I know two things about baseball.

1. It’s long. Like, it takes a long time to watch a game. I went to a game once, and couldn’t understand even a little bit what was going on — and in particular, I couldn’t understand why it was taking nine trillion years to get done. But I was with a boy I had a crush on and I told him I was having a good time, which was a lie so fierce and frequently repeated that I myself came to believe it was true.
2. It is the primary metaphor we have for sex. 

I have already written everything I want to write about point one.

To point two, I have a complaint: there aren’t enough bases for all the sex things for which we need metaphors. 

Maybe a more salient complaint would be that the lines around what it means to reach the respective bases are somewhat fuzzy. Here’s the consensus from my high school friend group, which was made up of one band geek, three girls who went to church (but it was an edgy church!), and a comic book enthusiast — all of whom, I should note, were definitely virgins.

First base: Kissing with tongue.

Second base: Touching boobs.

Third base: Touching penises and vaginas. 

Home run: P-in-V sexual intercourse to completion.

So, obviously, there’s some stuff missing. Here’s an incomplete list of the questions that are likely to arise:

• What about when he kisses you on the cheek after you see Shrek in the movie theater and it’s both of your first dates, so the sexual tension is PALPABLE?
• What about hand-holding?
• What about a first kiss so explosive that you feel fireworks all around you, but there was no tongue (and that was probably for the better)?
• Re: the seeing Shrek date. What if he does that thing where he acts like he has to stretch, but he puts his arm around you? And you’re like, “Wait, I thought this only happened on TV. And I’m sort of embarrassed because the people behind us must be annoyed by his fake-stretching.”?
• Is touching the boobs under the shirt at the same level as touching the boobs over the shirt?
• Is nipple tweaking included?
• What about nipple clamping?
• What about general kinky, S&M-type nipple-related stuff? Is that all just encompassed by base two? Because honestly, some of the boob / nipple stuff I learned about from Dan Savage is waaaay more NC17 than over-the-pants third base stuff. 
• I have so many questions about genitals and what counts. Over the pants? Under the pants but over the underpants? Just poking it? Just brushing up against it? Just nudging it with your leg? How long do you have to touch the genitals for it to be a valid third base time? For vaginas: do the fingers have to go in? Sorry, that was sort of jumping the gun: Does the finger (singular) have to go in? For penises: does the penis have to be erect? Does just looking at the penis and deciding it’s kind of scary count?
• And, um, obviously: what about oral sex? 
• Where do orgasms factor in?
• This bases metaphor is hugely heteronormative and doesn’t account for the many striations of beautiful gay sex that can happen. Where do the following go?
  • Fingering buttholes
  • Anal sex
  • Using a toy on someone else’s genitals
  • Sucking on your girlfriend’s clit piercing 
  • Mutually jerking each other off
  • Mutually jerking selves off, and watching
  • Gray asexual romantic milestones, like taking a bath together, back massages, or very expensive dinner dates
  • Three-ways
  • Orgies
  • Having a shower
  • Telling the other person the kind of porn you like
  • Role-playing
  • Recommending a podcast where there’s some subtext in the fact that you’ve recommended it that the host is going to talk about a sex thing that you’re interested in but you’re a little shy about bringing up to your partner
  • Bondage
  • Phone or text sex

I’m leaving some things off the list, because I think my point has hit home (see what I did there?). We need a new metaphor that has waaaay more categories than a baseball game can possibly accommodate. 

Here are my suggestions:

• A baseball game, but including more things than just the bases. Like, going to the snack bar, coming off the bench, doing the wave, staying to the end, saying “batter up,” etc. (Again, I have a limited understanding of baseball.)
• A 42-course meal.
• School, beginning with kindergarten and ending with your fourth Ph.D. (Which I think is probably anal hooks, but I’m not sure.)
• Bird species.
• Literal rungs on a 100-rung ladder. 
• Something less linear (because sex isn’t really linear, is it?), like the indefinable layers of consciousness in the film Inception.

One thing is true: Baseball takes a long time, and figuring out your sexual preferences takes a long time, too. And if your sex life is a baseball game, it’s also true that you’ll probably run the bases a few times before you’re like, “Oh, I get this. I know how to do this in a way that is safe and enjoyable for everyone, including the other team.” Now, if that was really how a baseball game was played, no one would go to see baseball. It would just be a bunch of happy guys helping each other round the bases and buying each other breakfast afterwards. 

Baseball takes a long time, and figuring out your sexual preferences takes a long time, too.

Which is something I would definitely watch, by the way. 

Feature photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash