Intimacy

The term intimacy comes from the Latin word for inmost, or inner, and signifies the deepest or closest kind of friendship and confidence. The word intimate comes into English in the seventeenth century to describe individual inner personal qualities, as well as one's very close associates and familiars. To intimate is to communicate with minimal gestures, suggesting that the closest of intimate relationships is such that the formality of language is nearly unnecessary. Intimacy describes the close, personal relationship of good friends, or confidants, who share secrets and private matters. Intimacy also serves as a euphemism for sexual intercourse, especially in more recent times, and thus an exchange of intimacies could involve secrets, sex, or both. Because intimacy suggests the closest kind of relationship between people, its transformation from a term indicating both friendship and sex in the seventeenth century, from an era when friendship was considered the best kind of relationship people could share, to a term associated in the early twenty-first century almost solely with sexual relationships, marks the gradual privileging of sexual relationships as the closest form of human relating, and the gradual devaluation of friendships as less intimate kinds of human connection.

Like sex, with which it has become synonymous, intimacy can take many forms. It can be heterosexual or homosexual, between men and women, women and women, or men and men. However, while "sex" can happen between any number of partners at the same time, "intimacy" retains the traces of privacy and inwardness contained in its original meaning as a term of confidence between two people. Intimacy also suggests the presence of great feeling. In the nineteenth century, terms such as passionate friendship or sentimental friends described an intensity of intimate romantic feeling between men or between women that was socially sanctioned and widely celebrated. Abraham Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman had passionate friendships that may or may not have been sexual, but were understood by them and their peers as noble intimate relationships of the highest order. This esteem is partly explained by late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century notions of women as creatures without lust, and partly by the prevailing view that it was difficult for men and women to attain the heights of intimate friendship available between those of the same sex.

In places where the physical touching of friends is not uncommon, the line between social intimacy and physical intimacy is not so clearly drawn. Intimacy in the sense of sharing body space is more common in other countries than it is in the United States, where only lovers or family members share body space. In Italy men touch men more, and women touch women. This is also true in Arab countries and Spain. Women in most parts of the world share each other's physical, intimate space in a way men do not.

The private and domestic world of intimacy is presumed to be necessary to the building of close relationships, but this view shows that contemporary notions of intimacy are grounded in the heterosexual couple form. Queer critics, most notably gay men and their allies, have argued that one can have closeness without the sharing of secrets or even names, and that there is even in anonymous public sex an intimate quality of value and world making that can sustain communities. The term intimacy is increasingly interchangeable with physical intimacy, a term once used to distinguish sex from friendship, but that now has a redundant quality. Physical intimacy implies sexual touching in some form, being in another person's bodily space, and eye contact. Sexual touching can include holding hands, stroking, hugging, kissing, licking, rubbing bodies together, caressing the genitals, oral sex, and vaginal, anal, or oral penetration with fingers, a sex toy, or a penis.

The rise of companionate marriage as a twentieth-century social ideal meant that couples were increasingly encouraged to see their spouses as friends and lovers, rather than merely domestic and reproductive partners. This meant locating all of one's most urgent emotional needs in one place with one person, viewing that sexual relationship as a friendship, and prioritizing that relationship over other kinds of "outside" friendships. Intimacy was thus located squarely within the domestic couple form, as either a prelude to marriage or part of it. Intimacy in the twenty-first century usually describes the closeness of lovers who share every secret, dream, and thought with each other, lovers who are presumed to be best friends as well as sexual partners. This association of intimacy with sex, its use to describe the strong feelings between sexual partners, suggests that one cannot truly be close to another person without sex, and, conversely, that sex itself makes people closer.

Intimacy between adult men and women in private is the most permitted form of sexual physical intimacy, followed by intimacy between adolescent boys and girls of the same age. Sexual physical intimacy between adult women is somewhat tolerated, as is sexual physical intimacy between adolescent women in countries where lesbianism is either seen as titillating by heterosexual men or regarded as nonthreatening, nonsexual, or both. Sexual physical intimacy between adult men is somewhat permitted where homosexuality is legal, but it is often considered shameful, and can be punished by violence. Places where homosexuality is illegal can punish homosexual physical intimacy with violence, dismemberment, and even death. Sexual physical intimacy between adolescent boys is heavily policed in most parts of the world because sexual conservatives consider male homosexuality to be a tragic choice, and because teenagers are supposed to be either asexual or heterosexual until they reach legal adulthood. Sexual physical intimacy between adults and minors remains the most prohibited kind of human physical intimacy, except in countries that allow older men to marry young girls.

Teenagers in the United States often measure sexual physical intimacy using a baseball metaphor, in which the progress of a sexual encounter is likened to running bases, where the scoring runner is male and the infield is female. Kissing a girl gets a boy to first base, fondling her breasts gets him to second base, touching her genitals gets him to third, and sexual intercourse, or "going all the way," gets him a home run. Supposedly girls share in the scoring as well, but the fact that it would strike most people as unusual for a girl to claim she "got to second" by putting her hand in a boy's shirt shows that when teenagers describe their sexual encounters with baseball metaphors, it likely that the boy is doing the scoring and the girl is getting carried along for the ride.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlant, Lauren. 2000. "Intimacy: A Special Issue." In Intimacy, ed. Lauren Berlant. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

D'Emilio, John, and Estelle B. Freedman. 1997. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Faderman, Lillian. 1981. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. New York: Morrow.

                                                Jaime Hovey