Sex educator, author, and speaker in Wynnewood, PAClaim to fame: creating the “pizza model” of consensual, pleasurable sex“In the baseball model, first base is usually kissing, second base is often thought of as feeling somebody up, third base in some cases is oral sex, and then a home run is vaginal intercourse or anal intercourse. This sets out a very controlled and scripted way to think about sex. It’s competitive, because you’ve got two opposing teams — somebody’s offense and somebody’s defense. It’s very regimented, in terms of you have to do things in a certain order, and it’s very focused on winning and losing. And while there might be an implied idea of fair play, we know from baseball that ‘win at all costs’ becomes much more of a dominant message than ‘play fair.’“And that model is sexist, because it assumes that the woman in a heterosexual encounter is the field upon which the game is played, and the guy is the player. It’s heterosexist, in that it defines sex in a very heteronormative way, and gay and lesbian folks and queer folks can’t easily fit the model. It’s goal-directed, in that it says it’s only ‘real’ sex if you get all the way around the baseball diamond and if you score a run.“Interestingly, ‘scoring a run’ seems to be more important for the boy than for the girl in a heterosexual baseball context. The fact that vaginal intercourse is a ‘homerun,’ and we know that a huge percentage of women don’t have orgasms from vaginal intercourse shows, again, the sexism and the way it’s tilted towards a male-dominated system. For all of those reasons, it’s really problematic.”“Rather than in baseball, where you get told when there’s a game on the schedule, with pizza it really starts with an internal sense of am I hungry? and what would feed my hunger at this point? Right away, there’s agency and choice. We can say, I am hungry, and I’m going to pursue that hunger. Or we could say, I’m hungry, but it’s not a great time for me to eat. Or, I’m hungry, but I’m going to have something other than this right now.“There’s no right or wrong way to do pizza. There are just a lot of preferences. I may like pineapples and you may like anchovies, and they’re not right or wrong, they’re just different. So there’s a lot of individuality. Also, with pizza, if you’re gonna have pizza with somebody else, one of the first things you do is talk about it; you may even negotiate. That’s really healthy, and that’s really absent in the baseball model. In baseball, you don’t need to talk about it. Everybody knows what you’re doing. You just show up and take your position and play the game, right?“Then, the outcome of pizza is not a competition. At some point you feel satisfied and you’ve had enough. You can decide you’ve had enough, you want more, and over-indulging tends to make you feel not so great.“It’s a model that is much more inclusive, much more based on individual agency, decision, and choice, and that is not competitive and it’s about shared satisfaction and pleasure. If our sexual encounters were more like that, we would be a healthier, happier society.”