As research for my novel (yes), I asked a few women I know what their preferred term for sexual intercourse was—just to get a sense of the range. "Most important," I said, "is the way you'd probably think of it if you were thinking to yourself, or writing in a journal, or talking to your closest friend—unselfconsciously, in other words." The results are too interesting for me not to post, although that was not originally my intention. (Am I turning into Philip Roth?*) I'll update this if I get any more responses—and if you're a woman between the ages of, say, 20 and 35, please feel free to comment on this post yourself, with your own answers,** as any and all information is helpful.
So. Without further ado—
THE RANKINGS
First place (by a landslide): have sex
Second place: sleep with/together
Tied for third: make love and fuck***
Honorable mention: bone [awesome –ed.]
[UPDATED 9/24/08: It's an upset!
Make love and fuck are still tied, but
pulling ahead of them into third place
is the incredible and fantastic and
previously merely honorable bone.
Good job and congratulations, boners!
Folks, you can't make this stuff up.]
* You wish. –ed.
** Particularly if you're willing to give some sort of identifying information about yourself—not your identity, of course, but your general age range, country or U.S. state of residence, level of education, that sort of thing—I suppose sexual orientation is pretty relevant, too.a
*** Very interesting!
a N.B.: I probably will not include your anonymous results in the extremely official rankings unless you contact me directly, which you can only do if you know me—in which case congratulations! and hello.
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have sex sleep with make love fuck bone . . . because stupidly those key words' being in bold apparently disqualifies them from all search results. I don't know about you, but I want to be able to find this post by searching "bone." [10/6/08]
4 comments:
Personally, I am a fan of the B-words: boff, boink, and bone. But I have also used the following:
Screw
Pork
Get laid
Romp
Jump bones
P in V
Hanky-panky
Business Time (Flight of the Conchords shout-out)
Roll in the hay
Freak nasty
Hump
Keep in mind I'm not getting laid as nearly as often as I have to come up with synonyms for "sex."
Thanks, Moo. Screw is classic, boff brilliant, jump bones (sans possessive pronoun) ingenious, and P in V, if we're to imagine it used in earnest, invigoratingly surreal. (How would you put freak nasty in the past tense? Or is it strictly in the moment?)
Um, I have some relevant footage that you should see.
/Melissa
Late to the party (just arrived here from a previous post), but I just had to emphasize how much I, a thirty-year-old, Caucasian, half-Jewish, college-educated, heterosexual, married woman and Los Angeles native with one child, hate the phrase "make love." Whenever I hear anyone say it in any context, I want to punch them in the face.
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