Sex & Sexuality

Just last Tuesday, right down the street from you, or perhaps even right where you live, two teenagers had sex for the very first time, and it was exactly as we all wish those first experiences to be. Or was it?

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?

A dildo – or any other sex toy – is not likely to do anything to the nerve endings within your vagina. In fact, it’s completely likely there isn’t a single thing wrong with you, and that nothing whatsoever has happened to your vagina to result in you feeling this way. As we’ve explained many times…

I’d like to focus this on the three primary issues you brought up here: your need for basic physical affection, your problem with upholding your own boundaries, and your ideas about how without intercourse, the sex you or anyone else are having cannot possibly satisfy either of you. On all of those…

It sounds as if you’re concerned about your performance abilities, and whether your partner is going to get pleasure out of intercourse. From what I’m reading, it also sounds to me like you’re already having “actual sex”—indeed, oral sex, manual sex….it’s sex! And with sex comes the need for good…

There’s no sense in being anything but frank. Sex does tend to change things. It can bring about or illuminate changes in the relationships it occurs within, changes in our other relationships, and changes in ourselves. Often, we have to add some factors to our lives we may not have had to before…

One of the biggest facets of a healthy sex life with someone is being sure that we respect when they do NOT want to have sex, and that they do the same with us. Healthy sex has a whole lot to do with both partners only having sex when that is what each truly wants to be doing. When it comes to…

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…

What you’re discovering is one of the many ways in which virginity as a concept often doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Let me be plain: if you two pursue sexual pleasure together, however you choose to do it, whatever your bodies are like, I think you’re having sex; you’ll have had some kind of…

This happens. I know that probably sounds cliché, but you need to understand that no matter how old you are, how much sleep you have had, how much you want to have sex, how turned on you are, your penis is neither a machine nor an obedient soldier. It’s a part of your body, like any other, and just…