Yep! Your clitoris can get hard and swollen when you’re turned on. That can happen during sex, masturbation, or even just from seeing or hearing something sexy.
The clitoris is a pretty interesting part of the body. Basically it’s only known purpose is to make you feel awesome. The tip of the clitoris is located at the top of your vulva (where your inner lips meet) and is covered by a little hood. The outside part of the clit can be smaller than a pea, or as big a thumb.
This outside part is just the beginning of the clitoris though. It extends inside your body, back and down on both sides of the vagina. This part, called the shaft and crura (roots and legs), is about 5 inches long.
One of my favorite research projects I ever did for school was the effect of single-sex education on children. I’ll tell you why.
My initial research (mostly news articles) all said that there’s no benefit to sex-segregated education. They acknowledged outliers like that school for young black men with such incredible graduation statistics, but said that, generally, there’s no benefit.
But then I kept looking. And it turns out that yeah, if you look at all children overall, there’s no benefit – because sex-segregated education is great for girls, and terrible for boys.
Girls in all-girl schools get better grades, have closer and healthier social lives, and have better mental health.
Boys in all-boy schools get worse grades and get in trouble more.
When attempting to make sense of this, journalists and researchers usually fall back on “girls do better because they’re not distracted by boys/boy drama, and boys do worse because there’s no girls to impress.”
Which is ridiculous, of course, because these effects are seen even grade school – 8 year old boys are not doing well in school to impress girls. It’s also ridiculous because teenage boys are also not doing well in school to impress girls. That’s not how teenagers work.
The answer is obvious to women. Girls learn better away from boys because they are not being assaulted, harassed, belittled, or compared to their male peers at every turn. Boys do worse away from girls because, without a socially acceptable target, they turn their antisocial urges on each other. Even adult men do this when separated from women – see hazing scandals at fraternities, or the constant man-on-man sexual harassment that is just “part of military culture.”
But because it doesn’t benefit men, sex-segregated education is considered pointless. Send your daughters to girls-only schools.
From 2008- 2009, ABC aired a short lived show called Eli Stone, starring Jonny Lee Miller. Eli was a lawyer who started having hallucinations caused by an aneurysm, and realized those hallucinations might actually be visions.
Many of Eli’s visions revolved around George Michael (and all of the Season 1 episodes shared their titles with his songs). However, when he appeared in Episode 9, titled “I Want Your Sex”, he wasn’t just a vision anymore.
George hired Eli to represent a teen girl who played one of his songs, the titular I Want Your Sex, during an abstinence only rally at her school. During her trial, she used both facts and personal stories to explain why abstinence only education is more dangerous than safe sex education. When the lawyer for the high school claimed that the song she chose promoted sexual promiscuity, George Michael was called to explain the true meaning behind the song.
Wethersby: Mr. Michael, tell me, what inspired your song I Want Your
Sex? A song, by the way, which rose to number one on the world charts, a song
that helped you win a Grammy for Best Album of the Year.
George Michael: Well, it was inspired by a relationship. Like most of my
work, it was autobiographical.
Wethersby: You heard Principal Ackerman describe the song as
encouraging promiscuity.
George Michael: But it’s just the opposite. Ironically enough, I wrote the
song about abstinence, and I was very much in love with someone at the time.
Wethersby: So how do you feel about your song being used to protest an abstinence only sex education program.
George Michael: Well I applaud it, obviously. When I wrote it, we were in
year six of the AIDS crisis, a crisis that Ronald Reagan did not even address publicly
until there were over 21,000 people dead. And what the government is doing
right now, funding federal programs that tell children that condoms don’t work,
is killing people all over again.
I have seen a lot of posts discussing how we lost such an important member of the LGBT community. This scene has always stuck with me, and I’m sure most people would not have had a chance to see it. Though it is through a fictional lens, George Michael is reminding us that there have been times where misinformation and government inaction made it seem wrong to have even monogamous sex with someone that you love, and that stigmatizing sex, and gay sex in particular, is dangerous.
I feel like k*nk is almost compulsory now and it scares me a lot
like I was reading this thing in vogue (I know I know) about how to ~Spice Things Up ;-)~ in the bedroom and there was a little story about one guy whose girlfriend wanted him to get rough during sex. He was really uncomfortable with it because, he said, he was raised to respect women or whatever so he didn’t want to hit his girlfriend?? And it was stressing him out and he talked to his friends about it and they were like, “well, you at least pull her hair and slap/spank her already, right?” Which is horrifying. But the story has a happy ending! See he tries slapping her in bed and he gets so upset that he can’t stay hard. I think his girlfriend cries. But then he Keeps Trying, and little by little he starts to get the hang of it! Now I assume he can have violent s*x without going limp, hoo-fucking-ray
but like just the attitude his friends had— “well OF COURSE you’re already chokefucking, her right?” and the way the article was like… idk… written trying to make it sound like his discomfort was just a hurdle keeping him from having Fun and Unrepressed sex or whatever ughughugh… I don’t know why bdsm/rough sex seems to be a mainstream thing right now, but I kind of suspect a lot of people are doing it more out of curiosity/boredom than because they really enjoy it and like that’s 1) super dangerous, and 2) maybe not the only option to explore if ur bored with your sex life?? I just hate it so much like I hate sex positivity I hate kink its so bad
just imo, its a symptom of society having become more ‘liberal’ in terms of permissible sexual behaviors but patriarchy and class being exactly where they were before. we are a society that still worships violence and subjugation and that bleeds over into the realm of sex as well
I saw a post the other day that was like “it’s 2016 stop pretending you don’t like being choked during sex” I wanted to fucking scream!!!
& I think that a lot of women are pressured into allowing themselves to be abused by men in the bedroom by this logic, because of course sex in which no one is being physically harmed or humiliated (and that someone, it’s implicitly assumed, is automatically going to be the woman) is supposedly “boring” or “prudish”….
how many times have we seen advice from women’s magazines and sex-positive feminists alike that goes “if you want to keep your man interested in you, you’ve Got To do things that are painful or unpleasant or humiliating or that you otherwise don’t want to do! it’s empowering!!”
I’ve said it before in other contexts, and I’ll no doubt say it again: Watching Pornhub does not constitute sex education. Porn tropes are no more representative of actual sex than historical romance novel tropes are representative of present-day romantic relationships.
Not every woman wants Mr. Darcy and if a man tries to choke me during sex, I will kick him in the nuts.
I grew up on the opposite end of this – in a world of kinkshaming to the point where my best friend stopped talking to me forever because I admitted I liked bondage.
So fuck expectations either way. Fuck kinkshaming AND prudeshaming.
holy shit literal children should not be taught abt sex and preteens that do experience sexual attraction have no privilege over their peers who might experience it later or not at all
ok but leaving the discourse behind, sex education is actually really important though??? i mean, my elementary school taught that so sex wouldn’t be a stigmatized thing for in the future
literal children are already taught about sex, i don’t understand. in my elementary school, in 4th grade we were taught about “”“male and female”“” development and “urges” we would feel. in 5th grade, we saw actual pictures of naked adult bodies, and in 6th grade we were taught about “types” of sex and protection and pregnancy.
my parents gave me a book targeted at 7-12 year olds that also taught about sex and the body and sex organs and shit like that, like. this post is objectively bad. education from a young age is good and important for the destigmatization of sex in society. i don’t understand, is there a point you hadn’t made clear that i’m misunderstanding, maybe?
let’s not show nudes to ten year olds what fucking school did you go to
learning abt puberty =/= learning about how to fuck and 110 versions of asexuality
I… wha… where the hell were you raised that you think there’s something wrong with kids knowing what a naked body looks like? What century is this?
Sex education isn’t just learning about puberty; it’s learning about sex, relationships and consent, and it’s goddamn important even for children.
I started having sexual fantasies when I was 4 years old; I just didn’t know what they were at the time, or why they made me feel strangely good. My Mum gave me my first book on sex and sexual health when I was 8, but by that time I’d already heard years’ worth of playground rumours about “sex” ranging from the improbable to the downright terrifying, and had at least one inappropriate physical encounter with another child. It’s much better for kids to be taught healthy and safe attitudes to their own sexual development – physiological and mental – than for them run off fifth-hand misconceptions they pick up from equally clueless kids.
I’m not saying we should be teaching five-year-olds about reverse cowgirl. I’m saying it’s never too early to teach kids messages like, “If she’s not having fun you have to stop.” I’m saying most kids have some awareness that sex and sexuality exist, even if they don’t fully understand what those things are. I’m saying some kids have feelings about getting physical with other people from a very early age. I was particularly precocious, but the average age people start experiencing sexual attraction is 10 years old.
And I’m saying that all of these things are why it’s crucially important to give kids the tools and information they need to contextualise and process their understanding of sex and sexuality, both in terms of their own possible sexual identities (all possible sexual identities), and of course in terms of consent and bodily autonomy.
Apart from anything else, we’ve seen proof that this makes kids safer in terms of identifying and reporting sexual abuse. The puritan myth that kids live in some magical fairyland isolated from any conception of sex or sexuality literally causes harm to children. You’re not protecting them from dangerous information, you’re depriving them of information and support they need to safely contextualise their experiences and feelings.
Teaching kids about sex is not the same thing as encouraging kids to have sex. That is literally the exact same bullshit argument that religious fundamentalists use to try to justify abstinence-only sex ed.
Studies show that teaching kids about sex actually delays their sexual debut as well as reduces the risk of STDs and unwanted pregnancy. The more you teach kids about sex, the less they actually have it.
Children live in a sexualised world. All 10-year-olds have already been exposed to sex in advertisements, on TV, and on the internet. If they don’t know what sex is, only that it’s this secret, shameful, dangerous thing they’re supposed to want and which will make them cool and successful people if they have it, they’ll explore their own sexuality in ignorant, harmful ways. This is why the USA have the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the developed world:
The only way to keep children safe is to empower them with the knowledge to make informed decisions about their own sexuality. No one was ever protected from something by keeping them ignorant of it! And no information is actually harmful if presented in age-appropriate ways – which, by the way, also doesn’t mean what antis and Americans think it means.
My school showed us a video of what was essentially softcore porn at age
10. I mean full on nudity, an erect penis, how to roll on a condom, a
man and a woman having gentle sex, and then how to remove the condom and
tie it off. It completely undid the ~mystery~ of sex and made us go
‘huh, that’s it? nah, not really interested actually.’
You can watch the sex ed video here on the Danish National TV’s web archive; it’s in Danish, but you can jump to 10:10 for the sex scene, although honestly I think you’d find the whole video fascinating even if you can’t understand what they’re saying.
wupacing 