Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer - Sex For Dummies

Chapter 1

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding why people have sex

Choosing the right partner at the right time

Making babies

Determining whether a potential partner is sex worthy

Sex. Once you’re under its power, you’re a captive for life. It starts when you’re young. When you’re a teenager and your hormones are surging, almost everything you do is connected to sex in one way or another. And although your sexual voltage goes down a notch or two as you get older, many of your daily activities are still influenced by sex.

You take a shower in the morning and do your hair to increase your sexual attractiveness.

You choose clothes that will draw the attention of other people.

You send sexual messages with your body language, from the way you walk to the angle you hold your head.

And it doesn’t matter whether you’re single or married, young or old, all of us are interested in how others react to the image we project. We want to be noticed. We want to know that we can still attract someone, even if we’ve been monogamously involved in a relationship for 50 years.

In this chapter, I give you a brief course in Sex 101, so that you and I will be clear about what I mean when I talk about sex. Although sex hasn’t changed much since men and women emerged from the cave, today’s sexual environment is open to confusion, so this chapter covers the basics.

Is sex just the way we differentiate ourselves, male and female? Or is it the means by which we reproduce? Is it a yearning that makes us go a bit crazy until we can satisfy those urges? Or could it be the key to exchanging extreme pleasure? Maybe it’s a way of cementing a relationship. What makes sex so amazing is that it’s all of those, and more.

We have special organs that are made to have sex; they fit together and have many nerve endings so as to make sex pleasurable. But sex is really a whole body experience, from your brain right down to your toes. And becoming a good sex partner means that you have to understand how to fit all those parts together. I explain the basics of the male parts in Chapter 2and the female parts in Chapter 3. If you want to know how they fit together, turn to Chapter 10.

Every generation believes that it’s the first one to have discovered the pleasures of sex, and yet none of us would be here if it weren’t for the sex lives of the previous generation. Even if it’s too much to imagine your parents and grandparents having sex, just give ’em a tip of the old hat.

You can have sex many different ways, and yet the outcome of sex, the satisfaction that comes from a sexual encounter, is the goal of each of them. (Of course, if your only aim is to make a baby, then the pleasurable aspects become secondary.) Part of the mystery of sex is why so many paths lead to this one end. Chapters 11, 12, 15, and 16cover different ways you can achieve orgasms.

It’s also true that some of us are attracted to the same sex, which means that making a baby isn’t possible from engaging in sexual activity. That doesn’t mean that the urge for a gay couple to have a baby isn’t there, and luckily there are other means such as adoption or artificial insemination. Since most of my readers are heterosexual, much of what I have to say in this book is addressed to them, but I can’t help but add that while science hasn’t yet been able to answer many questions about different sexual orientations, each and every one of us deserves the same respect no matter our sexual preference.

Ultimately we have sex in order to keep the human race going and to participate in a very pleasurable activity. Throughout most of mankind’s history, the two were almost always linked, but today they needn’t be. Being able to have an orgasm without worrying about creating a baby has changed the nature of sex, though when the two are put back together, sex reaches its greatest potential.

The English language is a rich one because it has borrowed heavily from so many different tongues. As a result, people use a variety of words to describe the same thing — especially if that thing involves sex. (I’m sure you’re familiar with some of these words, but, being polite, I won’t mention them.) What never ceases to amaze me, however, is how often people who engage in sexual intercourse forget that what they’re doing is directly related to procreation, propagation, continuing the species, conception, pregnancy, MAKING BABIES!

Some unlucky couples must go through a great deal of trouble to have a family, and some can’t manage to do it on their own at all, so they turn to medical science for help. But for most people, the process is relatively easy — at least until the baby actually arrives. The man needs only to place his erect penis into the woman’s vagina and ejaculate. A baby may not result the first time — though it can, as many women have learned when losing their virginity — but eventually one of the man’s sperm will unite with the woman’s egg, and, voilà, a baby is conceived.

Because baby making can be so easy, many women find themselves pregnant without intending to be. So here’s my first of many tips:

If you absolutely, positively don’t want to make a baby, then don’t have sexual intercourse — remain abstinent.

Yes, I know there are ways of preventing pregnancy from occurring — I talk about them in Chapter 7— but none of these methods is foolproof. Believe it or not, in at least one recorded case, the man had a vasectomy, the woman had her tubes tied, and she still became pregnant. So remember, the only method that works 100 percent of the time is abstinence .

The process of making a baby has not changed since Adam and Eve discovered sex: A sperm from the man must meet an egg inside of the woman (test-tube babies notwithstanding). When the sperm and the egg unite, the egg becomes fertilized .

Both the sperm and the egg are very special cells; they have only half of the genetic material ( chromosomes ) that other cells have. All cells need chromosomes to provide the instructions on how to divide and create an individual.

Fertilization occurs when the chromosomes and genes from both the sperm and the egg combine to form one single cell, called a zygote . As a result, instead of an identical copy of one of the parents (a clone), fertilization creates a unique individual that shares features of both parents. So now you know the reason you have your father’s nose and your mother’s feet: At least once in their lives, your parents mingled their genetic material.

Female humans differ from nearly all the rest of their sex in the animal kingdom because, rather than wanting sexual intercourse only when they can conceive (that is, when they’re in heat ), women can want sexual intercourse at any time (provided they don’t have a headache). Despite this difference, female humans do share with other female mammals the trait that enables them to make a baby, or conceive , only at certain times — in most women’s cases, from one to three days a month.