12 Women Describe Their Sex Lives in One Word

If you could use one word to describe your sex life, what would it be? Sexuality is beautifully complicated and multi-faceted, so this may be a difficult thing to ask.

Your answer may reveal a lot about how we feel about yourself — your own feelings about sexual desires and whether or not you feel free enough to express them — your own feelings about your emotional attachments to our sexual partners, and your relationship between sexuality and your body.

If I could describe my sex life in one word, I would say, "fluid." As a bisexual woman with a complicated sexuality, I have always struggled to pin down my sexuality to one all-encompassing phrase. My sexual attraction to men ebbs and flows with my mood, as it does with women. I am a sexually adventurous person, but as I am discovering, my willingness to explore my kinks and deepest desires are directly related to my emotional connectedness with my sexual partners. And at times, I feel sexual and open to having sex, while at other times I connect sexuality with emotionality and I feel unable to connect myself to another person with my body. Sometimes, I feel interested in a casual hookup, while at other times I feel deeply that sex is art that should only be shared with a special person.

To find out how other women feel, I asked 12 to describe their sex lives in one word, and here were their responses.