The Four Most Common Types
of Partnered Sex Acts
MOVA: Masturbation, Oral, Vaginal, Anal
MOA for people who don’t partner with women
Masturbation: direct stimulation to your partner’s genitals and surrounding region (thighs, testicles, outer labia, etc.) using your hands, a sex toy, or friction (humping or grinding).
Oral: using your mouth – lips and tongue primarily – to orally stimulate your partner’s genitals and surrounding region.
Vaginal: penetrating a female vagina with a penis, a hand (including “fisting”), or a sex toy (usually a dildo).
Anal: penetrating the anus with a penis, a hand (including “fisting”), or a sex toy (usually a dildo or butt plug).
These are the four basic types of ways people give and receive direct sexual pleasure.
Since we know these are the four physical acts humans commonly perform to achieve climax, a rational basis for evaluating sexual function would use MOVA (or MOA) as the basic template for normal sex acts. Instead, much of medicine and psychiatry still focuses on vaginal intercourse as the bellwether of sexual function for men and for women.
When you compare the realities of sex to the way we treat it socially, it’s no wonder that our culture is so messed about the subject. For example, since most people will grow up to get off on MOVA, why teach them that intercourse is the only or best sex to have? Treating oral sex as sinful, dirty or wrong when it’s an important component of sexual pleasure in adults is both counter-intuitive and spiritually destructive. The idea of raising people to remain abstinent until their wedding nights, and then insisting they derive all their partnered joy from a sole act goes against everything we know about human nature.
What traditional advice fails to acknowledge is that sex is experiential, not intellectual. No one can know which sensual and sexual acts give them the greatest sense of pleasure until they experience it. If you remember back to your own youth, before you had intercourse for the first time, and recall your expectation, my guess is that the reality was surprisingly and significantly different.
One can compare it to learning about fire: we understand its lethal potential the first time we get burned. Until then, fire looks so pretty and harmless. Sex may look pretty or it may look scary, it may look desirable or it may look gross; until you have an experience with it, though, you can’t be sure that your body agrees with your emotional opinion.
That’s why making a decision about the type(s) of sex to explore before actually allowing yourself to experiment often leads to sexual boredom in relationships. It’s pitiful that we treat sex as if expanding our erotic repertoires with partners were dangerous things that could destabilize relationships. The opposite is true. No one has ever come to me complaining of a partner who was too creative and sensual in bed.
Any catalogue of sexual behaviors has to start with the Internet’s Rule 34, “if it exists, someone’s made porn about it.”
The staggering variety of documented sexual behaviors on Internet porn sites is a sheer delight to a sexologist because it demonstrates a few things that ideologues and conservatives have historically denied, such as:
- All kinds of sex, including kinds we may personally find strange or distasteful, are enjoyed by average, normal people.
- Diversity is abundant and therefore normal.
- Pornography has universal appeal.
- The thirst for sexual variation crosses all religious, racial, social and age barriers.
In my books Different Loving and Come Hither, I made the brave attempts literally to catalogue known fetishes and kinks. Now I am older and wiser. There is no catalogue that can completely encompass the breadth of individual sexual variations. The minute one starts compiling such lists, exceptions will either come to mind or, down the road, an exceptional person will send a righteously ticked-off email.
Think of it this way: right this minute, someone somewhere is inventing something new – a new sex toy, a new shoe style, a new way to fasten clothing. Ten or twenty years from now, other people will develop fetishes for the new invention. Ten or twenty years after that, there will be porn sites devoted to it. That is Rule 34 and it’s a good rule. Sex is as infinite as the human imagination itself.
Of course, I can’t help myself from still trying to organize things just a little, if only to be meticulous.