"And how should I presume?"

deliveringidiots:

OKAY, ONE MORE TIME, PEOPLE, SAY IT WITH ME:

The prostate is not a “bundle of nerves.” It is a gland. Continuous stimulation of it can cause nice lovely pleasurable feelings for some men. Just touching it once will not generally cause lovely instant pleasurable feelings the same way a clitoris (usually) does.

There are some nerve endings of course, but there are nerve endings all over the shop back there, and that’s not really what specifically makes prostate stimulation funtimes. Calling it a “bundle of nerves” is really, actually, not at all an accurate description.

(via jcatgrl)

fuckyeahsexeducation:

Low sex drive can be due to several factors, it can be due to medication, hormones, illness (psychological and physical), and age.

With medication, not only is loss of arousal, orgasm, ejaculation, or sex drive a common side effect, but also whatever you’re treating could cause it as well. The main thing is medication that affects hormone levels, which mostly includes medication for psychological illnesses or birth control. Although so much goes into sex drives, hormones do play a big part. How you’re feeling and your psychological well-being also play a big part so if your medication messes that up it could affect your sex drive. If your medication is affecting your sex life, DON’T just stop taking it. Going off medication is really dangerous. Talk to your doctor about it. There may be a kind of medication that doesn’t affect your sex drive. Also, different brands affect different people differently. Basically, switching brand might be able to help. Whenever I was on Depo Provera I had no sex drive, couldn’t get lubricated, and orgasm was nearly impossible. As soon as I switched it was all better. Sometimes switching medication doesn’t help or the medication can’t be switched and you need this medication. There are ways you can boost your sex drive, which we’ll talk about in a bit.

As stated earlier, your mind is a big part of your sex drive. The biggest killer of sex drive is stress and anxiety as well as depression. Taking care of your stress can help immensely. The biggest help is talking to someone. Talk to your friends and partners about what’s going on in your life. If you have a lot of anxiety or depression, maybe check out a therapist. Learn relaxation techniques like meditation. The main thing is to focus on your breathing and to relax all your muscles. If you have any anxiety or unresolved issues in the relationship or about your body or your own sexuality discuss that with your partner. Tell them about all your insecurities and the issues you have. Talking it out and being honest is a big help. If you feel any anxiety about the relationship, your partner, your body, sex in general, or your sexuality you need to work that out first. If you don’t feel good about yourself, you’re not going to be comfortable enough to get into sex. You need to work through any issues you have with YOURSELF as well. Tell yourself you’re beautiful and worthy of love every day.

Unhealthy living, like using substances like alcohol, tobacco or certain drugs, eating unhealthy foods that make you feel sluggish, or not getting enough sleep can also affect it. Although alcohol and some drugs can make you less inhibited, enough use does dull your senses and can inhibit your brain chemicals which as we already discussed can really affect your sexuality. Things that make you tired like certain foods or not getting enough sleep or working too hard can really affect your sex. If you’re tired or sick feeling you’re not going to want to have sex. You have to take care of yourself and make sure you’re healthy. Doing some kind of exercise, even just walking or doing housework or dancing in your underwear is good. Sex is a work out; if you’re not physically fit for it it’s more difficult to do it and to get in the mood.

Of course, there are physical conditions that can make sex less fun. Things like chronic pain illnesses, menopause, hormone imbalances (especially low testosterone), or erectile dysfunction can cause problems. Whenever you have any problems, like not being able to orgasm or ejaculate or hold an erection even when masturbating or if you have any pain with sex see a doctor. You don’t have to just “put up” with intimate problems. Doctors get questions about sex all the time, you won’t be asking something they haven’t been asked before!

Now onto the big question, how do you up your sex drive, arousal, and ability to orgasm. First thing, foreplay and intimacy. Increase your time being with your partner. Just hang out, casually touching. Be naked together, not necessarily sexually, just be naked to get used to each other’s naked body. Give each other massages, cuddle, do things together. Spend a lot of time just touching each other, caressing each other, explore your bodies. Comfort is such a huge thing, you really need to get to know your partner’s body as well as your own and get used to being intimate. You need to schedule a stress free sex time. If you’re on a time limit or there’s any fear of getting caught or needing to leave, it can be difficult to get aroused! Another huge step is preparation. Part of foreplay is preparing your body. You need to get aroused enough either through touching with hands, rubbing body parts together, or oral sex, or anything else you find erotic. The main thing is to go as slow as you need. It may take extra work but you’ll get to arousal! Keep the line of communication open. Tell each other what you want and what feels good. Share fantasies you haven’t tried! Watch some pornography together. Watch each other masturbate. Get some sex toys, a vibrator can help with vaginal/clitoral arousal, a cock ring or penis teaser can help with maintaining erections. Try new positions or types of sexual activity. Experiment with your OWN sexuality. Masturbate! Use different techniques, pressures and sex toys. Use whatever you need to orgasm and be fully aroused and then gradually use less pressure and friction until you are more sensitive and get aroused easier with less stimulation. Another huge problem with libido issues is not producing enough lubrication. You may need to use lube to be comfortable and that’s okay. Again, the main thing is being comfortable and especially with penetration you or your partner need to be lubricated enough. The main thing with trying to reach orgasm is to not stress out or get too obsessed with it. Just do what feels good. Don’t focus on the orgasm or what’s not happening, just focus on the pleasure you feel, connecting with your partner and your body and what is happening.

There are things you can try that can boost your libido. There are a lot of arousal oils and products; although some don’t work or can even backfire it doesn’t hurt to try. Just look at the ingredient list and make sure you’re not putting anything dangerous in your body! You can also try natural aphrodisiacs you eat like oysters, yohimbine, gingko biloba, celery, bananas, avocado, almonds, mangoes, peaches, strawberries, eggs, liver, figs, garlic, chocolate, onion, scallion, leek, chives, cardamom, anise, turmeric, cayenne pepper, balck pepper, halibut, salmon, ginger, cinnamon, fennel, horseradish, sardines, shellfish, or asparagus or anything that is fun to eat. You can eat food off each other, although avoid sugars around the vagina. Of course, if all else fails you can try medication. People with penises have a lot of “male enhancements” to choose from, Viagra being the most common. Unfortunately there’s not much for those of us with vaginas. The main treatment is hormone therapy. Of course, seeing a doctor and asking what they think would help a lot.

Some people aren’t able to orgasm and that’s fine. Some people have lower libidos than others. The main thing is that YOU are happy. If you don’t mesh well sexually with your partner and they want more or less sex than you talk it out. If you’re not able to orgasm or it takes a lot for you to orgasm let them know. Underline the fact that it’s not on them, that that’s just the way your body is. Don’t push yourself into anything you’re not comfortable with and don’t stress out too much about sex. Sex is supposed to be fun! If you’re too busy worrying about if you’re doing it right (especially when there is no one right way to do it) then you’re not going to have fun. Just do what makes you happy and don’t stress the rest.

latinegrasexologist:

Are you 14-24yo? Advocates For Youth are recruiting now!

Are you a young person (14-24 years old) who is…

• Passionate about fighting for young people’s rights to sexual health information and services?
• Interested in connecting with youth leaders from across the country?
• Dedicated to developing skills to make a difference in your community?

Consider applying for one of Advocates for Youth’s programs! See all of the available opportunities below.

If selected, you will have opportunities to: develop new organizing and leadership skills; become informed on sexual and reproductive health issues; connect with passionate young people from across the country; and have a lasting impact on your communities. You will also join more than 100 youth activists in Washington, DC for an intense four-day activist training institute free of charge!

Advocates’ youth activists have done amazing work this year. You can join them in:

• Increasing HIV testing on your campus
• Providing confidential support and resources to young people who are worried about coming out
• Working with college administrators to make condom distribution more widely available on your campus
• Mobilizing your peers around international family planning issues
• Working to destigmatize abortion and ensure youth access to affordable birth control

If this sounds like something you want to be a part of, check out the program descriptions below and apply today! Application deadlines are coming up fast.

Wait — I’m not a young person…

If you are a parent, teacher, or advocate who knows young people who are passionate about sexual and reproductive health and rights, please encourage them to apply today.

Thanks!

Julia Reticker-Flynn
Youth Activist Network Manager
Advocates for Youth

—-
Campus Organizing Team

Advocates for Youth works with campus organizations to provide them with skills, information, and materials to conduct advocacy campaigns on their campuses. Each year, selected campus organizations are chosen to receive intensive assistance, including funding, advocacy and media training, materials for dissemination and on-going assistance to help educate, activate, and empower students on issues such as condom availability, LGBT rights, comprehensive sex education, abortion access, and HIV prevention/treatment among others!

Click here for application


Young Women of Color Leadership Council (YWOCLC)

The Young Women of Color Leadership Council is composed of young leaders and activists who come together to promote a message of prevention and empowerment through a reproductive justice lens. All of the Council’s work is a collaboration of diversity and power, in the hopes of affecting a million more young women of color. The goals of the Council are to educate, include, and empower.

Click here for application for YWOCLC


YouthResource Peer Educators

YouthResource, a website by and for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and questioning (GLBTQ) young people, explores issues of concern to GLBTQ youth. The Online Peer Educators provide affirmation and support to their peers, answer questions posed by visitors, and assist users to find the local resources they need. Peer Educators also write blogs, articles, and issue briefs for the YouthResource website, advocate for GLBTQ rights, and present at conferences on GLBTQ issues.

click here for Youth Resource application


Cultural Advocacy and Mobilization Initiative (CAMI): State Activists

Advocates for Youth works with state youth activists in 8 target states (AL, CA, CO, FL, OH, NC, SC, TX) on youth leadership councils, which advocate for comprehensive sex education and other sexual health and rights issues in their communities. Their goal is to mobilize people in their states to fight for honest, responsible sex education and ensure that young people are listened to and have a voice within the debate. Click here to find out more about our state partners. Applications will be available shortly.

Oh my God this would be the best ever

(via bad-dominicana)

letstalkaboutsex-ed:

siliconevalley:

- asked a friend. I wrote:

AWESOME QUESTION

THANK YOU FOR ASKING :D :D :D

I’m going to focus on straight, cis people - they’re the ones most affected here (I reckon) and also a lot of this is about socialisation, and we’re all socialised and assumed by society to be straight and cis (and many queer folks have worked out lots of what I’ll say already.)

I think it’s damaging to define ‘sex’ as *only* penile-vaginal penetration (or PIV, penis-in-vagina, sex. For clarity, I’ll call it ‘intercourse’ here.) And I think that a lot of people do define it this way, or call it ‘full sex’ or ‘real sex’ or something else meaning ‘the pinnacle of sexual experience’. It’s fourth base, it’s the only way to lose one’s virginity, and so on. It sets up the idea of foreplay! What on earth is ‘foreplay’? Everything before the main event - everything before you actually start having intercourse, which therefore doesn’t count as sex.

Essentially, it’s damaging because there is so much more to sexual experience, and focusing solely on intercourse erases a vast amount of absolutely awesome stuff to do with sex. Loads and loads of people don’t ever have intercourse at all, for various reasons, but do have loads of other awesome sex, and that’s ignored.

It is heteronormative - it makes intercourse the norm, and everything else a deviation, an aberration from that. It makes it ‘other’ (just like queer people are ‘other’), less ‘real’ and less good.

It erases the experiences of queer people - if you’re having sex with people with similar genitals to yours, intercourse isn’t really an option: and so all the sex you’re having isn’t ‘real’, right? This has created some other interesting trends -

- for cis gay men, it’s kinda made anal intercourse a new pinnacle of sexual experience: loads of cis gay men don’t have anal intercourse, and the idea that it’s a necessary thing is rubbish and creates loads of undue pressure. It’s also the root of lots of homophobia, I reckon - it’s sodomy that many homophobes are hating on, and that’s reflected in the fact that many homophobes are more okay with lesbians than they are with gay men. (Also, lesbians are hot, of course.)

- for cis lesbian women, other people ask us a lot ‘how do you have sex anyway?!’ - for many people, it’s unimaginable that people could have sex without a penis involved, and it’s also a telling thing about the PIV definition: though it involves a vagina and penis, the vagina aspect mysteriously disappears when the penis does too - I think it’s mostly imagined as a penis receptacle, rather than an autonomous sexual organ. (And there’s also a fallacy floating about that lesbians strapping it on is an imitation of het people - it’s not, it’s an entirely different kind of dynamic. Just like butch presentation isn’t an imitation of men, but people still ask ‘why go out with her when you could have a real man?’ of their partners, or assume femmes are really straight, etc. Which I think is related to this centralisation of het experience.)

- also, virginity! Because real sex is intercourse, anything that isn’t intercourse isn’t real sex, right? So lots of people have lots of sexual interactions that they never call sex, and we’ve got situations such as young people in the States swearing purity pledges and then doing *everything but* have intercourse. Including anal intercourse, while saving the vagina for marriage (some people call this ‘saddlebacking.’) (I wonder how many of the women having anal intercourse to save themselves for marriage were pressured into doing so by their (similarly pure) partners? It’s not like it’s a particularly easy thing to do pleasurably when you’re 16, after all. Records of barrier protection use here aren’t great, either.)

It’s also very much a genital-focused view of sex. Many people only start to consider kinds of sex that don’t involve genitals if they don’t have use of their genitals, through various kinds of impairment. If people acquire a physical impairment, they often think their sex lives are over, forever - because they generally haven’t heard of other kinds of sex. Lots don’t have sex again, lots have other kinds of really awesomely excellent sex with different parts of their bodies.

Intercourse might also not be an option for people with some mobility impairments - it is a complicated, physically challenging thing to do - but oral or manual genital-focused sex again can be absolutely awesome as a focus. Yet more people can’t have intercourse because of past traumas, but fingers, tongues and toys serve just fine.

So, that’s some stuff on queer and disabled people. It erases all the other kinds of awesome, ‘real’ sex there are out there, ‘others’ and marginalises queer sex, and is genital-focused, which just isn’t relevant or necessary for many people.

What about het people?

So, for het men, sex becomes all about the penis, and all about intercourse: meaning that men must ‘perform’ well to be good at sex - they must easily become erect, ‘last’ a long time, orgasm from intercourse and from penile stimulation alone, etc. 
It erases the experiences of men whose penises don’t behave like this (ie. in some ways, everyone) and paints other kinds of sexual stimulation for men as ‘other’ to that (an aberration, or a lesser thing: eg. nipple stimulation, anal penetration etc.)

For het women, it’s all about the vagina! The clitoris is never really mentioned in discussions on intercourse, and where intercourse is the main event, the clitoris is ignored - so again, clit stimulation is an extra, an ‘other’ in addition to intercourse.
It’s fairly well recognised nowadays (in the UK) that most women need clitoral stimulation in order to have orgasms (many only start having orgasms, btw, after getting a vibrator for this purpose),  but there remains quite a bit of pressure on women to have orgasms from intercourse alone anyway. It can happen, for very few women, but there seems to be an idea that it’ll happen if someone is really really turned on, or really in love, or there’s enough thrusting, or her partner’s penis is big enough, or if the angle is just right, and so on. People expend huge amounts of energy hunting for the magic formula to make this happen (and more recently, lots of this rhetoric has spilled over into conversations about the G-spot.)

(There’s also some stuff here about how vaginas work. Most vaginas need quite a bit of warm-up to take something as large as a penis (or penis-sized dildo), and extra lubrication is almost always useful. I’ve found that this is an assumed thing when having sex with people who have cunts, and something I’ve had to talk about and teach with people who don’t. More crudely, some men think it’s reasonable to just stick it in and go, and that’s not how it works. And it’s nothing to do with arousal level, either!)

It makes intercourse - or, let’s be generous, other kinds of sex involved penises and vaginas - the main kind of sex available between het people. So anal sex for men is struck off the menu. She can never strap it on. A milion kinds of kinky sex I’m not even going to start trying to list here aren’t an option - or (for any of these) aren’t an option on the standard, default menu. To explore these, they have to (firstly) know they’re even an option (and good luck finding a sex ed curriculum that mentions, say, prostate pleasure) and (then) *talk* about them, because they’re weird and special and for occasions and need preparation and… yeah.

Another quick thing on queer sex! The sex ed curriculum is reproduction-focused, so intercourse-focused, so phallocentric heteronormative intercourse-focused - talking about different kinds of pleasure isn’t really a thing yet. A trend we tend to see in film classification and porn classification is that *non-normative kinds of sex are seen as more dirty.* Things like fisting, strap-ons, some kinky stuff - they’re ‘extreme.’ And they also tend to be kinds of sex that queer people have more. So: queer sex is ‘extreme’, it’s ‘niche’, it’s got specialised subheadings on porn sites - it’s been marginalised by not being talked about in the standard discourse of sex, and it continues to be marginal in other areas.

Make sense? So, in summary, a view of intercourse = ‘sex’ is heteronormative and phallocentric. It erases and makes ‘other’ the experiences of (and many of these categories overlap):
- many het men
- most het women
- all queer people ever
- many many disabled people of all genders
- all kinky people ever
- oh, and masturbation definitely isn’t sex! Nooooo.

It doesn’t really benefit anyone! So here’s to a better, more inclusive definition of sex. One definition I really like is ‘a significant exchange of erotic energy, where the participants decide what’s meant by all those words.’

^

(via fuckyeahsexeducation)