Tag: Sexual Health

Posted on

Stuck in the middle

Growing into my identity

By Tatum Lindquist

As an empathic perfectionist, conflicts stung me. I used to perceive any conflict as a reflection of my flawed character. It took years of inner wrestling to understand that conflicts were opportunities to grow, not threatening, but nurturing in their tumult.

All too often, humans keep to their comfortable spaces, unwilling to engage in a conflict with those who differ. I do not have that luxury, nor do I want it. I open myself up to you today to push the conversation of sexual identity and religion, not as a destabilizing conflict, but rather a nurturing discussion that extends a welcome to all beliefs and identities.

I felt alienated in religious settings where my questions about the Bible and its origins were dismissed as irrelevant or spiritually weak, and as I learned more in school about the uses of the Bible to validate atrocities throughout history, I lost trust in my religious communities because the Bible wasn’t considered in its historical context or its imperfect translations. Specifically, I remember staying up one night at Christian camp reading Genesis 3, and as I read verse 16 in its NIV translation, “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” I cried without really knowing why.

Until, that is, I read Wilda Gafney’s womanist interpretation. In “Womanist Midrash,” the pain of that passage healed as she explored how the Spirit of God uses she/her pronouns in the Biblical Hebrew; how it describes an androgynous being, not Adam but rather the adam, referring to humankind that is then split in two; how “over” translated to “in” and “with” more often, reading instead “he shall rule with you.”

When I stopped living in fear and started letting go and opening myself up to conversations around religion, I found space to wrestle with my identity, my God, and their Scripture, leading me to where I stand today as a bisexual, Christian, cisgender woman.

I may have known my identity for awhile now, but only until recently have I found a sense of representation and visibility through my studies of queer and feminist biblical scholarship. With help from the class “Gender, Sex, and Religion,” I was exposed to multiple approaches to the Bible beyond just traditional biblical studies.

“I think [including more perspectives] just makes for more accurate, more representative, more interesting scholarship,” Mika Ahuvia, an assistant professor at the Jackson School of International Studies, said.] “The more [people] are looking at a text, the more nuances they notice.”

It turns out that biblical authors had no language for sexual orientation and gender identity, but rather viewed sex and gender within patriarchal constructs motivated over the years by different political, religous, and socioeconomic influences.

When the topic of “homosexuality” did arise in the religious circles at youth groups or summer camp, I was told that the Holiness Code of Leviticus in Scripture not only addresses it, but condemns it. Never, however, was I told during these conversations of its historical context, where it fails to mention how these laws merely condemned sodomy — non-procreational sexual acts — not homesexuality itself, nor did anyone explain the cultural beliefs that influenced these laws.

In biblical Israel, there was a cultural necessity to understand the religious and social significance of their bodies and so, procreation was viewed synonymously to achieving immortality and wasting semen was thought to be impure and harmful because it was believed to hold the most crucial role in reproduction.

By exposing myself in a variety of knowledgeable, heavily researched interpretations, queer and feminist biblical scholarship specifically equipped me with a platform and the language to heal. Whether it’s the deconstruction of gender and patriarchy through reinterpreted creation stories in Genesis or the contextualized and researched approach to the Holiness Code of Leviticus, biblical scholarship redefined my relationship with the Bible and deepened my understanding of its authors and how interpretations changed with time, and how they were shaped by and influenced societal constructs of gender and sex.

Regardless, the search for community as a queer Christian continues. Whether it was my faith in secular communities or my sexuality in religious ones, I still don’t know where I belong, a feeling all too familiar in my experience between straight and LGBTQIA+ communities.

While we may be the “B” in LGBTQIA+, the bisexual community still faces health disparities and stereotypes from straight and queer communities for a variety of reasons.

“Our research has found that bisexual people do experience many health disparities, both in Washington state as well as nationally,” Karen Fredriksen Goldsen, a professor in the School of Social Work, said. “For example, we found that bisexual women compared to lesbians have higher rates of disability and are more likely to experience disability at earlier ages

Fredriksen Goldsen especially noted the community’s lack of visibility, where an “increase in visibility could create opportunities to further build and expand communities” as well as reduce stigmas.

“As we recognize bisexual lives, we can begin to understand their distinct experiences,” Fredriksen Goldsen said. “Our research has documented many disparities as well as strengths in this community, as bi people are resilient.”

At the intersection of religious, secular, straight, and LGBTQIA+ communities, if I’ve learned one thing, it’s that the majority of these communities and the unique individuals within them don’t know how to interact with each other. As someone on the receiving end, the lack of dialogue between these diverse communities lends its hand to miseducation, stigmatization, and polarization.

When Ahuvia started teaching “Gender, Sex, and Religion,” she noted that the biggest gap she felt like she had to overcome was between the secular and religious students. Now, four years later, it’s shifted.

Silence and invisibility serve no one, so I will never refuse the challenge to uproot what I hold true, wrestle with it, learn, and grow.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

It took us long enough, but we’re finally paying attention to women’s pleasure

By Erin Magner

While the history of women and pleasure is fraught with stigma, it appears we’re in the midst of a pleasure revolution. Now, female-identifying founders are creating pornography, sex toys, sex-education platforms, and erotica, all of which normalizes and celebrates a woman’s right to get off. Not only are consumers turned on by this building movement—the global sex toy market alone is expected to be worth $35 billion by 2023, up from $23.7 billion in 2017—but investors, too, are shuttling millions of dollars into sexual wellness start-ups such as Dipsea, a sexy short-story app, and Unbound, an e-tailer selling sex toys and other bedroom accessories. In short, there’s never been a better time than now for having a vulva and loving to orgasm.

So how did we get to this place of openness when, just two decades ago, Samantha Jones’ unapologetic pursuit of big Os on Sex and the City was considered radical? While there have been many twists and turns throughout the history of women and pleasure, it can be argued that the modern movement’s roots first planted in the 1950s. Back then, attitudes toward sexuality were still, in many ways, informed by the repressive Victorian era—when society demanded a “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude toward female desire. Yet in 1953, sexologist and biologist Alfred C. Kinsey, PhD, published his landmark (and controversial) book titled Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, which shed light on women’s then-rarely discussed habits regarding masturbation, orgasms, and sex before marriage. (Spoiler alert: Among the 6,000 women interviewed for the book, all of those activities were highly popular.) From there, the world slowly but surely opened its eyes to women as sexual beings.

The early history of women and pleasure

Four years following the release of Dr. Kinsey’s book, William Masters and Virginia Johnson began their pioneering work on the physical mechanisms behind sexual arousal at Washington University in St. Louis. Their most groundbreaking findings are still frequently cited today, like the four stages of sexual arousal—excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution—and the idea that women are able to have multiple orgasms. “Even the very suggestion that sexual pleasure might be important for women and not just men was massively radical during those times,” says Zhana Vrangalova, PhD, professor of human sexuality at New York University and resident sexpert for sex-toy brand Lelo.

As the history of women and pleasure progressed, a succession of cultural milestones continued to help champion the idea of non-procreative sex among women. First, the birth control pill hit the market in 1960, which officially allowed women to have sex without the prospect of pregnancy. Helen Gurley Brown’s book Sex and the Single Girl (1962) gave advice for sex and dating as an unmarried woman, and a group of Boston women later self-published the seminal Our Bodies, Ourselves (1970), which provided evidence-based information to teach women about their sexual anatomy. Then as the hippie counterculture spread a message of free love, leaders of the second-wave feminist movement encouraged women to take an active role in their own sexual experience. You know, like men had been doing for centuries beforehand.

Despite all of this progress, however, Dr. Vrangalova points out that the framework for female pleasure in the 1960s and early ’70s was still largely based on a male perspective. “Given that the ’60s were a time when women were still very much second-class citizens, the way sexual pleasure was conceptualized was the way men, rather than women, thought about pleasure,” she says. “There’s no doubt women participated, but it seems like they adopted the male-driven vision of sexual pleasure, rather than focusing specifically on female pleasure. This was an inevitable product of the times—even scientists across diverse fields believed that whatever findings were true of men were also true of women, more or less.” For instance, at this point in the history of women and pleasure, there was still a pervasive view that women, like men, should be able to reach orgasm through vaginal intercourse alone.

“The ’60s were a time when women were still very much second-class citizens, and the way sexual pleasure was conceptualized was the way men, rather than women, thought about pleasure.”
—sexologist Zhana Vrangalova, PhD

Thankfully, in 1976, sex educator Shere Hite’s book The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality re-emphasized the importance of clitoral stimulation in reaching orgasm—an idea put forth by Dr. Kinsey two decades previously. (It wasn’t until 2005, however, that researchers led by Australian urologist Helen O’Connell, MD, would actually create a full map of the clitoris’ internal and external structures.) Then, in 1982, a book titled The G Spot and Other Recent Discoveries About Human Sexuality, brought this then-little-known erogenous zone—and the concept of female ejaculation—into the public consciousness.

But soon after, new discoveries around women’s pleasure began to cool off, a phenomenon that Dr. Vrangalova attributes to the early days of the HIV/AIDS crisis. “Unfortunately, that swung the pendulum on sexual pleasure—male and female—back toward the more conservative end of the spectrum, and America entered the Dark Ages of abstinence-only sexual education,” she says. “This had the incredibly harmful effects of sexually crippling an entire generation of Americans with lack of information, increasing fear of sex and STIs, and increasing stigma around pleasure, especially if it was outside of long-term committed relationships.”

Women are sexual beings, but there’s a pleasure gap to close and stigma to stop

Fast-forward a decade, however, and pleasure once again started to creep back into the zeitgeist. But even in 1999, when Sex and the City was must-watch viewing, 40 percent of women still claimed to experience sexual disfunction, characterized by a lack of sexual desire and difficulty attaining arousal.

According to public-health researcher Katherine Rowland‘s new book, The Pleasure Gap, this feeling of sexual dissatisfaction still endures, despite all the strides that have been made during the past 60-plus years. “Among the women who I spoke to, the persistent low desire was heavily associated with the idea that sex should revolve around penetration as the main course, with maybe a polite prelude of a foreplay, rather than thinking about sex as a broader universe of intimacy,” Rowland previously told NPR. “It’s the combination of a larger culture that privileges male sexuality over women’s, a culture that doesn’t teach women that pleasure belongs to them. A lack of anatomical self-knowledge. And feelings of sort of persistent danger and women being often censored and censured for expressing their desire.”

Yet on all of these fronts, the tides have been slowly turning in recent years, thanks in large part to the rise of the digital age. “The internet and smartphones enabled unprecedented access to vast amounts of sexual pleasure information and to all sorts of alternative and more liberal sexual values and lifestyles,” says Dr. Vrangalova, who notes that online porn and erotica helped to normalize the concept of “a women’s right to pleasure.”

Furthermore, the #MeToo movement of 2017 set the stage for the current pleasure revolution. “There are a lot of women who relived their traumas during #MeToo…it wasn’t a linear path,” says Alexandra Fine, sexologist and CEO of next-gen vibrator company Dame. “But it does ultimately feel like it empowered women to reclaim their sexual pleasure as their own and to speak more openly about it.”

It’s that open dialogue around sex that’s leading women to get curious about their own pleasure patterns right now—and that’s clearing a path for companies to create products and services that help them get to know their own bodies. “[At Dame,] we’re hearing so many stories of women being really honest about what their sexual experiences are in an unfiltered way that wasn’t available before,” Fine adds.

What to expect from the next chapter in the history of women and pleasure

As knowledge gaps continue to emerge around women’s sexual pleasure, organizations like Allbodies—a digital sex-ed platform—are stepping up to fill them. Allbodies co-founder and doula Ash Spivak says there are still many vulva-owners who feel alienated by conventional pleasure wisdom, either because they’ve previously experienced trauma or by virtue of the fact that everyone’s body works differently. “We have so much emphasis on orgasms in general as being the pinnacle, but pleasure is a spectrum,” she says. “There’s so much room in there to really play around and that’s really never been taught.”

“We have so much emphasis on orgasms in general as being the pinnacle, but pleasure is a spectrum. There’s so much room in there to really play around and that’s really never been taught.”
—Ash Spivak, Allbodies co-founder

There are also plenty of institutions that aren’t yet ready for an open dialogue around female arousal at this point in the history of women and pleasure. For instance, Facebook still doesn’t allow advertising for sex toys—although it does allow ads for sexual-health companies, like those promoting erectile-disfunction treatments for men. And Fine says targeting this is the next frontier of the pleasure revolution.

“This conversation around advertising policy is a really interesting place where it’s showing up,” she says, noting that Dame sued the New York City MTA in 2019 for refusing to run its vibrator ads in the subway. Changing this reality is part of her bigger mission for Dame. “If we can’t have public discourse around sexuality because we think it’s inherently inappropriate, then we’re pushing sex to the shadows. And the things that happen in the shadows when it comes to sex harm women.”

Fortunately, research is continuing to unveil nuances of the female sexual experience, which can only help to erase shame and popularize the idea that there’s no one-size-fits-all path to pleasure. One 2019 study, for instance, debunked the idea that all orgasms are positive experiences—some women do, indeed, view them as negative at times, particularly when they feel coerced into having sex or pressured into climaxing.

Brands are even contributing to our collective knowledge. Dame, for instance, asks members of its Dame Labs community to test its prototypes pre-launch and then uses feedback to fine-tune each product. For instance, Dame engineers were surprised to learn when developing the company’s first internal vibrator, the Arc, that testers considered the toy’s external sensations to be even more important than its internal stimulation properties—even though testers said they would purchase the toy to use internally. The engineers edited the design accordingly, and as a result, pleasure won.

And while pleasure is a right entitled to all people, vulva-owners certainly included, Fine, for one, believes there are even bigger health gains to to glean from knowing as much as possible about the female sexual experience. “I really believe that sex is part of our wellness—it’s literally what creates our life,” she says. ‘Why would we think it’s not constantly impacting [us]?”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Is Testosterone Therapy Safe for Women?

Testosterone is often prescribed to boost a low sex drive, but the research on its long-term effects remains questionable.

by Sarah Ellis

The hormone testosterone (called “T” for short in medical circles) has long been associated with the male physique, athleticism, and a heightened sex drive. But now, there’s an idea making the internet search rounds that testosterone therapy may be the secret sauce to revamping a woman’s shuttered sex drive.

Even health-conscious celebrities have gotten in on the hype. In 2011, Jane Fonda told The Sunday Telegraph that she started taking the hormone in her 70s to boost her sex drive. But before you run to your doctor to ask for a prescription, you should know that testosterone therapy is a controversial approach that is not FDA-regulated for women at this time. Despite its mythical reputation, this hormone isn’t a cure-all for sexual dysfunction, and it could even be dangerous for your health if not taken carefully. Let us explain.

How Does Testosterone Work in Women?

Testosterone may be known as a male hormone, but women’s bodies naturally produce it, too. It’s one of many hormones that work together to control our mood, metabolism, sexual desire, bone and muscle growth, and reproductive system. As you age, your hormone levels change, with one of the biggest shifts occurring during menopause when your menstrual cycle stops for good. Menopause causes your estrogen and progesterone levels to decrease, but interestingly, it is not associated with a sudden decrease in testosterone, according to the North American Menopause Society.

That said, there is evidence that testosterone decreases throughout your life. “Testosterone drops with age more than with menopause,” says Margaret Wierman, M.D., professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, CO and former Vice President of Clinical Sciences at the Endocrine Society. This may explain why testosterone pills, gels, and patches are sometimes touted by drug marketing campaigns (and celebs) as a sex drive booster for older men and women whose testosterone is naturally lower than it used to be.

The problem with this approach, according to Chrisandra Shufelt, M.D., associate director of the Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Center at the Cedars-Sinai Smidt Heart Institute in Los Angeles, CA, is that testosterone is not necessarily the miracle drug you may be reading about on the internet. “If you search online, it seems like testosterone could be the panacea of all hormones, relieving everything from fatigue to weight gain to depression,” Dr. Shufelt says. But interestingly, she notes, there is no scientifically proven list of symptoms directly correlated to low T in women. Everyone’s hormone levels are naturally different, and what looks “low” on a testosterone test for one woman may be a perfectly normal T level for another.

Does Testosterone Impact Sex Drive?

To some extent, yes—but it’s not the end all, be all. Dr. Wierman explains that there are many different causes of sexual dysfunction (the term for when you’re no longer craving or enjoying sex). “There are mechanical hardware causes, there are relationship causes, there are mood causes,” she says. “There are rarely hormonal causes, and [in those cases] it’s usually estrogen deficiency that is causing abnormalities.”

What Is Testosterone Therapy?

Testosterone products are supplemental versions of the hormone that people take to increase their existing T levels. They come as a patch, gel, pill, tablet, or injection. Prescription testosterone products are FDA-approved for men whose bodies cannot produce adequate testosterone, due to genetic conditions like Klinefelter syndrome or damage from infection or chemotherapy. Testosterone products are not–we repeat, not!–approved for people whose testosterone is decreasing with age.

Nevertheless, this hasn’t stopped people from taking T (and doctors from prescribing T) for reasons other than it is officially intended. This practice has become so widespread, in fact, that the FDA issued a safety announcement in March 2015 urging doctors not to prescribe testosterone to anyone other than men with testosterone-lowering medical conditions. The statement noted that testosterone therapy could possibly increase your risk of cardiovascular problems or stroke.

For women, the risks of testosterone therapy are even less clear. “What we know about safety and what has been studied in women is the short-term effects, up to two years,” Dr. Shufelt says. “Longer effects are not known, and we do not know the effects in women who have risk factors for heart disease and breast cancer.” She stresses that longer-term studies will be necessary to determine whether low-dose testosterone therapy has detrimental effects on a woman’s body.

When testosterone is taken in excess quantities, Dr. Shufelt explains, it can lead to some pretty severe medical issues for women. “Too much testosterone in women can result in deepening of voice, hair loss, acne, anger, and negative changes to the cholesterol panel,” she says. Dr. Wierman remembers seeing a perimenopausal patient who had been given testosterone pellets at an anti-aging clinic. The high levels of T caused an increase in bad cholesterol, increase in blood pressure, excessive body hair growth, and loss of scalp hair.

Yikes! Are There Any Medical Guidelines for Women and T?

In September 2019, the Endocrine Society, International Menopause Society, European Menopause and Andropause Society, and others got together to publish a global consensus statement on the safety and efficacy of testosterone therapy for women. Dr. Wierman, one of the principal authors, explains the major takeaway: testosterone therapy has only proven to be useful for one specific subset of women–post-menopausal women with hypoactive sexual desire disorder.

Hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) is characterized by an absence of sexual desire, to an extent that it causes emotional distress and relationship problems for a couple. HSDD can be caused by a variety of factors, from medication use and chronic health conditions, to chemical imbalances and hormone deficiencies. It is diagnosed by a healthcare provider using a questionnaire and treated with anything from counseling to hormone replacement therapy, depending on the situation.

Dr. Wierman says that for post-menopausal women with HSDD, “controlled studies showed that getting high physiologic doses [of testosterone] increased satisfying sexual relations by one per month, with some other potentially good effects on sexual function,” such as arousal and ability to orgasm. The consensus statement specified that these doses should mimic – not exceed – natural levels of testosterone in premenopausal women. The statement authors urged that more research be done on testosterone therapy for women, and that testosterone products for HSDD should be created specifically with women in mind.

So, What Does This Mean for Me?

If you’re curious about testosterone therapy and wondering if you fit into the subset of women who may benefit, Dr. Wierman suggests talking to your regular women’s healthcare provider. “I think that most providers, whether they’re gynecologists or endocrinologists or primary care doctors who specialize in menopausal women, can discuss the issues related to testosterone pros and cons,” she says.

But before you walk away with a prescription, keep in mind that your low sex drive may not have to do with your hormones. “The first thing when someone has abnormalities in their sexual function is to discuss all the different other causes of it, and try to be a detective,” Dr. Wierman says. “If she is having painful intercourse, maybe it’s local vaginal estrogen she needs. If there’s stress in the relationship, maybe therapy is what they need.” Testosterone therapy is one option to increase libido, but it’s certainly not a foolproof key to amazing sex. And unless you’re a postmenopausal woman with HSDD, you probably want to steer clear.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Sex burns about 3 to 4 calories per minute

— here’s how to burn a little more

By Ashley Laderer

  • One study found that during the average sexual session, men burn about 101 calories, and women burn 69.1 calories.
  • This calorie-burning rate is much lower than a session on a treadmill, so don’t skip the gym.
  • You can burn more calories by being on top and making the sex last longer.
  • Sex may feel like a workout sometimes, but just how many calories are you actually burning under the sheets?

Researchers first posed that question in 1984, in a paper published in the Archives of Internal Medicine concluding that sex equated to light-to-moderate exercise. Several more studies since then have found similar conclusions.

In other words, if you’re looking to burn a lot of calories over a short period of time, hit the gym, not the bed. 

That said, there are some ways to boost the physical intensity of sex to shed a few more calories than you otherwise might. There are also other benefits to having sex than just pleasure and calorie loss.

The number of calories sex burns

There are no large scale studies on how many calories sex burns. Though there are several small ones where researchers have found ways to estimate the amount. Some of the most recent data we have is from 2013, when researchers from the University of Quebec in Montreal published their study of 21 young, healthy heterosexual couples to see how much energy they expended over four different sex sessions.

The study, published in PLOS One, found that during the average sexual activity session — which the researchers defined as foreplay, intercourse, and at least one partner’s orgasm — men burned 101 calories, and women burned 69.1 calories.

Factoring in how long each session lasted, the researchers concluded that the men burned, on average, 4.2 calories per minute compared to 3.1 calories per minute for women. This was significantly less than when the same participants exercised on a treadmill, where men burned 9.2 calories/min and women burned 7.1 calories/min — more than twice as much as sex.

Co-author of the study Antony Karelis, PhD, who’s a Professor in the Department of Exercise Science at the University of Quebec, Montreal, says “there is some kind of energy expenditure [during sex] but it’s not that big.”

Another study published in 2013 in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded similar results that a man in his 30s might only burn 21 calories during intercourse if he’s having sex for 6 minutes.

Five to six minutes is about the average duration of sexual intercourse — not including foreplay, of course. And, of course, calorie expenditure is individualized, meaning you may burn slightly more or fewer calories than these study participants.

But, if your steamy encounters last about as long as an infomercial, then you should not rely on sex either to burn a significant amount of calories or to get in your recommended amount of weekly exercise.

How to burn more calories during sex

Let’s get the obvious out of the way, first: Whoever is on top is probably doing most of the movement and will likely be expending more energy.

So, if you’re looking to burn a few more calories during sex, take charge and get on top, or have you and your partner take turns so you can both benefit. Breaking a sweat is a good indication that you’re putting in work, says Karelis.

You can also make the sex session last longer in hopes of burning more calories, but that’s easier said than done. As for different positions, “it would be incredibly difficult for people to change sex in such a substantial way that it would be equivalent to a workout,” says Debby Herbenick, PhD, professor of sexual and reproductive health at the Indiana University School of Public Health and author of “The Coregasm Workout: The Revolutionary Method for Better Sex Through Exercise.”

Herbenick adds that “there are endless sex positions, and I recommend that people choose the ones that are pleasurable for them and their partner, not the one that will burn five or 10 more calories.”

Exercise itself can enhance arousal, according to Herbenick. She says people can exercise in ways that boost their own arousal, and then take those lessons learned to the bedroom and enhance their own sexual experience. Alternatively, you can do some exercise with your partner before sex as some real calorie-burning foreplay, and then focus on simply enjoying sex.

The benefits of sex beyond calorie burning

If you’re feeling disappointed that sex doesn’t burn as many calories as you’d hoped, remember that sex has plenty of other health benefits.

Additionally, Karelis notes research has shown that having sex regularly reduces your risk of heart disease and is even associated with living longer–especially if you’re orgasming regularly. These benefits seem even better than burning calories, no?

Karelis hopes more research will be done in the near future so we can learn more about calorie expenditure and other health aspects regarding sex. There’s still a lot to learn.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

How Stress Can Impact Your Sex Life


By Rachel Shatto

If you’ve always had a fairly healthy sex drive, but lately you feel like desire’s the last thing on your mind, there could be one factor putting the kibosh on your libido: stress. Let’s face it, these days it feels like there’s constantly a reason to feel stressed out. Maybe it’s the pressure at work or school, or the news headlines, or family issues. Whatever the case may be, how stress impacts your sex life is that it can be a real mood killer, says Dr. Logan Levkoff, a sexuality and relationships expert. “Stress can definitely affect your sex life, because desire is greatly impacted by our emotional and mental states,” she tells Elite Daily. Over time, this can even create a self-perpetuating cycle, she warns. “Unsatisfying sex can cause us stress and stress causes unsatisfying sex (or little desire),” Dr. Levkoff says.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to stay that way forever. Even though you may feel like it now, you’re not powerless in the battle between sex and your sex drive. But the first step is understanding just how stress is impacting your libido. Then you’ll have a better idea of how to address and lessen its impact.

How Stress Impacts Your Sex Life.

One of the main ways in which stress affects your sex life is that it increases your emotional needs, while deceasing your sexual ones, as sex and intimacy coach Irene Fehr tells Elite Daily. “Stress introduces extra needs that may not have been present or important before — emotional needs to be reassured, to feel safe amid the turmoil, to be heard about our struggles, to be gotten and understood,” she says. The one thing we need most in times of stress, Fehr explains. is a sense of connection and to be safe. We need to feel as though we’re not in the struggle alone. However, the problem is that, all too often, rather than voice those needs to our partner we turn inward. “Here’s the paradox,” says Fehr. “Stress makes us bottle it up and not allow their partner to see or witness how worried, stressed, or scared they are. Stress makes us share our needs less and has us go without having our needs met. All of this creates a wall between partners — a wall that they can’t penetrate emotionally and sexually.” This, in turn, leads us to feel more isolated and less sexual desire, according to Fehr.

There’s also a biological factor in the way that desire is suppressed by stress, adds Dr. Levkoff. “Stress can impact and decrease desire… and increase the production of cortisol. Cortisol is a hormone that, in excess amounts, decreases the production of sex hormones,” she explains.

The impact of prolonged stress can be felt throughout the entire body, Fehr says. “It affects every system in the body, including the brain, nerves, pituitary, adrenal, kidney, blood vessels, thyroid, liver, blood vessels, and the interrelations between them. As a result, the body mounts a stress response,” she explains. “Here, blood and energy are diverted to big organs and muscles that will help you outrun the threat or fight it — and away from desire and sex drive.” In other words, stress takes up a lot of your physical and mental energy, leaving you little left over to engage with your partner sexually.

When combined with the emotional and physical impacts, it’s little surprise that stress has such a profound effect on your sex drive.

What To Do About It.

The good news is that you’re not powerless in all of this. While eliminating all stress from your life is next to impossible, you can mitigate some of its effects, says Fehr, by addressing the emotional aspect first, by recognizing and expressing your nonsexual needs to your partner, rather than continuing to hold them back. “Getting your needs met is the key to wanting to be with your partner,” she explains. “It can be as simple as asking your partner for undivided attention as you share with them about what’s bothering you or your fears. It could be asking for extra-long hugs because they help you feel reassured,” she suggests. Another thing that can help, shares Fehr, can be simply letting your partner know that you need more space to address the causes of your stress. “Needs are individual and are appropriate to the situation. Only you will know what you need,” says Fehr. “Admitting your needs to your partner requires vulnerability and emotional risk, and it’s this vulnerability that will actually fulfill the needs of closeness that we need during stress to bring us back into desire with our partners and sex,” she concludes.

Dr. Levkoff emphasizes that there’s no magic cure in this situation; it’s more of a process. “However, recognizing that we’re entitled to sexual pleasure and fulfillment and prioritizing our needs — emotional and physical — during stressful times is a start,” Levkoff explains. Most important, she stresses, is that you should be kind to yourself through the process, and not to criticize or be hard on yourself, as that actually can stall your progress.

While life probably won’t be getting any less stressful anytime soon, the good news is that you don’t have to settle for a sex life that’s less than satisfying as a result. Solving this issue might take making yourself more emotionally vulnerable with your partner and doing a lot of self-reflection, but it’s something that you can both get through. At least that’s one less thing to be stressed about.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Why These Sexual Health Educators Took Their Activism Online

Education can be radical.

by Gretchen Brown

Sonalee Rashatwar believes education can be radical.

“Any time we are giving someone information about their own body, we are informing them about their rights, and that’s political,” she said.

“It destabilizes the structure when I tell someone they don’t have to opt into it.”

Rashatwar is a clinical social worker, sex therapist and grassroots organizer.

Known under the Instagram handle TheFatSexTherapist, she also works as a public speaker and sex educator.

She does this through her own lens as a person who is queer, south Asian and fat. Much of that means sharing her own personal story — experiences with dieting and sexual trauma, bifobia, fatphobia and xenophobia.

“I’m not generalizing, I’m not universalizing, and I’m allowing folks to map onto my narrative the parts of their own lived experience,” Rashatwar said.

That’s not the kind of sex education you typically get in schools. It wasn’t what Rashatwar grew up with either.

Sonalee Rashatwar is a clinical social worker, sex therapist and grassroots organizer.

Her teachers taught with the assumption that most people having sex were cisgendered, heterosexual, able-bodied, thin and white. There wasn’t information about sexuality, or gender identity or different body types.

Only eight U.S. states require that sex education programs be free from racial or gender bias, and only eight mandate that programs include information about sexual orientations.

“Sex has routinely been thought of as something that doesn’t happen pleasurably to people who look like me,” she said.

But there’s a new class of sex educators like Rashatwar — on the internet and beyond — who have flipped the script on sex education.

They teach it as a justice movement, as activism, as personal. And they include folks and identities that had previously been left out of the conversation.

Normalizing sexuality

Research suggests that many adolescents look to the internet for more information about sexuality.

Toronto-based sex educator Eva Bloom grew up on Youtube channels like “Sexplanations,” famous for their warm, casual and non-judgemental tone.

She’s always used the internet to fill in the gaps.

So when she became a sex educator herself — complete with her own YouTube channel, “What’s My Body Doing?” — it was a tone she wanted to emulate.

But Bloom is also a researcher, and just finished her Master’s degree in July, with an emphasis on sexting. She brings a distinct, research-based approach to her videos, many focusing on queer youth, like Bloom herself.

Eva Bloom is a Toronto-based sex educator.

She also talks about something that’s ignored in the classroom — pleasure.

“I talk about sex toys, I talk about kink,” she said. “And I try to really normalize and approach all of that with curiosity and excitement.”

Along with Nadine Thornhill, Bloom also hosts a Youtube series for kids, “Sex-ed School,” which has episodes on consent, gender identity, sexual orientation and masturbation.

“There’s one comment that sticks in my mind: ‘I’m really excited I can share this with my nonbinary kid,’” Bloom said.

Their goal is to make episodes that are normalizing, not dramatic. Think: the opposite of the sex educator in the film “Mean Girls.”

Thornhill and Bloom take into account that many kids already have knowledge about sex and sexuality. So the kids are the center of the show, and it’s about hearing from them, more than talking at them.

Access as justice

For some young people in the U.S., the internet is their only resource for sexual health. Many teens don’t get sex education at all.

Only 24 U.S. states require sex education, and only 20 require that it be “medically, factually or technically accurate.”

Haylin Belay grew up in Texas, a state where sex education is abstinence-only. So her career began as a teenager, as a youth intern and peer educator through GSA, a student-run organization for LGBTQ+ youth and straight allies.

A decade later, she’s still teaching sex education — often to adults who never had that education and are feeling that gap as they try to navigate their sexuality.

“They’re not new to sex, but they never had an opportunity to learn, ‘Here’s how your body experiences pleasure, here’s what you can learn if you are uncomfortable experiencing sex,’” said Belay, now based in New York.

Haylin Belay is a New York-based sex educator.

“… Just understanding how their body works, you can see the light go off in their eyes.”

She teaches with the manifesto, “all people deserve an integrated sex life and the healthy pursuit of pleasure.”

“Access to this information is a form of justice, it is a right, and it’s unsurprising that it’s a lesson that I was able to learn in high school through working with a queer organization,” she said.

Whether she’s going into a classroom and talking to young people about how to be sexually responsible adults, or teaching workshops about communication to adults in a sex shop, it’s liberation, she said — work that started with the reproductive justice movement in the 1990s.

So while she doesn’t call herself an activist directly, the work that she does runs parallel to activism. Information is power.

Space for survivors

“Something I like to bring into the classroom is how to say yes or no,” said Jimanekia Eborn, a sex educator and trauma specialist.

“…I had never had that. And I think that goes hand in hand with consent, and with learning boundaries.”

Eborn, who also goes by the moniker “Trauma Queen,” initially worked as a crisis counselor, in a mental health facility for young adults. The same life experience kept coming up: sexual assault.

Eborn, who is a sexual assault survivor, saw a need for sex education catered to other survivors, especially those from marginalized identities.

Jimanekia Eborn is a sex educator and trauma specialist.

That’s a space she had to carve out herself. Sex education is typically not catered toward survivors.

“There’s so many people that talk about the pleasure aspect, forgetting that people can’t get to that aspect because of the trauma,” she said.

Her approach is emotionally-focused, and treats recovery from trauma as a journey. As a Black, queer, polyamorous femme, Eborn wants folks like her to feel like they have someone to connect with.

It is a heavy labor. Eborn gets personal and teaches through sharing her own story. She finds that many folks have been sexually assaulted, but don’t have the words for it.

“I heal through my work. I’m constantly finding new things out about myself,” she said.

“And I think it’s nice for people to be able to see someone being able to share their story.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Sex during lockdown

Are we witnessing a cybersexual revolution?

Quarantine encourages the prosperity of sexual exploration. In the absence of consequence, there’s an abundance of freedom

By Ciara Gaffney

It’s with an almost nascent nostalgia that I recall the coining of the Gen Z “sexual recession”: a patronizing concern that our youngest generation would be rendered psychosexually stunted, unable or unwilling to fornicate due to over-exposure to smartphones, social media and porn.

To an extent, the stats affirmed this; between 1991 and 2017, the number of high school students having sex dropped from 54% to 40%. But in the nick of time, a worldwide pandemic arrived, and a budding sexual renaissance emerged in its wake.

Flinging the Gregorian calendar into irrelevance, humanity will be bisected into pre-Covid-19 and post-Covid-19, and although many will ruminate on how we have changed, one thing is indisputable: the rose-colored epoch before the coronavirus bitterly shamed the sending of nudes. They were perceived as gauche, even pathetic. In the lockdown era, however, thirst traps and nudes are not only making a glorious, unrepentant comeback, but are now a form of emboldened agency in Gen Z’s blossoming sexual liberation.

Sexual revolutions are often birthed by a narrowing of choice. Confined by the puritan values of 1950s America, the free love movement prevailed as a counterculture in which sexuality was celebrated instead of admonished. Its belief system was salaciously novel; the normalization of casual sex, porn and masturbation (all table stakes today) was bemoaned as a doomsday harbinger by the “boomers” of the time. They feared the death of convention: conventional love, conventional relationships, conventional sex.

Ironically, a deeper symmetry links the sexual revolutions of then and now, and that is pandemic. Free love met its abrupt end at the hands of Aids, but times, and the tools at our disposal, have changed. While one pandemic cut off a sexual revolution, another pandemic is galvanizing a new one.

The confines that spurred free love were morals, but the confines that mobilize the Gen Z sexual revolution are walls. Stratified by distance, Gen Z is similarly tasked with reinventing what sex looks like, in a quarantined world where physical sex is frequently impossible. As free love shattered the conventions of its time, Gen Z’s sexual renaissance is doing the same for organic sexual connection.

Is sending nudes foreplay? Are thirst traps posted to Instagram “close friends” lists modern courtship? Is mutual masturbation via Zoom sex? What separates the virtual from the real? Why is sexuality by video-screen considered lonely or isolating? If anything, we are seeing humanity at its most tender, reaching earnestly through the virtual void to “actualize” contactless sex. Filled with unfiltered longing posted with abandon, Gen Z’s sexual revolution is one that has been reconfigured and reborn for the digital age.

So, how exactly is this so fruitful for a groundbreaking sexual revolution? No one knows when lockdown will lift; we may be social distancing on and off for the next two years. Some commentators predict the “normal” we knew will never return. The mantra of the day is “nudes sent during the quarantine don’t count”. Yes, Gen Z’s sexual revolution is partly a response to the pure boredom of lockdown; what else are we supposed to do with our days besides masturbate excessively and send a flurry of nudes? But it’s more than ennui or physical stratification. It’s a seizing of finiteness.

Quarantine not only encourages, but forces, the prosperity of sexual exploration; of experimenting with nudes, thirst traps, camming and sexting for debauchery, mostly without IRL repercussions. Unlike regular life, which would encase sexual choices with all the judgmental trappings of “forever” – what will the other person think of me? What will this be like in person? – a pandemic provides a get-out-of-jail-free card. In the absence of consequence, there is the abundance of freedom.

If Gen Z are more sexually reticent than prior generations, a pandemic finally caters to Gen Z coming into their sexuality on their own terms – without stigma and pressure, and decidedly in favor of the virtual. In the end, it won’t matter whether the things that go down during quarantine happen “in real life” or not; whether the nudes and thirst traps don’t translate to everyday eternity. The Gen Z cybersexual revolution may be corporeally prohibited from morphing into free-love hedonism, but it is an uninhibited sexual renaissance nonetheless.

And in a pandemic that beseeches social distancing, a contactless sexual revolution was, quite simply, predestined.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

A new wave of online sex education introduces children to LGBTQ+ issues

How YouTubers are providing free LGBTQ+ focused sex ed to bolster school curriculum

YouTuber Lindsay Amer on the set of Queer Kid Stuff.

By

Picture this: A chalkboard with rainbows drawn on it propped up on an easel made for children. Crayons and other props are spread out on a desk. A stuffed bear sits at attention ready for class.

“Welcome to Queer Kid Stuff! I’m Lindsay, and this is my best friend Teddy,” the host says.

This is how YouTuber Lindsay Amer begins each of their sex education videos for children.

Just after finishing their study of theatre for young audiences, Amer, who goes by they/them pronouns, fell in love with children’s storytelling. After coming out as non-binary and reflecting on their own experiences, they wanted to alleviate the lack of LGBTQ+ representation in the media for kids.

“I wanted figure out how to marry these two things that (were) coming out in my life the same time, this love for storytelling in theatre, performance and media and also my queer identity,” they said in an interview with the Toronto Observer.

Amer’s series fills a niche by educating grade school students on same-sex issues, which has been largely missing from Ontario’s public school curriculum since the provincial government made cuts in 2018. Much LGBTQ+ representation disappeared, including references to gender identity, sexuality and more.

Many LGBTQ+ students have to resort to outside sources for their sex education. A study by MediaSmarts in 2014 reported that 23 per cent of teens sought out pornography online, an unreliable source for education on this topic.

However, certain content creators are working to change the narrative for LGBTQ+ youth who are disadvantaged by the education system by making reliable information available to them in relatable terms, just as Amers is doing with Queer Kids Stuff.

Their web series “aims to eliminate stigma by properly educating future generations through entertaining video content,” according to the website.

Similar to the way Ontario’s sex education curriculum has been a topic of controversy, so has Amer’s content. The conservative censorship rules that platforms like YouTube require users to follow have affected Amer’s content, by means of demonetization and even blacklisting, a term used when a video will no longer appear in the platform’s “suggested” pages.

“I’m actually part of a lawsuit suing Google and YouTube over discrimination of the LGBTQ+ community,” said Amer. They could not comment further on the topic.

Amer’s stance is that representing diverse people means including diverse people in the conversation about representation. They believe sex education is more than just a curriculum because it shapes the lives of LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ youth alike. They want to see the schools’ sex education curriculum reflect that.

“It’s important that when you’re writing these curricula that you are consulting queer people, that you are consulting women, that you are consulting intersex folks, who are very underrepresented in sex education,” said Amer.

“It’s so important to include those marginalized voices.”

There’s a divide between those who supported the inclusivity of the 2015 sex education curriculum versus those who commend Doug Ford for the changes made during the summer of 2018 to reduce LGBTQ+ representation.

“If you look at what is provided in terms of elementary grade level discussion of LGBTQ+ issues, it’s practically non-existent. The curriculum is really too late in terms of when it starts to address LGBTQ+ issues,” said Alex McKay executive director of the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada (SEICCAN), a not-for-profit charitable organization.

McKay said that in order for a sex education curriculum to be successful, it must be relevant to all kinds of students.

In a report titled “A call to action: LGBTQ Youth need Inclusive Sex Education,” the Human Rights Campaign specifies on their website that “well-designed and well-implemented sex education can reduce risk behavior and support positive sexual health outcomes among teens.”

Egale Canada, the country’s leading organization for LGBTQ+ people and issues, released a study called Every Class in Every School that looked further into what LGBTQ+ students face in secondary schools. These were some of their findings:

  • 55 per cent of sexual minority students have reported being verbally harassed in school.
  • One in five LGBTQ+ students reported being physically harassed in school.

“It’s very important that, from the very beginning, when we’re providing developmentally appropriate information to children and youth, that we are being inclusive. Kids in elementary school, for example, are aware of diversity of sexual orientation,” said McKay.

“The fact that sexual health education in schools often just ignores that sends a very negative message not only to LGBTQ+ children and youth, but it’s also sending a message to the whole school community, and it’s not being inclusive.”

Limited sex education is not only an issue for Ontarians, but an issue widely seen across the world. That’s where online educators where Amers and Nadine Thornill come in.

Thornhill, a Toronto-based expert in adolescent sexuality, is host of her own sex education web series. #SaveSexEd is a collection of videos tackling sex-related topics in an educational manner so that anyone – parents, caregivers, teachers, educators, community leaders or even youth themselves – can have positive conversations about sex and sexuality.

“If I had $1 for every time somebody said to me, ‘This is something that I did not know and never learned in school,’ I would be doing very well,” Thornhill said.

She started her journey to becoming a sex educator when she realized how insufficient her own sex education had been.

Topics like diversity of gender, of sex, or of sexual orientation are not beyond a child’s comprehension, she said.

“Those are things that young children are certainly capable of, being aware of and of knowing, it’s not going to destroy them” Thornhill said.

“By saying, ‘Okay, we have to wait until [age] 13 to have any kind of public discussion about this’ implies that there is something inherently sort of dangerous and child inappropriate about gender diversity.”

Thornhill is willing to create the content that she does if it serves the greater good, but her primary intent is to give adults the resources they need. She wants adults to have is to become responsible and trustworthy figures who can facilitate young people’s education.

“I think a lot of us don’t have a framework for how you would have this conversation in a child-appropriate way,” she said.

Content creators amongst the likes of Amer and Thornhill share one common belief that the public education system does not: LGBTQ+ youth deserve the same relevant sex education as their heterosexual, cisgender counterparts do.

“Even if children don’t have the language to express to us or even explain to themselves who they are, there is an instinctive understanding that almost all of us have,” Thornhill said.

“And so, when what they’re being taught is incongruent with what they are experiencing internally, or even what they’re seeing of the world, there’s going to be a lot more confusion that can be much more deeply entrenched.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Isolation could improve how we think about and navigate sex and relationships

By

The coronavirus pandemic has already profoundly changed many of our lives. And it is certain that the virus will change some things forever. Some industries will fail, others will prosper. We will learn new ways of working and new ways of understanding the impact of capitalism. We will reconsider who the most vulnerable people are in our global society.

Other things may change too – things not so well documented. I study sex – and I’m sure that this crisis will have some significant effects in terms of the way society sees it. This is because requirements to practice social distancing and isolation have meant that the way we think about sex has been turned upside down.

A third of the global population is on lockdown and we must stay apart from each other not for ambiguous or contested moral reasons, but to save lives. As such, many ways in which we navigate, understand and talk about sex and relationships is likely to change as a result.

1. Masturbation, sex tech and porn

Some sex toy companies are reporting that their sales have surged since the requirement to isolate, with some companies offering isolation giveaways. Access to pornography is on the rise too, with companies capitalising on the opportunity isolation brings to encourage us to watch more porn.

Before the crisis, these industries would hardly have been thought of as essential. Conversation around porn, sex toys and masturbation is conventionally seen as taboo, but an inadvertent consequence of the pandemic is that masturbation is not only being more freely discussed, but might be considered an important part of our wellbeing – even life saving.

So the conversation has begun to shift in interesting ways since isolation was imposed, but also by virtue of the willingness by normally prudish governments and officials to talk explicitly and in a detailed way about sex. The pandemic has seen the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene stating that “you are your safest sex partner” and warning against kissing and poorly cleaned sex toys.

2. New understandings

Social distancing means that we have been forced apart, yet sexual desire and our desire to touch, and be touched, continues. Cohabiting couples might find themselves divided due to advice to be three steps apart even within the same home if they become ill. And single people have inevitably been shut off from opportunities to connect sexually, which has caused a surge in (virtual) online dating.

Expert in sex and public health Carlos Rodríguez-Díaz has suggested that it is necessary to consider and recognise forms of virtual sexual contact as ways of expressing erotic desire, such as sexting, video calls, and reading erotica. This move away from physical touch as the centre of sex shifts conventional understandings of sex as only physical penetration.

It will be necessary to experiment with ways of not only connecting sexually, but also of appreciating these forms of sex as being meaningful.

3. Non-monogamous relationships

Under these unique conditions, we will be pushed to reconsider enduring questions around fidelity and non-monogamous relationships. Consider a situation where a partner within a long-term cohabiting relationship has an additional partner whom they do not live with, perhaps it is through an affair, or perhaps the relationship is polyamorous. The impact of isolation may provoke the possibility of break ups of some affairs, through a new understanding of risk in light of the pandemic.

Covert affairs and polyamorous relationships are already more emotionally complex than monogamous relationships, given the inherent challenge they bring to accepted and conventional ways of loving, as well as their unusual hierarchical structures. Physical presence is important, since it can often be the only way of communicating (particularly in covert affairs), and maintaining intimacy and equality among partners.

Isolation and this global crisis will trigger new conversations based on people’s lived experiences of the challenges and possibilities of such relationships.

4. Home as a dangerous space

While people must remain at home to preserve themselves and others, many governments have recognised that some may find their wellbeing jeopardised if they are isolating while in an abusive relationship. The risks to people in these situations can be physical, but they are also psychological and emotional. Shelters and hotels are being made available but access to these options will not be easy for all, since leaving the home at all will be difficult when under the control of an abusive partner.

Questions about the ethics of remaining in the space of such a relationship are now different. Outsiders might suggest that the person should now stay in the relationship, rather than criticise them for not leaving. COVID-19 should open up discussions, and bring focus back onto what causes harm in these relationships, rather than blaming the actions of the survivor.

5. Thinking about consent

To understand more about consent, it is important to understand more about the impact of touch. COVID-19 has made everyone more conscious of how their body might affect others, while also recognising our capacity for kindness towards one another through mutual aid groups compiled of volunteers, who in turn also need to be conscious of how they deliver aid with minimal touch.

COVID-19 forces the debate to focus on the impact of our actions on other people and those connected with our partners – parents, family members, friends. Isolation makes the consequences of breaches of consent visible and clear. The world therefore is presented with a unique opportunity to understand the impact of touch to have unintended consequences and chain reactions.

We are also forced into awareness of our capacity to be kind and put others first: a cornerstone of navigating good sex.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

How to find body positivity after cancer

Cancer can change how you feel about you, your body and your sexuality.

By Good Housekeeping

Cancer changes everything. The diagnosis, the treatment and the aftermath can affect your work, your finances, your relationships and, even more fundamentally, how you think and feel about you, your body, your sexuality.

The impact of treatment for breast and gynaecological cancers can be far reaching. Sometimes the changes are very visible, such as a mastectomy, while chemotherapy, radiotherapy or a hysterectomy can cause other issues, including infertility, early menopause, fatigue, loss of libido and physical changes like narrowing and shortening of the vagina, vaginal dryness and painful sex.

Changes to your body and the way you feel about it can come as a shock post treatment, says clinical psychologist Dr Frances Goodhart. “Treatment can be gruelling and often your sole focus is on getting through it. When it’s over and you’re living with a changed body, worrying about cancer coming back and feeling as though you’ve lost part of yourself, you can struggle with the sense of who you are.”

You don’t have to love your body but it is important to be able to accept.

If you find yourself struggling, you are certainly not alone. Research by Target Ovarian Cancer in 2016 found that 69% of women with ovarian cancer suffered a loss of self esteem, 73% had difficulty with intimacy and 84% reported a lower sex drive. Similarly Breast Cancer Care researchers found that eight in 10 women were unhappy with their sex life after treatment and research by Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust found that 67% of women experienced changes to their sex lives.

Given these statistics it’s clear that at least for some women, learning to love your body post cancer can be a very big ask. “Let’s be realistic – how many women actually love their bodies pre-cancer?” says Dr Goodhart. “So you don’t have to love your body but it is important to be able to accept it and recognise what it has brought you through.”

Read on for advice for finding that acceptance…

Try not to put off looking at your scars

If you have scars or other visible changes to your body, try not to put off looking at them with your doctor or nurse if this helps. Take it gradually – it’s normal to feel shocked and upset at first but for most women these feelings will ease over time.

Ask for help if you need it

And do it as soon as possible. Jo’s Trust found that two thirds of the women who experienced changes to their sex life didn’t tell a doctor. Your GP or clinical nurse specialist can provide practical help with issues such as vaginal dryness, tightness and pain and give you information on how to cope with sexual difficulties or put you in touch with someone who can help.

Intimacy doesn’t have to mean intercourse

Holding hands, cuddling, kissing, stroking can all help you to slowly get back to feeling closer and rebuild your confidence in taking things to the next level, or not. Remember it’s ok to not want to be sexual – it’s only a problem if it’s causing a problem.

Keep talking to your partner

What you have been through is scary for both of you and communication can break down if both of you avoid saying how you really feel to try to protect the other from hurt.

If you are single and want to meet someone, take your time

Dating can be hard and you are likely to feel frightened of rejection. It can be hard to know when to share the information about your cancer with a new partner – while there is no simple answer it’s important to reach a stage where you feel as though can you trust your new partner, especially if you have body changes that they don’t know about. Honesty is key to successful relationships and a loving partner should accept you as you are.

Allow yourself to grieve

You have experienced major changes to your body and a loss of confidence and certainty and it’s quite normal to feel sad, angry, defiant, even disbelieving about what has happened.

Express yourself

Talking to your partner, to a friend, to a counsellor or to other women who have been through it can help you to process what has happened and find your way forward. Some people find that writing a journal where you allow yourself to write exactly what you feel, or starting a blog.

Exercise can help boost your mood and your body confidence

One study found that twice weekly strength training after cancer helped improve women’s body image and feel better about their appearance, health, physical strength, sexuality, relationships and social functioning.

Find the positives

Despite the challenges, many women find that they emerge from treatment with a new found respect for their body. “It certainly takes time to rebuild confidence in your body but many women say that they start to reassess and to realise what their body is capable of. Women say to us if I can get beyond this I can tackle anything head on,” says Lizzy Rodgers, head of supportive services at Target Ovarian Cancer.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

What Is a Sex Therapist?

And How Can One Help Me?

Whether you’re dealing with sexual function issues or intimacy concerns, a sex therapist can help.

By Catherine Pearson

Talking about sex can be difficult for many people, and talking about sexual health problems can be even harder. Bedroom issues like sexual performance and low libido may go beyond the scope of what you would normally discuss with your primary care physician, ob-gyn, or usual therapist.

This is where sex therapists enter the picture — trained professionals who focus specifically on human sexuality and healthy sexual behavior, and who can offer compassionate, research-backed help while addressing the full range of pertinent psychological, physiological, and cultural factors in play. Think sex therapy could be helpful for you and your partner? Learn more about what sex therapists do and what a typical session may look like.

What Is Sex Therapy and What Do Sex Therapists Do?

“A sex therapist is a licensed mental health professional who has extensive education and training in sex therapy in addition to mental health,” says Neil Cannon, PhD, a Colorado-based sex therapist who serves as bylaws chair for the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists (AASECT).

There are many different paths people can take to becoming a sex therapist. A sex therapist might be a psychologist or psychiatrist, a clinical social worker, a family therapist, or maybe a doctor or nurse who has psychotherapy training and who has gone on to get specialized training in sexuality and sexual functioning, intimacy, and relationships.

Those are big, broad buckets, of course. But a qualified sex therapist should be adept at addressing a wide range of concerns including (but by no means limited to): issues about sexual desire, ejaculation-related problems, trouble orgasming, painful sex, and more.

What a Session With a Sex Therapist May Look Like

Sex therapy varies significantly depending on what is being addressed and who the therapist and patient — or patients — are. So there is no standard answer for what a particular therapy session might entail or how often you will go. One thing that will not be a part of any sessions is sexual contact. Sex therapy is talk therapy.

Most sex therapists will start by getting a thorough picture of your sexual history, whether they ask for that information before you attend a session, in person, or both.

“You’re really getting a sense of what, historically, has shaped a [patient’s] sexual map or preferences,” explains Megan Fleming, PhD, a clinical psychologist and sex therapist in New York City. “And then, most importantly, what is their presenting challenge or complaint that they want to be working on.”

A sex therapist will consider what Dr. Fleming calls the “bio-psycho-social” determinants contributing to a client’s concern — meaning any potential biological, psychological, and social factors — and will work with you to create a specific treatment plan. Sex therapists may see individuals, couples, or both. Some may be comfortable starting with an individual who eventually brings in his or her partner, though Fleming says that whether a therapist does this will depend on the specific circumstances.

What a Sex Therapist May Commonly Recommend

Again, the recommendations a sex therapist gives vary dramatically from patient to patient and the issues they are addressing.

“It depends on the therapist you’re working with as well as what it is you’re looking for,” says Fleming. Sometimes you’ll see the therapist for just a handful of sessions, maybe with a tune-up down the road; other times long-term, in-depth therapy might be called for.

Expect homework, which can be a common element of sex therapy. Your sex therapist will ask you to complete specific tasks in between sessions, and then ask you or you and your partner to report back. Those homework assignments could range from communication exercises to specific sexual experimentation activities.

What Type of Training Does a Sex Therapist Receive?

Unfortunately, no regulations govern who can call themselves a sex therapist, which is why it is important to pay close attention to credentials.

“In most states, anybody can say that they’re a sex therapist — or that they do sex therapy — and the consumer has no idea whether this person has ever taken a single class, has ever gone through any training, or has been supervised around sex therapy by qualified supervisors,” warns Dr. Cannon. “So if you don’t go to a certified sex therapist, it’s buyer beware.”

AASECT requires sex therapists to have an advanced degree that includes psychotherapy training and a certain amount of clinical experience — plus 90 hours of human sexuality education, 60 hours of sex therapy training, and then extensive supervision by a qualified supervisor.

How Can I Find a Sex Therapist Near Me?

AASECT keeps a list of licensed sex therapists on its site, which Cannon recommends as a good starting point. If you live in an area where sex therapists aren’t plentiful, he says teletherapy, or virtual therapy, may be an option.

Other healthcare providers may also be able to help, like your primary care physician or a more generalized therapist who may refer you to a sexual health specialist.

If you are in a position to, you should feel empowered to shop around for a good fit.

“This is not an easy topic for people to talk about,” says Fleming. “You need to feel that the person is open-minded, they’re not judgmental, they’re going to help you explore, and they’re really trying to help you ask the right questions — but they’re not jumping in to diagnose and pathologize.”

Remember: Your sex therapist must be a good fit for you. “Therapy is really about a relationship,” she adds. “So feeling a sense of security and safety — those are really important pieces.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Can acupuncture increase your sex drive?

Experts weigh in

By Tracey Anne Duncan

Acupuncture is, of all the alternative approaches to health care, one of the best known and most studied. A lot of people have used it to help with things like chronic pain and smoking cessation, but now there’s a trend of using acupuncture to increase your sex drive. While interest in sex can be wildly varied, loss of interest in sex can be more than a sexual problem. Low libido doesn’t just kill your boner, it can indicate emotional or physical issues or exacerbate depression. I asked an acupuncturist and a doctor whether acupuncture can help folks get their mojo back.

“Acupuncture can naturally boost libido for both men and women,” says Shari Auth, an NYC-based acupuncturist and Co-Founder of WTHN, an acupuncture and wellness clinic in Manhattan. “It works in several ways. There are acu-points all over the body that help increase sex drive, improve sexual function, and help get you out of your head and into your body, and finding that balance heightens your senses and helps you connect deeper sexually,” she says.

Sounds great, if a little woo. But most acupuncturists think that it’s healthy to be skeptical and to combine acupuncture with other treatments. “As with all medicine — acupuncture isn’t a one stop shop, nor should it be considered that,” says Kim Peirano, a San Francisco-based acupuncturist. “Efficacy of the treatment aside — the lack of significant side effects is one of the things that makes acupuncture a great treatment,” she explains. Acupuncture may not be a cure all, then, but it probably won’t hurt you.

What do medical doctors think of using acupuncture for libido? “Acupuncture may improve some of the factors that cause low libido, but others may benefit from additional western treatments,” says Joseph B. Davis, an obstetrician-gynecologist in NYC. He referred me to studies that indicate that women, in particular, might gain sexual health benefits from regular acupuncture treatments. According to a study conducted in 2018 and published in Sexual Medicine, women who received acupuncture treatments for five weeks reported an increase in sex drive. The study focused on acupuncture’s impact on symptoms rather than the why behind the results, so it’s not clear exactly what acupuncture did, in this study, to improve low libido.

Davis stresses that low libido can be a symptom of many things, and that while acupuncture may work for some causes, it may not for others. “It depends on the underlying cause. Libido may be low due to physical or psychological stress, low hormones, fatigue and low self image among other causes. Treatments should address the underlying causes,” he says. But he does seem to think that, overall, acupuncture can be beneficial for sexual health. The theory is that acupuncture can help balance out the hormones that make you feel happy – and horny.

Auth echoes that reduced interest in sex can happen for many reasons, some of which are mental and some of which are sexual. How can acupuncture possibly address everything at once? “Acupuncture balances both mental and sexual hormones. When your hormones are out of balance, stimulating and sexual experiences can be less desirable,” she asserts. “Acupuncture increases your ‘happy’ hormone, serotonin, as well as balancing sex hormones testosterone and estrogen.”

The theory is that acupuncture can help balance out the hormones that make you feel happy – and horny.

Research indeed suggests that acupuncture can boost hormone production in women, and Davis finds it worthy of exploration. “I think it’s plausible,” he says. “Some serotonin receptors increase desire and some inhibit. Testosterone increase would increase desire,” he explains. Still, studies which suggest that acupuncture can increase serotonin release have been conducted on humans, but the only studies that show that acupuncture can aid in the release of testosterone have been performed on mice. That’s important to keep in mind since while the little guys are important indicators of human health, our bodies are very different that rodents’.

If the only testosterone studies have been done on mice, can acupuncture help human men with libido-related issues? Maybe.

According to the Mayo Clinic, acupuncture can boost sperm count and help men relax. Erectile dysfunction, however, is another matter, so acupuncture may not be effective for all penis-related dilemmas. “Acupuncture may have some benefit for ED caused by psychological stress but not for ED due to physical causes,” Davis says. Research from 2019 published in World Men’s Health Journal suggested that men who experience psychological stress that caused ED showed major mojo improvement with very few side effects. That’s a lot more than can be said for pharmaceutical treatments for ED, which have some pretty unsexy side effects, like diarrhea and headache.

Davis says that he has seen acupuncture significantly improve health outcomes when used as in conjunct with medical treatments, but the woo factor is a definite barrier. “The greatest challenge facing acupuncturists is western medical providers not fully understanding the way acupuncture works within the western medicine system,” he said.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Coronavirus and Sex: Questions and Answers

Some of us are mating in actual captivity. Some of us not at all. The pandemic raises lots of issues around safe intimate physical contact, and what it may look like in the future.

By Jen Gunter

These are not sexy times.

As an obstetrician and gynecologist in the Bay Area, I’ve been caring for my patients via telemedicine for the past three weeks because of the new coronavirus pandemic. When I ask patients about new sex partners — a standard question for me — the answer is a universal “no.” They are taking California’s shelter-in-place very seriously.

In fact, many of my patients are more interested in updates about the virus than the medical (and often sexual) problem for which they were referred.

The pandemic has most of the world practicing exceptional hand hygiene and social distancing. This coronavirus is so new that we don’t know what we don’t know, and while fresh information is coming at an incredible pace, one medical recommendation has remained constant: the need for social distancing.

This time has been an exercise in prioritizing needs from wants. So where does sex fall on that spectrum?

Are we even wanting sex these days?

It’s hard to know yet. While some people may turn to sex for comfort or as a temporary distraction, these are unprecedented times and we don’t have much data.

Depression and anxiety have a negative effect on libido. Some people are out of work, too, and unemployment can affect sexual desire. The kind of worry people are experiencing crosses so many domains: job security, health, friends’ and family’s health, retirement and the ability to have access to medical care, to name a few.

One study that looked at the effect of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in China on the reproductive health of married women found sexual activity decreased significantly, and not just in the week after the earthquake.

Before the earthquake, 67 percent of married women reported they were having sex two or more times a week. One week after the earthquake, that number fell to 4 percent. By four weeks, only 24 percent reported they were having sex two or more times a week, well below the baseline.

While this study is retrospective data — women were asked to recall their sexual activity eight weeks after the earthquake — and an earthquake isn’t the same thing as a pandemic, it seems unlikely that sexual activity overall will increase.

However, trauma — and these are certainly traumatic times for some — can also lead to sexual risk taking, like unprotected sex or sex under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

What is considered ‘safe sex’ right now?

Your risk for infection with the new coronavirus starts as soon as someone gets within six feet of you. (And of course, if you do have sex, your risk for pregnancy and S.T.I.s remains the same, and the previous definition of “safe sex” still applies.)

You’ve read this elsewhere: Covid-19 is transmitted by droplet nuclei, tiny specks of infectious material far too small to see. They are sprayed from the nose and mouth by breathing, talking, coughing and sneezing.

A person contracts the virus sharing the same airspace — a six-foot radius, the distance droplet nuclei are believed to travel (although with coughing they may travel farther) — and inhaling the infectious particles. Or the droplet nuclei land on an object or surface, making it infectious. Touch that surface and then your face and the chain of transmission is complete.

If you do have sex with someone who is infected with the new coronavirus, there is nothing we can recommend, be it showering head to toe with soap before and immediately after sex, or using condoms, to reduce your risk of infection. (The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene issued these guidelines.)

We don’t know if the new coronavirus is present in vaginal secretions or ejaculate, but it has been identified in stool. Based on what we currently know about transmission of coronavirus, penetrative vaginal or anal sex or oral sex seem unlikely to pose a significant risk of transmission.

Who are the safest partners?

It’s best to limit sex to your household sex partner (HSP), who should also be following recommendations for hand hygiene and social distancing. The World Health Organization currently lists the risk of household transmission as 3 to 10 percent, but this is based on preliminary data. We don’t know what role kissing or sexual activity plays in transmission.

The idea of limiting sexual contact to your household partner and social distancing in general is about ending the chain of transmission to your household should one person become infected.

If your HSP is sick with symptoms of Covid-19, or has been exposed, definitely don’t have sex. They may be too fatigued anyway, but your risk of being infected will likely go up in close, intimate contact. Sleep in separate bedrooms if possible.

If you have more than one bathroom, designate one for the sick or exposed person. Try to stay six feet apart and be fastidious about cleaning surfaces. If they were exposed, living as separate as possible in your home for 14 days is recommended.

What if I’m in a new relationship and had planned to get other S.T.I. testing done?

Many labs are overwhelmed with coronavirus testing, so you may not get results for some S.T.I.s — like gonorrhea, chlamydia and herpes — as fast as before. Given the short supply of test kits for Covid-19, many medical centers and labs are taking swabs and liquid from other test kits to jury-rig testing kits for the new coronavirus, so sampling kits for genital infections may be in short supply.

Ask your health provider because work flows may vary locally and may change day to day. But if you are at risk of an S.T.I., you should still seek out a test as soon as possible.

Sign up to receive our daily Coronavirus Briefing, an informed guide with the latest developments and expert advice.

What if I don’t have an HSP? Am I now celibate?

Yes, I’m sorry to say, those are the recommendations. For now.

But this doesn’t mean you can’t meet people online — start talking on the phone, have video chats, sext or have phone sex if that’s your thing.

And if someone you meet online is encouraging you to meet in person? That not only tells you how they view their own safety, but, even more important, how they view yours.

What about a ‘Covid sex buddy’?

I’ve heard people talk about this: a sexual partner who agrees to socially distance with everyone else, but the two of you will hook up for mutual release.

I really discourage this (for now): Social distancing means limiting contact with people outside of your household. Each additional person added to the household increases risk. And of course, you are depending on this person to be as vigilant with social distancing as you are — not to mention the risk during transportation between your home and your partner’s. At the moment, the risk is too high.

Might we see people in close proximity hooking up who both tested positive for Covid-19 and are now 14 days post-positive test? It would not surprise me. However, we don’t know much about immunity (protection from reinfection) against Covid-19 after an infection. And because tests are in short supply, many people have presumptive infections but can’t be tested.

With seasonal coronaviruses that cause a common cold, immunity lasts about a year, but with the more serious coronaviruses like SARS or MERS, immunity seems to last longer. But we still don’t know enough to make concrete recommendations in terms of post-illness behavior.

What about sex toys?

Sex toys aren’t likely to be a method of coronavirus transmission if you have been using them alone. However, if you shared your toys within the past 72 hours, make sure they are appropriately cleaned and wash your hands afterward as the virus may stay active of some surfaces for up to three days.

And do not clean sex toys with hand sanitizer or use hand sanitizer immediately before masturbating, because it can be very irritating to the vagina or rectum. Ouch.

Is it safe to buy new sex toys?

Judging from the state of my inbox, it appears that a lot of vibrators are on sale. Is this a good time to take advantage of a deal and the extra time on your hands?

Paying electronically is safer than an in-store purchase: Paying online means no one is physically handling a credit card or cash.

As for the delivery itself, there is lab data suggesting the new coronavirus is viable up to 24 hours on cardboard. Washing your hands after opening and throwing away the delivery box seems like an appropriate mitigation strategy. Letting that box sit for a day (if possible) before opening may be a good idea, although we don’t know how the lab data of the virus survival on surfaces translates to the real world.

Does your online purchase of a nonessential (as much as it pains me to say this, a vibrator is a “want,” not a “need”) put someone else at increased risk? Workers at large warehouses where social distancing isn’t possible may be at increased risk, especially if they don’t have sick pay, so taking time off if exposed isn’t possible.

One option is to consider a local small business that can take your payment over the phone or online and arrange a curbside pickup.

What will safe sex look like in the future?

Right now the only safe sex is no sex with partners outside your household.

If you or your HSP are at high risk, should you take extra precautions to further reduce the risk of transmission — giving up sex and kissing, sleeping in separate bedrooms — in case one of you has an asymptomatic infection? Asking your doctor for guidance here is probably wise.

But what about when we emerge from our homes again — which may be some months away — and start thinking about in-person dating, and even mating?

No one knows if we are all going to have the urge to have sex after this quasi-hibernation. One concern is a potential surge in risk-taking and S.T.I.s. in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic. (After all, you can’t assume that if someone was celibate during the pandemic they don’t have an S.T.I.; most S.T.I.s don’t cause symptoms and could have predated the new coronavirus.)

If that all sounds fairly bleak, well, it is. For now, the new coronavirus probably means less partner sex overall, whether that’s because of the lack of a household sex partner for some or a drop in desire for others. Or both.

Hopefully, though, this is just for now.

Because the more everyone commits to social distancing, the faster we can all get back — and down — to business.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

10 tips to keep your penis healthy

WHEN it comes to talking about matters down below, it can be a pretty sensitive topic.

Most of us prefer to keep discussions about our privates, well, private.

Keeping your penis healthy is important – here are some essential tips

By

But keeping your todger in good working order is important – especially as you get older.

Research shows that looking after your member can reduce your risk of erectile dysfunction and prostate cancer.

It’ll also help you enjoy a long and happy sex life well into the future.

Not sure where to start?

Here, male sexual health expert Kerri Middleton, from Bathmate, reveals her top tips to keep your penis healthy…

1. Workout

You’ll be pleased to know that the number one tip is to use the tool you’ve been gifted with.

A study by Harvard University found that blokes who ejaculate more frequently — upwards of 21 times per month — have a 33 per cent lower risk of developing prostate cancer.

Men who have sex at least once a week are less likely to suffer erectile dysfunction than those who roll in the hay less often.

A Finnish study has shown that the more you use it, the better your erections will be.

And don’t worry if you’re going through a dry patch – masturbation counts, too.

But it’s not just your penis that you need to work out to keep performing at your best – it’s your entire body.

Plenty of evidence links a sedentary lifestyle with erectile dysfunction, so if you want to improve staying power be sure to enjoy plenty of aerobic exercise.

Running and swimming are the best for penile health.

2. Let go of stress

Leave your stress at work and minimise stressful situations in your home life to keep your member strong.

Excess adrenaline is released into the bloodstream when you’re in a state of worry, causing your blood vessels — including the ones in your penis — to contract.

There are plenty of methods you can use to ease tension and unwind, from meditation to laughter or pumping iron, all of which can help with performance.

3. Cut down on booze

One way many people choose to relieve stress after a hard day’s work is hitting the bottle.

However, if you want to enjoy a healthy sex life long into the future, alcohol can seriously scupper your desire.

Binge and heavy drinking causes nerve and liver damage and can affect the careful balance of male sex hormones.

Even in the short term, alcohol curbs sensitivity and decreases reaction time, leaving you less able to perform.

4. Ditch cigarettes

It’s no secret that cigarettes harm your blood vessels and have a negative impact on your heart health.

Remember that your heart is the ultimate titan, pumping blood throughout your body — including your penis.

Nicotine also makes your blood vessels contract and can stifle blood flow down below.

5. Drink plenty of water

Water keeps everything flowing, especially the plasma and blood cells that make your member stand to attention.

If you’re dehydrated, the blood simply doesn’t flow as well as it should.

So, if you’re worried, up your daily intake of straight H2O to the recommended amount of eight glasses per day.

6. DON’T skip coffee

It’s a little-known fact that coffee consumption and healthy erections are linked.

Drinking coffee is said to speed up the metabolism and get the heart rate going in a healthy way, contributing to blood flow and a healthy member.

Caffeine also causes the arteries in your penis to relax, promoting blood flow to the nether regions.

A study found that drinking two to three cups a day has a particularly positive effect on blokes who are carrying a few extra pounds.

Keeping your penis in good health shouldn’t be a strain.

All of the components required to lead a healthy lifestyle contribute to blood flow, sperm count and testosterone levels and help fight disease.

Get into a mindset where looking after yourself is a priority, and the rest will follow.

7. Get a good night’s sleep

It’s all too easy in our busy society to allow sleep to fall by the wayside.

Between working, playing, relaxing and chatting, there’s barely enough hours in the day.

Still, rest is one of the most vital components of a healthy lifestyle.

Not getting enough sleep is connected to several health issues that contribute to downstairs disappointment such as high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity.

8. Eat well

We all know how important diet is to our overall health, but not many men realise how vital it is to eat the right diet for your penis.

The fuel you put in your body won’t only help erections – it also improves sperm count, sex drive and even affects your risk of prostate cancer.

The foods to avoid:

  • Anything deep-fried
  • Processed meats like bacon
  • Soy
  • Fizzy drinks
  • Sugar
  • Refined carbohydrates like white bread and breakfast cereals

The best foods to eat include tomatoes, salmon, olive oil and oysters.

Another type of food associated with male sexual health is anything spicy.

A French study has found that men who consume more spicy foods have higher testosterone levels than those who shy away from them.

Serrano peppers increase testosterone levels by reducing the amount the kidneys flush out while capsaicin releases chemicals that increase your heart rate, mimic arousal and kickstart your libido.

9. Check cholesterol levels

Not being able to get it up becomes more of an issue the older you get — but it doesn’t have to.

The reason age is tied into loss of erectile function is because as we age, we tend to put less effort into leading a healthy lifestyle.

High cholesterol narrows the blood vessels, which is the leading cause of erectile dysfunction.

Keeping fit, eating healthily and avoiding cigarettes and alcohol are the ideal ways to lower cholesterol.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Can you have sex during the coronavirus pandemic?

We explain the risks and how to stay safe

Online searches related to the rules around sexual intercourse during Covid-19 are rising – so here’s what you need to know

By

The Prime Minister has been very clear, there are now only four acceptable reasons for leaving the house: shopping for basic necessities, taking one form of exercise per day, medical needs, or travelling to work if you’re a key worker. “A booty call with that guy you dated for three months last year” is very much not on the list. Nor is “a nightly visit to the nearby flat of the girlfriend you’re not ready to cohabitate with yet”. And don’t even think about going on a date, unless it’s virtual.

For some, it’s the element of this lockdown business which is proving the hardest to accept. In fact there are almost as many Google searches at the moment for “can I have sex during coronavirus” as there are for advice on the lockdown.

It might seem callous to be concerned for your sex life in the midst of a pandemic. But if isolation has taught us anything so far, it’s that it is entirely possible to be in a constant state of panic for your loved ones’ safety, while simultaneously feeling furious about the loss of more frivolous things like the freedom to go on a date.

If you’re not already living with your other half, the chances are you are staring down the barrel of a sexless few months (unless you’re planning on forging a new and exciting relationship with your housemate, in which case good luck to you). As for those already shacked up with someone, well, at least you can have some fun while in lockdown.

Or can you? If that Google search traffic is anything to go by, there seems to be some not inconsiderable confusion about whether or not you should be having sex during coronavirus, especially if one of you has symptoms.

To date, the government has disseminated no official guidelines about sex – but it has broached the subject of relationships more broadly. Yesterday, Dr Jenny Harries said in a Downing Street press conference that now is a good time for fledgling couples to “test” a relationship by moving in together (a risky game indeed). Government advice also stipulates that any contact with people not living in the same household should be conducted while keeping at least two metres apart, and that includes “non-cohabiting partners”, who could pass on the deadly virus if they continued to visit each other.

If you can maintain a sex life at two metres distance, then good luck to you. Maybe we’ll be buying your book when this is over.

In the meantime, here’s everything you need to know about how coronavirus is going to affect your sex life.

Can you have sex during the coronavirus outbreak?

In general, a couple living together can have sex if they both feel healthy, are not in an at-risk group, and have not come into contact with anyone with symptoms.

If you are in a group at high risk of becoming seriously unwell, the advice is different. If you live with your partner, have been self-isolating for two weeks or more, and neither of you are exhibiting symptoms or have come into contact with anyone who is, then go for it. But only under these conditions.

Professor Claudia Estcourt, an expert from the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV, says: “It is safe for people in a household which has been self-isolating for over 14 days to have sex. But remember that every time someone goes out of their household that person has the potential to acquire the virus. You will need to keep resetting the 14 day clock if one of you is in contact with someone with coronavirus or develops symptoms.”

If you are considering meeting up with someone to have sex, don’t. It’s against the stipulations of the lockdown. As Prof. Estcourt says: “To comply with the government advice to prevent transmission, it’s really important that the only people you have sex with are those who live within your household. You should not be having sex if so doing means you have to breach government guidance not to mix households.”

Can you have sex if one of you has coronavirus or has come into contact with someone who has?

If you or your partner is exhibiting symptoms, then the chances are sex is going to be the last thing on your mind. A fever and dry cough aren’t exactly aphrodisiacs.

If you, someone you live with, or someone you’ve had sex with recently has had symptoms of Covid-19 then you should self-isolate for 14 days to prevent further transmissions. This means no physical contact, which obviously includes sex.  

Prof. Estcourt says: “We know that Covid-19 is transmitted most easily between household contacts. Transmission is via droplet spread and surfaces which have been contaminated.

“The chances are that if you’re in the same household you are probably way more likely to acquire Covid-19 through usual household activities than through sex, because day-to-day contact is happening all the time.

“However, it would be fair to assume mouth kissing confers a high risk of transmission. And if someone is self-isolating because they are either exhibiting symptoms or have potentially been exposed to the virus, then they shouldn’t be having sex during the isolation period at all.”

Is Covid-19 sexually transmissible?

The virus is primarily spread through respiratory droplets. So while there is no evidence that it can be transmitted through genital secretions, it could be spread through saliva, so if either you or your partner are exhibiting symptoms or have come into contact with someone who is, then don’t have sex.

Dr Carlos E. Rodríguez-Díaz, associate professor of prevention and community health at George Washington University, told The Telegraph: “There is no evidence that Covid-19 can be transmitted via sexual intercourse; either vaginal or anal.

“However, kissing is a very common practice during sex, and the virus can be transmitted via saliva. Therefore, the virus can be transmitted by kissing.”

How can I have sex while self-isolating alone?

The short answer is no. The government has put us on lockdown to stop the spread of this deadly virus. And clearly that takes precedence over your sex life.

But all is not lost – the internet affords us plenty of ways to satisfy our needs from a safe distance. The dating app Hinge is encouraging users to enjoy its video chat mode, where you can have a virtual date rather than meeting in person. Make a connection and start exploring the possibilities of virtual sex. Sexting, erotic video calls and voice notes – a brave new world of virtual pleasure awaits.

And remember: keep your sex toys as clean as your hands and surfaces, using soap and water. Whether or not you choose to sing two rounds of happy birthday while you do so is entirely up to you.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!