G Spotting

Are you unsure about the G Spot? I wonder what you have heard or experienced. Here is a great film that is available to watch online called G Spotting: A Story of Pleasure.

This is only online until Feb 15 so watch it asap.

CLICK HERE

Orgasm Industry and women

Really good interview from Tamara McClintlock Greenberg with Liz Tanner in the huffington post

TMG: In your film Carol Queen describes FSD as the "hysteria of this century." How do you think the medicalization of female orgasm and desire has impacted women today?
LC: Throughout history, medicine has pathologized women's sexuality in order to understand and control it. During the Victorian era, many women with sexual problems were diagnosed as hysterical. In our grandmother's time, women with low desire were said to suffer from frigidity. During the feminist movement of the 1960's and 70's, the pathologizing and medicalizing of woman's sexual experience was challenged and resisted. Terms such as nymphomania, hysteria and frigidity were no longer used. Recently, the clocks have been turned back. The condition of low desire is now called hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) and there are quite a number of drug companies racing to find a nose spray, pill, cream or patch to cure it. The risk is that many healthy women will falsely think that they are diseased when in fact they are perfectly healthy and normal. By the way, I find it very curious that they're working on a desire drug for women. Would anybody think to develop a desire drug for men?
However, it is important to note that some women do suffer from a real physiological problem when they experience a lowering of their sex drive. Radical hysterectomies and some anti-depressants affect libido. However, the majority of women do not suffer from a disease. For many of us, our libidos are influenced by everyday life experiences such as aging, our sense of body image, the health of our relationship, stress, and past sexual encounters, including a history of sexual abuse.

GO HERE TO READ MORE

What is an Orgasm

I was asked recently by a teenager " What is an Orgasm"

Even as a sexologist this stumped me a bit... I thought well.... do I describe the sexual response cycle; if so which one should I describe? Should I describe what happens in the body and genitals, do I describe what happens with the release of dopamine, do I describe the neurophysioloogy of orgasm, do I describe the emotional state and build up/release of tension, ejaculation, vaso constriction, ejaculation, transudation - or do I embark on a cultural sociological discourse of orgasm from an anthopological perspective etc etc etc?

As an example: I could say something like this......

All of the genitalia contain a huge number of nerve endings (the clitoris alone has more than 8,000 of them), which are, in turn, connected to large nerves that run up through the body to the spinal cord. (The exception is the vagus nerve, which bypasses the spinal cord.) They perform many other functions in the body in addition to providing the nerve supply, and therefore feedback to the brain, during sexual stimulation. Here are the nerves and their corresponding genital areas

· hypogastric nerve - transmits from the uterus and the cervix in women and from the prostate in men

· pelvic nerve - transmits from the vagina and cervix in women and from the rectum in both sexes

· pudendal nerve - transmits from the clitoris in women and from the scrotum and penis in men

· vagus nerve - transmits from the cervix, uterus and vagina

The role of the vagus nerve in orgasms is a new discovery and there's still much that's unknown about it; until recently, researchers didn't know that it passed through the pelvic region at all.

So.....What would YOU say if somebody asked you???????

Good question

Recently I was working with some young women. We spoke of many things around sexuality and diversity. I was explaining that orgasm doesnt have to be the number one - be all end all- to sex play. As we were discussing why we have been conditioned to believe this , one of the young women asked " Well how can I tell if Ive had an orgasm, I enjoy sex but I dont know if I have ever had an orgasm"

I won't go into our discussion here but suffice it to say that if this question was asked of her friends the reponse would probably be something like " If you've had one you would know". This response is not true and is a sure way of shutting down the conversation.

Below is a response by one of my favourite bloggers ( Cory Silverberg) to the same question he received. What do you think?

If you only do one thing for your sex life, try and stop yourself whenever you are comparing your sex life to someone else’s. It’s not easy, but in the long run I promise you’ll be much happier, and think of all the time you’ll save by getting rid of all those anxious moments. Also, you never know if someone is describing something accurately, and, regardless, it doesn’t matter. Your sex life is all that matters, and possibly the sex life of the people you’re having sex with.

If you do two things for your sex life, you should make the second thing an effort to masturbate more. Sex educators don’t refer to masturbation as the “cornerstone of sexual health” for nothing. The best way to explore your sexual response, including what orgasms feel like, is to do it on your own first, before you get one or more than one person involved.

As for how to tell if you’ve had an orgasm or not, there isn’t a test you can take. After all, orgasm is not just a physical experience, it happens in your body, your mind, possibly even your spirit. And there is no single definition of orgasm. So what would the test measure? However, there are some tell tale signs of what we could call an orgasmic response:

• Increased heart rate and blood pressure
• Increased muscle tension
• A flush of your skin
• A release of tension followed sometimes by a feeling of deep relaxation

But you might experience one or several of these things and not “feel” like you had an orgasm.

So how can you tell if you’ve had an orgasm? Most people would probably respond by saying “you’ll know when you’ve had one”. This always sounds a little condescending to me though, and if you’ve never had one, how could you know?

Instead I would just ask you whether or not the sex play you’re having is pleasurable. Does it feel good? Does it feel like something you want to do more? Are there times during sex when you want to say or do something but you hold yourself back? Holding back is one way you might be reducing the pleasure you’re feeling, including orgasms.

Trying to figure out if you’ve had an orgasm can also be a dead end, because if you’ve had one, does that mean you stop exploring other ways of feeling good or having orgasms? It’s a cliché, but a true one, that sex is about the journey not the destination. Focusing on orgasm is like driving down a one way street that stops at the river. If you focus instead on sexual pleasure, on how you respond and what you can feel, you don’t have to stop at the river bank; you get to jump in the river and float with the current, and you never know where you’ll end up.

Young men fake orgasms

Its sort of a standing joke when my friends and I speak about orgasms that many women have faked an orgasm. Rarely is it mentioned that young men ALSO fake orgasms. According to research published in the November issue of 'The Journal of Sex research' 25% of men also fake orgasm. Go here to read more.

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Ejaculation without orgasm??

Many people would believe the myth myth that says 'Men always orgasm and you can tell because they ejaculate'

Well.... Men can ejaculate without experiencing pleasureable feelings and orgasm. If someone discloses that this happens to them - believe them. To hear more about this go to the Kinsey confidential podcast here.

Female Wet Dreams

I stumbled across some useful information relating to female wet dreams last week.

In 1953, Alfred Kinsey, Ph.D., the famous sexuality researcher, found that nearly 40 percent of the 5,628 women he interviewed experienced at least one nocturnal orgasm (orgasms during sleep), or "wet dream," by the time they were forty-five years old.

A smaller study published in the Journal of Sex Research in 1986 found that 85 percent of the women who had experienced nocturnal orgasms had done so by the age of twenty-one... some even before they turned thirteen. In addition, women who have orgasms during sleep usually have them several times a year.

Dr. Kinsey and his colleagues defined female nocturnal orgasm as sexual arousal during sleep that awakens one to perceive the experience of orgasm.

Girls and women who don't have orgasms in their sleep, or who don't know whether or not they've had them, are perfectly normal. It may be easier for men to identify their wet dreams because of the "ejaculatory evidence." Vaginal secretions could be a sign of sexual arousal without orgasm.

Press here to read more.

This information is on a website called Go Ask Alice - Columbia University's Health Q&A Internet Service, have a look around - there are some great questions answered.