"no sex" and what it means

[pantryslut]

When doctors recommend "no sex" (as with certain pregnancy complications, detailed in an earlier post), they always mean the same thing that the mainstream culture means when they say "sex": what some of us queers tend to call "penis in vagina sex" (PinV or PnV for short). It's just a base heteronormative assumption, one that's extraordinarily common and one that, say, obstetricians are particularly prone not to question because, hey, that's how most of their patients became their patients in the first place, if you see what I mean.

It always reminds me of the subject line of one of the advice posts at the site I work for: "fisting after sex?" I actually yelled at the screen "Fisting *is* sex, dammit!" in frustration.

Comments

[serenejournal.livejournal.com]

When I was having painful orgasms, the doctor recommended that I just have sex with women and not men for a while.

Um.

Yeah.

'Cause I don't have orgasms with women.

It took several iterations of the "it's not penetration that causes the pain, it's ORGASM" thing for him to finally get it.

(Of course, then his advice got even worse. Why not just have sex without orgasm from now on? Or hey, it only hurts for five seconds; just ignore that stabbing pain in your cervix that makes you cry and whimper; that would be sexy!)

[innerdoggie.livejournal.com]

Did you ever find out what was happening?

I was getting pain (like menstrual cramps) in the PMS time, so I'd take ibuprofen beforehand. I called it "cramp-gasm", but haven't asked the gyne about it yet, since the ibuprofen works fine.