he distinguished philosopher Thomas Nagel noted in his essay "Sexual Perversion" that sex means many things to different people.  Sex can be a way of getting even, as when one cheats because one’s partner cheated.  Sex can be a way of proving oneself, as when one sets out to prove to oneself that one has what it takes.  And sex can be a way of competing with others: if they can get some, then I can too.  I am not interested in these aspects of sex.  Rather, what interests me is the extraordinary depth of trust that sex involves.

To state the obvious, sex involves touching.  There is no mutual and consensual touching between two people that rivals the touching of sex.  The only thing that comes even remotely close, of course, is the touching that is involved in caring for and expressing love for an infant.  But, of course, the asymmetry here is that the touching in this instance is not at all consensual; nor is it mutual.  To be sure, within no time the parental touching is not simply something that the child has no choice but to let happen.  Rather, the parental touching becomes something that the child profoundly trusts. 

Human touching at its best is a profound form of trust.  When it comes to touching, it is stunning just how sensitive we are to things.  There is duration, intensity, execution, and location.  Culture influences these things.  But these variables are operative across cultures; and it is rare that we ever miss any one of these variables.

If you are a close male friend of mine, I can in all likelihood “rest” my hand upon your shoulder and you will be at ease with that.  You might even think of it as an expression of affirmation, nay even an appropriate expression of (non-sexual) affection.  By contrast, if you are merely a male acquaintance, the most that I probably can do is quickly tap you on the shoulder.  Significantly, the male behavior towards a male who is merely an acquaintance and the male behavior towards a female who is a close friend (where this is quite settled) parallel one another rather dramatically, the exception in the United States, of course, is the embrace.  American men do not regularly embrace one another.

The point that intrigues me is that in all of this we have varying degrees of trust. 

I would never ever touch a woman’s knee with the back of my hand, no matter how quick the touch might be and no matter how much she trusted me, whereas I can imagine so touching a male friend in this way.  It is not possible for me to touch a close female friend in this way and for that touch not to have sexual connotations; whereas it is possible for me to touch a close male friend in this way without sexual connotations coming into play. 

The manner in which adults touch one another marks the difference between a touch of friendship and non-sexual affection, on the one hand, and a touch surfeited with sexual meaning, on the other.  And as the split-second touch on the knee with the back of the hand reveals, the very same touching can change in meaning depending on who is the object of that touch. 

Make no mistake about it: Social interaction at its best involves the trust that the small instances of touch will be of the right sort.  Mistakes are possible and forgivable, but only if they are very few and far between. 

If this is not an indication as to how amazing human beings are at monitoring non-verbal behavior, then I do know what is. 

Sex is about taking touch to the highest degree possible between two human beings, where mutual consent is involved.  In this regard, sex is rather like going directly from a small pond to an ocean.  This is why I maintain that one of the greatest forms of trust between two people comes in the form of sexual interaction. 

Given that it is anything but trivial that people touch our shoulder in the right way.  The significance of touch has to hold all the more so in the matter of the touching that involves sex.  For one thing, in the case of sex the entire body becomes the the range for touching.  For another, there is not in the case of a mistake any corrective behavior that is the equivalent to the speedy removal of one’s hand.  If a split-second touch on the should is replete with significance, then even greater significance is involved with touching of the entire body.  

But there is more.  Whatever significance the shoulder has, it is not an erogenous zone.  So touching it does not occasion uncontrollable sensations of pleasure.  But to give another complete access to one’s most erogenous zones is to engage in a level of trust that is utterly sublime, precisely because this is (when things are as they should be) tantamount to two people choosing to trust one another when they are in fact most vulnerable with respect to experiencing rhapsodic bodily pleasure.

At its best, then, having sex is about two people mutually choosing to trust one another with their bodies.  Each gives her/his body to the other for receiving and giving pleasure.  The trust is that each will do just that in, of course, just the right way.  Trust does not get more visceral that that.  Trust goes not get more sublime than that. 

This is why the significance of sex will never reduce to something trivial.  It is simply not possible to make trust trivial.  At any rate, it is not possible to make trust trivial without doing enormous damage to our psyche.  The point, then, is that insofar as a person genuinely cares about herself or himself and has self-respect, it is not possible for sex to reduce to something trivial 

Take the mutual trust out of sex and one is left with an activity that at the level of sheer bodily movements seems indistinguishable from good sex.  Yet, there is a void like none other.  Why?  Because there is no set of bodily movements in the universe that can make up for the experience of trusting another and being trusted by that very same person in turn. 

Trust at its best turns the ordinary into the extraordinary.  Pick any moment where two people bask in one another’s trust, and what you have is a moment that each regards as wonderfully meaningful and fulfilling, though they not do much of anything except spend time together. 

What would make anyone thing that that the addition of trust at its best to sex would have any less of a salubrious impact upon the sex act itself?  Alas, the folly of modernity lies in the thought that trust is irrelevant to sex because sex is about the orgasm.  But this is none other than a form of social self-deception, precisely because sex invariably involves touching and touching between adult human beings is absolutely impossible without ineluctably raising the specter of trust.

If sex as sheer orgasms were all it took to make the world happy, then many societies ought to be be deliriously drunk with happiness.  What is missing the trust that makes the ordinary extraordinary.  Trust is and shall always be a non-fungible good for which there is no substitute.  Sex is not, and conceptually cannot be, the exception to this truth.