or geographical distance, yeah.