HUMAN SEXUALITY & HUMAN REPRODUCTION

Human sexuality is more than human reproduction – it involves all the senses and the emotions, but most parents are unable to handle their sexuality and are uncomfortable, or unwilling, to talk about sexuality with their children.

You will be a better lover if you have been brought up to be honest about sexuality, and to enjoy your body. If you have been punished for ‘playing with your privates’, you will associate them with naughtiness, and you will associate sex with guilt.

You may have escaped your upbringing to some extent, or you may be rigid in your ‘sex is dirty’ attitudes. But you can help your children to have a more appropriate, sharing attitude to sexuality if you go about it the right way.

This is what education in human sexuality is all about. It is to give children an understanding of the nature of sexuality. In today’s world, we need more sexual understanding and better, more explicit, sex education. You can start helping, by doing as many of the following as you are able to do comfortably. Don’t be ashamed of your body or your partner’s. Let your children see that neither of you is ashamed, by walking about your house naked.

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ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY OF SEX

The books agree that both partners must understand the anatomy and physiology of sex (which is reasonable) and they imply that, guided by the man, a woman will learn to develop specific sexual techniques, which will eventually enable her to have a voluptuous orgasm, and to give her man an earth-shattering climax.

To achieve this desired state demands not only mental but physical training in sex. You need to learn sex exercises. The more recent manuals extend these exercises from the pelvic muscles to the fingers and the tongue, as digital and oral sex are now accepted as normal. The pelvic muscle training, as outlined, is that a woman should learn to tighten muscles around her vagina so that she can ‘squeeze the man’s penis’ as he thrusts. Men have an equivalent exercise which is to ‘snap’ the muscles at the base of the penis whenever he has a spare moment, so that he can thrust more powerfully.

With the information from the reading and with the appropriate physical training, you should be able to pleasure your partner, provided you have developed the proper techniques. The techniques include the positions for intercourse, duration and length of foreplay, methods of increasing, prolonging, heightening, and sharpening sexual desire, and additional pieces of equipment which may give greater pleasure to sex. The emotional aspects of sex get only a passing mention.

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ERECTION AND SEXUAL INTERCOURSE

Both types of nerve fibres reach most organs of the body. They control the rate at which your heart beats and the strength of each beat; they control your digestive processes; they control your breathing; and they control your ability to have an erection. Stimulation of the parasympathetic nerves which reach your penis leads to an inflow of blood into your penis and it becomes erect, which is why these parasympathetic nerves are called the ‘erection nerves’. But stimulation of the sympathetic nerves supplying your penis, for example by anxiety, or a sudden frightening noise, or fear, can inhibit an erection, or reduce one.

Because erections are necessary to permit sexual intercourse and perpetuate the race, man has evolved, through evolutionary processes, a second system, should the first fail or be damaged, perhaps following a spinal injury.

In this second system, nerve fibres which travel outside the spinal cord in the thoracolumbar trunk connect the higher centres of the brain with the penis, missing out the spinal parasympathetic nerves. Erotic stimuli perceived by the brain excite the thoracolumbar trunk and an erection follows.

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SEXUAL BEHAVIOUR

If you do something well (as you perceive it, or as others tell you), or if you have a good meal, or if you achieve something you have long desired, your ‘pleasure centre’ is stimulated, and messages which make you feel happy, or satiated, or triumphant pass to other parts of your body. You feel good!

Our sexual behaviour is no exception to the ‘pleasure-pain principle’, but it is unique among the drives, as it is dominated by pleasure, almost to the total exclusion of the ‘pain principle’. So when you are sexually aroused, and this leads to a warm sexual contact, and perhaps to sexual intercourse, you feel warm, relaxed, pleasured, and ‘great’.

Scientists who study brain structure and function have found that the areas of the brain which appear to control sexual arousal are closely related anatomically to areas of the brain which relay sensations of pleasure. For convenience the areas controlling sexual arousal are called the ‘sex centre’, although in reality they are systems of interconnected areas in the brain. The ‘sex centre’ and the ‘pleasure centre’ lie close to each other in the oldest part of the brain and probably have nerve fibres connecting them. In an experiment which supports this concept, Dr Heath, a scientist, has discovered that in animals orgasm is associated with strong electrical impulses in the pleasure area of the brain. Many men and women, after a particularly arousing sexual experience, feel warm and loving to their partner; they lose hostility and aggression to others, and the pleasurable mood can last for hours.

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