I’ve often noticed people leaving comments based on the assumption that if someone who (you believe) has a penis and someone who (you believe) has a vagina are having sex, then they must be having penis-in-vagina sex. I’m not going to get into specifics here, because that isn’t anyone’s business, but the topic itself is relevant to just about everyone.

I’m sure that for many of you this will be incredibly obvious, but for others, it’s evidently not. Just because someone has a penis, it does not mean they are at all interested in using it to have vaginal sex – even if the possibility of vaginal sex is readily available to them. Likewise, not everyone with a vagina is interested in having it penetrated by a penis, even if a capable penis is available.

To some people, this apparently defies comprehension. I suppose that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, as our culture and media often treat “sex” in general as equivalent to penis-in-vagina sex, presenting this as the predominant mode of sexual interaction.

Some will protest, “But this is how lots of people have sex!” And that’s certainly true. But the near-exclusive focus on PIV sex often serves to erase and delegitimize other forms of sex outside of the standard script, limiting people’s imaginations so severely that they might not even understand what anything beyond PIV might look like. When it’s not about a specific type of sex involving the interface between a penis and a vagina, a particular mechanics of sex centered on repeated thrusting, and a timeline of sex oriented around when the penis-bearer has an orgasm, people are seemingly lost.

This is a pretty ridiculous situation. I know we’re not all experts here, but it should be rather obvious that people’s bodies can be stimulated by more than just a penis or a vagina. Anyone with long enough arms should have a very… firm grasp of this.

Yet even when people realize why asking things like “how do lesbians have sex?” is ignorant and unimaginative, they often still persist in the attitude that anything other than PIV is not quite “real” sex. To them, PIV is the indisputable gold standard of sexual activity, the pinnacle of sex itself. Without it, the very fact of two (or more) people having had sex is considered vague, nebulous, and potentially in doubt, because the standard of a penis in a vagina has not been met.

This is more than just harmless nonsense. The narrow focus on PIV is largely responsible for the idea that oral and anal sex are “not really sex”, which is both a dangerous misconception, and sometimes an act of strategic ignorance within an obsolete value system. It also serves as a focal point for the concept of “virginity”, a model which fails to describe sexual experience in any meaningful way despite supposedly existing for this purpose, and instead functions to define a woman’s worth by the history of her vagina.

More than that, the belief that PIV sex is desired and engaged in by anyone for whom it’s possible has a darker side: it implies that those who don’t or can’t have PIV must be suffering in its absence, with their sexual activity being an unsatisfying simulacrum of “real” sex. This perpetuates the idea that the relationships of same-sex couples will always be inadequate in this respect – their sex will never be as good as that of heterosexuals, and as a result, neither will their companionship. And if a gay or lesbian couple does happen to have a combination of bodies which makes PIV sex possible, people assume that it would be their first choice by default. It’s as though they believe penises and vaginas behave like magnets: get them close enough, and contact is inevitable.

This is definitely not the case, and it’s an insult to all the people who are having completely awesome sex without a penis in a vagina. Their sex is real sex, no less real and no less satisfying than anyone else’s. How do they have sex? The answer is: However they want. So let’s stop making unwarranted assumptions about the ways people must be having sex, and the kinds of things they enjoy in bed. That’s just… fucked.