intercourse

In American society we often grow up with baseball as THE metaphor to describe sex. Let’s deconstruct the baseball model, uncover its many flaws, and take a look at an alternative which is a whole lot better, even if it might make you a little hungry.

I think it might help if you made some adjustments to the way you think about intercourse and sex as a whole. You use the word penetration, and talk about what you're doing as stabbing or a kind of invasion. I also hear you saying that sex is something you are doing to your partner or on your...

Virginity is not something physical or medical. It's a cultural idea, one which many people have different definitions of and opinions about, and one that not everyone even subscribes to in the first place. The idea that vaginas can be permanently loosened is a myth, and one we have addressed over...

From both our personal experiences of our own varied sex lives, and in our work in sexuality with many other people, it seems pretty clear that really letting someone into an internal space in your body, or going into someone else's insides -- which we know might sound a little gross, but that is what's going on with this stuff -- is a fairly big deal for many people. So, what might make sexual entry different from other sexual activities?

I absolutely DESPISE the term "foreplay." Let me tell you why. That term states or suggests -- structurally, it means "before sex" -- that vaginal intercourse is capital-S sex and that every other kind of sex either isn't sex, or should only exist to help prime the pump, as it were, for vaginal...

When it comes to sex and particularly to the issue of orgasm, expectation can be your worst enemy. As soon as you are worrying about whether you are normal or stressing about a specific event happening or not happening then you’re creating anxiety for yourself, which is a huge barrier to actually...

Know what? Even if NO other woman besides you in all of human history (which you and I know isn't anything remotely close to the truth) needed or wanted other sexual activities before intercourse, the fact that YOU do should be all a partner needs to know. With someone who is being a good partner...

(Minny's question continued) Still, I seem to be the odd one out and I find it distressing. I broached the subject with him recently, merely suggesting that I hadn't actively enjoyed the way we'd had sex (not even that I disliked it) and he'd got very worried and hurt and said that I should have...

Some folks have the idea -- usually before they have any or some kinds of sex with a partner, or when the only kinds of sex they've had have been when one or both partners either feel uncertain, not ready or just aren't all that excited and aroused -- that you can divide any kind of sex with...

One of the biggest problems with all of the information out there about sex is that there are quite a lot of myths surrounding the subject, and it’s very difficult to know what’s safe to believe and what isn’t. First, it is not bad for someone to abstain from having sex of any type for a while or...