Scripts

The most elaborate taxonomy of sexual acts ever devised was not produced by lawyers, or doctors, or theologians. It was produced by American teenagers, and it is based on baseball.

The system is post-war, and it is beautifully compact: first base, second base, third base, home run. It has been exported worldwide by American film and television, which is why it is intelligible to British adolescents who have never seen a baseball game and could not identify a shortstop under torture. It maps physical intimacy onto forward progress around a diamond, with the implication — noticeable once you notice it, and then hard to stop resenting — that a sexual encounter is a linear journey with a scoring event at the end and a fielding side trying to stop you.

What is instructive is where the system breaks. First base is kissing; almost nobody disputes it. Second base is above the waist; a little disputed. Home is intercourse. And third base is a shambles. Depending on who you ask, and when, and where, third base means manual stimulation, or oral sex, or oral sex only if it is the boy doing it, or “anything below the waist that isn’t the main event”. Some accounts push oral sex all the way to home plate on the grounds that by the 1990s it was functionally equivalent. Others insist it is third and always has been.

This is not sloppiness. Vagueness clusters around the contested item, the way fog collects in a dip. The taxonomy is stable precisely where the culture agrees and unstable precisely where it does not, and it has been unstable at third base for at least sixty years.

British adolescents, lacking a diamond, improvised. The vocabulary I grew up with was drearier and more procedural than the American — a business of getting off with, going further, doing stuff, going all the way, everything but — but the architecture was identical. There was a summit, the summit was intercourse, and every other act was located by its distance from the summit rather than by anything intrinsic to itself. Oral sex in that system is not primarily an act with its own character, pleasures and difficulties. It is a position on a ladder. This is a peculiar way to think about putting your mouth on somebody, and we should be more surprised by it than we are.

from By Mouth (2026)