SEX ACCORDING TO MAÏA

Are you dominant or submissive? Clitoral or vaginal? Top, bottom, agnostic? Do you gravitate toward your partners' physical beauty or their intelligence? Every summer, we're all bombarded with quizzes like these – ever more creative when it comes to compartmentalizing ourselves. The promise is simple: to get to know ourselves better. But few people warn us against the risk of locking ourselves into ever more narrow and rigid identities.

Paradoxically, we all experience moments when our sexuality becomes less well defined. After 40 years of heterosexuality, some mothers find happiness in the arms of a woman. After the fourth spritz, some dominant men find themselves on all fours. After two sleepless nights, the sex-obsessed prefer a chamomile tea to a round of sex. Sometimes, a one-night stand reveals the orgasmic potential of our breasts, an erotic dream brings out a new facet of pleasure or sadomasochism tried out "for fun" becomes a religion.

These surprises happen to thousands of people every day. So much so that if we were to glue together end-to-end all the exceptions, all the altered states of consciousness, all the influences, all the surprises, the idea of a sexual "essence" would collapse. In fact, when we accumulate so many sideways steps, it's not uncommon for our preferences to be flipped like a pancake. Babes in the woods become fearsome dominatrixes, compulsives settle down: Never say never.

If we were reasonable, we'd give ourselves a bit of leeway when it comes to self-definition. Not that we should forget all labels – it's perfectly true that identities such as "asexual" or "gay" enable us to understand ourselves better, to make ourselves better understood and to create useful communities to resist discrimination. But these labels are less true for "cougar" or "shibari aficionado" (an enthusiast in the erotic Japanese bondage art). As soon as you dig deeper, the sexual diagnosis tends to become more nuanced. Contingencies appear. Contradictions pile up. Preference becomes a hasty simplification of desire and, after years or decades as a couple, it can even begin to resemble a cage.

It has to be said that once the inclinations have been communicated to the people involved, it's very difficult to go back. It's only natural. It's so embarrassing to verbalize one's secrets that one rarely dwells on the twists and turns of pleasure. This is all the more true as, on the pillow, in a hurry, it's hard to imagine launching into an exhaustive lecture ("I like the feel of wooden sex toys, especially oak or maple, except on Tuesdays and until further notice").

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