I don't ponder this often, but if I were to consider how to define the word "sex" to someone, I'm fairly confident that I could come within striking distance of an accurate description. But according to a few articles floating around today, I might be a little overconfident...it turns out, Americans have almost no common definition of sex. In fact, about 37 percent of women consider oral sex "sex" -- and 63 percent of them don't. Somewhat surprisingly, men are more likely to consider oral sex to be "sex" (though Amanda Hess of The Sexist Blogs has an interesting take on this finding).

Why the confusion? Have years of philandering politicians and their fast and loose (pun intended) definitions of sex made the American public less sure of themselves? Well, maybe they're not all to blame. According to Erick Janssen, a scientist at sex-research Mecca, The Kinsey Institute, "Sex is a word and nobody is really in charge of that term. In a way, our thinking of sex and definitions of sex is more complex than they were in the past."

And even in the (admittedly recent) past, things weren't very clear. In 1998, two other Kinsey researchers were publishing a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association on how people see sex. The answer: We can't really agree. "These data make it clear that general agreement regarding what constitutes having 'had sex' and how sexual partners are counted cannot be taken for granted," Kinsey researchers Stephanie Sanders and June Reinisch concluded in their JAMA paper.

So, what's the big deal? Who cares if we can't come up with an official definition? To my mind, it doesn't much matter if my definition and yours don't match up...but sex is a big enough deal that, if you're having it, you should be able to talk about it. And to borrow a point from the Sexist Blogs' Sexist Beatdown, "it's not as important to define what 'sex' is as it is to define what we're comfortable with people doing with us or with other people."