Tag: Sex

Sex Could Save Your Life

Posted by MouthyGirl on 04/14/2010 | 2 comments

We’re obsessed with sex, its in everything and if you listen to rumor, even Disney incorporates it into their programming and movies. Sex affects everything, your mood, your relationship, your sleep, and even the way that you cope with life. And….your health.

It’s one of the few things in life that is enjoyable, free and good for you and there’s proof but first…a few obvious things to consider:

1. Be with someone that you care about, or at least like enough to have sex with, protect yourself. Life is too short to let consequences from 15 minutes of sex make it even shorter.

2. Throw yourself into it and really feel it, don’t worry about how you look during sex or what he/she might be thinking, enjoy the sex, the moment and especially, the release. ;)

3. Keep it down, unless you’re in a soundproof room and your partner has incredible concentration, try not to be too loud, you’ll not only get your neighbors worried (or excited) but you’ll possibly break your partners concentration and that can ruin everything.

4. Use birth control if you don’t want a baby evidently this sounds simpler than it is….

Don’t roll your eyes at me! Now for the good stuff that says you should be doing it more, you know besides the obvious reasons.

1. For the ladies, sex strengthens the pelvic floor muscles: (straight from WebMD) For women, doing a few pelvic floor muscle exercises known as Kegels during sex offers a couple of benefits. You will enjoy more pleasure, and you’ll also strengthen the area and help to minimize the risk of incontinence later in life (guys love it when you do this during sex, it’s a treat that never goes unappreciated, even if unmentioned). To do a basic Kegel exercise, tighten the muscles of your pelvic floor, as if you’re trying to stop the flow of urine. Count to three, then release.

2. Sex is a pain reliever: As the hormone oxytocin surges, endorphins increase, and pain declines. So if your headache, arthritis pain, or PMS symptoms seem to improve after sex, you can thank those higher oxytocin levels.

In a study published in the Bulletin of Experimental Biology and Medicine, 48 volunteers who inhaled oxytocin vapor and then had their fingers pricked lowered their pain threshold by more than half.

3. For the men, Reduce the risk of Prostate Cancer: Frequent ejaculations, especially in 20-something men, may reduce the risk of prostate cancer later in life, Australian researchers reported in the British Journal of Urology International. When they followed men diagnosed with prostate cancer and those without, they found no association of prostate cancer with the number of sexual partners as the men reached their 30s, 40s, and 50s.

But they found men who had five or more ejaculations weekly while in their 20s reduced their risk of getting prostate cancer later by a third.

Another study, reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that frequent ejaculations, 21 or more a month, were linked to lower prostate cancer risk in older men, as well, compared with less frequent ejaculations of four to seven monthly.

4. For the older adults: Sex improves quality of life: While some older folks may worry that the efforts expended during sex could cause a stroke, that’s not so, according to researchers from England. In a study published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, scientists found frequency of sex was not associated with stroke in the 914 men they followed for 20 years.

And the heart health benefits of sex don’t end there. The researchers also found that having sex twice or more a week reduced the risk of fatal heart attack by half for the men, compared with those who had sex less than once a month.

5. This is my favorite one: Sex burns calories! Thirty minutes of sex burns 85 calories or more. It may not sound like much, but it adds up: 42 half-hour sessions will burn 3,570 calories, more than enough to lose a pound. Doubling up, you could drop that pound in 21 hour-long sessions.

“Sex is a great mode of exercise,” says Patti Britton, PhD, a Los Angeles sexologist and president of the American Association of Sexuality Educators and Therapists. It takes work, from both a physical and psychological perspective, to do it well, she says.

So there are all the possible reasons you might need to get over your hang ups about sex, it’s good, it’s good FOR you and it can keep you alive longer.

So go get healthy! ;)

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Gay Marriage

Posted by Wendy on 06/01/2009 | 3 comments

I used to think that the gay marriage issue didn’t belong to me. It wasn’t my fight, I’m straight. I used to think that it didn’t matter if it was called a civil union or marriage. To me, it was all semantics. I privately thought that the citizenry was probably doing gays a favor by not allowing them to marry. Don’t more than 50% of marriages end in divorce now, anyway?

Then Proposition 8 was put on the ballot in California in a year where I was paying attention to politics closely. Earlier in the year, the California Supreme Court overturned California’s ban on same-sex marriage citing that the state’s Constitution protects the fundamental right to marry. Afterwords, thousands of same sex couples married. Then in November, the California electorate stripped that “right” away by changing the state’s Constitution to say that marriage is between a “man and a woman”. And then last week, the same Court that affirmed gays’ right to marry only a year earlier, upheld the same sex marriage ban imposed by Proposition 8, stripping their rights away.

Now, some will say that same-sex couples in California shouldn’t complain because they still have the right to civil unions. It is equal to marriage. The problem is that civil unions only protect same sex couples under the law in the event of a death. In other words, if one partner were to die, then the law protects them in property rights and in the receipt of insurance benefits. Same sex couples aren’t afforded about 1400 legal rights that are given to married couples. That may be separate, but it is not even close to being equal. Gay marriage should be legal and recognized–not just in California, but by all 50 states and the federal government.

I know that the majority of Americans don’t agree with me. A recent Quinnipac poll showed that 55% of Americans oppose same sex marriage in their states. But I find it odd that the majority of Americans think that same sex couples should get social security death benefits if their partner’s die, should be allowed to openly serve in the military, and should be allowed to adopt. Also, it surprised me that a majority of Americans disagree with the notion that same-sex marriage is a threat to traditional marriage. So what’s the beef with allowing them to marry, then? I don’t get it.

To me, it seems that the people are opposed to same sex marriage just to oppose it. To disallow one group of consenting adults the right to marry is discrimination. That is just wrong.

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