Where is my Vagina.

Assuming that as a little girl I knew where my vagina and its related parts were, and suddenly I think I have location insights beyond "uhh...my vagina is between my legs."

I did not always know that my vagina was anything but lips. Until the nurse giving "becoming a woman" talks at school pulled out a transparent woman's hip section complete with reproductive organs, I was totally oblivious to there being an internal canal down there. I basically knew how babies got made, but figured that the penis must just somehow lie between the labia during sex.

I don't remember going home immediately and poking around trying to find my vagina. This was all when I was 9 or 10, at which point I didn't masturbate or really expect to start bleeding at any moment, and generally didn't spend much time hanging out with my unit. I don't actually remember when I first found it. Maybe not until I started masturbating. Hmm.

Anyway, from what I can tell, the opening to my vagina is right down between my legs. When I am standing it opens down and is about centered over the back of my legs (I think; I just tried this out). It is part of my abdomen, in that its angle will match my hip bones and back in whatever position I am in. Thus, if I am on all fours, it opens kind of behind me. If I sit cross-legged and slouchy (ie: most of the time), it opens kind of forward.

It is surrounded by my labia minora, which start higher up than my vagina itself does. They surround my urethra as well (it took me awhile to notice that).

Inside, it points up and towards my spine (not straight up into my belly). This has to be dealt with when inserting anything into my vagina.

From what I can tell, my vagina neighbours on some other internal organs. At the end of it I can feel my cervix. If I push on the front wall of it, especially from deeper inside my vagina, I get the urge to pee and would guess my bladder is in there somewhere. The back wall borders quite cosily with my rectum. Yes, rectum! (I don't know, sometimes I feel silly making these declarations. Just cause it's typed doesn't mean I am official enough to remain dignified while referring to my own rectum. Gah!)

But yeah, the two openings aren't so close together, but inside where they each open up into chambers they really just have a wall between them. They aren't off in two separate zones. Sex involving thrusts pointed more towards my back than my front can jostle things up back there and make me farty afterwards (it's reeeally cute too, when I'm all smutty and wet in the area. Why am I telling you this?). Furthermore, if I happen to be having difficulty passing something from my bowel, pushing my fingers against the lower part of my rear vaginal wall (not like right inside my vagina, just at the opening) can kind of reinforce/redirect things and err... (word choice)... help. Ya. No more poo talk.

My vagina is between my legs. That's all I have to say.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

The colour of my vagina.

I don't often see my vagina fully displayed in a mirror, but even from a regular perspective I can tell that it is a darkish pink, inside and out. There are some small purply veins as well. It flushes more red when I am excited or being a smut.

The outside of my labia are the same whitey colour as the rest of my skin, but a little darker and rosier in the hidden, inter-thigh region. Some book that my beloved was reading used the colour "labia pink" to describe a motel in Brazil somewhere. I stole it to use in a choose-your-own-adventure smutty romance book that I am very slowly writing.

Sometimes the outer edges of my inner labia get a purplish or greyish tinge to them, the way that cold toes do, but I don't think it has to do with them being cold. Usually when I notice this colouring they are dormant and wilty.

I have a small mole on the outside of one lip. This caused me minor shame for a short while after I discovered it, even though it is hidden by hair and is just a mole. Once I got used to it, I was neutral about it, and lately I slightly like it. After all, it is a beauty mark. It makes me think of aging beauty queens making dots on their cheeks with eyeliner.

________________________________________________________________________________

The Size of my vagina.

I don't know what the average measurements of a full grown vagina are, or how mine relates. Whenever my roommate gets her CrapHound (clip-art zine) stuff back I'll have a diagram of relative vaginal diameters to put up here. It is an enlargement (ha ha) but I guess I'll re-scale it.

I have never measured any part of my vagina, but I have a fairly good idea of its size from my various encounters with it while dealing with menstrual products and sex. Also, I've occasionally been curious about the size of it and poked around inside it with my fingers.

I have recently concluded that my vagina, in its unstretched state, is about the same length as my fingers. Figuring this out took extended messing about inside me with my fingers (I was trying to work out an Instead menstrual cup).

Previously to this I thought that my vagina must have been longer, mostly based on diagrams of vaginas I'd seen all over the place (textbooks, tampon instructions). I feared though, that it was shorter and/or too short. All these stresses from not having formal expectations.

Further revelations from my recent explorations include that my vagina seems to be slightly deeper at the back of my cervix than at the front, and that my cervix is the least deep and most immovable end point of my vagina.

This unstretched measurement is not a good overall description. I can always push further into my vagina, and can fit my beloved's whole unit inside me, or our whole rubber toy. So my vagina can stretch from around 4 inches deep to around 8. It's actual depth gets to be kind of irrelevant. It can accomodate.

The width of my vagina is also difficult to describe, as it is very elastic. It collapses shut when not held open, but can stretch about as wide as hand. This is about how big the ring of my pelvic bones is. My vagina feels stretched if it is opened wider than two fingers or so. I think it is wider front to back than side to side when it is empty and resting.

My vulva is plump and soft but not pendulous or noticeably big. I am not a fat girl, and do not have a fat vagina, but apparently fat women have more and better orgasms during sex than thin women do. I don't know whether the orgasms are due to the fatness of a vulva or are just part of being a big woman.

____________________________________________________________________________________

My pubic hair

My pubic hair is brown. It has always been brown. Quite a dark brown.
I do not really remember when my vagina grew its fur. I guess technically it is not the vagina that gets furry. But, I do not remember when I developed pubic fur. Sometime in the grade 7-8 range.
I was quite a late bloomer in other areas, so this might also be the tail end of the fur-development-age bell curve. This did not distress me that I remember. Probably because the growth is much more covert than breasts, and I didn't see a lot of pantsless girls at that age for comparison.
I do remember that the growth was gradual, and that the first forays into furriness were not curly. The straightness didn't worry me but I did want it to hurry up and curl; I thought it was a bit unsightly.
Now my fur, left to its own devices, makes a triangle over my mound of womanliness, and also covers the more hidden regions of my outer labia (like between my thighs), and this spreads about an inch or so onto my thighs. It is quite thick, course (but soft) and curly, and I guess covers a fair sized area.
I will note that pubic hair has a tendency to fall out and tends to accumulate in places like bedsheets, shower walls and floors, bathroom floors, etc. I don't know if it falls out at a faster rate than head hair or whether some other factor makes it noticeable. It doesn't bug me. It is kind of funny to live with roommates who have different coloured hair, cause you can tell whose pubic hairs are whose in the shower. Forced intimacy, but that's ok.
I do wash my fur in the shower, but I don't shampoo it or condition it. Neither do I style it. I wash it the same way as I wash the rest of my body.
For awhile, I shaved my bikini line along with my legs and armpits, mostly to stave off ridicule during jr. high gym class and swimming. I would shave all the hair on my inner thighs and a little bit further on the front. the main goal was to keep the fur small enough to hide inside my underwear. One time I shaved the hair off my labia just past the crease of my thighs between my legs. It was very prickly and uncomfortable for quite awhile. Not cool.
Technical details and tips for shaving pubic hair and bikini lines are on their very own page.
I was never very satisfied with the job I managed to do with my bikini line, as it was usually prickly no matter what shaving technique I employed, and the dark roots of hairs would show through the pale skin anyway.
I think I trimmed my fur a couple of times too, to make it less bushy.
Just recently I embarked on an extreme waxing adventure, in which I removed all the hair from my entire unit. This justifiably has its own page.
For several years I didn't shave anything. Thus I was quite hairy (which made waxing quite a job), and the hairiness was noticeable if I wore underwear that was high-cut at all, but I liked it. I mostly wear hot pantsy underwear anyway.
One thing about not shaving is that the hair sometimes gets stuck between underwear elastic and leg, and pulls some. This could be awkward to adjust in public but most of the time wriggling can fix the problem.
I was never a big one for disposable menstrual pads, but they can be a bitch for sticking to pubic hair around the edges where the glue isn't stuck to panty fabric, or just where blood is drying.
I have never shaved my pubic fur into a shape such as a heart, or into an extreme little velcro strip. Neither have I bleached or dyed it any colours. Applying chemicals to pubic hair is supposed to be dangerous, and I can imagine that any stray drips or fumes of bleach or ammonia dye that got into the moist inner sections of my vulva would cause serious burning pain. I don't even like soap to get in there. However, there has to be some way to safely dye the fur cause I have seen both ladies and gents with day-glo fur (and who guessed where?).
____________________________________________________________________________________

About my virginity.

When referring to virginity, I mostly use the word itself, but sometimes substitute derivatives of "purity" as a joke. In high school, my friends and I mostly used references to The Big V Club, with people being "in the club" or "out of the club." We also had a Big C Club for (mostly reluctantly) celibate people. These were just descriptive terms, we didn't have club activities or enforce membership or anything. We did have unofficial hand signs (V or C shaped fingers). Lately I also use derivatives of the word "nun"-- nunnish, nunnery, etc. These sort of refer to this tiny bed I used to call my nun bed, and also to my roommate's two spayed nun-cats. I never really use the word "cherry" when referring to a virgin or to virginity, but my dad does (why do I know that?) and it comes up a lot in suggestive jokes on sitcoms and music videos.

In the beginning, I was not aware that I was a virgin or anything else. When I learned what the word meant, I thought it was risque because it referred to sex. I didn't think of myself as a virgin until it became apparent that people my age could have sex. This was in about seventh grade, when I was eleven or twelve. Virginity really wasn't an issue for me at this age, cause pretty much everybody was still expected to be pure. I had never even kissed anybody by then.

I started to get self-conscious about my virgin status once people I knew actually had opportunities to have sex. This was kind of a progression of my previous late-bloomer angst about being the last girl to get a bra and her period and kissed and whatever other pubescent milestones I could perceive.
My attitude towards my virginity was rather complicated. I didn't think that being a virgin was bad, but I didn't want to be one. I was frustrated because I wanted to have sex for the sake of sex, but I was also embarrassed that other people would realise that I whether or not I was saving myself, I didn't have anybody to have sex with. So mainly I was upset about not having a proper chance to have sex, and other people knowing this. There were a few times that I probably could have had sex with a boy, but I didn't because I didn't want the boy. I count that as not having an opportunity. I was more focussed on my lack of sirenly sex appeal than the lack of desirable bed partners, but both were sources of teen angst.
I wasn't upset about this all the time. Sometimes I was fine with people knowing I was a virgin. It was mainly context. I would be uncomfortable if I ever ended up in a conversation which referred to virginity or sex stories. It seemed dangerous, like somebody might figure me out or accuse me. If I thought that somebody might be judging me on my sexual status, then I was uncomfortable. If somebody mentioned the Big V Club or was just discussing ideas about virginity, I had no problem.

For the record, nobody ever actually made fun of me for being a virgin. I was just worried.
The only virgin-teasing incident I can think of at all involved two guys who locked their roommate Mike out of the apartment in his underwear, and demanded that he yell a password to be let back inside. The hint for guessing the password was "It rhymes with 'Mike's a sturgeon.'" In telling the story to me they made a point of clarifying that they didn't think there was anything wrong with being a virgin; they just knew Mike was embarrassed about it.

As a quick aside, I was also very familiar with virgins in the context of the Rocky Horror Show (virgins being people who have never seen it live), where virginity is given a much more fun treatment, based on the attitude that nobody will be a virgin by the end of the night. Oh, the debauchery. Anyway.
Currently, I am not a virgin (Rocky Horror or otherwise), but I know quite a few people my age (21) who are, both males and females. It seems to be less of an issue now than in high school, but that may be because I'm not worried about myself anymore. I've never known anyone who actually cared about whether someone else was a virgin or not. That is probably an important thing to know. Even the orthodox religious people I know only seem to care about the virginity of prospective spouses.
Occasionally I think that it would have been sweet to have saved myself all this time and have been all pure for my beloved, just for the cheesy romanticness of being all his. However, I am glad I had other sex because it was fun, what I wanted to do at the time, and good practise. Besides which I did actually care enough about each of my partners to go to bed with them.
All the statistics I've seen about the percentage of any age group who are sexually active and the average age for first sexual encounter are different. I have no idea what the latest ones are. I used to take consolation if I was in the majority, but that's irrelevant really.
Once I graduated high school, I got to be quite painfully ashamed of being a virgin, mainly because I did not like what I thought being virginal would make people think about me. I have always been like I am now, kind of a smut who thinks all kinds of people are foxy, who can appreciate how just about anything could be sensual and who spends a fair bit of time sitting around thinking up things that are sexy. I have always been quite attached to these elements of my person, and was very distressed that people might discredit them because I hadn't had sex with anybody. Yes, made me cry. In particular, I didn't know how to explain or proove that I was some kind of bisexual creature, without having any evidence in the form of girl sex.
All of this led to the intensely embarrassing and regrettable state of me getting in the habit of lying about my virginity. I thought it would be pretty gross to lie and say I just wasn't a virgin at all, so I developed this compromise that I had never had sex with a boy, BUT... I had "messed around" with girls, which later blossomed into the full "I had sex with a girl." Conveniently this simultaneously established my desire to have sex with girls. At the time I thought this story established me as a virgin who had an excuse, and as a virgin without any of the stigmas I thought people would attach to me if I'd never had sex at all (despite my not applying these to virgins I knew).
I had a very practical view of the lying, that it was an easy way of making people understand what I was like, that it did reflect honest desires and traits in myself. Also, it wasn't intended so much as a lie, but rather as a preview. I figured it wouldn't be shameful to say I had had sex with girls as long as I eventually did. This hinged on the girl sex not being attached to an age number, which I think I felt was possible since to me at the time, girl sex wasn't impacting my virginity (especially since it was imaginary, eh?), and virginity was the main thing that had an age attached to it. Girl sex was more of a yes or no quantity, maybe because nobody really asks "when was the first time you were gay?" but rather, usually "are you or aren't you?" or at least "how gay?" or "what kind?." Come to think of it, it would be cool if that was the popular attitude about sexuality in general; instead of "when did you lose your virginity and how many partners have you had?", folks could ask the more relevant "how much and what kind of sexual do you think you are?," since that is what the previous questions are trying to discover anyway.
Also, this wasn't a story that I voluntarily broadcast; it was my backup story for panicky situations in which I felt I was about to be evaluated or compared. It was somewhat encouraged by the universal reaction of the people who heard it: "Wow, aren't you sexier than I thought."
This could be used to indicate all kinds of negative things about my attitude towards my own sexuality and towards homosexuality in general ("not 'real' sex"?), but it was really only about definitions. It's hard to know intuitively whether oral sex between two girls counts as sex, and if so does oral sex between a girl and a boy, or between two boys count? I explained my professed situation as "I've never been with a boy but I've slept with girls" to avoid confusion (and also some accountability). I have worked out that most people now understand oral sex between two girls as sex. Whatever :)
This is a lot about what I "count" things as. I think the various descriptions of virgin and sex and sexuality and whatnot (and gender for that matter) are only as useful as how meaningful they are for a person. I used this vagueness for my own ends to make myself more presentable, employing the fuzziness of whether or not I was talking about my virginity or just some event. I avoided calling anything by any name until I worked out what I meant by each word, and what other people were likely to think I meant.
This led to me describing myself as a virgin (with an excuse) until I had sex with a boy, even though I'd previously professed to have had sex with girls. After I slept with a boy, I found that the girl sex had gained credibility as "real" sex. By this point I had decided that the girl sex was indeed sex, but mainly the issue was that having the boy sex gave me a solid back up argument that I really wasn't a virgin, relieving any need to evaluate sexual acts for legitimacy (ability to destroy virginity). All sex acts were then equal, except that one must have come first.
This made me rather more uncomfortable about the lying than before, since now it was a rather concrete lie regarding a number, the age at which I had lost my virginity. I haven't really sorted this out yet, as anybody who has been reading this site for awhile will have noticed, but for the record the real (as in not made up, not as in valid) first sex was when I was 18.
I don't like at all that the numbers hold any interest. I purposely don't ask people when they first had sex if such a topic comes up. I don't mind if they tell me, but I don't ask. It's my leftover nerd politics. Things like sex shouldn't be cred, so I try not to make them into any. Further, having been a late-bloomer in a number of physical puberty/sexuality kinds of areas, I don't like to put ages on things, cause for me that implies a scale, a schedule, a proper rate or range of time in which to do things, that I have often felt left out of. I wouldn't want to make anybody else feel like that.
I should mention that my first boy sex didn't hurt. I wasn't worried that it would, because my vagina had lots of practise, between masturbation and using various internal menstrual products. That's probably the main thing people reading this page wanted to know, besides my age statistics. Ha ha.
I didn't have any particular emotional or intellectual reaction the first time I had sex. If anything, I was somewhat relieved, not to have had sex, but to have credibility should anybody ever question my smuttiness. It didn't make me believe any differently about myself, but for whatever reason it made me more convinced that I could get other people to believe who I was. Gah.
All this and nobody ever once made any comment to suggest that I was inferior in any way for being a virgin. I think I extrapolated from comments made at previous moments to suggest that I definitely was inferior for not having bled yet, or had a boyfriend, or for having small breasts in grade 9 and whatever else. So... yes it was in my head, but I still blame the weird pressure pot that is junior/high school culture.
Also, I was thinking about it, and it seemed a little odd that people now will develop angst and shame about being "too old" to be a virgin, when being a virgin used to be expected and a status point. Then I got to thinking that before the sexual revolution or whatever, women just used to get ashamed of being "too old" to be unmarried, which amounted to exactly the same thing if you weren't supposed to have premarital sex. So really it has always been shameful to not be desired sexually, we've just taken the marriage part out of it. This annoys me no end, especially considering the piles of people I know who are perfectly desirable but single or celibate or virgins because of random situations. However, I don't know how to deal with this at all. Euh... everybody please be nice to each other from now on and don't make anybody feel inferior unless they are doing something mean.
I know people can also end up with shame and guilt about having sex "too young" or any old time, but this has not been my experience at all. Everyone I've ever known who had any guilt in this area has offset it with pride in their desirability, prowess, conquest, naughtiness, precociousness, whatever.

_______________________________________________________________________________

My Hymen

 I don't remember when I first heard about hymens, but I associate it with jr. high. Maybe someone's last name sounded like hymen and everyone was excited.
As is fairly well published, the hymen is a thin membrane of skin (hymen is Latin for membrane ) that partially covers the opening of the vagina. Usually it is depicted as being attached along the back edge and up the sides rather than the front, and not stretching across as a band in the middle. It is located right at the opening, just inside the inner labia.
It can be one piece or somewhat webbed, and it can be smoother or flappier. All of this is being related by me as second-hand knowledge. I have never noticed any hymens on anybody.
The hymen is also referred to fairly commonly as a cherry (never by me personally), and has been associated with virgin females because its presence is thought to guarantee that the vagina in question has never been penetrated by a penis.
I myself don't much correlate the two, partly because, as is fairly common knowledge, a number of things besides sex can break the hymen (excercise, masturbation, tampons. Horseriding and gymnastics are frequently implicated). If such activities don't break the hymen they often give it practise stretching so that it won't break when stretched to accomodate a phallus and will remain intact after sex. Further, the hymen actually recedes back into the body and disappears on its own starting in adolescence (according to a Kinsey Institute report; I have never read this anywhere else).
So, essentially, the hymen is a small bit of skin that may hurt a bit if it is torn somehow, but will go away by itself even if it isn't broken.
As for my own hymen, I've never actually noticed it, despite having being familiar with my unit for quite some time now. I think that is why this page is the 100th one to get made-- I never think about my hymen or the memory of it (I assume it is a trace entity by now, whatever happened to it). In thinking about my vagina i was much more preoccupied with the mole ;)

____________________________________________________________________________________

My Vagina Smell

Smells are difficult to describe. I will start with general things.
My vagina makes various smells. Sometimes they are stronger than other times. In some circumstances I can smell my vagina while I am sitting around, usually cross-legged in pjs in the middle of the day after not showering. I do not find the smells offensive. I used to worry about them occasionally, but I don't think I ever worried about people smelling them by accident and thinking I was dirty or gross.
I did used to worry about make-out partners getting too near my vagina and smelling it. I soon realised that people are aware that vaginas make smells, and that most people aren't grossed out by this. Oral sex can be relaxing that way. I think that believing my vagina wasn't a dirty thing was important.
Washing makes my vagina smell less strong. Going several days with no washing results in a more pungent vagina. Most people could probably have guessed that.
Recently, while our toilet was broken and had to be filled up manually to be flushed, I noticed that for some reason, if I pee less often my vagina smells more strongly, even when freshly washed and non-smutted up.
My vagina makes different smells at different times of my cycle. It smells sexiest at ovulation time, not surprisingly. This smell is a creamy kind of smell, and I associate it with raw potatoes, and with white glue. That sounds kind of gross but please map those smells into a sexy zone. My unit smells most pungently while I am bleeding. I think this is only partly the blood, because my vagina smells different during my period even if I use tampons or my swank rubber cup. Once I sniffed a tampon out of curiosity and it was freakily similar to the cliche tuna smell. Oh well.
People sell used tampons, pads and panties on the internet on the grounds of sensual smell.
Another smell my vagina has is a smutty smell after naked hetero sex. Sex with latex doesn't result in a lot of pungency, although it does get the smell of the condom lubricant, which is kind of funny, on my vagina. Unprotected sex results in a much stronger, as well as different smell. My boy ends up with about the same smell, but mine is usually stronger.
I don't think oral sex makes my vagina smell any different.
 

____________________________________________________________________________________

My Vagina Taste.

I have only tasted my vagina a few times other than tasting smears of me on someone else's body. This was accomplished by licking my finger; I've never tried to lick my own vagina because I can tell that I couldn't reach it. When I asked for my boy's input as to the flavour of my vagina, he offered that it was "good." Lately he's added that it goes with everything, even recently brushed teeth. Also it goes with margaritas. For details, you are stuck with my description, constructed mostly from other people's vaginas which I have tasted more extensively than my own.
This is still a limited description. My beloved also pointed out that different vaginas have different tastes, which hadn't occured to me for whatever reason. The only excuse I can think of is that my vagina-tastings have been few and far apart.
But, from my small experience, vaginas have both a taste and an aftertaste. Neither of these is easy to describe, as they aren't similar to anything else that I know of (suggestions so far: a penny (for metallicness); a taco; white glue; potato; cedar; armpit; cantaloupe; fish; umami. Variation, yes?).
The taste of a vagina comes mostly from the fluids in it, and is thus stronger inside the vagina itself than in the external parts. The taste is not quite sour, but somewhat astringent, perhaps because the vagina is, after all, acidic. The tartness is mild but the taste can be quite strong. To me, the taste seems "thick," which is my word for the combination of aftertaste and creaminess of some of the vaginal fluids. I am intrigued by the suggestion that the taste of vaginas may include umami, the fifth taste, because I definitely do associate some of the qualities of umami with the taste of a woman. The slippery (non-creamy) fluids that get made when I'm excited don't taste like much as far as I know. I find that the taste of a vagina isn't too related to the smell.
Everyone I've talked to likes the taste, and I don't think that it takes as much "acquiring" as the taste of semen, which is slightly bitter rather than sour.
The aftertaste of my vagina is not acid, but rather composed just of the flavour, which is the part I am having trouble describing. In some ways, to me, it is similar to the aftertaste of raw tomato (an umami flavour!). It does not linger overly long, but it is definitely noticeable.
Tastes of bodily fluids can be altered by what you eat. Asparagus is famous for making ejaculate taste like hot mustard (bad thing), and pineapple is the most recent food I've heard rumoured to make people taste delicious. I want to have a pineapple feast as an experiment. Smoking gives your vulva ashtray breath along with your mouth and fingers and clothes and house etc.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Touching my vagina.

This page is about having other people touch my vagina, or touching my vagina in the company of other people. Solo stuff is under masturbation.
I mostly enjoy having my vagina touched as foreplay or in conjunction with oral sex. It is a little hard to tell without looking, exactly where your fingers are at in relation to the rest of a vagina, and some precision is necessary when dealing with the clitoris. It seems to be easier with your own vagina, when you can work by feel. Other people's fingers do better finding their way inside the vagina itself. I've never had anybody in my vagina up to their wrist, but I've had a fair portion of hand inside of me.
I've only had one orgasm as a result of touching alone. Mostly, other people's fingers are too clumsy or too different from what I would do to myself.
I would say that I've gotten used to my own masturbation style, which may or may not be unfortunate. I have heard radio show sex therapists encourage people to diversify their masturbation techniques for fear of only being able to orgasm with one specific type of stimulation (humping an arm chair or what have you), but I don't seem to have trouble having orgasms during other activities.
I have found it sexy to touch myself while my beloved boy holds me or kisses me. I also like when he touches himself when we are together. Mostly we do this as a lead up to other things, since the more excited either of us gets the more we want each other, but sometimes, if I am sore or for a change, one or both of us will have orgasms that way.
The only person I have masturbated with is special boy. I've never had a masturbation contest with another woman (although I did race boy once, and I kicked ass). Some women probably do that, but I don't know any who have mentioned it. Usually when masturbating with the lover, we are both touching ourselves at the same time. Usually it works out that we'll be touching each other and our hands will get tired so we'll kind of encourage each other to take care of our own selves while we continue to make out and whatnot.
For awhile I was quite self-conscious about masturbating in front of a boy, because I didn't want to be observed as a curiosity ("ohhh, that's how girls masturbate...") but it can be a good thing to do sometimes. I kind of educated my boy, using his own hand on me when I was shy to use my own. It worked out. Now we both touch me, or ourselves, at the same time or solo.
Mainly when being touched I lie on my side facing my partner, but this often gets adjusted to have me on my back and the toucher propped up on an elbow over me. This way I can spread my legs some and not squish his/her/my hand.
Things get slightly more complicated when touching someone and being touched back at the same time. Lying on sides will lead to arms getting tangled up or cramping each other. The lying on my back thing can remedy that, but there are plenty of interesting variations. I didn't get any of them from this book, but Sex For One seems to have a lot of ideas for this kind of thing. I encountered the book at the same erotic art show where I found the gspot book, but I remember my boyfriend's mum having it around when she was researching orgasms for her counseling practise.
One position that is nice for both freedom of movement and closeness of bodies and faces is for a boy to straddle my belly or chest (me lying on my back) and avail himself of himself (or I can kiss, or touch, or all of these things) while I can reach over one of his legs to touch my own self. Enjoyment of this benefits from my liking to be close to what is going on. If I was intimidated by penises this might freak me out.
A position that my boy and I end up in a lot involves one of us lying on the other's back while we touch each other. This is all awkward and kind of torturous, but it feels really nice to lie against someone's back :) An easier version is for me to sit up to my hands and knees and have him behind me. We can reach each other through my legs. This usually just results in us having sex because our genitals are too close together to resist very well.
If I come up with or remember more positional ideas I'll put them up, but it really isn't hard to make up your own.

____________________________________________________________________________________

My vagina pH.

The normal bacteria in the vagina produce lactic acid, rendering the whole place acidic. I can't remember if this in itself has antiseptic properties or not.
I do know that semen is alkaline, and that sperm are killed by acid. The vagina is quite a hostile place for the wee armies. The fluids they swim in help to neutralize their new territory some, but many of them die anyway. Their carcasses make up a large part of wet spots.
Some vaginal bacteria suffer when their environmental pH is raised by the alkaline semen. This, and the possible presence of yeast and other microorganisms on the penis depositing the semen can lead to yeast or other infections in women who are susceptible to this. A lot of the time these kind of sex-induced infections are mild and go away on their own.
However, there is quite an industry built around pH and "freshness" restoring douches. I've never used any, but I've never had an issue with my vaginal pH or freshness. I've also had douches condemned to me by a doctor, who explained that the flow of liquid in the vagina can simply mix any infecting populations around and risk ushering them into the uterus itself, which is a much more serious infection to have.
Also, in case anyone hadn't figured it out, douching with an acid after unprotected sex will not kill all the sperm and prevent a woman from becoming pregnant. They will be swimming away, and are partly protected by their alkaline fluids. The liquid can sweep them into the unterus, and any acid not very dilute can do damage to the vagina. Thus ends my education of naive teens.

____________________________________________________________________________________

My Panties.

I don't think much about what panties do to my vagina, but I do notice what my vagina does to my panties (see discharge). I've been told that panties, and in particular pantyhose, can do bad things to a vagina, causing things as vague as "crotch rot." I think the idea is supposed to be that wearing underwear presses on and holds moisture against the vagina and facilitates infection. I have never personally had a problem with this.
However, I don't always wear underwear :) Sometimes just because and sometimes because it is past time to do laundry. I don't like the way pants feel against my nether regions with no panties to shield them. If underwear gets moistened by vaginal activities, it is held against the body and stays warm and not very distinguishable from the vaginal activity itself. However, if pant seams or fabric happen to get wet, they get cold and clammy and it isn't good. If I'm going knickerless I usually wear a skirt.
Without the absorbant presence of underwear, I occasionally get moist upper thighs. More noticeably, the pubic hair near the mouth of the actual vagina gets more messy than when I wear my panties.
If I am wearing underwear, they are usually boy's no-gap fly briefs in nice colours. These are crazy cheap and very, very comfortable, being all flannelly with wide elastics and thick, soft trim. Also they look kind of foxy on girls, I think. I do have other underwear, but it is mostly old and slowly turning tatty. I try to cull the ratty ones now, but I didn't for a long time.
Special boy has a band called Panty Boy.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Noisy vagina.

My vagina only makes two noises that I am aware of, and it does not make them very often.
The first kind of noise occurs when either set of my labia is quite wet, or if there is a pool of wetness at the mouth of my vagina. Moving my vagina in nearly any way will cause the wet parts to press against each other and pull apart, producing a noise like lapping, or bubbles popping. A wet noise.
The other kind of noise is the often made fun of farting noise that occurs after air is forced into my vagina during sex or daily life. My roommate informed me of a slang term they use in Kamloops for this but I forget it (wait, it's queef, and many people seem to use this judging by the emails I've been getting...Another suggestion: vart). I've never known a vulgar term for these.
I find that air is more likely to get into my vagina during sex in positions other than man on top missionary (possibly related to less direct angles of entry catching air in the inward thrust). Also, more air gets in if my manfriend is making longer thrusts (drawing further out before re-entry), or if my vagina is less lubricated, as in extended sessions of love making or if it just wasn't terribly slippery to start with.
In cases when I have become full of both air and smut, I can do tricks with my vagina. In these situations I refer to it as a volcano. With some experimentation, if you are a silly nerd like me, you can achieve quite a range of vaginal vocalizations, including multiple notes and panting noises. Ya.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Licking my vagina.

The official latin-based term for oral sex on a female is cunnilingus. A friend of mine wants to make a product called something like Honeylingus. I don't use either of these terms except in official discussion. I rarely use 'going down' either. I think I have avoided most established sexual terms for some reason. Right now my beloved and I say "kissing on" to refer to either of us, and context explains where this kissing on would occur. It is kind of nice not to define things exactly.
I like to have my vulva kissed on. It does not have to be carried through to orgasm, although it is one of the easiest ways for me to have one. Licking and kissing and things are sexy foreplay, and I like all the wet feelings.
I have not found that either girls or boys are intuitively more adept at performing this, but other people might think otherwise. People get rapidly better with practise, and I think girls become more brilliantly skilled with less practise, possibly partly because being kissed on yourself is another source for ideas. To be a good kisser, I think that it is important to pay attention to how the woman you are kissing on is reacting.
Thus, it is important to respond helpfully if you are a woman being kissed on. I don't think that graphic "left...right...no, slower" kind of directions are necessary, especially since I don't usually have an exact vision of what I would like to be done to me. However, varying degrees of happy or excited sounds can let your lover know what feels better than other things, and encourage them to keep doing something that feels good. Then they can still be creative.
More explicit directions can be given by shifting my hips around to get my partner where I'd like them to be. I sometimes involuntarily push a person's head against me some if they do something that feels good. It seems to get the "keep doing that!" point across, but so would saying something.
I think some of the reason oral sex tends to get better as I get to know my partner is that I get more explicit with the happy sounds. I think I have been less shy with each new person, but I still start out shy-er than I end up. I should probably point out that I mostly don't make noises on purpose, or with the intention of giving technical direction. I am just being expressive, but I think it is an important way to communicate.
I find personally that any combination of fairly smooth techniques does good things to me. Changing direction all the time or any kind of poking or jerking usually distracts me too much to get excited. Things don't always have to be gentle, but smoothness and softness is an asset. Flexed, pointy tongues are less sexy to me, but everyone has different preferences.
A variety of things can be done to a vagina with the lips, tongue, teeth, mouth, nose and chin. Among them are long laps, short laps, fast or slow lapping, licking along the side of the inside lips, licking between them, circling the clitoral hood or the opening of the vagina with the tongue, sucking on lips or the clitoris with or without simultaneous licking, pressing the clitoris (usually better to press near the clitoris), wiggling things with the tongue, and putting nearly anything into the vagina. If there is a tongue piercing involved, it can participate or not depending on how much of the tongue is in contact with the vagina at any particular time.
I have never had someone with a pierced tongue lick or kiss on my vagina, but I've heard good things about my piercing in this context. This makes sense to me. The jewellery is smooth and round and would just be extra sensation.
Fingers can get involved pressing, stretching, stroking or being inserted into places. They can also touch other body parts like hips, waist, thighs, breasts or bum. All of these things can be good. I am particularly susceptible to being kissed on and touched by slippy fingers at the same time, when all the appendages are sliding rather than poking and are splitting and filling things (either actually inside me or between external parts).
I've never had toys involved with oral sex, like being kissed on and having a product put in me at the same time. Only fingers frequently end up inside me whilst being licked. I think I have a bias towards things that can be achieved using only bodies.
There are plenty of different positions in which to have oral sex. I have mostly been kissed on while lying on my back with my knees pulled up a bit or with the kisser holding my legs apart or down or wherever. I have mostly kissed on this way as well. Other ways I've encountered include:
.girl sitting on the edge of something (bed, chair, counter, etc...) with the kisser kneeling between her legs.
.girl on hands and knees being kissed from behind or underneath (I like this way).
.girl kneeling over kisser's face (gives girl free hands in easy reach of lover, but I find it more awkward to position myself on my lover this way, since hip-tilting often results in backing away).
.girl lying on back kissing on kisser (awkward to do heterosexually without girl getting choked, unless the boy has a shorter back than she does).
.girl kneeling overtop kisser who is lying on back, and her kissing on kisser (works nicely with girls or boys).
.random, climbing-on-each-other positions, often while hiding under the sheets.

I've only ever managed an orgasm a few times during mutual oral sex (which I think of as 69 but barely ever say). Either I get too distracted trying to be good to my lover to take care of myself, or they get too distracted to keep up, or I get too distracted to keep up, or whatever. It is fun but distracting, and usually leads to something else. Also, having a penis in my mouth upside-down often results in its coronal ridge getting caught on my tongue ring, which is silly).
Various things can be done to avoid getting a lot of hair in your mouth while performing oral sex. One is to spread the lips of the vagina apart with your fingers to keep any furry parts out of the way, or to bury your mouth between them (sometimes going nose first makes this easier). Another is to avoid swallowing very much so as to keep any hair that does get in your mouth from getting in the much more uncomfortable position of being stuck in your throat.
I do not think it is offensive for somebody giving oral sex to pause and pull a hair off their tongue. It is thoughtful to keep up the intermission with the fingers of one hand, but I don't find a brief pause ruins anything.
Also, I don't think the hair is a major problem, worthy of devoting worries to. The only time it is really an issue is when playing a lot and kissing around on thighs and mound.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Inside my vagina.

My facination with the internal nature of my vagina grew out of a facination with the way penises are external. It seems a lot of girls comment on the exposed nature of penises.
My vagina is a different kind of internal orifice than my mouth. It is more like an esophagus. It collapses on itself when not held open. I can squeeze it shut, but I cannot open it with vaginal muscle control.
The inside of my vaginal is not smooth. It curves some, and is kind of wrinkly. It is very stretchy and soft, as in easy to push into, but also firm, in that it is not substanceless like a pillow. It is muscular.
It has a mound just inside itself on the front wall. This mound separates two of my favorite anatomical regions: the vestibule (the outermost part of the vagina, like a foyer), and the vaginal vault (the part that is sealed shut behind the mound). V words!
For awhile I was slightly paranoid that my vagina was deformed, given the various lumps and nubs that it has, but it seems to be fine (see cervix for more internal bump descriptions). When I was younger I sometimes wondered if it would be too short to fit a penis into, but it wasn't. It is only slightly longer than my fingers, but it stretches a lot.
In fact, another of my favorite anatomical parts, the fornix (fornyx?), helps ensure that my vagina is long enough for intercourse. The fornix is the part of the vagina that is deeper than the cervix, like a moat around the uterus. When aroused, the rear part of the fornix pouches out to make a pocket (the stuff you learn when you read publications of the Kinsey Institute). Fornix of course has the same word root as fornication.
It is warm inside my vagina. Even the outside parts of the unit are quite warm. I notice this if I am sitting naked on any part of my boy, usually his tummy or bum. I notice especially if I have been swimming somewhere chilly and then walk around-- chilled skin will get pressed against my vagina and it will feel warm. Sometimes it burns with passion. I think it does actually get warmer in such instances.
It is also slippery and moist inside my vagina. Sometimes the outside parts get a little drier, but the inside is always wet as far as I know.
Nothing terribly creative has been put inside my vagina. I have not smuggled drugs or parakeets. There have been a variety of body parts (finger, tongue, penis, toe, nose, hand...), and a couple of stray bathroom objects like small lotion bottles that were on the edge of the tub when I lived at home and was a randy teenager with no sexual outlet. There have never been any vegetables inside my vagina. The only foods that have been in or on it are honey, sherbet and ice. Oh, menstrual products have also been inside my vagina (tampons, Instead brand polyethylene cups, reusable rubber cup that I very much like).
When something is fully inside my vagina, I can't feel it. I can feel if it slips, drips or somehow gets pushed out, but I can't feel it when it is inside. I think the only nerves in the top 2/3 or so of the vagina feel pressure and are not very sensitive. Soreness details some effects of this. See also sensitivity.
I know that doctors recommend not leaving anything in your vagina for more than 8 hours, to avoid getting a dangerous infection like toxic shock syndrome, but I don't stick too closely to this. Usually there is no point to leaving anything in my vagina for more than a few hours, but if I am sleeping or not bleeding very much, I will sometimes be lazy or forgetful and leave a menstrual product in me for 12 or so hours. The longest I have ever left anything is about a day, and that was an accident.
I know various horror stories and urban legends involving leaving food in a vagina by accident after playing sexy games with it. Usually these stories end up with the vagina being disgustingly infected by maggots or demon roaches, but I would be more inclined to think they would just rot and smell bad and get very full of bacteria, the way that menstrual blood can do that if you forget about a tampon or a diaphragm for weeks. So no keeping food in your vagina.
I don't invasively wash my vagina. I get the outside parts and the vaginal opening with water, but I leave the inside alone. I do not put soap or any chemicals in or on it. Whenever soap gets in my vagina it stings, so I try to keep it away. I understand that the vagina has an important pH and microbial balance, and I try not to mess it up.
___________________________________________________________________________________

My vagina elasticity.

My vagina is very elastic, I think lengthwise as well as widthwise. Stretching it has never hurt, during sex or any other time. I think this is because it has been fairly well introduced to stretchery. I did not put things in it when I first started masturbating, but worked up to a couple fingers and whatnot. Also I've always used internal menstrual products.
The degree to which it can stretch is explained under size.
Stretching my vagina does not wear it out, or make it less elastic for later. It always bounces closed again. It is made of muscles, and meant to be stretchy (for babies to fit through). A fair number of people seem concerned about the possibility of vaginas being stretched out of shape and becoming loose or saggy. To my knowledge, this does not happen, although the extreme stretching while giving birth can resize the vagina a bit. Exercising the vaginal muscles can help keep the vagina toned and strong.
Being stretched does not make my vagina sore, but it can contribute to extra rubbing (big things rub more than small things), which can end up hurting some. Thus, it helps to be extra slippery if something particularly large is going to be in my vagina. A penis is not particularly large; something like a hand or a lot of fingers is.
I can feel my vagina being stretched much more than anything else that is done to it. It is generally a good feeling.

_____________________________________________________________________________________
Vagina peeing

Peeing was the first function that I associated with my vagina.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

My vagina muscles.

I'm pretty into my vaginal muscles. When I was 16 or 17, I read a collection of Germaine Greer's early articles for various underground newspapers (The Madwoman's Underclothes, most libraries have it). I totally loved one article called Lady, Love Your Cunt, and it seriously changed my relationship with my vagina.
Part of the article went off about not wearing underwear, and part of it was about exercising vaginal muscles, both to make them strong and elastic and as a hands-free masturbation technique. This was similar to Kegel exercises, which I found out about later. I've never seen Kegel exercises given as a masturbation technique, but I have seen them described as a way to improve sex.
I've gotten pretty good at this. It is very easy and has all kinds of benefits. Also, it is probably the main way I got to be familiar with my vagina. A productive way to spend some time getting to know how the vagina works and stuff.
The idea is simply to practise clenching the vaginal muscles, without tightening muscles in the thighs, bum or stomach. These muscles usually get referred to as pubococcygeus, but I've also seen the bulbocavernosis muscle listed as the one that Kegel exercises involve.
In any case, this clenching can stimulate all kinds of nerves in the vagina, and brings direct pressure to bear on the clitoris. I have a hunch there is also an orgasm-related nerve somewhere in the lower abdomen that this presses on (I was reading a Cosmo at the supermarket that had a column about manually pushing on your stomach during sex for mind blowing orgasms etc). Either a held squeeze or a series of pulses can feel good.
Finding the right muscles took a little time but I didn't have any trouble. Since then, I've found that doing this can lead to serious arousal if you have the dedication. With some experience, I've developed a fair bit of muscle control in there. You can isolate various places to squeeze, and squeeze with varying intensity. I've never stuck it out and achieved orgasm using only my vaginal muscles, but I'm sure it can be done.
A lot of praise was given to how undetectable this practise it; that you can masturbate on the bus, or in church, or waiting in line at the bank or wherever. I don't remember ever doing this in public on purpose, but I did sometimes end up distracted in high school if some crush object was in the desk ahead of me. It's kind of a good arousal, because you don't have to be all distracted or even thinking particularly sexy thoughts. It can just be a background happy/excited feeling.
Bonus benefits of good pubococcygeus muscle tone include improved bladder control, an easier time during childbirth, and a firm, clenchable vagina.
As well, this being able to clench your vaginal muscles can be pleasurable for a sexual partner. I sometimes get inappropriately reminded of "her cunt grips him like a warm, friendly hand" from some Jim Morrison poem. Besides being good for my beloved boy, I like being able to squeeze my vagina against something. It brings a lot more touching and intensity into sex, plus I find I tend to get more focussed and involved the more active I am. Also, it still does all the good nerve stimulating that squeezing an empty vagina does.
For awhile I was confused about my tummy having reshaped itself since my boy and I moved in together after living in different cities all summer. It used to be smoothly rounded like a big egg, and now it is a tummy with a wee roll around the middle and a flatter lower abdomen. I've just realised this is probably because the exercise my vagina does has trimmed the tummy around it, while the rest of my tummy has stayed the same. So there seem to be tummy toning benefits to all of this too :)
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Vagina cycle.

I do spend time thinking about other monthly-ish events than menstruation, the whole female cycle gets its own section. All this hormone stuff used to make me pretty bored but the rest of it has always been of interest to me: what happens when, and all the weird moon-alignment and variations in problem-solving abilities. Lately I'm more into the hormones cause I actually figured out how they work and thus how the  birth control pill works.
___________________________________________________________________________________

Vaginal dryness.

Vaginal dryness seems right up there with vaginal odor on the list of things people say in feminine advertisements.
My vagina does not get dry very often, but when it does get dry it is uncomfortable.
The most common thing to induce dryness in my vagina is wearing tampons for several days in a row. They will absorb all my regular vaginal lubrication along with menstrual blood. I have never bought an anti-dryness product or applied one, but I have made efforts to enhance my natural lubrication by masturbating.
Multiple washings in a day, including baths, showers, swimming, etc. can also contribute to dryness in my vagina by washing all my secretions away. Water does not make my vagina moist, it dries it out.
_________________________________________________________________________________

lippy lips

I think "labia" in my head, not "lips," so that is what I'm using here. Lips seems rude to me for some reason. It reminds me of some guy going on about the beauty of pussies, in reference only to their ability to be fucked. BUT, that is me :)
The two sets of my labia are really not that related, despite having the same name. I'll start at the outside.
My outer labia/labia majora are quite plump, fatter than my thumbs, but they are flatter and smaller around the opening to my vagina where I sit on them. They begin joined somewhere just under my pubic bone and sort of fade into my bum at the other end. There is a crease where my bum starts though; you can tell.
The outside of these is covered in similar skin to the belly and leg skin next to them, as well as in fur. They are furry pretty much the whole way along them, but less densely in the inter-thigh regions than at the front.
The inside of the outside lips is pinker with purply veins under the skin in some places. It is moist. There are lines of bumps sort of like goosebumps along the bottom edge of each, where it blends into the rest of me.
My outer labia are quite smooth and sleek, with no real wrinkles or creases in them. They can seal together but mostly they are a little gappy, leaving an upside-down teardrop sort of shape at the top where they join, and then mostly staying open a bit all the way along if I have my legs together. I don't think they ever really close around the opening to my vagina. They don't hang though; they are snug to the rest of my vulva.
My minor/inside labia are quite thin, like a couple mm. They are pink like the rest of the inside things there, and moist. They start just below my clitoris where its little hood finishes, and join together again on the other side of my vagina.
They are wrinkly and wavy and reasonably flappy. The one on the right side is about twice as flappy and big as the other one, which used to cause me angst (see symmetry). The larger inside lip can poke out of the outside lips, but it is more comfortable if it stays tucked in so it doesn't rub on anything and get dry. The smaller lip mostly stays hidden.
The little hood around my clitoris is much like the minor labia. It is not a flappy and is, I think, symmetrical, but it is the same colour and thickness and whatnot.
Also, inside my inner labia is the opening of my vagina, which is not smooth and sleek looking, but wrinkly and fleshy. It sort of looks like it has more membrane/lip stuff around it.
___________________________________________________________________________________the Sensitive regions

This should be fairly straightforward. I think most people know this stuff anyway.
The most sensitive parts of my vaginal unit are the insides of my labia and all the moist parts of the vulva, with the clitoris obviously being a special, especially sensitive organ unto itself. The clitoris is capable of generating physical, sexual sensations, while the other parts are merely suggestive.
They can be ticklish, especially the outsides of my outer labia.
The actual opening of my vagina is also reasonably sensitive to touch, to temperature and to pressure. For about an inch (2-3cm) inside itself, it can feel all those things. I find that stretching is what it can feel the most.
In the depths of my vagina, I can really only feel pressure, and not very much. This means that I can use internal menstrual products without noticing them. It also means that while I sometimes get sore around the opening of my vagina, the inner reaches barely ever feel anything. Sometime I worry that some patch inside me could be rubbed raw and near to bleeding and I just haven't noticed it.
The insides do occasionally get bruised, which I can feel if something presses on them. I can feel the inner reaches being pushed into and stretched when something sizable like a penis or several fingers is inside me, but I can't often discern the location of the touching. Similarly I can feel good feelings and sometimes the need to urinate if my boy has put pressure on my g-spot, but I couldn't point to the spot itself. It's a funny set of nerves in there.
Finally, I think my cervix is somehow more sensitive than the rest of the inside parts. It is not ticklish or anything, but I can feel it being scraped against when I have a pap smear, and if it gets bumped by a menstrual product or during sex, it can actually hurt. I think it only hurts when it is displaced, but this can be a sharp pain. It goes away, but can make me wary of more poking.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

In the beginning.-Vaginal Blood.

As far as I know, menarche, or a girl's first menstrual period, is pronounced much like anarchy. Mine was when I was 14. I was rather relieved to finally be bleeding, as I was somewhat insecure about my late-blooming nature.
I did get teased once or twice about being 13 and not having bled, but by the time I was about 15 and most girls had gotten over the novelty of puberty, nobody got teased anymore. There was no retroactive teasing, as in "I remember that you were a late-bloomer." There was only present tense teasing, as in "at this moment, you are behind."
I got my period at home, which probably saved me some embarrassment and stress in the style of being afraid to come out of the school bathroom. The night before I remember noticing a small amount of brownish streaking on my panties, which I figured had something to do with not wiping properly.
The next morning I had a sore, tight back. No cramps. I noticed the blood when I went to the bathroom to pee. I was freaked out, despite knowing what it was. It had been built up to be a rather major event and I didn't know how to react so I quietly panicked. Then I changed out of my pjs and found a pad to wear. I figured I should tell my mum but I didn't want to. She guessed anyway cause I hugged her and she could feel my pulse racing. Then I started to cry.
Touching, huh? My mum did not give me a "now you're a woman" speech or anything, she just made sure I had some products. She actually just showed me where hers were. When my little sister got her period we each got our own stash of tampons and whatnot. My family is kind of anti-climactic.
During my first period I was also rather uncomfortable as it was heavier than anything since and lasted around a week. I did not have abdominal cramps, but I had cramps in my lower back.
After my first bout of bleeding, I didn't have another period for about 6 months. I wasn't worried about this as I knew this could happen; I just enjoyed the break.
I was embarrassed that my mum told my dad when I got my period. I didn't mind that he knew, I just minded that he knew when, and that he felt compelled to tease me about pms. Dads of the world, that isn't funny. I was also embarrassed that my sister knew when. I was more embarrassed when she got her period in grade 6 to my grade 9. This wore off.
I'm not sure why bleeding is such a status symbol for middle school girls.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

How often i bleed.

When I first started getting periods they were fairly irregular. After the first 6 month gap, I think they gradually shortened from about a 6 week cycle to about a 4 week cycle, and every once in awhile an annoying 3 week cycle. I think my cycle was fairly steady by the time I was 17.
I have never marked my periods on a calendar, or predicted them by counting days like they teach you to in school, partly because I was shy about writing it down, and partly because I have this laziness thing where I prefer to keep on top of my life purely by awareness and not by doing any work. I work out my cycle by paying attention to what my body is up to and the patterns it usually follows during a month of hormones.
My breasts usually get a little tender a few days before I bleed, and about halfway between periods at the time of ovulation. As well, I usually get pre-cramp discomfort as my uterus warms up for the big event. See also discharge. I think that monitoring my cycle this way is easier and more accurate than counting days. Also I like being able to tell what my body is up to.
If I am going on a trip I will count weeks to see if I should pack significant amounts of menstrual products, and figure on about 4 weeks between bleeding. I find that any major airplane flight will bring on a light period soon afterwards anyway. This is common enough that I got warned about it when I went on a Girl Guide trip to Switzerland.
Since being on the pill, I obviously have regular 28 day cycles. This isn't overly convenient to me, as I was lucky enough to rarely be caught by surprise before, but I can see the benefits this would have for some women.

_____________________________________________________________________________________
The blood itself

For starters, menstrual blood is heavier than water and will settle to the bottom of a toilet bowl. If a tampon or a bloody tissue is left in the toilet the blood will dissolve out but stay in a layer on the bottom. This layer always ends up a pretty dark red colour no matter what colour the blood started out as, as far as I can tell. Fascinating.
Menstrual blood smells mostly like other blood; metallic to me. I think the different smell that the vagina developes while bleeding is due more to the vagina than the blood itself, but I could be wrong. Of course, the blood and the vagina are mixed up with each other and each's smell gets on the other.
The colour and consistency of my menstrual blood varies, in a mostly predictable pattern during the course of my periods.
The first slow blood of each period, and the last spots at the end are both brownish and get mixed up in my regular vaginal secretions. The blood kind of gets trapped in the discharge and only marks up the surface of a tissue or the top of my underwear, rather than soaking into the cloth/paper the way other blood will. These marks conveniently come out quite easily. If this kind of blood gets wet it turns red again. I think it just takes awhile to find its way out of me and dehydrates a bit during its journey. Like scabs turn brown when they dry.
I can tell if I am actively bleeding or if there was just incidental blood in my vagina (from spotting or very lite bleeding) by the colour. Brown is slow and leftover, red is current.
The actively bleeding red blood varies from dark purple-red to bright red, with no pattern that I've noted (haven't paid too much attention-- I might have noticed more if I used pads and actually looked at my blood more). During very heavy days, globs of endometrium are frequently mixed into the liquid blood. I wouldn't call these "chunks," because mine have never been jagged or particularly solid. They are very wet, smooth and slimy and kind of similar to the semi-congeled blood you can blow out of your nose after a nosebleed has mostly stopped. I think the allusions to other kinds of blood are making this page more disgusting than it really has to be :)
These solid bits would range in size from thin strings under a cm long to blobs in the thumb knuckle size range. They could probably be bigger, this is just what I recall. They tend to fall apart into strings in the toilet water.
The majority of my blood is liquid and quite thin/runny. The globs and lumps have mainly been present on very heavy days. I don't remember ever noticing them sitting on pads, but then I really never use pads. My encounters with the blobs of bloody tissue have been with them sticking to the outsides of tampons, or having nestled on top of a tampon and disconcertingly come rushing out behind it when removed.

____________________________________________________________________________________

About blood messes

It took me awhile to perfect the art of having a tidy period. I still occasionally get spots on some underwear, but even this is very rare with my super-light birth control pill periods.
I have bled on all of the following things: underwear, sheets, mattress, pyjamas, pants, products, the floor, myself, a cloth hankerchief, a towel, my beloved boy.
I've never had an embarrassingly public blood mess, although I have bled through my clothes in public situations(in high school, at camp, while hiking, on an airplane). This has only happened a few times that I remember, and usually the blood spot would be in an inconspicuous area like between my thighs, rather than somewhere exposed like the seat of my pants. In such situations, I would just be careful about my sitting posture so as not to expose my secret to the world, and would often fall back on the classic sweater around the waist hiding mechanism.
I think all my public messes have been due to whatever product I was relying on giving out at an inopportune time, rather than the sudden onset of my period. When I start my period, I barely ever kick it off with a big gush of blood that could catch me by surprise.
These messes are complicated in situations where I don't have any replacement products, or am far from a bathroom. Usually I can make due with toilet paper until I find new products, but in smarmy public toilets this is sometimes more difficult. My parents lived in Indonesia for awhile, and many of the toilets were of the "washing hands after" rather than "having toilet paper" variety, besides which I didn't really trust my immunity to whatever the humidity and heat had allowed to spawn on the toilet paper (wiping seemed ok, but long-term contact was more uncomfortable). That is what led to the cloth hankerchief being sacrificed to bandage my uterus. I suppose a sock or something could also substitute, but it would be a bit of a bulge ;)
I used to worry quite a bit if I was caught product free for any amount of time, like if there were 5 minutes left in class before I could leave or if I hadn't quite arrived at some destination. After awhile, I noticed that even if I felt quite messy and wet and gushing, my vulvo/vaginal unit would hold a lot of blood to itself, in its various crevices and whatnot. It took several minutes to make a real mess of my underwear, and rather awhile after that for anything to appear on my pants, especially if I wasn't sitting or wearing something tight. Now my main motivation in avoiding messes is that I like my underwear and don't want to stain them, rather than my previous motivation of avoiding embarrassing moments.
I think the blood spots on pants might be kind of like the teen boys with erections; how nobody really notices even though it happens a lot. OK not quite, boys probably have more moments. Still, I've only ever witnessed two blood messes on girls, neither still wet, and both times I think I was the only one to notice. Once a girl sat down on the floor across from me and her skirt fluffed out and flashed stained panties, and once my roommate just had a spot on her pyjamas that she later cleaned up. (I've only noticed one inopportune erection that wasn't for me to see, and that was actually the class photographer and not a teen boy at all. That was... inopportune...)
In coping with period laundry, my first method was to keep all of it in a bucket of water in my closet until my mum would discover it and make me wash it. This was traumatic for me for some reason. I think it was a kind of shyness. I really didn't like being conspicuously busy in the laundry room with a bucket full of bloody underwear and a bottle of liquid laundry soap. The soaking prevented most stains though.
Eventually I got on a system of immediately rinsing out any spotted items in the bathroom sink. This suited me much better. Nearly all blood will come out right away if run under cold water while it is still wet. Then it can be put in with regular laundry. If you are particularly shy you can even lock the bathroom door while you are at it.
Over time I had fewer leakage problems, mainly as I got better at estimating how long a tampon or pad would last, and also as my periods got lighter.
Most of my messes have occurred at night, because I always try to not have to get up in the middle of the night and re-dress my bleeding self. I think I would have done better had I just accepted that sometimes this is an inevitability.
Another common mess is due to having sex during my period. Being that I tend to be a smut, this happens a fair bit. The main challenge is to dispose of whatever menstrual product I'm using, get back to bed, and then get motivated to leap up and go back to the bathroom to stop up the bleeding again afterwards before making a significant mess of the sheets. I find that having some dark coloured underwear to pull on for the trip back to the bathroom is an easy way to prevent dripping on my legs or the floor while I scamper around. I've still made a mess of sheets doing this. Sometimes there are secondary messes like bloody fingerprints if I am bleeding quite a bit at the time.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Cramps and soreness

Menstrual cramps really have nothing to do with my vagina, but I included them in here anyway to make my coverage of bleeding complete. Not to ignore my vagina completely, it does get tender and occasionally achy during the first couple days of my period. This can afflict either my actual vagina or various parts of my vulva. I can't decide whether I like the word vulva or the word vagina better. I don't like either of them very much. I think I prefer vulva. It reminds me of "evolve" and of "Volvo."
I didn't get cramps for several years after getting my period, but I would get an achy lower back, which I suppose was actually back cramps because it stayed tense and uncomfortable even under the influence of painkillers. When I was 16 I suddenly started getting intense cramps. I don't think that people who have never had menstrual cramps understand that they are much different than regular muscle cramps, or stomach cramps. I didn't even recognise them as cramps at first.
My cramps would be a serious, serious ache in the pit of my abdomen, nestled just above my pubic bone, and a feeling of heat. My belly would actually get warm to the touch. This pain would bring on all kinds of other symptoms including nausea, migraines, sweats, grey-green skin and fainting. Often my vagina itself would be achy if I had cramps.
They lasted anywhere up to about 10 hours.
Once I actually had cramps, none of the drugs we had around the house would help. Usually I would take 2 or 3 acetomenophen with codeine (generic Tylenol 1) and try to go to sleep. Also I found that pads were much more comfortable than anything internal if I had bad cramps. My mum, sister and a cousin of ours all started getting sick with cramps when we were around 16. I've missed classes and work with them and their associated headaches.
I've never had a prescription for cramps, but I know several people who have, commonly an anti-inflammatory and relaxant called Naproxen. My mum takes the same drug for migraines. It seems that a lot of girls I know get really bad cramps. At least seven or eight, not even considering people I've never talked about cramps with. An increase in menstrual cramps can be a sign of developing endometriosis (it was for my mum), but it can also happen as a girl progresses through puberty and starts producing more hormones and grows a bigger, stronger, meaner uterus.
I don't like to take a hot bath for cramps, because although it feels good to be in the tub, I almost always feel awful when I try to get out and am all hot and steamy. I get dizzy and sick and things. I prefer to stand in a scalding shower with the water on my tummy. A hot water bottle can be nice too. The best thing was when I had cramps and special boy had a raging fever, and I could use his bum to sooth my cramps. I'm not up on particular herbs that help cramps, but sometimes I have tea just for the warm liquid.
A friend of mine (the same friend who gets mentioned all over the site) said that she noticed an improvement when her naturopath recommended going off dairy for a few days before bleeding, and that her previously horrendous cramps went away completely when she went vegan (almost typed vegas). Further, if she eats dairy on occasion it brings the cramps back in some capacity. My mum the nutritionist said this might have something to do with consuming soy products instead, because they contain notable amounts of estrogen-like compounds that can counteract the effects of the huge hormone drop during your period (also during menopause), but my friend said she didn't really replace the dairy with soy.
Curious. I feel a need to note that anybody considering ditching dairy during cramp time should please make sure to have an alternate source of calcium. (Furthermore, I recently discovered that another friend made her previously horrendous cramps go away with calcium and magnesium supplements).
If I am feeling well enough to think of it, having an orgasm can often help to relax the uterus or to coordinate its contractions somehow so that cramps are lessened. All the endorphin chemicals released in the brain during orgasm help too. I have sometimes masturbated just for this reason. Therapeutic orgasms.
Until recently, I thought that being on the pill had made my cramps go away, except for the occasional outburst. The last couple of months have been sort of bad though, involving major fatigue, dizziness and tunnel vision as well as a symptom I had forgotten about until it happened: whole body tenderness. Mostly arms, face and feet, aside from all the vaginal and tummy parts.
I think that I may have mistaken the cause of my lessened cramping. The cramps going away coordinated nicely with my retiring from work and school, and hanging out at home making projects for 9 months, getting enough sleep, food, water, pee breaks, exercise, good loving and whatnot. The cramps magically came back the first time I had to be at work during my period, standing still for 2 hours at a time hunched over a cash register, not getting to pee every 20 minutes and lie down like my uterus wanted me to. Another contributing factor may have been the way that waking up for shifts at different times of the morning (when I usually take my daily pill) will throw my pill-timing off. Being late or inconsistent with even one pill in a month will reliably make cramps spike (as well as being less effective birth control and causing more side effects like headaches etc. I was reading the package insert).
So I don't know what the pill has done to my cramps. However, that same friend of mine said that going on the pill made her cramps worse. My mum was on the pill to treat her endometriosis and it helped her cramps, but that was probably because it was keeping her rogue endometrial lining in check. Also, one time my mum mentioned that her brief use of an intra-uterine device (IUD) was ended because it gave her horrible cramps ("like having a miscarriage every month").

_______________________________________________________________________________how Much i bleed

As it is, the only real status issues I have noticed with menstruation deal with how soon a girl menstruates and how late a woman keeps it up.
When I first started bleeding, it was quite heavy, and I would have to change my pad or tampon every couple of hours. The first day was the worst, and the bleeding would gradually taper off over the next 5 days or so, followed by 2 or 3 days of spotting. This was uncomfortable and a fairly major inconvenience. I looked forward to the mythical lightening of the period in my post-teenage years.
When I was 17 the bleeding started to slowly ease up, so that I would only bleed for 3 or 4 days. The first 2 would be only moderately heavy, and after that things would be nice and light. This was a satisfying development, despite the annoyance of spotting (bleeding intermittantly, which gets my hopes up that I'm all done, only to have them dashed repeatedly).
Since being on birth control pills, my periods are very wee. The smallest one lasted about an hour as far as I could tell. Usually I bleed lightly for a day or two and then stop, with no spotting, which is nice. For awhile my pills were too low dose and I would bleed for up to a week in anticipation of my actual period, which was very annoying but remedied by a slightly higher dose brand of pills.
I have noticed that the more regularly I take my pills, the lighter my periods are. If I am a few hours late with a pill one day, I end up with a noticeably heavier period. I can't imagine that the uterine lining manages to double in size during a 6 hour gap in synthetic hormones, but it certainly seems like it does :) Lesson: take your pills on time.
___________________________________________________________________________________my Vaginal discharge!

Discharge is right up there with invaginate on the list of words I don't like. But, I do for some reason know quite a bit about my average vaginal secretions. I think I started paying attention after hearing some described on the Sunday Night Sex Show on the radio but I don't remember.
When I was wee I don't recall noticing any discharge from my vagina. As far as I was concerned, the whole unit was for peeing. Around the time I first had classes in school about how girls become women, I started noticing minor clear, egg-whitish secretions now and then. I think this was mostly due to diligent observation, as the health nurse who had instructed us about menstruation had said that most girls started getting this kind of discharge before they got their first periods. As there was pretty much a big race to get your period, I was eager for warning signs. These were commonly referred to as "snot clots" by little ladies on the playground.
Now that I have a full-grown vagina, it has a fairly reliable monthly cycle of discharges. Actually, the vagina is lubricated by secretions made by the cervix. The only glands in the vagina are near the bottom and they might make lubrication for sex.
Right after I finish bleeding, my vagina lets loose a moderate amount of thickish, creamy, yellowish discharge. This tapers off to a slipperier white secretion that is slightly less heavy.
By the end of the week, around the time of ovulation, the discharge is clear and stretchy like raw egg-white. There gets to be quite a lot of this for about a week, but it gets more white and less clear. It is only raw egg-whitey for 2 or 3 days, and the stretchiness definitely peaks on ovulation day. This mid-cycle discharge smells the sexiest, says me. Sort of creamy, if I can say that without being a perv.
For 4 or 5 days before I start bleeding again, my vagina quits producing much of anything, and there is only a mild white secretion.
I'm on a system now where I use a reusable rubber cup that fits like a tampon when I bleed. Because it doesn't absorb anything, I've noticed what kind of discharge my vagina makes while I am on my period. Exciting for you! It is not surprisingly about half way between the week before (minimal and white) and the week after (moderate and yellowish). It is a minor amount of quite thick, creamy, off-white stuff. This increases in inverse proportion to the amount I am bleeding, I think.
The other kind of discharge that my vagina makes is a clear, slippery lubricant (but I assume a protein not an oil) when I get smutty ideas.
All of these will dry to a kind of greasy cake. I haven't paid attention to their various odours, but I might start.
Since I've been on the pill, there is less of all of the discharges. I used to keep track of them some so that I would know where I was at, rather than counting days. It was handy, since between the 4 days of no vaginal discharge and the onset of pre-cramps and sore breasts, my period rarely caught me by surprise even when I was irregular.
Lately it is hard to keep track of what kind of discharge I've got going on because it is usually diluted and mixed up with smut from me and the boy. This was not a problem when I was using condoms. Recently I was too sick to be up for much seduction, and my vagina seemed to still be making the recognizable patterns of secretions. Clever vagina. Hormones are neat.
______________________________________________________________________________

Vagina Flora

Most people are aware that the vagina has a natural population of various microorganisms, the same way the rest of our bodies do. (Random fact from your hostess the microbiology student: there are about 13 trillion cells in the human body, while there are about 14 trillion bacterial cells living on the skin alone, as a normal, healthy population. That doesn't include fungi. Fully 10% or something of dry body mass is bacteria-- that is what, 10-20 pounds of germs?)
Anyhow, the only bacterial species native to the vagina that I can name is Lactobacillus vaginalis. Other lactobacilli also inhabit the vagina. These are lactic-acid producing bacteria, and are largely responsible for the acidic pH in the vagina. Candida albicans is the yeast that causes yeast infections, but it can live peacefully in the vagina as well. My last pelvic exam indicated that there was Candida in me, and I have never had a yeast infection.
Among other things, the populations of these microbes provide competition to prevent other random pathogens from setting up home in the vagina. This is a very efficient way of staying free of harmful infections. Antibiotics and other factors can reduce the populations of friendly flora in the vagina, providing opportunities for particular microorganisms to reproduce and get out of balance. This is a common cause of yeast infections.
I've heard eating yogurt recommended to women fighting yeast infections. Presumably this is to help re-establish the normal bacterial populations (active yogurt contains both Lactobacillus and Acidophilus species). I don't really see how eating these bacteria would help them get to the vagina, but then by most logic they shouldn't even be able to get past stomach acid into the intestines, which they do.
I do know that various microorganisms can be spread from the bowel to the vagina, given the lovely moist crevice that joins the anus and the mouth of the vagina. This is apparently another way that yeast infections can be started (and a possible roundabout way for yogurt bacteria to finally get to the vagina? I hope not). When tampon manufacturers were first pushing their products in the US in the 30s, they claimed that pads promoted the transfer of yeast and other things between the anus and the vagina. I don't know how substantiated that is, but some gynecologists do recommend that patients prone to yeast infections stay away from brands of pads with plastic "topsheets" (ie: Always), which are more likely to get sweaty and wet. I do know that grooming habits are important: only wipe front to back, including when changing babies.

____________________________________________________________________________________all About my cervix

Despite not liking many words associated with my vagina, I do like the word cervix. I think it is partly the X.
I have never seen my cervix, but I would like to. A happy porn star turned happy lesbian feminist porn star that I like, named Annie Sprinkle used to do a live show called Post Porn Modernist. It included a unit called Public Cervix Announcement, in which she would manipulate a speculum on stage and invite members of the audience to come see her cervix.
I am curious about my cervix. It seems to have all kinds of cool functions. It secretes mucus to keep sperm out of my uterus, or to store them for later use if I am about to ovulate. It will develop a plug to hold the baby in if I get pregnant. It can be changed by hormones. It can dilate and contract. It can possibly get cancer, so I get tests done on it. Its secretions lubricate my whole vagina.
But I have only a vague idea what it looks like. From every diagram I have seen of the female reproductive system, the cervix appears to be where the uterus is preparing to kiss whatever finds its way up there. A pursing of the uterus. There are a lot of lips associated with my vagina. I think cervixes can be more correctly assumed to look like strong pink donuts with very small donut holes. (Hooray for food analogies!)
I assume that the cervix is made of muscles the way the uterus and vagina are, and that it also has some other components to do with the mucus secretion and whatnot. But that is all I know. I don't even know what colour it is, although I assume it is some kind of pink.
Maybe next time my doctor is examining my cervix I will ask what it looks like. That should make for a splendid conversation. I don't think I've ever had a well-socialised doctor, who could carry on a social conversation, especially about a cervix.
___________________________________________________________________________________

Me and my arousal.

Mechanisms of arousal are always ignored by sex education. A friend of mine pointed this out while we were colouring schematic diagrams of dissected penises in grade 10 or 11.
The sex ed classes that I had summed male sexuality up in two topics: embarrassing occasions of involuntary erection, and the biological process of ejaculation (glands, muscle spasms). Female sexuality was comprised of genital diagrams that included "anus," presumably to make sure that everyone knew the vagina was indeed a separate opening, and of various studies of menstruation, relying heavily on two-dimensional pictures of the uterus, which looked mostly like a cow’s head with fallopian tubes for ears and horns.
I think of arousal in terms of particular feelings that I recognize in myself, of the sensual/sexual variety. Sometimes these will include a desire to touch somebody and/or be naked with them, and sometimes they are all unfocussed and just feelings of pleasure and non-fulfillment. There is a description of the general physical sensations as part of the orgasm description.
Being aroused can also make me entirely more sensitive. I’ll end up enjoying the pressure of my feet on the floor when I walk, the feeling of my tongue in my mouth, drafts moving my hair, vibrations from music, and especially being in contact with whoever my desires are focussed on (sounds like a certain drug, huh?). A lot of the time I get a fluttery stomach too.
As expected, being aroused will tend to make my vagina slippery and wet. I don't usually feel this gushing out of me; usually what I notice is that I am slippery and that my various vulval components slide past each other when I move, or that my underwear are cold when they touch me.
My clitoris swells up and turns redder when I am aroused, but I never really notice this. I only know this because I have checked specifically to see if it looked different when I was excited. It doesn't feel different except that I am aware of it.
Also, I barely ever say aroused, and never "turned on" or "horny." Mostly I say "want," as in "I want you," etc. Sometimes I say excited. Sometimes I say randy, mostly as a rhyme with panties, and mostly as a joke.
I don’t know what I think about the idea that female arousal is less physically driven and more romance-related, in some kind of contrast to male arousal. True, even if I am all mentally excited to have sex, I sometimes end up totally not aroused during the act even though I still enjoy it and it feels good. This barely ever happens during oral sex, which is generally more likely to directly involve my clitoris.
I kind of think the mental-only female arousal concept arises from the fact that regular hetero sex doesn’t necessarily involve female phallic tissue. In this context, there isn’t the same opportunity for physical arousal. For sure, I have to be paying some kind of attention to have an orgasm, and the more I focus the more I can work myself up, but this is hardly a revelation unique to female sexuality. If a guy is all tired or drunk or otherwise distracted, he won’t necessarily come either, especially if you are humping some part of his body that barely has any nerve endings.
I've never noted whether I am more often or more easily aroused by mental or physical suggestions. I'm sure that the two together are more potent (clever me).
I don't buy the idea that guys have a more demanding sex drive than ladies. When we were retired, I was always the one chasing my boy into bed. Now that I'm working more than him, he does most of the seducing. I think it depends on who has more time on their hands :) In any case I think it varies.
I don't know what I think of studies that pin testosterone as the sex drive/arousal hormone. Mainly I have come across this research quoted by two groups: Christian educators who are rationalizing why female masturbation is evil and male masturbation is not (girls just don't have the same drive, apparently), and marginally trained folks who are into evolutionary gender differences (also people like Anne Landers who just want to use science to confirm traditional wisdom).
Most things I have read acknowledge that several hormones have influence, as well as a lot of non-hormonal factors. Somewhere I was reading about a non-androgen hormone that appeared to be very involved in sex drive and orgasm, in general pleasure from touching, and also in seizures. I will go get that book again and find the name of the hormone. There was a weird correlation with it in that it concentrated in areas with fatty tissues, such as breasts, vulvas and pubic mounds, to produce extra sexual sensitivity in these areas. Nutty, I thought. It was a weird shape-shifter hormone too, that had slightly different forms in the blood, in the brain, in fat, and in the skin. Anyhow, should just get the book at the library and state actual research.
Some things that can make me think smutty thoughts are: the presence, voice, smell, attention, appearance, and concept of my beloved, and previously whoever else I was attracted to; random suggestions as from books and pictures, in the right context; having gone several days with no sexual gratification. Also, eating something sweet and fleshy (mangos, cherries, grapes, any kind of berry and most melons); being warm; having cold water trickle on me (as when the shower goes suddenly cold) and run through my hair; panting due to exertion; clean sheets, soft bed; being in a non-laying down position while cuddling my beloved (corners of couches, standing against wall/counter...); being well-fed; feeling accomplished; wearing foxy clothes.
The single most reliable thing that makes me aroused is being happy. Being aroused is nearly a symptom of my being happy. If I am very happy, I am very easily aroused and occasionally just walk around aroused with no actual focus for it except the sensation itself. I remember my entire grade 11 year as being like that. If I am sad, I nearly never get very aroused except by myself, even with prolonged, direct, skilled clitoral stimulation.
It usually works better for me to be aroused before attempting to go to bed than to try to get me aroused once I'm there. If I find myself in bed being pampered and don't have an already existing desire to get it on, I will almost certainly want to go to sleep, even if I mentally think I shouldn't. It is kind of funny and has caused a few romantic plans to backfire. For some reason the make-out location most likely to get me in a smutty mood is the kitchen. Kitchen. I don't know why, but it's quite reliable. Perhaps because the counters are waist height and leaning on them presents your pelvis to your companions?
Some things that can contribute to me being passive and unresponsive to smutty suggestions are: more than anything else, being sad or otherwise distressed; having not had very exciting orgasms lately, which is too bad because the two things feed off each other and both get worse; being very tired, although this does not always impede things; being sore, in pain, sick, uncomfortable, itchy, crampy or what have you; having had all kinds of orgasms lately and not feeling a driving need to have more. I also find that having my leisure time restricted by a job makes me not want to have sex. I think it can be the same for my boy. We've both been known to say "I feel like I have to get something done today before we go to bed."
My ability to be aroused is about the same thing as my sex drive.
____________________________________________________________________________________all About wet spots

Apparently the biological term used by sexologists to describe semen leaking back out of the vagina after unprotected hetero sex is flowback. (I was watching sex week on the Discovery channel.) I am unclear as to whether this is a verb or a noun. Does flowback get on the sheets, or does smut flowback onto the sheets? Either way, I do not ever use this term :)
I usually describe sex-related fluids as smut. Thus, anything flowing back out of my vagina is smut to me. I can become smutty or covered in smut, get smut on the sheets, etc. If smut gets on the sheets I usually call it a wet spot, but sometimes I still call it smut. I use the words smut and unit to describe most sexual things.
Because neither sex with latex nor oral sex on me produce anything in the way of flowback or wet spots, I have always maintained that most of the flowback fluid is semen. However, as being aroused can result in my vagina producing enough fluid to make a wet spot on my underwear, it would make sense that some of the flowback fluid is from me. It smells like semen, but I don't think that female sex lubrication smells like very much.
To add to the not-as-yet cross-referenced scientific info about my vagina, flowback is supposed to result partly due to the physical force of gravity acting on fluids in the vagina, and partly due to the mass death of sperm encountering the acid pH and immune response of the vagina. Our bodies make much stronger immune responses to foreign cells of our own species than to cells of other species. There is work being done on a system of vaccination against sperm antigens that would make a woman permanently unimpregnable by her partner. Taking immunology classes is fun.
I don't know the proportion of dead to live sperm in human flowback. There is some relation between this figure and the proportion of sperm which are poor swimmers, deformed, or otherwise weak. Humans have more virile sperm than gorillas, but less virile sperm than chimpanzees. This is likely due to varying competitive forces: male gorillas have sexual monopolies over their harems, chimpanzees mate with everyone, and humans are in the middle-- moderately polygamous. That had very little to do with my vagina but I thought it was interesting.
Further scientific trivia: if a woman has an orgasm within a few minutes before or after being ejaculated into, there is significantly less flowback. There is a theory about the evolutionary purpose of the female orgasm charmingly known as the "upsuck theory" that relates to this. (The other main theory on the topic is referred to as the "poleaxe theory" because it relates to the ability of orgasms to sedate a woman, so "upsuck" isn't all alone in the land of poor taste.)
The flowback fluid that I encounter ranges from clear to creamy coloured, sometimes clear with creamy bits, and is slimy and mucoid. It dries to white streaks, or to yellow stains if it is absorbed. If I am bleeding the blood will sometimes mix in to produce pink or orangish colours, and sometimes it will just swirl through without dissolving.
Usually the mixed fluids flow out of my vagina after my partner and I disengage and separate. If we don't stop and separate right after he ejaculates, some smut will often find its way out before we are through. If we stop but don't separate right away, the fluid will usually stay inside until we do part, at which point I am often reminded of images of corks.
Whenever it manages to flow out of my vagina, the smut usually gets into most of the crevices of my vulva and between the cheeks of my bum. Depending how much I move around, it will also get out onto my upper thighs. It does not always get on the sheets, especially if I am lying on my side after sex and the smut can't flow either way along the fairly continuous front to back bum/vulval crevice. If I sit up I can make sizable wet spots. Sometimes I sit on my beloved afterwards and get smut in his bellybutton or on his bum (to tease, not to be sexy). Sometimes we have smut fights.
Wet spots on the sheets are not pleasant to sleep in unless they grow right under me and stay warm so that I don't notice. Wet spots form most often in the middle of the bed, and my boy and I have a system of taking turns keeping them warm while each other gets up to pee or get a drink if we have to come back to bed to sleep. That way, no one has to lie in a clammy wet spot. If we make a wet spot in the middle of the day, we try to leave the covers off to let the spot dry. This measure mostly applies if the sheets are sweaty as well.
If I am trying not to make a wet spot on something (ie: couch, kitchen counter) I get up right after sex and pull on some underwear. This will soak the underwear. Actually, if I have to get dressed after sex for some reason and haven't let sufficient smut find its way out of my vagina, I have to be careful not to let fluids soak through my pants. I try not to sit anywhere until I've had a chance to go to the bathroom and wipe up a bit with toilet paper. Post-coital fluids can be fairly easily gotten rid of with a concerted bearing-down effort into tissue or the toilet. Incidentally, smut does not mix well with water, and will make aquatic spider web patterns in the toilet bowl.
Occasionally, flowback can be rather more active and dramatic. If for some reason air has been forced into my vagina during sex (see noises), various sex fluids can be expelled afterwards in a bit of a burp, instead of simply flowing. This doesn't always happen immediately, or at all. It is kind of funny when it does. Doing the bicycle right after making it is nearly guaranteed to produce this effect (if you are so inclined).
__________________________________________________________________________________

Vagina Masturbation

Female masturbation seems to intrigue a lot of people, either because they can’t figure out how common it is, or how girls do it at all. Or, of course, for voyeuristic reasons, as has been the case with most of the email anticipating this page.
I don’t really know what proportion of girls masturbate, or how often, but I do it. Sometimes a lot, sometimes not as much. Not very much lately, because I live with my beloved boy and have sex almost every day, but when one of us goes somewhere for any length of time, I masturbate some.
There are lots of reasons that I have masturbated. Most often just because I wanted to, but also occasionally to get to sleep, or to help cramps or a headache, and sometimes to help get aroused, in which case I wouldn’t follow through to orgasm. I didn’t ever masturbate to relax before a date or a party.
The first time I masturbated was in grade 8. The idea hadn’t occurred to me until it was discussed in sex education class. The class convinced me that it wasn’t wrong or unhealthy, but I knew that my dork status would be elevated to perverted dork if anyone ever had reason to suspect my habits.
Until about grade 10, I don’t remember having any kind of discussion about masturbation with any of my friends, except in the context of dirty jokes. For the rest of high school, the most myself or my girl friends would say was impersonal and kind of political. Agreeing that masturbation by girls in general should be accepted, the way it was for boys. Stating that it was silly that a masturbating boy was deemed healthy while a masturbating girl should be taken to the doctor. I don’t remember guys getting in on the discussion.
That was all more applicable in a small, redneck town such as we lived in. Some girl once made a comment in health class to the effect that she couldn’t be expected to know what her vagina looked like because she would never, ever look at it. Only my friend and myself were taken aback.
Until I was about 20, I never discussed or referred to masturbation, so I didn't develop any other names for it. I knew various names but didn’t use them. I don’t remember telling a lot of masturbation jokes, and I’m pretty sure I never accused anybody of it or made fun of them for it. Currently, I prefer to refer to my own masturbation as either "availing myself of myself," or as, umm... beating my meat (when I am being silly).
The only girl I have ever witnessed masturbating was at a sleepover in grade nine, when I woke up early. It was nothing graphic (she was still laying in bed), I could just tell what she was doing. All I thought was that she was kind of dumb for not realizing I was awake, as I presumed she didn’t want me to see.
She was proceeding in about the same way I would, as far as I could tell, and the existence of radically different methods didn’t occur to me until like last year, when I was reading a lamely-executed masturbation resource page for entertainment.
What I have always done is (voyeurs get ready but know that I probably wouldn’t get you off on purpose) rub two or three fingertips between the outer labia of my vulva, just above my clitoris. This pulls the skin of the clitoral hood against the erectile nub itself and feels good. I find my clitoris too sensitive to touch directly. I don’t move my fingers in circles or anything, just up and down, fairly quickly. I've never seen another girl masturbate, or had a girl graphically guide me in touching her, so I can't vouch for anyone else's technique.
If I am not concerned about mess on my fingers, I’ll get them slippery with the wetness my vagina makes. If I am especially concerned about mess or smell, I’ll rub through my underwear or clothes. I used to like my long underwear for the waffle texture.
Sometimes I would also insert things in my vagina-- mostly just my own fingers but occasionally small objects, commonly bottles of lotion or bath oil. Also, in high school, if I had somehow mustered up the courage to buy a sexy bra on a shopping trip with my mum, I might put it on while I masturbated. I eventually stopped doing that, maybe after I got used to the idea that I could occasionally be sexy.
The first few times I masturbated, I was too overwhelmed with the discovery of orgasms to fantasize at all. Since then, I’ve fantasized more often than not. Sometimes the masturbating would arise out of the fantasizing, and sometimes I would be masturbating just because I was randomly aroused and end up fantasizing.
The object of my fantasies was more likely to be a specific person if I was fantasizing before I started touching myself. The popular belief seems to be that girls always masturbate about a specific person, with a face etc., but I have had fantasy lovers with no identity. Sometimes my smutty thoughts would just be about an act, not about a particular person, or about a feeling that I didn't put into specific images or words. Sometimes the mental fantasy was more about a sensation or idea than a sex act or person. Oooh, arty me I masturbate about colours and air. Anyway. If I had a serious crush object then they would be the default fantasy lover.
For a couple of years I meditated almost every day in some form or another, and would sometimes focus on sexual energy and get myself all riled up with breathing exercises and the beauty of nature and the universe and end up masturbating because I couldn’t achieve orgasm without touching (this is yet another link to the muscles page for the masturbation tie-in).
Mostly I masturbated in bed before I went to sleep, but also often in the bath or shower, and sometimes other places (watching tv, camping) if the urge struck me. I don’t remember masturbating anywhere very exciting or public.
When I first started, I masturbated quite a lot, and then would try to cut down, and not succeed, and then forget for awhile and slow down, and then masturbate a lot again, etc etc. Usually the more I did it the more I wanted to. Every once in awhile I would make myself sore with rubbing and have to give it a rest for a couple of days. This pace tapered off as I got older, but I would still have bouts of frequent masturbation.
Having a regular sex life does not make me stop masturbating, although I think it does reduce the frequency a bit. Right now I reckon I take myself to bed (or wherever) once a week or so (?have not paid much attention).
____________________________________________________________________________________

The mound of my womanhood

I actually had a request to write something about my "Mound of Venus," and another suggestion to discuss my mons pubis. It is a happy vagina geek when people actually want her to write.
So, I refer to the mound in question as my mound of womanhood, mostly in jest. When being more serious, I say simply "mound." The structure being referred to is the, well, mound, that I have on the front of my body, at the bottom of my belly, about where my pubic hair begins.
Underneath it is a bone apparently called my pubic bone. I can feel most of this bone like a horizontal ring between my legs if I push around in the various soft tissues. Pushing into my belly I can find the top edge of the bone and sometimes even hook a finger behind it (feels fine to prod mine, but it is uncomfortable to push on my boy's. hmm). Then it is solid down to near the front of the opening of my vagina. I think my hip bones have a lot to do with the sides and back of the ring of bone. Incidentally these bones seem further back from the sides and back of the vaginal opening than the front. I don't know how big the whole ring is. Big enough to fit a baby's head through I would imagine. The ring is the limiting factor in baby head size.
As well as having the bone jut out between my upper thigh/lower hip region a bit, there is a nice cushioning of flesh over it. It feels firm enough to have muscle on it, and then it has the mound of womanflesh that separates into the lips of my vulva. This flesh feels about like lips or face cheeks. Firm but squishable. This is the texture/consistency/sensation(?) I think of as "flesh," rather than "muscle" or "fat" or whatever.
This thing is about as wide as four fingers, or a palm. If I lay my fingers along the creases of my thighs, there is a crevice to fit a finger between leg and mound.
I usually extend the definition of my mound to include the fleshy mound that is the rest of my vulva, because it can all be cupped together in a hand as one mound.
I like the moundness of it immensely now, although it used to actually cause me some embarrassment. I would sometimes notice it when wearing a swimsuit and fear that people would think it was wrong somehow for a girl to have a bump there. It isn't a small, defined bump, but it is definitely a bulkiness. I thought bulkiness was only for boys.
But, currently I like the mound for its fleshiness and its ability to be gripped. A cunt can be gripped in a number of ways but I think my favorite (under most circumstances) is to have mine cupped or squeezed as a mound. It's like hugging it :)
I used to sometimes sleep on my front, with the heel of one hand settled onton the top of the pubic bone, with my palm cupping the mound. This evolved out of a need to cushion my breasts from the weight of my body when they were tender cause of hormones, but worked out to be comfy for everybody. I got kind of self conscious about this posture when I would sleep in the company of others, and often would just sleep on my side. Come to think of it, I sleep on my side now. I should try out the old system tonite.

_________________________________________________________________________________

My clitoris

I love my clitoris. I just appreciate its clitoral nature. There aren't really any qualities that I am aware of that make a clitoris better or worse. They are not supposed to be a certain colour or size or sensitivity; they are just good. I like that.
I say clitoris like "KLIT-o-riss," although I know people who say "kli-TOR-iss." My way seems easier to say (to me) but I don't know whether either way is the decided right way to pronounce the word.
I mostly use the whole word, but sometimes say "clit," especially when referring to piercings. "Clit" seems hipper, but it is hard to sound uptight when willing to refer to a clitoris in the first place. I think I just like the "lit" syllable, despite the fact that with the exception of lit itself, most -lit words have weird sexual connotations (clit, slit, split...).
Lately I've been finding out all kinds of clitoral anatomy, just by accident. Junior high school sex education taught me where my clitoris was (the top structure between my labia, with a little hood of pink skin over it), but only made reference to it being a small, highly sensitive nub of flesh.
While reading about masturbation using vaginal muscles in an old Germaine Greer article in The Madwoman's Underclothes, I discovered that the clitoris has an extensive internal shaft that is something like 7cm (about 3 inches) long. More recently, while flipping through a book on g-spots, I found a diagram showing this internal part of the clitoris as forked. Forked! Apparently it straddles the urethral sponge tissue, which swells during arousal.
Forked!
This forking makes sense if you think of the general female genital area, which has a split down the middle. Where men have a single scrotum with a seam down the middle, femmes have two labia, and a a split shaft for the clitoris, although the glans or head is still single.
As far as I know, the whole clitoris is erectile, and swells up when it is aroused. I very much like the fact that my clitoris has a head and a tiny little (external) shaft. I can barely see my wee shaft, even with the hood pulled back out of the way, but it can be felt under the skin when it is excited and swollen up.
The head of my clitoris apparently has as many nerve endings as the head of a penis. Both of these organs develop from the same bud of tissue in embryos. The glans tissue becomes either a glans clitoris or a glans penis. I don't know where I pick up all these tidbits about embryonic stem tissue.
I find that touching my clitoris directly is uncomfortable and makes me cringe. It is too sensitive, what with all the nerves. It is better to rub it through its little hood, through my labia or some other cushioning, or to simply move the tissue around it and let it get touched that way. Also, I find that stimulating the base of it (the shaft!) can be more pleasant than going for the head. Of course, it is so compact that these distinctions are hard to make. Also I think that touching any part of the clitoris tends to put something in contact with the rest of the organ, whether it is the object doing the touching or whether it is skin that got caught up in the adventure.
Stimulating my clitoris the right way can make me aroused, but I think it is easier to be good to my clitoris when I am already aroused because of some other activity. Any kind of rubbing or poking at my clitoris with a dry object like a finger will likely be uncomfortable. It is better to get things wet or let them wet themselves before undertaking any manual stimulation. Also, my clitoris doesn't need to be touched to become erect and excited, although it generally has to be stimulated somehow for me to have an orgasm.
I don't think too much about my clitoris; I mostly just appreciate it along with the rest of my vagina. I probably mention it more often than the other parts, because it is the only part I tend to anthropomorphisize (it's the little shaft, it makes it seem like a peg person). I have never wanted to change anything about my clitoris, or had any concept of how it related to other clitorises. It seems like they are too small to have any really noticeably variation, but I don't know for sure.
This whole size issue only occurred to me as I was reading a personal account of a gender reassignment surgery where the author, Paula, "requested a large clitoris." I had never thought about the size of a clitoris being important, but then I realised that if you were making a clit out of the relatively less sensitive glans of a penis, you might want to conserve as many nerves as possible. Then I got all fascinated with making vaginas out of penis flesh, and which parts would get made into what. It's the embryonic stem tissue all over again!
___________________________________________________________________________________

All about my sex drive

I think of my sex drive as referring both to how often I want to have sex or an orgasm, and how intensely I want to. Basically, this describes how often and how much I get sexually aroused.
The usual figure I've come across for the scientifically determined average desired frequency of sex is once every 3 days. Most people realise that this varies by person, and generally with age, possibly gender, and with the length of time you've been with the same partner (monogamy can lead to less sex, but also better sex).
When I started masturbating, I think it was mostly more often than once every 3 days. In relationships, I have more urgent desires than that statistic or my solo libido. The beloved boy, who I live with right now, is the only person I've been with long enough to have the possibility of getting bored. We still have crazy sex, which is partly because we are both smuts and crazy for each other, and probably partly because we are only 21. I think it would be hilarious to be 85 and have sex every day. Besides grossing out the kids and neighbours, it would just be good.
I find that my intellectual desire to get it on often outpaces what my body can physically keep up with. Sometimes I will think it would be a good idea to have sex, but it will be hard to get me actually aroused. Sometimes I just end up sore from having sex too frequently.
The most intense my libido has ever been was when I moved to a job in a different city than my boy for 4 months. We only saw each other on the weekends, and tended to stay in bed most of the day and not get any sleep. Occasionally he would come for a surprise visit in the middle of the week and I'd end up late for work, or missing it all together. I think the most we had sex was 7 times in one day, or 5 times in 3 hours.
Now that we are retired and see each other all day, every day and have lived together for over a year (that makes us spouses on next year's income tax, which is both fun and gross), we have mellowed out to once or twice a day, which is still rather a lot. I like it.
I think what has happened is that this has become our regular sex life, so that it doesn't seem like a lot to keep up. If we miss a day, or if one of us is away for awhile, both our desires go up. If we stay in bed all day, the next day will usually be chaste until nighttime.
Recently, I had a serious slump in libido. I'm pretty sure this was due to a prolonged mopey mood I was in. This was a big pain in the ass. Special boy still wanted to go to bed as often as usual, but didn't want to harrass me if I wasn't in the mood. I wasn't, but didn't want him to be deprived of sex and didn't want him to think I suddenly wasn't attracted to him.
I ended up having sex when I was barely aroused because I couldn't/didn't get any more excited, and when I did manage to have orgasms they tended to not be very dramatic. I tried masturbating to see if they'd be better, but they weren't. I was a bit surprised. I had never been incapable of having good orgasms before.
What finally fixed this was, I think, fixing the mopey mood. Also though, since the lame orgasms were contributing to the bad mood, I had to fix them. Even once I got my sex drive back, I kept having crummy orgasms for awhile and it would depress my libido again. Arrgh!
Eventually, I decided that I would just masturbate all the time (uhh...yeah). The idea was that this would encourage my sex drive along, because in the past I'd found that the more often I had orgasms, the more often I wanted to. I think it kind of worked, at least so that I could start having better orgasms during sex, and so that feelings of slight arousal could blossom into full-on loin fires.
Yet another therapeutic use of masturbation. I start to feel silly sometimes, with how often I reply to email from people who've been reading this site, and tell them that the answer to their troubles might be to masturbate. I used to make fun of how often that was the brilliant advice given by sex therapists in newspaper columns or on radio shows. It's true though-- it fixes almost everything!

________________________________________________________________________________

My smutty dreams

I can think of two kinds of sex dreams that I have.
The first is the usual kind, where sometimes when I am asleep and dreaming the dream is sexy or I have sex with someone. Everyone I have ever talked to about this has dreamt about sex, and no one I have ever talked to has ostracized me in any way for having or not having sex dreams. When I was in junior high, I was once describing a romantic dream and felt the need to give a "but I didn't dream that I had sex with him" disclaimer, and my friend immediately replied, "Don't worry; I have sex in my dreams all the time. One time I had sex with Jesus." This made me feel very secure.
I myself can't ever remember having dream sex with an iconic being, but there has been a fair cast of characters, covering the full rainbow of gender, personality, imaginariness, and real-life relationship. I'm not really sure whether this dream lover is most often someone I am actually attracted to, or whether it is equally likely to be a random aquaintance or a fully made-up person.
I can't remember ever having felt strange the morning after having a smutty dream about someone who was technically inappropriate, like my neighbour or the postman or my mom or whatever. I don't feel dirty or take responsibility for my dreams. I don't think I control them; I think they just happen. Also, I don't think the gender of the dream lover is really a result of what gender I am attracted to. I do find though that sometimes a sexy dream involving a particular concept like lesbians or being half dressed will make me desirous of things of that nature for a day or two.
For the sake of completeness, some notable dream people I can remember having smutty dreams about: an imaginary black disco vixen in an orange halter-suit; my father, who had a fat, manly but hairless vulva in the dream; my special boy; an imaginary ski instructor with freckles and black hair; a friend of mine in a reptilian incarnation (very focussed on her imaginary round, smooth reptile belly which was both snake-ish and furred); my special boy and other imaginary people at the same time; an imaginary woman who had an oyster instead of a vulva, which was pearlescent, mostly white with dark pink accents, and very tidy and plastic-looking; etc etc...
I don't know anything of dream interpretation, and have never been terribly curious about what my smutty dreams have to say about me (in real life I don't have a fetish for reptiles, although I do like my belly).
One thing I was recently discussing with a female friend was the fact that we never have orgasms in our sleep, despite having massive smutty dreams in which we get hugely aroused and can feel it. Both of us will always either wake up or be interrupted in dream land (dream turns into a chase dream or whatever). Upon waking up, both of us would expect to still be all excited and on the verge of orgasm and attempt to masturbate but would find that we weren't actually physically aroused, we were just dreaming that we were (much like when you wake up crying but are just making wimpering noises). We both thought this was sort of unfortunate, given the way that guys can wake up having spilled their lust all over the sheets.
I can remember having been frustrated at waking up like this, and trying to get back to sleep to finish things but not ever being able to get aroused in reality without starting from scratch, which is hard when you are still mostly asleep and can't concentrate. Any females who have had femme wet dreams, please do write and give me hope (ok, hope confirmed! Now please send tips?).
The second kind of sex dream I have is not really a dream, but more of a hallucination. Often, when I am fully awake and having sex, I involuntarily get the strong impression of a scene, or of this sex being set somewhere specific, such as a German ski lodge or a garden made of candy. Strange, I think. When I close my eyes I will see bits of this place, not distinctly-- just in the background and not with specific details. It is more like I will have the visual sensation of being in a place, as opposed to actually seeing a place.
Much like a dream, I don't always remember these things afterwards. When I do, I usually want to tell about it, and it ends up sounding much like a trip story because of the way the setting is conceptual and not purely visual.
At first I figured this was just happening when I had sleepy sex and that I was half-dreaming when I closed my eyes, but it actually happens pretty much all the time. Sometimes even when I am not closing my eyes or in any kind of rhythmic half-trance. I have no idea what determines the setting; it barely ever repeats and isn't usually attributable to something I've seen or read about recently. They usually are familiar enough for me to have a generic name for each place (a subway, a pastel cowboy desert, Tron, etc). The scene never extends to who I'm making it with (I don't get the impression I'm having sex with a different person), but sometimes I will get an idea like "We are both astronauts" as an extrapolation of the setting. I've only ever discussed this with special boy, and we both think it is kind of hilarious, but he doesn't recall it ever happening to him.
I would like it very much if this had something to do with the way orgasms alter your brain chemistry (maybe being excited gives me a cool kind of seizure-- oooh), but I have no idea.
____________________________________________________________________________________

Sex Location

I myself am a person who enjoys having sex just about anywhere, and am pleased that I have seduced and been seduced in a fair variety of environments. However, I really don't think that where a person does or does not have sex makes them less or more sexy, passionate or anything else.
I worry sometimes that my tendency to keep track of where and how many places (43) I have made it is a lame insecure way to maintain sexual confidence, but I can also honestly say that I genuinely want do get inspired by different places.
Following are some general kinds of places I have had sex, with comments (comments are not quite finished yet, as you'll notice further down the page). There is more info coming, too (page was huge so posted it in fetal stage).
beds, bedrooms, guest rooms
Beds are among the comfier places to get it on, being soft, supportive and appropriately sized. I don't have a real preference between high beds or floor-level beds, but I do find myself more tactilely pleased by beds that are clean, soft, sturdy and quiet. Bouncy beds can be fun.
I have had sex in my own bedrooms and in the bedrooms of lovers, and on occasion in guest bedrooms where I was staying as part of a couple, but never in another person's bed (parents', friend's, stranger's). Something in me would consider that to be quite rude, I think because I wouldn't like to think of other people having sex in my bed. My bed is for me to have sex in.
I was reluctant to have sex in the guest room at my parents' house for a little while, mainly because they kept boy and I in separate rooms when we stayed there (resulting in lots of fooling around and covert oral sex), but once they let us sleep together I figured it wasn't rude to have sex there.
couches, chairs
I like making it on couches, because they are semi-public and thus exciting, and also because I like the feeling of being nestled into a space. Couches have arms and backs that result in bodies being cradled on more than one side. This can create awkwardness and require weird leg placement, but generally I like it quite well.
Armchairs are more awkward than couches, I find, simply because they are smaller and necessitate more extravagant contortions to fit 2 bodies together properly within their laps. I have had most success having sex on chairs using some variation of either a girl on top position (usually either me straddling boy's lap and facing him, or me sitting on his lap and facing away) or one where my boy is standing or kneeling on the floor in front of me while I sit on the chair.
Sitting facing my boy while on an armless chair can be very pleasurable for me, because of the way his belly will be pressed against me when we are both sitting upright. Much clitoral stimulation, which usually makes me come quite quickly.
counters, tables
When engaging in intimate relations in a kitchen or bathroom, I will frequently end up sitting on a counter with my legs around my boy. Also sometimes he will end up reclining on a counter or table with his legs wrapped around my waist. I find this far more comfortable than lying or kneeling on a cold, hard floor (see below).
However, the height and depth of the counter can greatly affect whether having sex this way is awkward or easy. A surface that is too high forces my boy to stand on his tip toes, and often encourages me to sort of slip off the counter in an effort to get closer to him. It is good exercise for both of us, but can also give us cramps or wear us out before we are really done. Often it leads us to move to somewhere more comfortable.
General observation has led me to believe that counters (kitchen or bathroom) and work tables are often higher than ideal, while kitchen tables are about right. I think the magic measurement is to have the surface height be an inch or two below the standing partner's bum.
Depth of the counter or table top simply affects my balance as I attempt to find a comfortable and easily accessible position. Being unable to lean back makes it hard to balance.
against walls and upright structures (indoor/outdoor)
Pressing someone up against a wall can be very sexy, in that they are somewhat trapped against you and held against you (of course not sexy for that person if they want to get away -- sane, safe, consensual please). I like both being pressed and doing the pressing.
Most often, for me, sex against an upright surface has resulted from kissing against one. The full body contact can get me quite aroused, and lead to seduction. I can't recall ever wanting to have sex and thus taking my partner over to a wall. It has been purely spontaneous, often intended as a temporary, teasing sort of penetration before we went off to bed or I had to leave or go to the bathroom or something.
I can't decide whether my boy or I is more likely to end up against a wall when we have sex like this. We switch, as often we are in a hallway and can push or pull each other to one side or the other. I think overall I might be more frequently against the wall, because if my pants are still partly on it is easier if I am not trying to straddle my boy, which is the easiest way to get him inside me if he is the one backed up against something.
I think that the relative heights of partners can affect success with this kind of sex. A taller female makes deeper penetration easier, as she can spread her legs apart a bit without becoming awkwardly short.
In a similar consideration, this isn't the easiest way to have sex in a public place, where one doesn't want to remove a lot of clothing for fear of having to cover up quickly, or if one simply can't get one's pants off without removing shoes. Pants around ankles keep legs rather glued together (at least when standing up) and make it hard to get very close to a lover.
Pantsless or in a skirt, it is possible to have a girl wrap her legs around her boy's waist and be held up against a wall/tree/whatever during lovemaking. I have only ever done this for brief periods between standing, and again this was the result of spontaneous escalation.
One final note is that upright structures can have different angles. Walls and trees tend to be mainly vertical, but I once made love against a small lighthouse, which tapered from base to top and thus had a reclining sort of wall. In my head, I expected this slope to make it easier to balance and move. However, the opposite was true-- the reclining position made my feet get in the way and made it harder for my boy to get at me. I don't know if it would have been easier had he been against the wall instead of me.
Wait, wait: an extra consideration, in the blushing giggle category. Having hetero sex standing up, against a wall or any other way, can have the titillating result of a lot of the male partner's ejaculate ending up on the ground. I guess this has only actually happened to me once, and it was due to awkward timing (thrust, come, slip out by mistake, all fluids make their escape). Still, I quite enjoyed it. (I don't know; we thought it was pretty funny. It made a splat sound!)
floor, ground (hard, flat, uncomfortable surfaces)
Whoever ends up on the bottom when having sex on a hard surface is not going to be comfortable. I have had sex on the floor quite a number of times, all of them out of spontaneous necessity (for example, being in the bathroom at someone else's house and not having anywhere else to retire to).
The main body parts that get sore or bruised (when lying on back) are the back of the head, the spine of the lower back (pelvis level) and that vertebrae that pokes out at the base of the neck. I have also bruised my knees and elbows, depending on the position.
Quite frequently I resort to piling my clothes or at least a towel or something under my head, and laid out under my hips if I can. This leaves weird texture prints on your body but is better than bruises and linoleum-burn.
I think of floor seductions as best kept short, but they can still be fun/good.
Actual, natural ground is often not as rock-hard as a man-made floor, but can be bumpy or full of rocks and roots, which compensates for bruises that would otherwise have been missing.
bathtub
Bathtubs are a slight variation on floors, in that they are still hard and smooth, but are also a confined space. More opportunities for body bruises!
The narrowness of most tubs makes it hard to fit four legs across the bottom of them, but the hardness of the tub makes it uncomfortable for the person on the bottom to curl up and wrap their legs around their partner's waist. I cannot recall a single appropriate position for this situation, but I have managed it a couple of times so creativity must allow for something.
A quick safety note: it is not a good idea to have sex in water, and not because it washes away lubrication. The pumping action of a penis penetrating a vagina can force water into a woman's reproductive tract and promote infections. Serious stuff-- the pelvis is not a good place to get an infection, especially if you want to have babies sometime.
wilderness: yard, desert
see also floor/ground, above
I can only recall making it in two backyards, both of which belonged to me or my partner. Yards are actually decently erotic locations, as they usually smell nice, have soft grass on the ground, and are somewhat concealed from the neighbours and passersby. Other wilderness sites for seductions have included once in the middle of the desert, once in sort of the backyard of a campsite (ya more burningman sex), and once on a wall out in the ocean (see "public," below).
Neither of the yard events, nor the desert one, occurred directly on the ground, but rather on a blanket, bedsheet, or sleeping bag. Since living with beloved boy, outdoor sex is more a result of spontaneous inspiration than planning. In the past though, in situations with little possibility for discreet seduction, field trips outside were undertaken specifically for the purpose of getting it on. The outdoors can be a person's last option for alone time, which is kind of weird considering some of the main functions of houses.
I am more likely to be smuttily inclined outside at night, but in a very private yard or a secluded area such as the far side of a lake or something, I can be inspired in daylight. The reasons I haven't followed through on more of these inspirations have been mainly lack of available condoms, and more recently (in the age of pills) lack of enthusiasm/guts in either partner or self (more an issue of "i guess we shouldn't" than "that's weird or gross").
For whatever reason, I really like having sex outdoors. It seems very loving, maybe because of the proximity to nature (hippies nod your heads with me), and also because it loses any connection to daily life and lifestyle considerations, such as maintaining a room and bed suitable for the act. I like forgetting that sex has a social place. Outside sex seems more just like living and less like lifestyle, at least to me. It seems more like a universal, biological, non-socially-involved kind of pursuit. Unless of course the neighbours see.
trampoline
I have only had trampoline sex once and it was not energetic circus sex, it was gentle quiet sex so nearby people wouldn't have to listen to us. The trick to trampoline sex seems fairly intuitive (pretty much everybody can imagine how the trampoline helps you bounce, I think). If you push down on the trampoline, it will bounce you back up immediately, probably to a higher point than you started at.
This makes it quite difficult to maintain a steady rhythm, since the trampoline is constantly trying to accelerate the bouncing. If you bounce faster to match the trampoline, it goes faster still and higher. Oh, ha ha. Then its springs start creaking and you have a fine circus.
It was quite awhile ago, but what I recall being the key to slow trampoline sex was not the forward/inward thrust, but the release/withdrawal. If you switch quickly from one to the other (in-out style) then you will bounce, possibly apart. This is kind of entertaining but maybe not desirable all the time. If you push forward more gently and withdraw non-suddenly, there is less bounce. It is easy to feel that this is needed, without having to think about it, but that is the notable skill required, in words.
Some positions would also induce less bounce. Things like the missionary position (man lying on top) and female superior sex where she is sitting upright have thrusts that are directed quite vertically and would bounce a lot. The girl on top techniques that I prefer involve scooping the hips in a more horizontal direction (down boy's belly) and don't bounce so much. Trampolines do still bounce at an angle and angled bounces can be unpredictable, but I think it would be easier to control these than vertical bouncing.
Of course, fun could be had with bouncing too, and I do have daydreams of chasing a lover around a trampoline and being thrown apart.
Anyway, I like the way the trampoline presses lovers together, and the way it bends and curves to accomodate weight and pushing and squirming. Rolling over while attached is easier on a trampoline than a rigid surface because legs don't make such a bump to get over.
public: smut shack, breakwater, sidewalk, park, public washrooms
semi-public: common rooms of shared houses, bedroom recently vacated by roommate and soon to be inhabited by a new roommate
cars
ferry
____________________________________________________________________________________

All about humping

Other kinds of sex like oral and with fingers have their own pages. I think that it can be a good idea to call all kinds of smutty activities sex, to give yourself more options and to get away from the penetration/male orgasm structure of sex. Also to get away from giving activities status.
However, I don't call everything sex. I call everything smut, or by different names for clarity. I don't stratify activities into first base, second base and whatnot, because I don't think something like oral sex is a consolation prize, a partly satisfying activity, less sexual or less intimate. It's all smut, and I like some variety :)
Besides calling sex "sex," I mostly say "going to bed," especially when propositioning. These have always been my main standbys. I barely ever say "making love," and only when speaking with my boy. I like that he favours that term just because it is him, but it always strikes me as cheesy in other contexts. "Fucking," "getting laid," and "going all the way" only get used as jokes. I think I said "fuck" more in high school, but until recently I could only recall one instance where I ever said "I want to fuck you" or anything similar (and it didn't lead to sex).
Because of the excessive amount of Marvin Gaye/Isaac Hayes/Barry White type music in our house, "gettin it on" and "makin it" get used quite a lot. Makin it is fast becoming my new standby. Other people are mostly said to "sleep together;" it just seems polite. The elementary school verb "to hump" comes up at least once a week, mostly in reference to the pelvic gesture and not actually to having sex, but sometimes as a joke someone is said to be humping someone else.
___________________________________________________________________________________

About pap smears

I am not too fond of Pap smears, but I think they are kind of funny. Pap is another word I don't like very much. In most all other areas of life I am very agreeable and enjoy nearly everything, but vagina-related words seem to suffer from gross syllable combinations. I didn't even like the word pap when I had only heard it used to describe a thin gruel.
A very public health oriented female doctor explained the importance of Pap smears to me, using slogans like "No one should die of cervical cancer in today's world." A very public health oriented clinic volunteer explained the procedure involved in a Pap smear to me, and she was very accurate.
The doctor performing The Smear will have you take your pants and underwear off (I take my socks off too for some reason) and sit on the exam table with a disposable sheet over your lap. When you are ready, the Dr has you lie down and put your heels up in some conveniently but unglamourously placed stirrups. This puts your vagina on display for the Dr to examine.
A good Pap tip is to let your knees flop even more unglamourously apart, and breath deeply to relax. This makes everything much more comfortable.
As the exam is actually of your cervix, a speculum gets involved. This instrument is shaped a little bit like a tubular L, with one arm fitting into the vagina and one forming a down-pointing handle for the doctor. The speculum is in two pieces that slide vertically apart and lock, to hold the vagina open so the Dr can see through it to the cervix. They use a little light.
The speculum puts some pressure on the vagina, which is slightly uncomfortable but has never been painful or even very irritating for me. A Pap smear is quite a brief procedure anyway.
Using a flat wooden tool, the doctor collects a few cells from the cervix (yes by scraping). This again feels slightly uncomfortable, but there really aren't many nerves in the upper 2/3 of the vagina and all that I have felt is pressure from the instruments. The collected cells are sent to a lab and examined for irregularities and cancer.
Often I get a bimanual pelvic exam done at the same time as a Pap smear, which is supposed to be done once a year. During this exam, the doctor inserts two gloved fingers into my vagina and taps my belly to feel my ovaries, then pronounces them healthy and I can put my pants back on. It amazes me what doctors can feel inside my belly.
The last time I was at my clinic, the doctor was going over my file out loud before asking me why I was there, and he muttered
"And you had a pelvic exam in November...and you had chlamydia..."
I was rather taken aback, as no one had told me anything about this, and I couldn't think where I'd had the chance to get chlamydia, being not only a nerd, but a monogamous nerd. For a couple of seconds I expected him to continue "... and you had that treated?" but then I realised that he only meant I'd had a mandatory chlamydia swab test done in November, along with the pelvic exam and Pap smear. I explained my brief shock to the doctor and he laughed the laugh of a poorly socialized hermit and agreed to be more careful. He was a pretty good guy.

___________________________________________________________________________________

My ovaries

My ovaries are only vaguely attached to my vagina, but because they are involved in many vaginal activities I am including them on the site. It might seem like an ovary would be a passive, silent internal organ like a liver or a kidney, which you would never really be aware of, but I find quite the contrary. Ovaries are bizarre. I can feel one right now, as I write this.
The main times that I am aware of my ovaries are during ovulation and bleeding times in my cycle, and sometimes during or after sex. Also sometimes during gynecological exams I think about them, but I haven't ever been able to feel them being prodded during abdominal exams.
For review, ovaries are the two walnut shaped organs that hold all the unripe ova (eggs) in females, and produce various female sex hormones. Once per menstrual cycle, a ripe ovum bursts out of one or the other ovary. Yes, bursts. Explodes right through the wall of the organ. No tidy dispensing there. Hardcore! The equivalent male organs are the testes.
Ovaries sit on either side of the top of the uterus. If I put my hands on my belly (standing up) with the tips of my fingers meeting over the center of my pubic bone, and my thumbs touching to make a triangle, the places where I can sometimes feel my ovaries are at about the places where my pointer fingers join my hands. So they are at the bottom of my abdomen, one on either side.
The usual sensation that my ovaries make is a slightly sharp ache. I don't know what to compare it to, except a bloated uterus waiting to bleed, which is not much help to any male readers. Sorry. Wait, actually it is quite similar to localised gas pain! Charming! My ovaries have this ache for a few days around ovulation time (two weeks before my period starts), and sometimes for a few days around the beginning of my period. Often only one is sensitive at a time, but I'm not sure whether they alternate. They can, on occasion, both be achey at the same time, usually at the beginning of my period.
If the ache is particularly active, I will sometimes have a hotter spot there on my belly. I imagine this is because the organ is sucking extra blood into the area and it is warming up, and not because the organ itself is generating heat, but who knows.
Sometimes at ovulation time I also have a twinge sensation on one side, which I have presumed to be the feathery ends of the fallopian tubs swishing around to catch the egg being released. May I just comment that this is a strange sensation. Hello, body, I see you are up to something in there. One time I saw the twinge. Kind of fun, kind of "I am possessed by an abdomenal demon." There is a German word meaning something like mid-month twinge. Mitterschmertz or something good like that ("Mittelschmerz!" - thanks to Debbie at The-Clitoris.com. I was pretty close for a non-German speaker!).
My ovaries only tend to get involved in sexual activity with deep penetration, or in positions where penetration is directed towards the front of me (usually rear-entry positions, but also sometimes with me on top). It freaked me out a little bit when I realized that the sensation of something being poked in such situations was my ovaries, indeed being poked. Aiee!
I tend to envision the whole internal female reproductive tract being larger than it is, and it took me a lot of being reminded to get it in my head that ovaries were low enough in the abdomen to get bumped during sex. Also it is a bit disconcerting to think of how the vagina must be stretching to be reaching organs on beyond the uterus in various locations. It helps to keep in mind that this whole bodily area is only a few inches in any dimension.
For the record, I think it is unhealthy to bump the ovaries much. I've seen it mentioned in sex position books as something to avoid.
This topic has brought up quite a few instances in which I have been freaked out. I admit, being aware of my ovaries makes me feel a little creepy. It is not because they are gross or because they are organs or anything. I think it is because whenever they feel sensitive, I get a distinct sense of what size they are, and when I rub my belly to make it feel better, I often get a mental image of just reaching in and touching the ovaries themselves, rolling them between my fingers or just squeezing them lovingly. Invariably in these images the ovaries feel like hardboiled eggs without the shell, or like eyeballs. Bouncy and slightly squishy. Ya. EWWW. I think that I think of ovaries this way because that is basically what testes feel like. They are much more accessible, as a body part, and easy to check out.
In summation, these are the internal organs that I am sometimes aware of:
heart
lungs
brain
stomach
intestines
bladder
uterus
ovaries!

The ovaries are the only ones that make me feel weird. I'm working on it.

____________________________________________________________________________________

About slipperiness

The everyday slipperiness of my vagina varies. At any time but ovulation, it would be what I would call moist, rather than slippery. See discharge for details.
Very occasionally my vagina is decidedly non-slippery, usually as a result of swimming in a chlorinated pool or having an extended bath (all the various lubrications get washed away). Tampons can also absorb anything that would otherwise make a vagina slippery, and I used to sometimes end up dry if I used tampons for 3 or 4 days in a row.
There are two glands, on either side of the vagina near its opening, that are sometimes purported to make slippery fluids in anticipation of sex. I only recently read that, but the placement made sense to me-- I had figured on the wetness being produced somewhere fairly low since tampons didn't usually stop it. The other explanation I have read of where sex lubrication comes from is that when the vaginal walls swell during arousal, the fluid sweats out of them. I do not know which of these explanations is correct, but the sweating theory is Kinsey Institute info.
In any case, the fluid is clear and thin but quite strong, and isn’t easily rubbed into skin. It can be washed away easily with water, even once it has dried onto something. As it dries it gets sticky.
I find that feeling all slippery will arouse me more and beget more slipperiness. One of the reasons I like to be licked and kissed on is the wetness of it.
Being more slippery will almost always make for more enjoyable sex for me. Until lately, I'd never used any lubrication but what my body makes, with the occasional addition of saliva from foreplay activities. Spit is not a good overall sex lubrication as it dries too quickly and wears off. However, it can get things started, make a path for my own fluids to venture outside the vagina to other, nearby, and important places that could otherwise be chafed.
Beloved boy and I bought lube when we bought the strap-on, and of course ended up playing with the bottle of slipperiness. Neither of us thought that it made me slipperier than I usually am, but I did notice that it was sort of more durable than my own lubricity. (OK, lubricity is a great word. So funny to hear smut shop hostess going on about lubricitous qualities of various products.)
The main place we found the bottled slippery made a difference was for fingers venturing toward the backside of a lover. Being slippery there makes it easier to come and go, to tease and generally play. Kind of nice to not have to have such a commitment to the area.
Occasionally, even if I am quite excited, I am not very slippery right away. It will occasionally worry me that my boy will be wanting to get it on and I won't be ready, but it is quite easy to work out. Either one of us can encourage my vagina to make more wetness. The best way is usually with licking, as the wetness of that will make me relax, silly as it sounds. It reminds me of guys worrying about not keeping up an erection, which is kind of funny :)

____________________________________________________________________________________

About my urethra

Mainly this is about the opening to my urethra, since that is the part most obviously related to my vagina. My urethra (the tube from bladder to outside world) opens out in my vulva, nicely centered and somewhat below my clitoris, inside my labia minora.
It took me until a few months ago (I am 20) to recognise this exact placement. I have never had a good look at my urethra in a mirror. I think it must be quite inconspicuous, being small and buried under various vulvic lips.
Also, I think I had been mistakenly attributing some clitoral sensations to it, which had thrown off my idea of where it physically was. See, whenever I squeeze pelvic muscles to stop or avoid peeing (so whenever I pee or feel like I have to pee), the clitoris actually has pressure put on it, so I feel something. Just because of circumstances, it seems like I should be feeling something in my urethra, but it is really my clitoris. Also sometimes the act of peeing will somehow nudge a sensation out of the clitoris.
It is a different bunch of sensations than full-on clitoral arousal, in that the arousal involves clitoral feelings that are physically deeper, along the whole shaft of the clitoris, whereas the peeing sensations are just small, at the tip. I figured they were in a different place altogether.
Well. Mass confusion, I tell you.
Uhh, no. But I do think that a major step in learning to pee standing involved actually figuring out where my urethra was at. All this faux urethral sensation had me thinking that it was higher than it is-- at the top juncture of the wee lips as opposed to between them-- making it hard for me to tell what would be an appropriate way to hold my labia minora out of the way to successfully pee standing up without spraying and dripping on myself.
The second surprising revelation I had about my urethra is the size of the opening. I think because I had never seen it or bumped into it , I figured it must be very small and inconspicuous. Imagine my disbelief when I discovered I could actually feel it with my finger. It's practically the same size as a male urethra, which I guess makes sense, but golly!
I think I will probably get to know my urethra better, just for the sake of doing so. I know that it must get stimulated sometimes (oral sex for instance), but I totally can't distinguish it from the rest of my vulva.
___________________________________________________________________________________

Protecting my vagina

My vagina protects itself from various things. It has populations of friendly microorganisms that prevent other bugs from growing in it. It is acidic to kill things. It is hidden inside me in a covert location. The cervix makes protective mucus to keep things out of my uterus.
I also protect my vagina in various conscious ways. I don't consider underwear one of them, as I don't think a flimsy layer of cloth keeps much out. I sort of protect my vagina from various diseases by getting periodic preventative checkups at the doctor. Mainly I have protected my vagina from being infected, and protected myself from becoming impregnated through my vagina (see birth control).
To avoid yeast infections and things, I groom my vagina carefully. To protect against sexually transmitted diseases, I have used latex when having sex. I have never used latex when having oral sex, which doesn't make me a great role model. At first I did not know any better and as it turns out there was no problem. Later, with boys and girls, I knew them well enough that I thought it was a safe risk. I have never had an STD, or STI as they are apparently referred to now, so I guess I did alright.
____________________________________________________________________________________

Birth control

The only time I've ever had sex without birth control was between a condom coming off and taking the morning after pill (this seemed like a good idea but stressed me out later). This list is only as big as the birth control methods I've considered or used, so please remember that there are plenty of others.
.condoms.
.the morning after pill.
.birth control pills.
.token abortion stance.
___________________________________________________________________________________about

About me and penetration

This is the act that usually defines hetero sex; purity tests require only penetration not orgasm. For me it just distinguishes "intercourse" from other kinds of smut. Again I will point out that I don't think any one sex act automatically has more "status" or is more intimate than another.
I use the word penetration to describe the state of an external object being partly inside me. Usually this refers to being inside my vagina, but on occasion things have penetrated my nose and other body parts. I give much more thought to vaginal penetration, and I suppose anal, maybe because these acts have no real purpose or motivation besides penetration. (Usually my nose is penetrated for the purpose of scratching etc).
Quite a bit is actually already written about this topic as part of other pages, so I won't repeat it (no need to make this site more extremely wordy). See inside for things that have been inside my vagina and what they found there. See toys for a specific object that has penetrated my vagina and which I have used to penetrate another person. See sensitivity for what it feels like to me. I have a feeling this page will be heavily cross-referenced.
For some reason, I only think of things as penetrating me when they are both inside and outside of me at the same time; ie., they cross the boundary of Me. Thus, I don't usually think of tampons or menstrual products penetrating me; I think of them being carried inside me.
When my vagina is entered by something sizable, usually a penis, several neighbouring tissues and organs are affected. Inside has some general details. Some things that I actually consider at such times are my cervix, because it is painful to bump it the wrong way, and my ovaries, because I read in a book about sex positions that deep penetration from behind can actually bump them and hurt. I sometimes forget how small the female reproductive tract is. Diagrams of it always look huge, I think because of the whole looking-like-a-cow's-head thing. Cows have big heads.
Also, if I have to pee at all, I can be aware of my bladder through my vagina.
If the first few penetrating movements are slow-ish, it will often help prevent any neighbouring organs and tissues from entering the fray. I think this has to do with the way that the average erect penis is actually longer than the average vagina, and the way that vaginas conveniently puff out backwards past the cervix when they are excited, making a pouch for amorous phalluses to fit into. I think the slow start helps this pocket, and the various curves and swells of my vagina to get opened and more aligned. This makes an easy course for future loving, and prevents further thrusts from veering off course, say into the bit of vagina (fornix) in front of the cervix where it isn't so stretchy and receptive, and where it will make my bladder think it must be time to pee.
Eventually the pages for individual positions will each have details about such things as what kind of penetration they promote, but these are some general notes.
The more folded up I am and the more my hips are rolled towards my boy, the deeper he can fit inside me. Most rear-entry positions are good for this, as well as having me curl up on him. In the missionary position, my knees need to be pulled up and apart to allow much deepness, but because in this position my legs are not restrained in any way or stuck against anything, I can achieve very happy combinations of up-and-apart which can be tailored to the moment and allow for excellent custom penetratability. Mm-hmm, jargon.
The angle at which I am being entered can make quite a bit of difference to whether or not I end up sore. I find that having my boy behind me can lead to him bumping the front wall of me quite a bit and can cause some bruising. Strangely, about the most gentle and naturally-angled penetration I've noticed is when our bodies make spoons, when he is behind me and we lay on our sides curled together.
Also, obviously (maybe?), just about any kind of penetration can be made into good sex. It doesn't have to be deep, or shallow, or towards the front or back or a side, or in circles, or a particular speed, or whatever. Variety can be fun, but steadiness can also be very sexy. This is where personal creativity and preference comes in, I think.
At different moments, I have desired different kinds of penetration. Often I don't have a particular idea in my head, but some specifics that I can think up right now include: action that seems smooth because it is aligned with the angle that I am inside, especially if this is deep enough that I can feel it press against the insides of me; somehow setting things up so that my boy's good hardness is pressed parallel against the bottom or back edge of the opening to me, rather than angled towards any edge, or being neutral in the center; slow movements where much of the motion involves pressing our bodies together where they connect and pushing further together than the immediate edges of our bodies, creating tension to be released and then heightened by the actual advance/retreat motions; plain old fast deepness, usually best if angled a little towards the back of me to avoid bumping anything sensitive; and the sensation of the tip of my boy almost slipping out of me then slipping back in.
etc. I could go on, but so could you, non?
If I have a craving for something in particular, I will often steer my boy there. I can pull his hips into me with hands or feet or legs or sheets pulled across him, and I can hold him back, mostly with my thighs. I can press myself onto him; I can move my hips to the angle I want; I can rock my pelvis in the motion I want. Also I like when he wants something. We pay attention to each other so it works out.
It would bug me if I never got to influence the rhythm or style of thrusting during sex, but it would also bother me if I had to guide the whole process. Balance is important. Most people must know that already. No wait, the first time I had sex I was totally shy and wanted to be guided and lead. I probably didn't have to be shy, and I'm sure it would have been more fun for everyone involved if I'd been more assertive. The thing to know is that there is no right thing to do-- you can do anything, so do what you like.
Ok... besides being penetrated, I have done a bit of thrusting myself, since the purchase of a shiny blue strap-on dildo. This was something that I was fascinated with for some time before getting to do it (see toys for specifics). For me, being the person in charge of penetration was not a power trip, it was simply sexy because it involved an entirely different set of movements and actions. Anything new is almost automatically exciting.
Also, while it isn't so much a reversal of who is powerful and who is passive in bed (because I'm almost never passive or submissive in bed), it is a reversal of who is active and who is receptive, if that makes sense. Instead of taking something into me, I get put into somebody else. This can be sexy when it simply involves fingers or kisses, but having hip action involved is much satisfying in the way it relates to fundamental sexual reflexes (want to move hips!).
Maybe an even better example of this active vs. dominating idea is this sex position that I've gotten much enamoured of in the last little while:
If I am on top of my boy, but lying against him rather than sitting up, and with my legs inside of his (take a moment to visualize this with stick figures so you know what I'm talking about), I am mostly responsible for the movement of our bodies together. For some reason I find this more intense in this position than when I am simply sitting up on my boy, because the movements involved are not "riding" or squirming style movements but rather thrusting style movements. I am not receiving anything so much as making it (not letting or taking him into me, but putting myself onto him?).
Mainly it has pointed out to me that the person with the phallus doesn't have to be responsible for the penetration. I knew that anyway, what with how active I can be in moving to meet my boy or in pulling him to me. It made a difference though. As well, it is kind of fun to think about the idea that penetration requires both something to put inside something else, and that something else, so that the act can be caused from either side or both. I can be the penetrator even with my regular unit, cause the penetration is shared across two bodies.
And I'm not a feminist hippie, honest :)
____________________________________________________________________________________
I am... a backdoor man (Anal Sex)

If anyone can think of a better name for anal sex, i'd love to hear from you.

"Fifth Base" has been suggested :)
So... I am uncomfortable with the term "anal sex." Special boy and I had our first chat about the subject last night, and I think the comfortable euphemism that is going to get used around our house is backdoor action. There are enough songs about being a backdoor man residing in our cd collection that I can feel affinity with the phrase.
Anyhow. This barely has anything to do with my vagina but I figured I'd make the sex topics a complete set. I've had a bit of anal sex, though not a whole lot, as both a top and a bottom (see toys, especially once it gets expanded). Much more frequently, boy and I engage in some less intense backside loving when we are in bed, with just fingers and kisses. Even with full engagement, this is mostly a transient activity and rarely is something we do to bring us both to orgasm. The most common affair involves my fingers and my beloved's bum.
Some considerations before I really begin, so I feel like I am dealing responsibly with this topic:
It is unwise to put anything in a vagina after it has been in a bum, especially if that vagina is prone to getting yeast infections. I am not very religious about observing this and have never had any trouble, but this is definitely a way to set yourself up for a fine outbreak of Candida. See also grooming for descriptions on proper wiping.
Also, anal sex is among the highest risk sex acts for transmitting infections. Rectal tissue is fragile and tears easily, and also is by nature an absorbant, receptive tissue. It is very easily infected. Further, anal sex puts more stress on condoms than vaginal or oral sex, so use lots of water-based lube and consider doubling your latex.
Last thing: you can get pregnant by having anal sex, because the anus is separated from the vagina by only a small, moist patch of skin. Semen easily dribbles across this, so use birth control for anal sex like you would for other sex.
And, as a reference, this is a list of Dr. Jack Morin's 10 rules for pleasurable and safe anal sex. He has published a well-respected book on this subject.
Ok.
It isn't very often that I have a desire to have anything up my bum, but occasionally my ass does get aroused (somebody please quote that last bit somewhere). It took me a minute to figure out that this wasn't purely a mental desire. There are physical qualities that make the err... backdoor an erotic location. It has a billion nerves and is very sensitive, and also it is somehow connected to or involved with the muscles in the vagina and the pelvic floor (the Kegel exercise muscles). So it gets squeezed too when the vaginal muscles hug themselves or bear down.
Thus, it isn't that surprising that when I am very aroused and excited, I sometimes get a desire to be touched there along with the rest of me. It can be very sexy to be touched or kissed there during sex, oral sex or just foreplay. Initially I was embarrassed to be kissed there, but I do make a point of keeping it clean and eventually I calmed down.
This desiring is even more true of my boy. I don't have a special erotic spot inside myself there, the way he does. Mine is inside my vagina. Touching him there during sex can heighten his excitement, whereas it often just distracts me. I am more into it in conjunction with oral sex.
Whether or not any penetration is involved, some slipperiness in the area is of great advantage (this can be from a bottle or from the wetness I make). It makes things less likely to chafe or tickle, and makes access easier (both to get to it and to get into it). During most activities, it is a slightly awkward area to reach and the slipperiness reduces resistance to approach from indirect angles. After all, the door itself is buried within bum cheeks that can can squeeze and generally be in the way (although they can also be fleshy and sexy).
Also, by nature the anus is a less receiving opening than the vagina or the mouth. It takes some effort to slip into it, and slipperiness makes it much easier. It is kind of sexy to have it be easy to play with because then more casual intimate contact is possible, if that makes sense. It doesn't require such a commitment and obvious effort to do anything to it. It can be secondary to other things, or it can be teasing. Casual.
I don't find that anything the size of fingers causes pain when inserted this way. Two fingers starts to be a noticeable force, but again not painful. Mostly fingers feel slippery, I think because they don't stretch things enough to compromise the mucus that naturally lines the inside of the opening. Also they can satisfy desires for penetration, whether that desire was general or specific to the backside.
Anything larger like a penis or a dildo requires quite a bit of pressure to insert, and generous lubrication. Initially it can hurt some, but more lube and more arousal will fix this. I don't find this to be in any way unbearable, and enough lubrication and patience can reduce it to nothing. When there is a definite pain, it is of the burning type (as opposed to ache or something).
For this to relax, it helps for me to be both actively aroused and actively relaxing myself. I tend to lie flat on my tummy, to be better relaxed and unstretched. Also I find it is necessary for the phallic object to be inserted far enough that it is past its widest point, so that I'm not being actively stretched by any movement (I'm staying the same size). This requires gentle but steady pressure until it gets to a manageable place. I know a girl who "gets off on the pain" but mostly I work with it until it settles down a bit.
I do notice that if it hurt at the time, I will be tender for a day or so afterwards. Anybody constipated or having very stiff poo would probably suffer rather a lot. (Take-home lesson: use more lube. It can be the slippiness made by boy's and my bodies, but it has to be there).
The other main sensation involved with this is one of fullness, which is approximately the same feeling as being in the middle of pooing and requires me to resist the urge to push. This has elegantly been described by others as "like shitting backwards!"
None of this sounds terribly sexy, I'm sure. I think at least part of the fun is the idea of it all. "I'm a hardcore smut" etc. The other part is the serious feeling of being penetrated, which, as a person whose primary sexual organ is designed to invite penetration, I can appreciate when I'm in the mood. Also, it makes a huge difference if either myself or special boy strokes or touches my clitoris and vulva during all this. It keeps my arousal up and makes the penetration sexual for me, instead of just anal. I've had pretty good orgasms this way.
I don't always come during anal sex, partly because it doesn't involve my clitoris and partly because we usually are done quite quickly, compared to our usual sex. I think mainly this is because my boy doesn't make a point of waiting for me, since it can be an easily overstayed state for me to be in. Usually my desires for this kind of contact are sated soon after things get started so this is fine with me. I can be taken care of other ways.
My main hesitation with anal sex is mess. I fear getting my mess on my boy, and sometimes I am reluctant to get his mess on me (usually fingers). Yes the rectum is a passage and not where poo is stored, and yes it is usually empty, but also it can have stragglers and residues in it and it is not really that deep (and is followed by full on poo storage and processing facilities).
Also, what with the "shitting backwards" phenomenon and the way that air can be pumped into it even during slow sex, things can expel themselves. This was only actually an issue once, and we handled it ok. We just went and had a shower and felt better about our dirty selves. After serious finger action, which most frequently happens if I am kissing on my boy or if we are strictly touching each other, I will go wash my hands. I usually have to pee afterwards anyway so it isn't a completely conspicuous trip to the bathroom.
As far as mess avoidance, I think my notes will be fairly obvious. The mess is mainly dependent on where you are at. If you are full it will be messier than if you have emptied things. I don't make a point of "emptying" before going to bed, but I do make a point of avoiding much backdoor action if I am worried about my backdoor contents. Also, the consistency of these contents if of some importance. Firm, well-formed contents won't tend to get spread around or make a mess as much as anything of the loose variety.
Another consideration is that male ejaculate mixed with poo is about the worst smell in the whole world. This is not a smell that necessarily manifests in the bedroom, but one that I might notice alone on the toilet later. This doesn't really matter I guess, since nobody smells like roses to start with, but it's gross! I would rather have my boy come on my skin than inside me there.
The most fun mess is when we play with the fancy strap-on unit. If we are just playing, it will usually end up beside us once we move on to some other activity and it will be no big deal to wash it later. However, on the occasions that we go all out with it and special boy ends up coming with it inside him, we can get self-conscious about removing it. One excellent memory is of beautiful boy waddling off to the bathroom to take care of it himself (he's so cute!). Not one for people with roommates.
Regarding the strap-on, I'm going to discuss it on the toys page because this is already long, and because it really is a different act in relation to my vagina. One is thrusting and one is being penetrated.
My boy is very cautious about this penetrating me, because he does not want to hurt me or break anything inside me. The rectum curves around inside the body and is more fragile than the vagina, as far as I know, so it benefits from a gentle treatment. Also he doesn't want to coerce me into doing something if I don't really want to. He tells me these things.
I much like that he is careful and considerate, but it does require some fairly specific communication. It can hurt to start, but that's ok. Sometimes a specific amount of lubrication or slowness or pressure is required to make it good, and this has to be conveyed somehow. I don't want it very often, but sometimes I do. I have to be very, very aroused beforehand for it to be any fun or seem sexy.
We only recently had this discussion despite having done this a few times. We had managed before, between intuition and non-specific talk like "is this ok?" and "ya," but it was big fun to actually tell each other what we thought about it. Heavy use of touching places instead of saying their names. I think the whole barrier to talking was the grr term "anal sex."
I find it really special? neat? nice? that boy and I can do this as a loving act and not be fetishy about it, when anal sex is usually portrayed as perverse or hardcore or extreme in some way, or as involving domination and power because it can hurt the person receiving it. The only positive reference to anal sex that I can think of is the Pansy Division song "Ring of Joy" ('any girl or any boy can break on through that ring of joy' ya). The only thing I find about it is that because special boy is behind me I miss him by the end and want to hold him and look at him and kiss him afterwards.
I bet I used the word "it" more on this page than on any other in the whole site.

___________________________________________________________________________________about About orgasms!

Particular techniques for making me orgasm are discussed under the headings for specific activities. See masturbation, licking, and muscles, which has a hands-free masturbation method. Sex pages up soon. Another article of interest may be this description of how the clitoris functions during intercourse.
I’ve made the other things I know about my orgasms into separate pages for ease of navigation.
.portrait of an orgasm.
.issues affecting quality.
.simultaneous orgasms.
.multiple orgasms.
.fake orgasms.
I have had many orgasms. The first orgasm I had was the first time I masturbated. I was rather surprised that I could make myself feel so good and hadn't noticed before. Having orgasms seemed like a good idea. I don't remember any particular best orgasm, or worst orgasm. I have noticed that I seem to have to be paying attention to have one.
Unlike many of the words on this website, I do like the word orgasm. In high school we used it as the magic word. I know a guy who still uses it that way. He also introduced me to the idea that 10 sneezes is the same as an orgasm, on the basis of some questionable scientific data relating to endorphins released during each process. Sometimes I still count sneezes per day.
____________________________________________________________________________________

Portrait of my orgasms

I'm not sure at which point arousal and orgasm are distinguished. I usually think of orgasms as just the sexual climax, but I've heard them described as a process culminating in the climax.
However things are defined, I have to be aroused before I have an orgasm.
The usual progression begins with fairly localized good feelings centered around my clitoris. As I get more excited, these intensify and spread to a kind of deep pelvic pleasure and a desire to be touched both at the clitoral center of this business and inside my vagina. I don’t think these desires are intellectual, I think they are the nature of the pleasure feelings. I would describe all of these things as arousal. I can experience all of them with no actual stimulation besides thinking, and if I don’t do anything about them they will eventually go away. (For other things that can stimulate them, see arousal.)
I know that some women have orgasms involving no touching at all but I’ve never been dedicated enough to achieve this. At around this point in my journey toward orgasm (err…), I will usually cave in and touch myself if no one else is, or eventually lose interest and return to the land of the non-aroused.
If things continue, I will stay at about the same level of excitement for a varying length of time. The length of this depends on all kind of things, like how much I’m being physically stimulated and what kind of ideas I’ve got in my head, and whether or not I’m uncomfortably cold or itchy or nervous etc. I think these are the kind of things you would expect to affect an orgasm.
This stage, which I believe is called The Plateau, is followed by the part that I actually think of as an orgasm. This involves a sudden betterment of all the pleasure feelings going on in my pelvis, with most of the intensity returning to my clitoris instead of being focussed also into a desire to have something put in my vagina. These escalate to a peak, which is characterized more by being followed by an end to these particular pleasure feelings than by the achievement of any particular maximum level of them. At this point I know that the vaginal muscles will contract, and sometimes I can feel this. I can usually feel them spasm more if there is nothing in my vagina. After this event, all the arousal feelings are replaced by deep contentment and a hypersensitive clitoris that doesn’t want to be touched anymore.
All kinds of things can happen at the peak of an orgasm, depending on how intensely good I have come to feel. My orgasms frequently involve some involuntary hip action and the clenching of various muscles—thighs, pelvis, face… The better ones make me briefly lose feeling in my feet and legs, and sometimes in my hands. They can also cause me to briefly get tunnel vision or black out, and occasionally get dizzy. Once my beloved made my ears ring for several minutes afterwards. It was very serious :) Recently, he made me cry (happy/overwhelmed). This had more to do with the context of the orgasm than the quality of the orgasm, as I had been in a bit of a slump and feeling disconnected from our sex life.
Frequently I can also feel the various things connected to my vagina kind of settling back down after an orgasm. During the female orgasm, the uterus will dip down and contract some, presumably to make it easier for sperm to go the right direction. Sometimes I can feel what seem to be uterine as well as vaginal spasms, but could be just about any lower-abdominal muscles.
Orgasms also serve to redirect all the blood that has been sent into the pelvic area during arousal. In the absence of an orgasm, I can sometimes feel a sort of heavy discomfort in my belly. I only recently figured out what this was (from a magazine article). Easy cure = orgasm.
Even quick, less thrilling orgasms make me feel good. All my orgasms result in a post-orgasmic, calm, happy mood and much physical comfort. Sometimes it makes me laugh because I am happy. Sometimes I also laugh because I realise what kinds of silly noises I’ve been making. Eating any kind of yummy food (cookies, cherries, fruits, juice, honey... chocolate expecially, or grapes) after orgasms will make all the good feelings stronger and longer-lasting. Makes me purr, and keep chocolate cookies in the bedroom.
Also, for whatever reason, I frequently have to pee after an orgasm. I also usually have a brief surge in energy and then get sleepy. I attribute this to the release of happy chemicals, which wear off and leave me in a state of moderate physical tiredness and calm relaxation. The peeing thing might have to do with all the stimulation and spasming of various body parts near the bladder and urethra, but I don’t know. It could be a reflex designed to keep foreign cells out of the urethra. It could be coincidence.
____________________________________________________________________________________

About matching orgasms

Simultaneous orgasms can be tricky because wanting to do good things to my partner can distract me from my own orgasm. It took awhile (5-6 months?) for my boy and I to get good at coming together.
Partly, he is good at timing himself and waiting for me. Partly, I can tell when I can concentrate more on what will make me come than what he needs. This doesn’t mean ignoring him, since being with him is a lot of what is sexy about the whole thing. I’m sure some people just coincidentally come together, but we mostly manage it by knowing each other well enough to balance doing good things to each other and making sure good things get done to ourselves.
Usually, in what I consider simultaneous orgasms, I come a little before my boy and he comes before I really finish. I think this is a product of him waiting for me.
I've never managed simultaneous orgasms during mutual oral sex or mutual masturbation. I find I get too distracted to do a very good job of handling someone, which may be lack of practise. It requires less coherent effort for me to keep up the simpler and mostly instinctual hip action involved in plain old het sex.
In case this was in question, I think coming together is neat. It adds to the already weird moment of distorted consciousness at the peak of orgasm, since there is nobody left out to act as a tie to regular reality. For me it cuts out all distractions to have boy in the same state as I am. I can be passively aware of it, I don't have any reason to think. I hope that didn't sound too much like I think orgasms are a rocket ride to another dimension.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Issues affecting quality -Orgasms

My orgasms can vary quite a bit, from full body events to quick things that I notice more because they’re over than because they happened.
For me, it makes an orgasm better if it escalates slowly enough to notice. I also find that the slower it progresses the more intense it will become. All of this has a lot to do with how much I’m paying attention and what I’m thinking about, although the person with me (if there is one) has to be doing a lot of things right for things to progress at all.
I would say that the single most important influence on the quality of my orgasms is how aroused I am before any stimulation begins. If I have a fire in my loins I will have amazing orgasms. If I have to be coaxed and kissed on to get me excited, I will usually not climax with such impressiveness.
The only situation in which I’ve actually tried to engineer a prolonged orgasm is while masturbating. While seducing or being seduced I usually have enough distractions that purposely trying to delay an orgasm tends to end up with me not finishing at all.
Thus, I mostly accept my orgasms whenever they are going to come. It is usually more enjoyable to not come right at the beginning of sex and then have no sense of anticipation, but coming at all is better than not, and an orgasm is never a bad thing.
Some women seem to enjoy their orgasms more if they are loud about them (notably my old landlady and upstairs neighbour). I don’t have a preference. I am loud in varying degrees, mostly depending on how many people are in adjacent rooms. Sometimes I am louder than I notice.
Other things can lead to more exciting orgams, like appropriate mood lighting or the danger of being discovered, but I think of these more as dealing with arousal.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

About multiple orgasms

To my understanding, female multiple orgasms consist of one orgasm followed by another, as opposed to some climax within a climax structure. I don’t know if these have to be immediate to "count."
I frequently have more than one orgasm during a session in bed, and very occasionally during a single episode of sex. I refer to both of these occurrences as multiple orgasms, but for some reason I think there might be some more elite definition that I am unaware of. I’m not that concerned about valid terminology; I would just be curious about a mythical, complicated multiple orgasmic structure.
I think the most orgasms I have ever had in a row is three. One is the most common, then two, etc.
Usually, after I have an orgasm, my clitoris will be very sensitive and hard to do anything pleasurable to. I will start to be aware of anywhere that my vagina is sore, bruised, raw, etc. Also I will be quite contented and hard to arouse.
This is a difficult state in which to have another orgasm. If I receive a lot of stimulation, such as if I come before my boy and we keep having sex, it can easily make me sore or uncomfortable, due to the sensitivity of the various parts of my vagina and accessories. If I am left alone, I will bask in my contented state and develop very little motivation to carry on with more sexual pleasures.
Most of the second and subsequent orgasms I have are because my partner has set about seducing me again after a short rest. Sometimes I start things with mostly mental motivations and little physical desire. In these situations, my next orgasm will be less exciting than the first. It usually comes fairly quickly because of my over-sensitive clitoris, and is usually quite localized because the rest of my pelvis is sore or trying to rest after the first round.
Occasionally, after my first orgasm I will still be sort of aroused. This seems to occur mainly after really good orgasms, or if I am stimulated nearly to the point of orgasm and come on my own momentum, or with those unfortunate half-orgasms where I attempted to wait but couldn't after all and it all kind of petered out. The first two mostly work out with simultaneous orgasms, or if my boy does something to make me come after we have sex. I can also sometimes get re-aroused fairly soon after an orgasm, mostly after oral sex or if I haven't had an orgasm in several days.
In either state, I will want to entice my beloved into having sex again, and can usually have a very nice orgasm after a short rest while we work up our desire. Again, I will usually come quite soon.
I’ve never had a spectacular orgasm after the second one. I think I get over stimulated. The extra orgasms are still nice, although they tend to make me more worn out than I would otherwise be, and tend not to last as long as the first one.
Also, the more orgasms I have, the less soon I will want to have sex again that day.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Faking orgasms

I have faked orgasms, but I try not to. I maintain that it is counter-productive, even without getting into issues of honesty. How is somebody supposed to know how to be good to you if you make it seem like everything is good?
I think I got better at faking orgasms with practise, and as I had more real orgasms during sex to model on. I made a point of never getting in the habit of faking, even if occasionally it seemed easier than working on real orgasms. I figure that good orgasms are important enough to not compromise. Faking orgasms doesn't properly indicate to my partner what could help me have a real orgasm, and also makes me feel mean for lying, and can make me feel less close to my partner.
I have faked orgasms for several different reasons. I was tired and wanted my partner to stop trying to make me come, but didn’t want to embarrass them. I was shy about not having an orgasm. I knew I wasn’t going to have one but wanted to make my partner understand that I still enjoyed the sex or whatever we were doing. I thought I was expected to come. I was satisfied and didn’t want my partner to feel obligated to keep doing things to me.
Mainly it has been the last one. I haven't had much trouble having orgasms during sex for quite some time, and even before that I rarely felt deprived. The thing is, I don't always want to have one. I enjoy sex separately from my enjoyment of orgasms (I thought this must be a viewpoint mostly limited to females- but people who email me disagree-- right on!.). Sometimes I am happy with the closeness and with having my boy inside of me. Sometimes, although I am happy and content, I am not that aroused and having an orgasm seems like a lot of work.
I don't know that my boy entirely believes that I can be completely satisfied without having an orgasm. I think he thinks I am being a bit of a martyr. I can understand how guys could be unsure about this. It must seem a little odd that females can have sex without being at all aroused, and furthermore that it can be pleasurable. Even further, that even if a female is excited and aroused about sex, that she can be satisfied without having an orgasm.
It is true that most of the time I want to come, but I don't think that it is fair to assume that an orgasm is the only measure of valid or good sex. I have to figure out some sex act that would equivocate this for guys.
I don't fake orgasms much lately. If I want to have one, my beloved is rather pleased to oblige, and good at it. Most of the time, I have an orgasm when we have sex. If not, he mostly notices and takes up some or other supplementary action. If he doesn’t notice, and I still want one, I’ll usually start something. It all works out. Most of the orgasms that I have faked have been at the beginning of relationships, or during the first few tries at a particular act. Mainly this is because during the first attempts at something I am unlikely to actually come, but tend to be embarrassed of that. Silly, yes. Also, if you aren't going to come, how else are you supposed to end a sex act without insulting somebody?
Every now and then, I still fake an orgasm. Either because of the above, or because I get carried away (am making lots of noise, decide to follow through rather than admit I was just making lots of noise for fun).
I have never noticed someone faking an orgasm to me, but don’t rule out the possibility. It’s not really that hard to fake a girl orgasm, if you are uninhibited enough and have a minor understanding of what is supposed to happen. My boy says he has faked in his life ("I was tired... It just wasn't going to happen"). I hadn’t thought much about guys faking orgasms, though in a condom i suppose it would be pretty easy.
One of the main things that boy and I have going that saves us both from considering faking is that we both know that we don't both always come, and that that is ok. We let that happen if we want to.

_____________________________________________________________________________________