Or Was It Sense & Sensibility?
Sexuality isn’t just sexual feelings
or sexual intercourse. It is an important part
of who we are and who’ll we become.
It includes all the feelings, thoughts, and
behavior associated with being female or male,
being attractive and being turned on, as well
as being in relationships that include sexual
intimacy, sensual and sexual activity.
Nude Art from Yves Chauvel on Vimeo.
Sensuality is awareness and feeling about your
body and other people’s bodies, especially the
body of a sexual partner.
Sensuality enables us to feel good about how
our bodies look and feel and what they can do.
Sensuality also allows us to enjoy the pleasure
our bodies can give us and others.
This part of our sexuality affects
our behavior in several ways.
Body Image
Feeling attractive and proud of one’s body
and the way it functions influences many
aspects of life. Adolescents often choose
media personalities as the standard for
how they should look, so they are often
disappointed by what they see in the mirror.
They may be especially dissatisfied when
the mainstream media does not portray or
doesn’t positively portray physical
characteristics the teens see in the mirror,
such as color of skin, type or hair,
shape of eyes, height, or body shape.
Experiencing Pleasure
Sensuality allows a person to experience pleasure
when certain parts of the body are touched.
People also experience sensual pleasure from taste,
touch, sight, hearing, and smell as part of being alive.
Satisfying skin hunger
The need to be touched and held by others in loving,
caring ways is often referred to as skin hunger.
Adolescents typically receive considerably less
touch from their parents than do younger children.
Many teens satisfy their skin hunger through
close physical contact with peers.
Sexual intercourse may sometimes result
from a teen’s need to be held, rather
than from sexual desire.
Feeling physical
attraction for another
person
The center of sensuality and attraction to others is not
in the genitals (despite all the jokes).
It’s in the brain, humans’ most important “sex organ.”
The unexplained mechanism responsible for sexual
attraction rests in the brain, not in the genitalia.
Lingerie Art from lingerie collective on Vimeo.
Fantasy
The brain also gives people the capacity to have
fantasies about sexual behaviors and experiences.
Adolescents often need help understanding that
sexual fantasy is normal and that one does
not have to act upon sexual fantasies.
Fucking Art Form
The Thinking
Woman’s Orgasm
There’s new research in the fields of neuroscience and
cultural history to re-evaluate the mind-vagina connection
and how important the female sex organs can be to health,
happiness and even creativity.
Contemporary society may be overdue for another sexual
revolution. Our attitudes about sex are much more relaxed
than before and many women feel comfortable expressing
sexuality, but our general culture still largely fails
to acknowledge women’s unique needs.
Thirty per cent of women don’t reach orgasm when they
want to. About one-third of American women are estimated
to have hyperactive sexual desire disorder, or low libido.
Women’s sex organs are more complicated than previously thought.
Unlike men, who share similar sexual physiology and similar
reactions to the same types of stimuli, each woman has a
unique network of nerve pathways in their bodies.
Some women have nerve endings that terminate in the mouth
of the cervix, other have pathways that end in the walls
of the vagina.
Every woman is wired differently, and so the takeaway is
that a woman has to learn herself in a very attentive and
subjective way, and every lover of a woman has to as well.
We now know how intensely connected
women’s sex organs are to the brain.
Feel-good hormones and chemicals like dopamine, opioids
and oxytocin are triggered by arousal and orgasm.
The positive effects of these experiences are important to
a woman’s sense of emotional health, confidence and focus.
This mental, emotional and physiological sexual network
also means a woman’s arousal can depend on her mental state.
A woman who feels stressed out or unable to relax is
less likely to desire sex with a partner and less
likely to achieve orgasm.
Using brain imaging scans, neuroscientists have begun to get
a sense of what parts of the brain light up during sex,
especially at the moment of orgasm.
Much more so than men’s brains, female brains go mysteriously
silent during orgasm. In particular, the left lateral
orbitofronal cortex and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex,
areas involved in self-control and social judgment,
respectively, are deactivated.
Brain activity also fell in the amygdala, suggesting a similar,
albeit more drastic, drop in vigilance and emotion as in men.
At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings.
Another way women’s brains are different from men’s when it
comes to sex is that some women can ‘think themselves off’.
They’re able to induce orgasm without any physical stimulation.