Three-Dimensional Sex
At least until I discover the string theory / sex crossover with ten dimensions
Today’s thesis is that there are exactly three kinds of sexual experiences.
Right away, you should roll to disbelieve, of course. How in the world could a thesis so specific, describing something so complex as human sexuality, be true, unless it is also vacuous? This has to be bullshit. You’re probably right.
I’m going to tell you about it anyway!
I’m a sucker for a good conceptual framework. Frameworks feel like toys for my mind. Maybe you feel the same way.
Even if all you do is disagree with the framework, the way you push back against it, add to it, edit it, or even just rail against it will help define your own thinking about sexuality.
I think most people lack vocabulary for describing what kind of sex they like, and as a result they don’t think deeply or talk about it much at all. This framework will, at the very least, give you some concepts and vocabulary. Have a conversation with your partner(s) about it and see if you learn anything about each other!
Credit Where Credit Is Due
I didn’t invent this framework. I heard about it from Eric Candell, who read about it in David Schnarch’s 1991 book Constructing the Sexual Crucible, which in turn cited Donald Mosher’s 1980 paper in the Journal of Sex Research called “Three dimensions of depth of involvement in human sexual response.”
Prior to that, Michael Weiss-Malik told me about a model of his own invention that was eerily similar to this one. Probably he’s not the only person to have independently come up with this framework. Actually - the more people who derived it separately, the more likely it is to be in any sense “true.” Did you also invent this framework, or know someone who did? Let me know!
The Three Dimensions of Sex
Here’s the TL;DR.
We know a lot about the physiological experience of sex; what happens physically in our bodies when we get aroused: the changes in blood flow, the tensing of various muscle groups, and the release or resolution associated with orgasm. That’s all well and good.
But what is actually going on psychologically, emotionally, cognitively? What do people think about and feel and experience in their minds? Where’s the sexual response cycle describing that?
Well, Mosher came up with one. It has three dimensions and you can go shallow or deep on each dimension. You don’t have to pick just one, you can mix and match and do all three at once if you want.
And here’s the key. Mosher says that “it is the psychological involvement that makes physical sexual stimulation effective.” That is, the same exact touch either feels sexy and is exciting and interesting - or is not - depending on what’s happening in your mind. Sounds right to me.
The three dimensions, briefly, are:
Sexual role enactment - what is the structure of your relationship to your partner, in fantasy and/or reality? What story are you telling with the sex you are having?
Sexual trance - can you disconnect from reality and enter an almost dissociative sexual trance in which you sink into the sexual stimulus?
Engagement with the partner - how do you feel about this person in particular? What is the meaning of your sexual encounter?
I’ll tell you more about each one in just a second, but first…
A Quick Note about Solo Sex and Other Edge (heh) Cases
Sex is not just for two! You can also have sex with yourself, or with multiple others!
I think this model adapts to those situations pretty well, but that is not how Mosher wrote the paper originally. In his paper he’s definitely talking about two people having physical contact with each other. I’m mostly going to follow suit here, but if you want to think about solo or moresome sex I invite you to adopt the model wholesale and just apply it directly. I think it still works.
And of course, because the paper was written in 1980, it mixes up sex (as in, what body parts you have) and gender a lot, and it privileges monogamy. That’s gonna happen when you go read old papers.
Dimension One: Sexual Role Enactment
What is Sexual Role Enactment?
The use of the word “role” makes it sounds like this is about roleplay, like someone is going to be wearing a French maid outfit or a sailor suit, and while that absolutely could belong in this category, that is not really what it’s about.
The stuffy definition is: “A sexual role is the organized set of behaviors that belongs to the position of sex partner that is activated in an appropriate role location or sexual setting. The concept of sexual role implies a patterned interaction with the sex partner in a complementary role.”
To put it another way, what is the story of the sex you are having, what kind of script are you going to follow, and what’s your part in the play?
Some examples of sexual scripts:
The Same Sex We Usually Have on Saturdays Around 8PM
We Are Living Our Best Sexual Life With Each Other
Horny Handsy Teenagers
Showing Off Our Skills At the Swingers Club
I Couldn’t Help But Notice Your Mouth Is Not Busy
Your Essay Was Terrible and You Might Flunk, See Me After Class
Please Help, It Doesn’t Hurt When I Sit Down Anymore
Midnight in the Lady Garden of Good and Evil1
… I could keep going but I think I better keep this moving along!
Characteristics of Sexual Role Enactment
At the shallow end, sexual role enactment feels performative, fake, put-on, pretend, awkward, uncomfortable, ill-fitting, detached, perfunctory.
To fit well, the roles you choose must mesh well with your personal characteristics, beliefs, and values. It will be easier to play “We Are Living Our Best Sexual Life With Each Other” if you hold the belief “I am passionate” and “I am skilled at pleasing my partner” than if you hold “I am terrified of disappointing my partner.”
Similarly, “Showing Off Our Skills at the Swingers Club” fits well with “novelty strengthens my marriage” but does not fit well with “sex should remain private.”
Sexual role enactment deepens when you feel at home playing your role, maybe so much so that it ceases to feel like a role and you are simply being yourself, but in a dramatic and expressive way. You feel confident and skilled at what you are doing, and you and your partner(s) are improvising successfully within your roles in a complementary way. The sex is playful and dramatic and brings novelty and variety. It’s expressive. It might involve a lot of lusty sex talk; partners might direct each other. It’s fun. At its deepest, you might feel transported and transformed.
Dimension Two: Sexual Trance
What is Sexual Trance?
Sex can be an altered state of being, in which the real world fades away and your mind shifts into an alternate plane of reality.2 The Mosher paper cites an earlier work by Ludwig (1966) called “Altered States of Consciousness” that describes ten characteristics:
changes in thinking (attention, concentration, decreased reflective awareness)
changes in sense of time (timelessness, time stopping)
loss of control
change in emotional expression
body image change (dissolution of boundaries)
perceptual distortions (hyperacuteness of sensations, synesthesias)
change in meaning or significance (profound love or illumination)
sense of the ineffable (which is hilarious because we’re here for the effing, are we not)
feelings of rejuvenation
hypersuggestibility
If that sounds like being high, you’re right, the same framework captures mushrooms, sex, and sex on mushrooms.
Characteristics of Sexual Trance
At the shallow end, you are still very anchored in normal reality, and your awareness of the sexual is dampened or limited. You may still think about needing to pick up milk at the grocery store and notice that irritating stain on the ceiling. You wonder how long this is going to take. The sex feels mundane, dull, boring, unerotic.
As the sexual trance deepens, your awareness of normal reality falls away until it would take an urgent distraction or even an emergency to bring you back to earth. A touch that would normally tickle may feel like a caress. Your partner’s nude body, not usually very interesting when they’re just changing clothes, is now enticing and erotic. The sound of yourself breathing raggedly now heightens your own arousal.
Sex that is high in the sexual trance dimension tends to take place in a serene environment free of distractions. It’s slow and repetitive, sensual, inwardly oriented. The partners probably don’t talk very much, except to offer pacing instructions. There’s no script. You might close your eyes and fantasize, or simply sink into the sensory experience you are currently engaged in. At its deepest, trance-focused brings intense physical sensations and may mimic the effect of psychoactive drugs even while unaltered.
Dimension Three: Engagement With Partner
What is Engagement with Partner?
You can knock it out of the park on the first two dimensions with anybody you jive with at a basic level. But for this last one, your connection to your partner really matters. You have to be really into them. It matters that you are having sex with this person, specifically, and nobody else.
(Again, I’ll note that I think you can absolutely apply this idea to solo sex if you focus on how much you cherish your connection to yourself. I also think this dimension is compatible with polyamory - though Mosher would disagree. According to me, you can truly, madly, deeply3 love more than one person - but when you are having sex with this partner, you are focusing on your unique connection to this one in particular.)
Characteristics of Engagement with Partner
At the shallow end, you have negative or neutral sentiment toward your partner. You may be having sex with them to get revenge on someone else. You may not really think of them as a separate person with their own rich inner life; you see them more as an object for your own sexual gratification, a sex toy.
Wading into deeper waters, you may think of your partner as a real person, but be very focused on your own appearance or performance.
Deeper yet, you see appreciate your partner’s appearance and performance, and you try to bring out their pleasure as much as your own.
And at the deep end of this dimension, you love your partner for their whole self and personality and keep all of that in your awareness as you engage in sex with them. Your fantasies may be romantic and poetic. At the limit, you experience the sex as a mystical or spiritual union celebrating life itself.
Sex that is focused on Engagement with Partner is romantic and loving and may involve kissing, full body contact, and eye contact. You might fantasize about love songs, your partner’s face, your future together, your cherished memories. It’s a fusion, a merging, a union, a celebration.
Okay, So Now What?
Here are some ideas where to go from here:
Fight me. What would you change about this model? Let me know.
What kind of sex are you having these days, charted in these three dimensions? Bear in mind that you don’t have to pick one of the three dimensions, you can absolutely combine them.
What kind would you like to be having?
What kind would your partner(s) like to be having?
Are you and your partner(s) well matched in terms of your favorite kind of sex? Even if you are not a perfect match, where do you overlap the most?
What would it take to attain greater depth in any of the three dimensions?
Within the dimension of sexual role enactment, what are your favorite scripts? What roles do you like to occupy? Do you have any beliefs or values that clash with the scripts you would most like to play out?
Within the dimension of sexual trance, do you know how to tune out other distractions and tune into sensuousness? This is a skill that can be learned - but it’s too big a topic to cover here. Let me know if you want another article about that.
Within the dimension of engagement with partner, if you do have a partner, what helps you get on the same wavelength with each other during sex?
I’d love to hear about whatever you discover!
A Parting Joke
Okay, so sex has three dimensions, but the chirality of your sex depends whether you jerk off with the left hand or the right.
I’ll just go now.
I wish I could take credit for all of these but in fairness I must admit that Matt May wrote some of them.
One reader offered the feedback that “the real world fading away” and “tuning into sex” are two different perceptual shifts and that you can do either one without the other, and he’s right! The original Mosher paper actually described this; I glossed over it in my summary.
And actually the Savage Garden lyrics are pretty good if you want a more poetic description of this.
Fascinating. And while I have NOT invented such a framework myself, I do seem to have invented a conceptual dimension that this framework maps onto: who is the sex centred on, in simple terms, is it FUNDAMENTALLY masturbatory or is it FUNDAMENTALLY a way of relating/connecting to others: it goes 2, 1, 3, with 2 being the most obviously self-centred and 3 being the most obviously about the connection with the other person, and 2 requiring another but not necessarily in their full humanity.
Another idea: the sex I am having might be different than the sex my partner is having, at least in the case of 1 and 2, and it might work very well. Probably more likely in bdsm where a "role enactment" of the top (whether submissive or dominant) might result in the bottom (whether submissive or dominant) achieving a sexual trance of bliss ("devoted submissive focused only on the pleasure of his dominant who doesn't need to worry about pleasing him at all") or an altered state known as "subspace" (most common in masochist but also reported by other bottoms, often submissive bottoms).
As to sex I am having nowadays: following a post-breavemement exploration period of (1) made more enjoyable by quite a bit of (2), I got bored of doing anything whatsoever with "people I gel with on a basic level", and now I'm passively seeking (3) type connections. In my experience it takes about a dozen people to remind oneself of the limit of the former kind of thing.
It is possible that I don't quite GET (1) beyond figuring out what gets me to optimal (2) or (3) and it seems obvious to me that (2) doesn't require presence of a partner whatsoever.
I'm also wondering about the distinction between TRANCE and FLOW, with both of them characterised by a certain ego diminishment and an extreme narrowing of focus but in very different ways, the biggest difference I experince here is between receiving sexual pleasure (kinky or not context) and topping in a BDSM scene.