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Sexual egalitarians have often objected to the sexist nature of the English verb to fuck. For many speakers of English, the subject of fuck needs to be male. So Bill fucked Monica sounds okay, but Monica fucked Bill is a bit odd (unless one is speaking metaphorically, but that's grist for another essay). There is certainly some variation here. Miss Poubelle has occasionally heard things like She fucked him (with no intention of conjuring images of anything strapped on), but she thinks that this is much less common than the reverse.

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This is probably because most speakers understand fuck to mean something like "insert a penis into a vagina." Miss Poubelle believes that for most heterosexuals, He fucked her implies vaginal sex, and not anal or oral sex. For gay men, Gregory fucked Christopher implies anal sex and not oral sex, and it also implies that Gregory was the top and Christopher was the bottom. Among lesbians, Miss Poubelle believes that Moonhawk fucked Matilda generally implies that Moonhawk used her fingers or a dildo. If any kind lesbian readers out there disagree, Miss Poubelle would be very interested to hear about it.

In all of these sort of sentences, the person doing the fucking is treated by the grammar as the active participant, while the person getting fucked is treated as a passive participant. There is a sort of grammatical inequality in these sentences. In a case like Sandy fucked Lee passionately /slowly/accidentally, the adverbs passionately/slowly/accidentally describe kinds of actions, but they only describe Sandy's actions. For all we know, Lee could have been asleep during the whole thing.

But this is really an outmoded and incorrect view of the way sex actually goes. We all know that the person getting fucked is often a more active and involved participant than the person doing the fucking.

When we use the word fuck without an object, it seems that the sentence implies a more even distribution of the action. So Sandy and Lee fucked passionately seems to imply that both Lee and Sandy were passionate. For those who want language that describes an equal relationship between sexual partners, an intransitive understanding of fuck has many advantages.

For those who sense that the word fuck is tainted with non-egalitarian connotations, a few alternatives are possible. There are always the old and reliable make love to and have sex with, which happily accept either partner as subject. However, Miss Poubelle has recently come across another egalitarian sex verb that may appeal to her gentle readers.

In older forms of English, gender could be used as a verb meaning to have sex. It is primarily used in talking about animals, as in the following 1599 quote: "In the beginning of winter, the wilde swine gender." What is interesting from our point of view is that the verb to gender never has a direct object. If a single animal is the subject, then it always genders with the other animal. For example, when a 15th century text writes, "Then shall the Roobucke gendre with the Roo," [Then the buck will have sex with the doe], it doesn't treat either animal as the direct object.

To Miss Poubelle's ear, Gregory gendered with Christopher has a gently sweet and archaic sound to it. It is completely and intentionally vague about who put what in whom where. Gendering suggests that sex is an exploration of each other's genders, and at its best and most spiritual, this is what sex can be-- an appreciation of the complex ways in which culture and biology and the chances of individual history have come together to form another person's sexuality. Because of our experience as sexual minorities, gay men and lesbians have a step up in understanding that gender and sexuality are much more than our biology. Truly understanding another's sexuality is the beginning of a deeper understanding of what it is to be human. Happy gendering!