Bill Clinton’s line, “I did not have sex with that woman,” famously sparked heated debate about going down.

Did Clinton perjure? In trying to decide whether oral sex is sex, we’re confronted with the question of what it truly means to have sex. How would you answer the question: Would you say you “had sex” if the most intimate behavior you engaged in was (fill in the blank)?

Northwestern University Linguistics Professor Gregory Ward addressed these definitional questions in his Sex Week lecture titled “The Problem With Having Sex.” In his lecture to nearly 40 students, Professor Ward focused on the ways in which language shapes our conceptualization of sex, zeroing in on two lexical semantic issues: “having sex” and “losing one’s virginity”.

Sex Week Committee Director and founder Natasha Matusova, a SESP senior, says that they picked Professor Ward to speak after one of their committee members raved about his Language and Sex class. “How we talk about sexuality and sex is a lot of how we think about sex,” she says. “This is really important because it teaches us to think about the way we describe sex and sexuality and sexual orientation.”

According to Professor Ward, most of us subscribe to a “coitocentric, heteronormative, and scalar” conception of sexuality. To emphasize the “coitocentric” aspect of our notion of sexuality — meaning that at the center of our conceptualization of sexuality is intercourse — Professor Ward analyzed two surveys that asked undergraduates to define “having sex” by choosing from a range of choices spanning from french kissing to anal sex. The first survey addressed a general cross-section of undergraduates and the second specifically addressed gay, lesbian, and bisexual students. Both arrived at the same conclusion: 60% of respondents thought oral sex did not count as “having sex”.

Bill Clinton, you’ve been exonerated.

Ward’s lecture explored the LGB community’s conception of “having sex”. According to Professor Ward, heterosexuals and gay and bisexual men define “having sex” as penetration or “coitus,” whereas lesbians define “having sex” as any genital contact. Similarly, when defining “losing one’s virginity,” lesbians perceive any genital contact as a loss of virginity, while homosexual, bisexual, and heterosexual men define loss of virginity as intercourse.

However, when ranking degrees of intimacy, gay men view french kissing as a more sexual act than do lesbians. As Professor Ward puts it, “If a dude sticks his tongue down your throat, you might as well be fucking.”

Professor Ward says he believes that our conceptualization of sexuality is marked by degrees of having sex, ranked from least to most. One ranking that struck a particular chord with the audience was the “Catholic School Girl Scale,” where anal sex was ranked as less intimate than vaginal sex.

So how does the way we talk about sex affect the way we act and think? “It’s important to become aware of what’s involved so that you can then start making conscious decisions: do you want to participate in that conceptualization… or do you want to adopt a different one that doesn’t buy into a more, restrictive conventional, heteronormative notion of sexuality?” Ward asked.

If the locution of sex is something that interests you, Professor Ward will teach his “refreshingly popular” Language and Sex class again next winter.