Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Holly of The Pervocracy, talking about normal vs. kinky brings up one interesting data point…

All I know is that if I have to sit through another conversation at work on the topic of “my husband and I are never in bed together and that’s awesome because gosh it’s such a pain having to deal with those icky things he wants”, I’m going to explode and tell them everything.

She said it here.

and one of her commenters brought up another…

Is ‘icky things he wants’ non-vanilla sex or is it sex at all? I’m over on the asexual end of the spectrum, and if I came out with something like, “Actually, I’d be perfectly happy to never bother with sex again,” at work, I would be stuck spending the rest of the season putting up with well-meaning busybodies demanding that I justify my marriage.

He or she said that here.

Pretty wild, right? If you’re “too” sexual (in Holly’s emergency-medical staff workgroup that evidently includes owning a vibrator) you get branded a wild child. But! On the other hand, as the commenter pointed out, if you’re not sexual you’re in for a world of scrutiny as well. All made worse by our general reluctance to discuss whatever “happy medium” it is we’re all supposed to “naturally” have.

Or, as yet another of Holly’s commenters, Mousie76, puts it

I don’t think normal, vanilla people know what normal and vanilla is like, because part of being normal and vanilla is not really talking about it.

Much hilarity does not ensue.

Along the same lines as my previous post, here’s the answer I submitted a while back for this week’s Em & Lo’s Wise Guys feature. The question was “What’s the best way to turn down a guy who you’ve been on a date or two with, but don’t want to go on any others?” My answer?

The most gracious way is also maybe the most practical. You want to say some variation on “I wouldn’t have gone out with you the first time if I didn’t like you. I wouldn’t be saying no now [i.e. instead of just disappearing] if I didn’t respect you.” The point being to make it clear it you didn’t make a mistake saying yes the first time, and that not being a perfect match for you doesn’t make him a loser. That’s the gracious part.

The practical part is that men start learning as early as fairy tales that we have to be persistent, to never take no for an answer, to strive and achieve, and if we just work at it long and hard enough we’ll always “win over” the reluctant girl in the end. Letting him down with ego intact makes it less likely that he’ll try redoubling his effort to win you over. If he can walk away feeling respected he’ll be more likely to respect both you and your decision.

I said it here.

If only I’d figured that out years ago. That and understanding you should probably say the same thing to a woman you didn’t want to go on a 2nd or 3rd date with.

Sigh.

The other wise guys’ answers are pretty good too, as are the comments.

Sungold of Kittywampus has some interesting, and cool, news about new uses for IUDs

Actually, this isn’t a truly new option, just one that has gotten no press up to now: using an IUD for emergency birth control:

“A copper intrauterine device was 100 percent effective at emergency contraception in a study of almost 2000 Chinese women who had the device implanted up to 5 days after unprotected sex.”

Read the rest of her post, and follow the links, here.

Sungold adds that she thinks IUDs would be…

Especially for anyone who’s a repeat customer for EC, the IUD seems like a highly sensible choice. While IUD insertion can cause cramping (which can persist for a few days), Plan B can inflict pretty intense nausea. Having to chase down EC repeatedly is stressful for body and soul. Where 1 in 100 women will still get pregnant on Plan B, it’s fewer than 1 in 1000 with the IUD as EC. And in the long run, a woman who chooses the IUD is highly unlikely to face an unwanted pregnancy.

That’s not a panacea. But it’s a pretty excellent option.

I think that’s about right. But then of course I’ve always been a big fan of post-Dalkon-Shield-debacle IUDs, going back to the original low-impact copper Ts of the 1970s. But then there’s the bit about how healthcare providers remain reluctant to provide IUDs… even caregivers who use and swear by them personally. And since I’ve got a vasectomy I’m not exactly a candidate for IUDs, and so my enthusiasm has always been muted with a great deal of deference.

Which is why I was happy to see Sungold’s update based on comments on her post by MomTFH. MomTFH said

According to a midwife who taught me about birth control, the reason why IUDs were not recommended for women [who haven’t been pregnant] were because so many of them successfully sued over the Dalkon shield. The company had to pay a much higher settlement to women who never got to have children due to their injuries than they did to those who already had children. The indications for the newer IUDs, including the copper T, originally said the ideal candidates were parous women, but that is no longer the case. New recommendations say that pretty much any woman who does not have active pelvic inflammatory disease is a good candidate.

The Dalkon shield was a completely untested, unresearched, unregulated piece of scrap metal. The copper IUD is a much more carefully created and substantiated device. It has a higher rate of continuance of use than any other form of birth control. Not only do I have an IUD, but the IUD is an incredibly popular form of birth control among female ob/gyns I have very unscientifically surveyed.

That makes a little more sense. Not in the conspiracy-theory sense, just in the practical institutional-memory-informs-practice sense. With the benefit that institutional memory will shift as people in the medical industry, like MomTFH, begin speaking out.

Final note: I’m not sure anti-choice wingnuts are going to be cheery about IUDs as emergency contraception. But then again they already oppose IUDs anyway. So… cry wolf much?

Via Discover Magazine’s NCBI ROFL blog an Egyptian medical research team has a paper out called An electrophysiologic study of female ejaculation. Here’s the abstract ROFL cited

Opinions vary over whether female ejaculation exists or not. We investigated the hypothesis that female orgasm is not associated with ejaculation. Thirty-eight healthy women were studied. The study comprised of glans clitoris electrovibration with simultaneous recording of vaginal and uterine pressures as well as electromyography of corpus cavernous and ischio- and bulbo-cavernosus muscles. Glans clitoris electrovibration was continued until and throughout orgasm. Upon glans clitoris electrovibration, vaginal and uterine pressures as well as corpus cavernous electromyography diminished until a full erection occurred when the silent cavernosus muscles were activated. At orgasm, the electromyography of ischio-and bulbo-cavernosus muscles increased intermittently. The female orgasm was not associated with the appearance of fluid coming out of the vagina or urethra.

Read the abstract in context here.

Lest one imagine the researchers (led by the late Ali. A. Shafik of Cairo University) were singling out one sex for electromyographic scrutiny they’ve also published Electromyographic study of ejaculatory mechanism.

Cavernosus muscle (CM), seminal vesicle (SV) and vasal ampullary (VA) contractions at ejaculation are said to be reflex mechanisms (ejaculatory reflex), which have been scarcely dealt with in the literature. We investigated the hypothesis that contraction of the CMs, SVs and VA at ejaculation is a reflex action. The electromyographic (EMG) activity of CM, SV and VA during ejaculation was recorded in 28 healthy men. The test was repeated after separate anaesthetization of the glans penis (GP), CMs, SVs, and VA in the pre-ejaculatory period. Latent ejaculatory time (LET) was calculated. CMs showed no EMG activity until rigid erection phase was reached. SVs and VA exhibited resting EMG activity which increased gradually with different stages of erection. At ejaculation, CMs, SVs and VA showed two to four intermittent contractions. The mean LET was 1.3 +/- 0.2 sec. GP anaesthetization led to the disappearance of CM, SV and VA EMG activity at ejaculation, while bland gel did not affect EMG activity. CMs, SVs and VA when anaesthetized in the pre-ejaculatory period exhibited no EMG activity at ejaculation, while saline did not affect EMG activity. Increased EMG activity of CM, SV and VA apparently denotes increase in their contractile activity. CM, SV and VA contraction on GP stimulation and ejaculation are assumed to be reflex actions and are mediated through the ‘glans-cavernosovesicular reflex’ (GCVR) which presumably represents the ejaculatory reflex. Changes in LET or evoked response would indicate a defect in the reflex pathway. The GCVR might act as an investigative tool in diagnosing erectile dysfunction, provided further studies are performed in this respect.

Read the quote in context here.

And I might as well add that Shafik actually authored or co-authored an astonishing number of similar papers dealing with neuromuscular activity of the general pelvis, urogenital area, and lower intestinal tract.

Now when I saw the name it rang a bell and I realized Mary Roach had written about him in her (excellent) book about sex research, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex.

While Googling to confirm the connection (she did write about him) I ran across an interview of Roach by NPR’s Robert Siegel. Seigel approached the subject matter a little glibly, as mainstream types often feel obliged to do, and after a bit of mocking of Shafik’s self-funding, his seeming remoteness from western medicine (although he was often published in reputable peer-reviewed proctology, urology, andrology, and gynecology journals), and an admittedly goofy-sounding paper studying the effect of polyester on rat fertility, he asked Roach

SIEGEL: Well, after meeting people like Dr. Shafik in Cairo, and you and your husband taking part in a study with Dr. Dang in London and so many other interviews you report on on the book, then what do you come away, what’s the takeaway knowledge you have from having written “Bonk”?

And I think she just knocked the answer right out of the park (emphasis mine.)

MS. ROACH: Well, I think that one of the things that I’m left with is a lingering sense of surprise that there are still a good number of mysteries in the realm of sexual physiology.

You kind of have the sense – as a person who has sex, you figure, well, you know, it seems to work, what else do we need to know, which is kind of a ridiculous attitude. That would be like somebody saying to a person who’s studying, say, the esophageal sphincter, well, we all know how to eat, why do we need to study that?

SIEGEL: Mm-hmm.

MS. ROACH: So, I come against that all the time. People are saying, well, what’s the point of this research, you know? Tell me something I don’t know about sex. We don’t know, for example, the mechanisms of ejaculation, what the trigger is for that. And there’ve been all kinds of elaborate and quite frightening little studies that have been done in that realm, just any number of things that we really should still be looking into, and yet it’s very difficult for sex researchers to get funding for purely anatomical and physiological research these days.

She said it here.

The mild rebuke is well taken. The researchers Roach documented often are a little goofy, they usually are self-funded, they often are from seemingly-obscure parts of the world, and even when much of their work is actually credible when they’re cited in the mainstream press (whether by NPR or Discover Magazine) it’s their whackiest work that gets singled out rather than their more useful work.

I like her useful comparison of attitudes towards sex and food since I’m often taken by the analogies. If our social attitudes were reversed you really might be as difficult to get funding for credible research in the U.S. and western Europe. We might instead be subjected to knee-squeezingly embarrassed radio discussions of the swallowing reflex and other bodily functions above the belt.

Do we really need to know more about the electromyography of ischio-and bulbo-cavernosus muscles in women or the the ‘glans-cavernosovesicular reflex’ in men as it pertains to sexual arousal, orgasm, and/or ejaculation (male or female?) Why as a matter of fact we do.

Because, not to put too fine a point on it, laughing is not the only thing we enjoy doing while rolling on the floor.