The Case For
By Rachel Rabbit White
Sex on the beach is a genre. If it were a color, it would be lipstick red. If it were a film, its score would prominently feature a saxophone solo. Its image is one of a paperback novel: a sandy-headed couple locked in embrace, waves rushing over their bodies as they reach the height of orgasm — forever, impossibly together.
Like its more desperate cousin, “long walks on the beach,” there’s something clueless about the trope. And yet, sex on the beach cannot be completely dismissed. Clichés hold power.
Of course, this particular act’s power comes from fantasy. In movies, it’s about passion, the amorous trance of falling for someone and needing them right here, right now in flesh and soul. It sits under the umbrella of “love making” (a concept I’ve always mistrusted for its cultish promise of sensual utopia). Then again, I’m less of a believer in free love and more of a romantic — and romance courts melancholy.
The reality of beach sex is uncomfortable: the sand is hot, gritty, likely to contain the shards of smashed conch and stubs of extinguished cigarettes. Yet all of this points to another inherent hotness. Beach sex contains the fantasy of getting caught, of feeling a lust so great that one risks the harm of broken seashells and bottle caps.
Once, during a particular rocky stretch, my ex and I took a vacation to Hawaii where we vowed to not argue in the airy house perched above a private beach. Outside of our daily routine, it became clear how out of sync we had grown. When I wanted emotional intimacy he pulled away; where he wanted sweet sex, I only liked it rough.
Placed in the lackadaisical haze of a beach vacation, our energy began to shift. As we rose each morning to swim nude, he emerged from the ocean with a new presence, an emotional and sexual warmth that made me shy. He redirected our pattern and this left me uneasy. But just as every bodice-clad heroine eventually does, I gave in.
I gave into the sunrises, to the eye gazing, to re-learning how to kiss him in the many ways I had forgotten. I gave into him in the sand as the waves washed over us and in this I felt electric, teenaged, transcendent. It was something about the ocean and its raw power, that seductive ability of nature to dwarf all but the present. For a brief moment it seemed he and I both wanted the same thing, which, in retrospect, was to never return to our daily lives.
We were renewed. We vowed to visit Hawaii every year.
Then work got in the way. A year passed, then another year, then we broke up. Which is sad, but fine. I’m not sure that the genre of beach sex, with its heights of passion and unreachable expectations ever has a happy ending After all, no one ever argued that romance isn’t hopeless.
But still, a girl sometimes wants her clichés. It’s summertime and what is summer without romance, and what is romance without risk? Despite having been broken before, I’d give the sands another chance.
The Case Against
By Chelsea G. Summers
Here’s one compelling clue that sex on the beach sucks: The drink named after it uses peach schnapps. At best cloying and at worst the thing of which nightmare hangovers are made, peach schnapps is preferred by people who are young, unsophisticated and lacking a proper bed.
Which, I might add, is also true of those who consider sex on the beach a capital idea.
The act seems to hold myriad allure. Sex on a beach is public, it feels romantic and classic movies tell us it’s something hot couples do. No doubt, the beach is sexy. People are barely dressed, rubbing themselves with oil, dripping with pheromones. Everything about the environment tells us we should want to fuck.
Everything, that is, except the sand. And the bugs. But mostly the sand, which sticks to moist bits (and what is sex but an elegant mashing of bits that are moist?). At its essence, sex on the beach is a bucket-list act, sitting alongside the mile-high club as something we're supposed to do. Beach boning is a to-do list item that, once checked off, is unlikely to be done again.
I know that of which I speak. Yes, I have succumbed to the siren song of beach sex. It was on Grand Cayman, where I was taking a scuba-diving holiday with a boyfriend. We woke in the morning to sex, punctuated our day with sex, fell asleep after sex. One night, my boyfriend wanted to do it like Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr (or Christopher Atkins and Brooke Shields, if you prefer). He trucked us to the beach so we could get it on — as the waves crashed and the stars twinkled and the breezes blew balmy.
We did it because we had to. And then, cold, sandy and abraded, we returned to the hotel where we fucked in a proper bed. It was a stark lesson in expectations versus reality.
I like public sex as much as the next exhibitionist, but the last time I had public sex, it happened at the Metropolitan Opera with the soaring singing of Prince Igor swooping around us. It wasn’t cold. It wasn’t wet. And most of all, it wasn’t sandy. When we composed our clothes, there were no stray threads of kelp and hitchhiking bugs in our nethers.
You kids can keep your sex on the beach, both the act and the cocktail. I’ll sip my small-batch bourbon and enjoy my sex, public or private, like a real adult.