OUR SEXUAL BODIES: TYPES OF OUTERCOURSE AND SEXUAL INTERCOURSE

Types of outercourse (foreplay and alternatives to intercourse)

• Masturbation. Masturbation is the most common way we enjoy sex. Partners can enjoy it together while hugging and kissing or watching one another. Masturbating together can deepen a couple’s intimacy.

• Erotic massage.
Many couples enjoy arousing one another with body massage. They stimulate each other’s sex organs with their hands, bodies, or mouths. They take turns bringing each other to orgasm.

• Body rubbing (“frottage”).
Many couples rub their bodies together, especially their sex organs, for intense sexual pleasure. Many are stimulated to orgasm by this “dry humping.”

• Erotic fantasy,
role play, masks. Reading, watching, or telling erotic fantasies with a sex partner can be very exciting. Acting out fantasies can be exciting, too. Masks and costumes may intensify this kind of sex play.

• Sex toys. Sex toys, including vibrators and dildos, can heighten sexual pleasure. They are used to stroke, stimulate, probe, and caress the body.

Types of sexual intercourse

• vaginal intercourse (coitus)—inserting the penis into the vagina

• anal intercourse—inserting the penis into the anus

• axillary intercourse—inserting the penis under the armpit

• interfemoral intercourse—inserting the penis between the thighs

• mammary intercourse—inserting the penis between the breasts

• oral intercourse— inserting the penis into the mouth. Sex play that involves putting the tongue into the vulva is also often called oral intercourse.

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SEXUAL ANATOMY OF CHILDREN. ERECTIONS, SEXUAL FANTASIES. GYNECOMASTIA

Spermarche, Erections, and Wet Dreams

Boys have erections all their lives, starting from the moment they are born. But at puberty, erections occur more often. Many young men think that the occurrence of an erection means that their bodies are ready for sexual activity. This is not true. For example, when a boy or man wakes up from sleep, he may have an erection. This is because his bladder is full. A full bladder may stimulate nerves inside the body near the base of the penis and cause an erection.

Erections normally occur throughout the night during sleep. Erotic dreams cause young men to become aroused in their sleep. Young men undergoing puberty may notice that when they wake up, heir bellies, clothing, or sheets are sticky and wet around their penis. This is because young men may ejaculate in their sleep. The ejaculate, or semen, is the sticky substance found when a young man awakens. Ejaculating in one’s sleep is often called a wet dream. The clinical name is nocturnal emission. Almost all young men will have wet dreams. Boys and men who ejaculate during masturbation or other forms of sex play are less likely to have wet dreams.

The first time a young man ejaculates is called spermarche. Ejaculation can occur during nocturnal emission, masturbation, or sexual intercourse.

Sexual Thoughts and Fantasies

A young woman’s body will begin to respond to sexual thoughts and stimulation during puberty. Before puberty, children and babies touch the vulva only because it feels good. Their autoerotic play is usually not a sexual type of pleasure because it doesn’t involve sexual thinking or fantasy. At puberty, young women may begin to touch the clitoris and vulva for sexual pleasure. They can also be aroused by sexual thoughts or touch. Sexually stimulating dreams may mean that a girl wakes up with her vulva moistened with lubrication.

Sexual arousal—an erection or lubrication of the vulva—may happen without sexual activity. All the sensitive nerve endings that give us sexual pleasure are present from birth in girls and boys. A puberty, young women and men begin to have more sexual thoughts. When they touch themselves in the same way they have done all their lives, but with sexual fantasies while they are doing it, it is more correctly considered sexual activity.

Breast Size Changes in Boys—Gynecomastia

The change in hormones during puberty may cause surplus estrogen to be produced in a young man’s body. This usually happens only for a short period of time. It can mean that his breasts become slightly larger. This condition is called gynecomastia. It happens in 40 to 60 percent of adolescent boys. Young men feel very self-conscious and embarrassed about having enlarged breasts. During puberty, gynecomastia is usually temporary—it goes away within one to two years. I it happens before a boy goes through puberty, or continues after puberty, a health care provider should be consulted.

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MEN’S INTERNAL SEX AND REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS AND SPERM PRODUCTION: VAS DEFERENS, SEMINAL VESICLES, PROSTATE AND COWPER’S GLANDS

Vas Deferens

Mature sperm are pushed out of each epididymis into a long, thin tube called the vas deferens. The vas deferens connects the epididymis to the seminal vesicle. It moves sperm to the seminal vesicle by contracting and pushing them on their way.

Seminal Vesicles

The seminal vesicles are two small organs that are located beneath bladder. It is here that the sperm are combined with a fluid called seminal fluid. This fluid gives the sperm more room to move and also provides nourishment.

Prostate

The prostate is the next important place on the sperm’s journey. The prostate gland is located below the bladder and is very sensitive. Some men like to have it stimulated during sex play. When sperm, combined with the seminal fluid, reach the prostate, another substance is added to the mixture. The prostate produces a thin, milky fluid that is secreted into the urethra at the time of emission of semen. The substance helps give the sperm an environment in which it can swim easily.

A muscle at the bottom of the prostate gland keeps the sperm out of the urethra until ejaculation begins. Then the sperm move through the urethra in the penis and out of the body.

Cowper’s Glands

While the sperm are waiting, something else is happening to make the voyage easier. Located below the prostate are two Cowper’s glands, which are attached to the urethra. The Cowper’s glands deposit a fluid into the urethra before ejaculation. This fluid acts as a lubricant for the sperm and coats the urethra while flowing out the penis.

If there are sperm in the urethra from a previous ejaculation, they will mix with the Cowper’s fluid. This means that sperm can slide out of the penis before ejaculation. The lubricant is often called pre-ejaculate.

Ejaculation happens when the prostate muscle opens and the prostate gland pumps the seminal fluid into the urethra. It then gets pumped out of the body through the urethral opening. When the final mixture leaves the body, it is called semen.

Some men worry that they may urinate instead of ejaculating. This is impossible. When the penis is erect, a muscle closes off the bladder so no urine can pass through the urethra. It is also not possible for semen to mix into urine during urination because the prostate closes when urine moves into the urethra.

If these muscles are not working correctly, semen can be ejaculated into the bladder instead of out of the body. This is called retrograde ejaculation. This does not happen often. It is most likely to happen to men who have had prostate surgery or who have diabetes or multiple sclerosis. Men who have retrograde ejaculation are still able to have fulfilling sexual relationships and orgasms.

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ALL ABOUT SEX: OUR SEXUAL BODIES

Whenever a child is born, family and friends always want to know the child’s gender because most people treat girls and boys differently from the day they are born. Actually, the human bodies of girls and women and boys and men are not that different. All have hearts, brains, stomachs, bones, muscles, blood, and many other commonalities.

The one very important difference between female and male is in the nature of their sex and reproductive structures and functions. The sexual anatomies of women and men are different inside and outside their bodies.

Everyone’s body is made up of many parts. Some of these parts, such as fingernails, scrotum, eyebrows, and vulva, are structures. Some body parts have more complicated functions and are called organs. A leaf is an organ of a tree; an ear is an organ of an animal. Our hearts, ovaries, brains, penises, and lungs are organs.

We have special structures and organs that are a part of our sex and reproductive systems. The parts outside the body are the external sex structures and organs—commonly called genitals. The structures and organs inside the body are the internal sex and reproductive organs and structures. These are linked to the external sex and reproductive organs and structures.

Our sex and reproductive organs identify us as girls and boys or women and men. They are also the source of sexual pleasure in our lives. But they are not the only sexually sensitive parts of our bodies.

“SEXUAL REVOLUTIONS” THAT HAVE AFFECTED OUR SEXUAL NORMS

Sexual norms and gender equality have been crucial concerns of various social and political movements throughout our history. These include the civil rights and antiwar movements as well as the movements for women’s equality and gay liberation. They all have had a major impact on our attitudes toward sex and sexuality today. Here are some of the highlights:

First-Wave Feminists: The Women’s Movement— Suffragists and Abolitionists

Women began fighting for the right to vote—suffrage—20 years before the Civil War. The suffrage movement was born out of the abolitionist movement that fought to outlaw slavery. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott held the first women’s rights conference in Stanton’s home in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848.

The suffrage movement split from the abolitionist movement before the Civil War began. Some women found it unacceptable that men in the movement wanted to postpone the suffrage effort until after slaves were emancipated. Many women remained with the abolitionists under the leadership of Lucy Stone. Others formed their own movement under Stanton, Mott, and Susan B. Anthony. They widened the suffrage agenda to include issues such as divorce reform, sexism in the church, and assistance for workingwomen.

Temperance and Moral Reform

In 1874, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was established to work for moral reform. The union worked toward eliminating prostitution, improving public education, and enacting universal suffrage. Its chief goal, however, was temperance—abolishing the sale of alcohol. Union members believed that drinking was a threat to the American home—that drunken husbands wasted money on liquor and were abusive to their wives and children.

The social purity campaign against prostitution grew out of the temperance movement at the end of the nineteenth century. Its members worked to create a single standard of sexual conduct in the belief that prostitutes were the victims of male vice.

The Sexual Revolution of the 1920s

The soldiers who experienced the sexual norms of Europe during World War I changed the sexual norms of the United States when they returned home. They became much more likely to have intercourse with women for whom they cared than with prostitutes or casual sex partners. Young women and men began to develop equality in romantic relationships and sexual behaviors. The number of women who had sexual intercourse before marriage increased from 25 percent at the turn of the century to 50 percent by the 1920s.

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BECOME A MALE – TESTOSTERONE

The development of the foetus as a male happens because the ovum was fertilized by a Y-bearing sperm, because its gonads secreted testosterone and the female duct-inhibiting substance. But this is only part of the story of why a male becomes a male.

The physical changes in the genitals of the unborn male child, which are mediated by testosterone, may have a psychological component.

In small mammals, such as rats, monkeys, and sheep, testosterone made by the testicles of the foetus is known to modify the animal’s brain, imprinting on it a ‘maleness’ in its response to stimuli after it is born. In humans, this pre-natal brain conditioning has only a small effect, which is to modify or blur the child’s behaviour towards a male-type behaviour rather than to alter it considerably, as is the case of many other mammals.

The conditioning of the male child’s brain may enable the boy to identify more readily with his father (or some other significant male) and to model his behaviour on the way the adult male behaves. At the same time the modified brain response makes the boy treat his mother in a different, complementary way.

This means that, as far as the example of his father is concerned (or his mother’s interpretation of how a man behaves), the child responds positively by thinking, ‘This is how I am to behave’. In contrast, he responds negatively to the model of his mother by thinking, ‘This is how people of the other sex behave, and I must not imitate this behaviour but I must respond in a complementary way’.

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HOW YOU BECOME A MALE – INTRODUCTION

Deep in the dark, moist, warm innermost recesses of the vagina, three hundred million spermatozoa (sperms) are ejaculated from the pulsing male penis at orgasm. One of these three hundred million will, with luck, succeed in making the 12-centimetre journey through the uterus of the woman and will penetrate the ‘shell’ of a single egg which lies waiting in her oviduct. The egg, or ovum, which has been expelled from the woman’s ovary at ovulation, has been gently propelled into her oviduct by the finger-like fronds which surround its internal opening.

The journey of the sperms is only possible within a period of two days on each side of ovulation, for it is only during this short time that the sperms can penetrate the mucus which fills the canal which leads into the uterus. Only at this time does the mucus alter from an impenetrable mesh to long strands through which twisting, turning channels form. Through these helical tunnels several million sperms pass, of the three hundred million ejaculated, propelled by the thrashing of their long threadlike tails. But only those sperms whose heads are of the right size can get through; sperms with abnormally big heads are trapped.

Of the several million which reach the uterus, only a few thousands will survive the journey through its cavity, and even fewer will survive the journey along the oviduct. One, and one alone, will penetrate the shell of the ovum. As its head fixes deeply into the substance of the egg cell, it loses its tail, and the free head fuses with the nucleus in the ovum. A new individual, male or female, has been formed.

Each of the sperms ejaculated into the vagina carries in its head in twisted material, like a bank of computer tapes, all the genetic information needed to make the new individual unique. The twisted material is separated into strands called chromosomes. This genetic inheritance from father and mother, and their father and mother, and their father and mother, combines in an almost infinite variety of ways, suppressing some inherited characteristics, exaggerating others, so that family resemblances appear in the new individual, but not so much that the individual is identical with its parents or ancestors.

The core genetic material in the head of each sperm fuses with the core genetic material in the ovum to make a new mix – a new individual who will be formed as the fertilized egg cell divides repeatedly in complex ways. Once the individual has been created, each cell in his or her body has the genetic material within it capable of forming another new individual, but through aeons of evolution this facility has been suppressed, and only two specialized cells are capable of this function. These are the female and the male cells, the ova and the spermatozoa. Each human body cell, except the sex cells, carries 46 chromosomes in its nucleus. Forty-four of these determine the individual’s appearance, 2 determine its sex. The sex cells contain only 23 chromosomes, half the human number, so that when the sperm head (containing 23 chromosomes) fuses with the ovum (also containing 23 chromosomes), the normal human number of 46 is restored. Each ovum carries one sex chromosome, called an X chromosome because of its shape. Each spermatozoon also carries one sex chromosome, but about half of the spermatozoa carry an X chromosome, and the other half carry a smaller chromosome which resembles a Y.

If an X-carrying spermatozoon fertilizes the ovum, the resulting new individual becomes a female. If a Y-carrying spermatozoon fertilizes the ovum the resulting individual is a male.

Since only spermatozoa carry either an X or a Y chromosome the sex of the unborn child – at this stage only the size of a pinpoint – is determined by the child’s father. So if a man sires many daughters but no son, he cannot blame his wife. The sex of each of his children is his responsibility!

With the fusion of the nucleus of the sperm head and that of the ovum, a new life has begun. Quite rapidly the single cell accumulates energy and divides, and then divides again, so that 2, then 4, then 8, then 16, then 32, then 64 cells are formed. Each of these cells contains in its nucleus a chromosome count of 46 of which two are sex chromosomes, one X and one Y. In genetic shorthand this is written as 46XY or 46XX.

Occasionally, for incompletely understood reasons, something goes wrong to upset this seemingly simple system and extra X or Y chromosomes are added, or are taken away, or otherwise distorted. Such cell lines may continue and the individual, when born, may be sexually abnormal.

The dividing cells form a sphere, which looks rather like a mulberry within 3 days, and a day later the sphere has entered the cavity of the uterus and has become attached to its lining.

Growth occurs rapidly, and the sphere changes shape. One part of it, where several layers of cells collect, forms the embryo and, later, the foetus, while another part forms the placenta.

Three weeks after fertilization, the embryo, which now looks reptilian, has developed a gut cavity. Along its back surface, two ridges appear, one each side of the midline. These ridges will form the sex glands, or gonads. Into these ridges sex cells migrate from a nearby area, and rapidly divide and divide again.

At this stage of development it is impossible to tell the sex of the embryo by looking at the sex glands, but the cells of the sex glands have been programmed by the sex chromosome they have inherited. If the cells contain a Y sex chromosome, the gonads develop into testes and, provided the embryonic testes function properly, the remainder of the sexual anatomy will develop as a male. This is because the Y chromosomes in each of the cells which make up the embryonic testes induce it to manufacture quantities of the male sex hormone, testosterone, and a much smaller quantity of the female sex hormone, oestrogen. If the sperm which fertilized the egg carried an X chromosome, not a Y chromosome, the gonads will become ovaries, which produce quantities of oestrogen and a much smaller quantity of testosterone. In other words, the testes and the ovaries produce both male and female sex hormones, but in different quantities. The embryonic testes also produce another substance called the female duct-inhibiting substance which is important in determining the sex of the embryo.

There is, of course, more to the sexual apparatus of a male than testes. From each testis, on each side of the body, a twisted, hollow tube runs to join a similar tube from the other testis, at what will eventually become the prostate gland, and opens into a pit at the rear end of the embryo called the cloaca. By now, about 7 weeks after conception, the embryo also has a set of female ducts -oviducts, uterus, and upper vagina. Under the influence of testosterone, the male ducts grow and the female duct-inhibiting substance-causes the female ducts to wither away. If it so happens, as occurs rarely, that the embryo has a testis on one side and an ovary on the other, the side with the testis will produce a male duct and that with the ovary will produce a female duct. The child will be born a hermaphrodite.

Normally, testosterone and the female duct-inhibiting substance secreted by the testes make the male ducts grow and the female ducts wither. The embryo is well on the way to becoming a male.

He has to go through another stage of development before he does. The male ducts, at this period of development, terminate in the cloaca where the gut also ends. Just in front of the cloacal pit (that is on the embryo’s front side) a small lump appears, and two swellings grow backwards to make a raised edge to the pit. Looking from the outside, it is impossible to tell if the embryo is a female with a big clitoris, or a male with a small penis and a split behind it.

Quite soon the sex of the embryo becomes clear. If the embryo is a male, the cloacal cells absorb the testosterone which is circulating in the blood and convert it into a new product called dihydrotestos-terone. This, in turn, converts the tissues of the cloaca into male genitals. By the 14th week after conception, the lump at the front has become a tiny penis, and the folds at each side of the pit have joined together to form a scrotum. At this stage of development it is empty. Much later in pregnancy the testes are drawn down into the empty scrotum from their previous position in the foetus’s abdomen, and at birth the baby is obviously a boy.

After birth only small amounts of the sex hormones are produced by the gonads – testes in males and ovaries in females – until puberty occurs.

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