I used this as a title years ago for a piece that ended up being mostly complaints and jokes. The premise sounds more scandalous than it is: does anyone actually call out an ex’s name during sex? I doubt it. The vocabulary we have for sex has thinned out to 'Daddy' and 'slut.' If someone tries something sweeter, it can feel out of place, almost embarrassing. Maybe that counts as cultural regression. Online, though, erotic writing has become more inventive, partly because it has to hide. Sex cannot appear openly in articles, so writers bury it in the margins. Some of the results are excellent—there’s a piece that folds sex into planting sweet potatoes, and you don’t realize what you’ve been reading until the last line, when you want to slap the table and say, 'Brilliant.'
Here’s another way to look at the shrinking vocabulary: the same words now cover heterosexual sex, sex between men, sex between women. Is that equality? You can pick a fight about it if you like—why is he 'Daddy' while she’s 'slut'?—but the simplification has one practical advantage: nobody is likely to call out the wrong name anymore. Who they’re thinking about is another matter. That, only the person in bed knows.
Years ago, people loved to argue about which did more damage: physical infidelity or emotional infidelity. Maybe they still do. I may just have aged out of caring and decided the topic was dead. I can still remember why I once chose emotional infidelity as the worse offense. A couple whose bodies and minds have drifted apart is already hurting each other; why waste more of each other’s lives? Physical infidelity had a strange philosophical flavor to me: I love one person emotionally, my body strays with someone else, but the love itself doesn’t change.
I have actually met people who believe this. For a while it made me wonder whether I had misunderstood physical infidelity—whether I had failed to account for a whole worldview in which the red flag stays at home while the colorful flags fly outside. If those people call their lover’s name during sex, maybe they think it’s noble: they have separated body from heart, and the love gets confirmed and elevated.
But infidelity is infidelity. The damage doesn’t really depend on who you sleep with, whose name you say, or whether you feel guilty on the way home. It depends on the person being betrayed—on whether they want to puncture the answer they already know. Many marriages break not because the truth is hidden but because both people can feel it. They don’t tear the last sheet of paper because once the suspicion is gone, so is the last connection. Better to keep living in that cramped arrangement than to destroy everything; at least hatred gives you a reason to keep going.
So calling an ex’s name in bed depends on the angle. If it’s longing, maybe it’s a kind of love—or maybe the current partner is just worse in bed than the ex. If one person makes the other say it, maybe that’s a kink. At that moment, love and not-love are beside the point. Who isn’t someone’s true love, for however long? The physical-versus-emotional question should be settled by the person who was betrayed. If they see it as a matter of principle, neither kind is acceptable. If the relationship is already down to that last sheet of paper, the concept of infidelity barely exists. And from the cheater’s side, what does the choice even mean? People who swear oaths by the yard will still be careful not to say the wrong name in bed, and even more careful not to let their partner realize they are cheating.
The whole thing is a false question. Not just 'which hurts more, physical or emotional infidelity?' Even 'does infidelity hurt?' is a false question. A cheater who answers the question will still cheat; they may even use the ex’s name in bed to prove their true love for someone else. And the betrayed person still won’t cut the connection. Either they never find out, or they find out and have nothing left but the right to hate the other person as their final way of loving them.
So maybe simplifying sex talk to 'Daddy,' 'Mommy,' and 'slut' really is social progress. At least it leaves people the right to think about someone else. Seen that way, the betrayed person can come out winning—even while being cheated on.