Chapter 2
<< Learning about Your Body >>
The Anatomy and Physiology of Sex
How the Machine Works

“What a funny way to put it,” you may be thinking — “learning about my body? What is there to know? I can see it, and feel it for myself.” But oddly enough, preteens often don’t understand the commonplace things that are happening to them as they grow up, and some carry this lack of knowledge right into adolescence. Maybe you believe you’re just as happy not knowing, but knowing is more comfortable.

All this is particularly true for girls, who have more to think about where their bodies are concerned than boys do. In some ways, of course, they develop the same as boys as they approach puberty and pass through it into adolescence. Both experience changes in body size and shape, in the breasts and sex organs. For boys and girls, the most important change is when ejaculations or menstruation begin, because after that, it’s possible for them to conceive and bear children.

Think of your body as the most complicated computer ever devised. You can’t use it properly, however, until you know how it works and in this case how it’s programmed for sex.

To begin, it’s a fact that the penis (“cock”, “dick”, “prick”, “peter”, “pecker”, “thing”, “dong”, “schlong”, “meat”, “wee-wee”, “tool”, “frankfurter”, “dingus”, “dork”, “dinky”, “wanger”, “pisser”, “penie”) is the central point of the male’s body, as far as sex is concerned. It’s a part any boy can be proud of, so graceful and beautiful in its construction that the greatest sculptors have reproduced it in marble and the finest artists of all ages in their paintings. The same thing, of course, can be said for the female body, including its sex organ, the vulva, with its small clitoris.

Penises come in all sizes. A tall, heavy man can have a short penis, or a short, slight man can have a large one. There’s no truth to the belief that boys or men with large ones are any more sexually active, or sexually potent and powerful than those with small ones. Boys often worry about this, though. Some think they have unusually small penises because they’re viewing them at an angle, from above, and the growth of pubic hair makes it seem shorter than it really is. It’s also true that a long, limp penis will not gain as much length in erection as a shorter one, because of the circulation of the blood in the erectile tissue.

When a boy reaches adolescence, his penis will probably be of average size, which is six inches when erect, but there’s great variation. If a penis is below average then, it may grow later, but even if it doesn’t, there will be no difference in the amount of sexual pleasure it can give, in spite of anything you’ve heard about big penises. Nor will it make any difference in how you perform sexually. “Average” means a point that is halfway along the range of penis sizes. Some may be smaller, some larger, but whatever its size, the penis will become erect when stimulated, either for nonsexual reasons or for specifically sexual ones.

Penises circumcised and uncircumcised.

There’s a loose piece of skin extending to the end, or beyond the end, of the penis called a foreskin. In everyday medical practice, doctors once cut it off routinely a few days after a baby was born. Removing this foreskin is called circumcision. Circumcision is a genital mutilation. It was done because it was believed easier to keep the head of the penis and the part just behind it cleaner if the skin was eliminated, but now most consider the procedure unnecessary and even harmful. Nor is there any truth in the popular myth that circumcised males are better lovers or have any other advantages. Circumcision remains the fundamental part of Jewish and Muslim religions.

Sometimes the foreskin has such a small opening that the head of the penis can’t be pushed through. That’s called “phimosis.” If a boy has that condition, it’s possible to stretch the foreskin without circumcision. It can be done by inserting the tips of the forefinger of each hand into the opening of the foreskin and stretching it outward for about ten minutes every day. In two weeks or so, the skin will be stretched enough so the penis can emerge freely from it.

There’s a white cheeselike substance called “smegma” that forms behind the head of the penis in uncircumcised men. Smegma may have an unpleasant odor, and a girl who smells this may conclude that a boy has a venereal disease but he just has bad personal hygiene. Pulling foreskin back you wash the glans of penis carefully as you have a bath. Use soap and water also to wash yourself around the anus.

Beneath the penis is a loose bag called the scrotum, which contains two testicles (“balls”, “nuts”, “eggs”, “stones”, “rocks”, “cubes”, “jewels”, “cojones”, “things”, “bangers”, “hangers”, “seeds”) that are made from a complicated arrangement of tubes and cells. This is where the sperm cells are manufactured in adolescent boys and adult males — the tiny organisms that contain the seeds of a new life when united with a female egg from the ovaries. Sperm can be seen only under the microscope. They’re very active; they move by lashing their long tails. Their heads contain all the elements that make up our heredity — color of eyes and hair, height, mental and emotional characteristics — just as the egg carries the hereditary characteristics of the woman. United, sperm and egg make a new human being.

There are very few of people in existence who has the gonads of both sexes — that is, testicles and ovaries. These persons are called true hermaphrodites. However, there are pseudohermaphrodites, who are anatomically somewhere in between the two sexes — for example, a boy with a tiny penis, like a clitoris, or a girl with a clitoris almost large enough to be a penis. The word “hermaphrodite” is sometimes also applied to others, such as a man who has large breasts like a woman’s, a woman with no breasts at all, or a woman with hair on her face, like a man — the “bearded woman” of the circus and the carnival sideshow. These people are not really hermaphrodites, and their problem is usually the result of some disturbance in their hormone balance.

When a male is sexually stimulated, the first thing that occurs is erection of the penis. That’s because blood flows down into its tissues, congests them, and makes the organ rigid and hard. Erection has been observed at all ages, in tiny infants and very old men — even before birth. In fact, many boy babies are born with erections. The penis, the scrotum, and the anus (where excrement comes from) are all very sensitive to sexual stimulation.

Erection can occur for other reasons, however. Healthy young males are capable of three or four erections a night, and those of all ages often find themselves waking up in the morning with an erection caused by sexual dreams. More rarely, it can also occur from lifting very heavy loads or by straining when moving the bowels. Boys who wear tight jeans have long since discovered that irritation from them can also cause erection. Swimmers learn, too, that it’s possible to have one as a reaction to cold water.

What can you do about erections if you get them in a public place? The best thing is to try to think of other, nonsexual things. If you can, your penis will become soft again. Or you can put your fingers in your pockets in such a way that the effect will be minimized by pushing your jeans or trousers out a little. Another way would be to wear a sweater or a jacket that comes down far enough — but then, of course, you’d have to anticipate what was going to happen, and that’s not likely. Some boys wear an athletic supporter — the common jockstrap, in other words — which will hold down the penis. Boys ordinarily wear these in games to give the penis and testicles protection and support. Aside from all these possible remedies, however, there isn’t much you can do if you happen to be wearing tight blue jeans. In that case, you can’t very well hide what’s there.

Erection brings good feelings, and many pre-teen boys already masturbate. Boys who masturbate may have orgasms and even long and rich multiorgasmic sessions. But up to thirteen and even fourteen they wouldn't produce any semen.

It’s very difficult, though not impossible, for a man to urinate with an erect penis, and it’s hard to have intercourse without an erection. Consequently, a man only rarely urinates in a woman during intercourse. It’s much easier for a woman to do so in the same circumstances, and occasionally it occurs as part of an intense orgasm.

       Probably the part of body development that most worries girls is their breasts. It’s unfair, but our society has put a premium on ample breasts, and girls think they won’t be attractive to boys if they don’t have fairly large breasts. Teen-agers go through a great deal of unnecessary worry about their breasts, mostly because they believe what Nature gave them is too small. There’s much less worry over whether they’re too large. The fact is that breasts, like every other part of the anatomy, come in all sizes, and appear to be attached to the body in a variety of ways.

Real change begins usually about the time a girl is twelve years old, although it can happen earlier or later; there’s no rule about it. Some girls have pubic hair and developing breasts when they’re as young as eight or nine, while others don’t exhibit those signs until they’re fifteen or older. The culmination of their physical development usually comes at about the time they reach sixteen or may not until they’re twenty-one. Even when growth and height are complete, there’s still further development in the breasts and the growth of pubic hair.

As they grow up, most girls realize that size isn’t important to anyone but themselves. Few of them are built like movie and television stars, yet there doesn’t seem to be any difficulty in finding sexual partners, other things being equal. Many girls know that there are far more important things that made them attractive to boys they liked. What most do not know, is that breasts become larger temporarily during sexual arousal, sometimes by as much as 25 percent. In any case, a girl can be sure that boys are going to like her for herself, not for her cup size.

Unfortunately, girls who spend a lot of time worrying about their breasts often don’t know and understand the rest of their anatomy. It’s amazing but true that girls rarely examine their own sex organs to see how they’re put together. It’s a little more difficult for them than it is for boys, whose organs are visible and accessible. It’s universally true of males that they examine their own penises and scrotums. If girls had a little more curiosity, it would repay them to hold a mirror in one hand and part their pubic hair with the other. If they did, they would understand their own anatomy considerably better.

What they would see first is a primary difference between the sexes. Girls have one more body opening than boys. Both have the anus, from which the body’s solid waste materials are excreted, but there the resemblance ends. The boy has another opening, at the end of his penis, out of which he discharges urine and the sperm-laden fluid of his ejaculation. But the girl has a special opening to discharge the urine and a third opening between the urinary outlet (the urethra) and the anus. It’s called the vagina. She also has, near the top of the vulva (the collective term we use for all the sex organs visible outside the body) a tiny organ called the clitoris (“spot”, “pea”, “bud”, “clit”, “man in the boat”). It’s a pealike structure at the top of the inner lips of the vagina, but enfolded by the outer lips. This organ with a rich supply of nerve endings is the female equivalent of the male penis, and when it’s stimulated, it provides sexual pleasure; so it’s the focal point of stimulation in self-masturbation or stimulation by another person. The vulva consists of the opening to the vagina and two folds of skin — an inner one, called the labia minora, which is the fold of skin just outside the opening; and an outer one, called the labia majora, which is the outer fold of skin enclosing the labia minora. A vulva of adolescent girl has pubic hair growing on it.

A girl’s pubic hair is finer and silkier, like the hair on her head, grows around a girl’s sex organ, and looks more triangular than a boy’s. Some boys think they can tell whether the color of a girl’s hair is natural if it’s the same color as her pubic hair, but the real comparison is with the eyebrows, yes, it’s usually the same color as her eyebrows. A blond girl’s pubic hair will tend to be darker than her head hair, a brunette’s will be lighter. In adolescent boys the pubic hair is growing around the penis, especially directly above it. As people get older, pubic hair tends to go gray, just as hair on the head does, although it changes at a much slower rate than head hair. Pubic hair also grows from a boy’s scrotum (the bag holding testicles), even in back of it and often around the anus. For some boys, as they grow older, a line of hair may grow up to the navel. A small number of girls also have this line.. A girl’s pubic hair doesn’t interfere with intercourse because there isn’t any on the inner lips of the vagina, or even on the inside of the outer lips.

Sex organs inside the woman’s body.

The vagina (“pussy”, “cunt”, “beaver”, “hole”, “muff”, “honeypot”, “thing”, “box”, “snatch”, “poontang”, “pudie”, “stuff”, “slit”, “quim”, “twat”) is simply a passageway between the external vulva and the internal sex organs, which include the uterus or womb, the ovaries, and the Fallopian tubes. All of these are encased within the protective framework of the pelvis, that part of the abdominal cavity lying between the hipbones.

A vagina is a remarkable tubelike structure, no matter how it’s viewed. Its walls have an astonishing flexibility, so that no matter how large a penis may be, it can hardly test the capacity of an organ whose walls are able to stretch and stretch enough to permit a baby to be born. That’s truly remarkable, if you know that the vagina, on the average, is only three to three-and-a-one-half inches long (9 cm). It’s an organ with many uses. It provides a canal for the menstrual flow; it receives the penis in intercourse, penis enters it in intercourse; it holds the sperm cells when the male has discharged them and starts them on their journey upward. Finally it provides the pathway for a baby’s birth, and it is very expandable — enough to accommodate the birth of a baby. The entire structure of the female sex organ, including the vulva and the vagina, are what is meant when they’re commonly called “cunt” or “pussy.”

In all these functions, the vagina gets some help from its own lubrication system. Fluid comes from glands in the cervix, to which the vagina is attached at the upper end, and is lubricated still further by other glands near the outer opening. Mostly, however, it’s lubricated by internal secretions from its own walls when they get warm in response to sexual stimulation — much like sweat on the body. A girl feels these secretions. She becomes wet around the vulva and possibly on her thighs when she’s sexually aroused.

Over the entrance to the vagina is a thin membrane called the hymen, with an opening in it that allows menstrual fluid to pass through. The hymen is flexible enough so that a tampon can be inserted, usually without breaking it. Girls used to worry that when they had their first intercourse and the hymen was broken, the result would be pain and blood. But the pain is usually no more than a brief twinge, and the blood only a trickle if it occurs at all. In any event, hymens are often broken these days long before first intercourse takes place. This has been true for some time now, ever since women began to participate actively in sports and to go on exercise regimes. Hymens are also broken sometimes when girls masturbate by putting a finger or some other object into the vagina. Often the hymen breaks so easily a girl doesn’t even know when it happens. Only rarely is it so tough that a doctor will be needed to break it.

Girls who have been blissfully unconscious of their sex organs while they’re very young suddenly become very much aware of them when they begin to menstruate. That usually occurs about a year after the appearance of pubic hair and the beginning of breast development. But again, there’s considerable variation among girls, and it may not happen at exactly that time. There’s no reason to worry if it doesn’t happen until later. Like other symptoms of sexual development, it doesn’t matter whether it’s early or late.

      In the later pre-teen years there is aphysiological difference between boys and girls that may present particular problems. Girls are likely to grow more rapidly at this time, and to mature earlier and faster than boys, going through the stages boys will undergo between twelve and fourteen, as a rule. Their pubic hair usually grows before the male’s, and their breasts get larger before the corresponding breast knots in a boy begin to swell. As the girls fill out and look more like young adults, the boys still tend to look like small boys. This is, of course, a generalization. Children vary widely in their growing, and every child grows' at his own pace. Nevertheless, the physical discrepancy between boys and girls in this period is a frequent source of dismay and distress for both sides, but particularly on the part of boys. It also causes strains on the relations between friends of the same sex. Children go through the very real sorrow if they remain short or spring up unusually tall. In such cases, children of this age should be reassured that they grow at different rates, and everybody will catch-up to everybody else, more or less, in time.

Growth changes, concurrent with changes in weight, are the heralds of puberty, and that means sex organs will soon be maturing too. As the sex glands develop, releasing hormones, the secondary sex characteristics begin to appear. In boys the approach of puberty is marked by a penis and testes that seem suddenly to grow in size. This happens usually at about eleven or twelve, a year or so before pubic hair appears, although it may happen as early as age ten, like the girls. Boys who masturbate may have orgasms in their pre-teen years, but only a few will be able to produce semen.

In girls the earlier maturity manifests itself first in menstruation, which may occur as young as ten years, although probably with most girls it does not start until twelve or later. But if menstruation does begin early, the secondary sex characteristics appear then, too, and the eleven-year-old girl displays clearly the rounded hips, wide pelvis, breasts, and pubic hair she will have as an adult.

On the average, girls menstruate about a year before boys are able to ejaculate, but there’s a reverse difference here. A boy has sperm in his semen from the beginning, while a girl probably won’t produce egg cells capable of fertilization at the time of her first menstruation, although we don’t have absolute proof. It may take several months, even years, before this ovulation process begins. We do know, however, that such a delay isn’t true of all girls.

If some girls react badly to adolescent changes in their bodies, it’s because they sense that life has now become different from what it’s been for so long. Some girls simply don’t like the idea of growing up. And anyway, for everybody, menstruation seems like a messy business. If they happen to have cramps, or other aches and pains, as some girls and women do, they resent this intrusion into their lives every month. When they realize it’s something that’s going to happen to them for the next twenty-five to forty years, a few girls even feel trapped and are seized with a kind of despair.

Most girls, however, take it all in stride. They’re even pleased by the onset of menstruation because they do want to grow up, and they understand that this is one of the most important parts of that process. Menstruation means becoming a young woman.

What’s happened is that inside the girl’s body her ovaries have begun to function. These organs, one on each side of the uterus, carry the eggs that create another life when they’re combined with a male sperm. One of these eggs matures every month (usually), and about halfway between periods of menstruation, it breaks loose from the follicle that encloses it in the ovary and moves down into the Fallopian tube. The follicle is only a covering for the egg, but it also has the function of producing the female sex hormone, estrogen, which provides a girl with the characteristics identifying her as female. Its companion ovarian hormone, progesterone, prepares the uterine lining for pregnancy, if the egg is fertilized by the sperm.

After the egg has left it, the follicle changes color and becomes something else, called “the yellow body.” It’s larger now, and it begins to affect the lining of the uterus, providing it with blood pools concentrated under the cell layers so that the baby will have oxygen and food if conception occurs.

In adolescent teen boys, whatever the cause, when the sexual stimulation reaches a certain point, sperm emerge from the testicles in a sticky substance called the seminal fluid. It looks globby, has a milky color, and spurts out through the opening of the penis.

Sex Organs inside the Male Body and Ejaculation.

In the ejaculatory duct the sperm from testicles mix with fluid from the prostate and
seminal vesicles to form semen which comes through urethra and urinary opening.

But the penis has another function as well. A tube called the urethra runs up through it into the body and connects with the bladder, making ii possible for males to urinate through it. Just below its connection with the bladder, the urethra is joined by another tube, like one river flowing into another. This tube comes around the bladder and connects with the testicles, so that a pathway is provided for the sperm to come out of the testicles, travel through the tube, enter the urethra, and flow on out the penis. When that happens, we call it an ejaculation — or a boy “comes,” as we say.

Semen is a complex fluid. Components are collected from numerous glands
before it's ejaculated or milked from the penis and then may be churned dry.

When a boy ejaculates into a girl’s vagina, he pours his semen into it, and millions of sperm cells begin to lash their long tails and move forward in the vagina. They swim into the narrow opening called the cervix near the end of the vagina. The cervix opens into the uterus (the womb). This is a pear-shaped organ that looks something like a very small cow’s head, with the Fallopian tubes symbolizing the “horns.” These tubes connect the uterus with the ovaries. The sperm continue to swim through the uterus into these “horns.” There they may encounter an unfertilized egg cell coming from the ovaries.

Sperm are like tadpoles that move forward under their own power, and if a boy ejaculates near the opening of the vagina, even if his penis doesn’t enter at all, it’s possible for the sperm to work themselves along the entire length of the vagina and up into the uterus too. Or if a boy masturbates, let’s say, and his hand is covered with sperm, which he immediately transfers with his fingers into the vagina, pregnancy can occur too.

If the sperm find an egg in the tube, they begin a fierce bombardment of it. Lashing their tails, they surround the ripe egg cell and try to penetrate it. This is when a pregnancy may occur, as a sperm manages to get through the egg wall and merges with it. Immediately the cell wall hardens and prevents any more sperm from getting in. The successful sperm cell then becomes a part of the egg’s nucleus, while the others that failed to penetrate the egg die in a few hours. The period from the time the sperm are ejaculated until one of them reaches an egg cell (which does not always happen) may be as much as three-eight hours or longer. For all this time to survive sperm cells need to have the moist, warm, alkaline vagina to live in, and they might remain alive for one or two days, otherwise they die quickly if remain outside.

Joining of sperm and egg is called fertilization. This is the moment when the baby is conceived and its sex is determined. Sperm carrying Y chromosomes make boys; those carrying X chromosomes make girls. The sex of a child depends on which kind of sperm cell fertilizes the egg cell — in other words, it is pure chance.

Chance is involved in much of the whole process, as you can see. The sperm has to be in the Fallopian tube at the time the egg is traveling through it. The sperm must be vigorous, and the egg must be ripe. A woman produces only about four hundred ripe eggs in her entire lifetime, and there are only about twelve to twenty-four hours in every month when it is possible for a ripe egg to be fertilized.

If an egg is not penetrated by a sperm in the Fallopian tube, it simply passes down through the uterus, disintegrates in a few hours and is absorbed in the vagina. That’s no problem. It’s hardly visible to the naked eye. The whole process it just went through is called ovulation, and it happens only once a month, about halfway through the menstrual cycle. If fertilization has occurred, no more ripe eggs will be produced by the ovaries until after the baby is born. As for the fertilized egg, it moves out of the Fallopian tube into the uterus, nestles into the uterine wall, and the baby begins to grow there until it is ready to be born.

Girls who wonder how anything as large as a baby can come out of anything as relatively small as a vagina simply underestimate the incredible stretching capacity of that organ. It’s the stretching of the cervix that causes pain, but many women have learned to have little fear of it by absorbing the techniques of natural childbirth, which help to take part in the process in an active way so that a woman participates in the experience. For those who can’t accept these techniques, modern anesthetics can help to decrease the pain. In any case there’s little danger in properly supervised childbirth these days. For one thing, women see their doctor regularly during pregnancy, and the physician is consequently able to anticipate any possible complications. As for the discomfort involved during pregnancy or birth, millions of women will testify that it’s more than made up for, many times over, by the special joy of giving birth to a baby.

If fertilization doesn’t take place, the yellow body goes too, since it no longer has any purpose. What remains are the blood pools it created, but since the body isn’t equipped to take these back into the circulatory system, the blood and the cell layers in the lining of the uterus slip out through the vagina. And that’s what we call menstruation. Most girls simply say they’re having their period.

Girls who fear they’re passing too much blood should know that they’re losing only about one to three ounces of it. Menstrual blood isn’t like the blood that spurts out when you cut yourself, because it’s mixed with the mucous membrane from the womb. A girl shouldn’t feel squeamish about it, although some do.

One of the things that might happen to a boy with a girl who’s menstruating is to discover that she won’t let him touch her sex organ even though he’s done it before. There wouldn’t be anything harmful about it if he did, and some people have intercourse right through a woman’s menstrual period, even though it may be a little messy. People frequently have intercourse during menstruation and feel entirely comfortable. There are also those of both sexes who won’t have intercourse at this time for purely aesthetic reasons. This is particularly true of young boys and girls. Often it depends simply on how much two people are carried away by the sexual urge.

On the average, girls are more easily aroused for the day or two just before they menstruate and for the day or two following it. During menstruation is another time when they may feel especially sexual. However, this isn’t true for all girls. Some don’t seem to have these ups and downs in their sexual feelings.

There’s no reason to worry if menstruation is irregular when it first begins. Sometimes several months elapse between the first and second times, and it’s perfectly natural for young girls to be irregular. It only means that the ovaries haven’t yet begun to produce mature eggs on a regular basis. Nor is there any reason to worry about the length of the period. Sometimes it takes only three days, sometimes as much as seven. Five days is the average, but a girl might not always menstruate for the same number of days every time.

Some girls have their period regularly, have no forewarning until it begins, and experience no symptoms of any kind, except maybe a feeling of fullness, and take their period in stride. Some have only the common symptom, cramps and headaches. But there’s considerable variation. Some girls feel miserable, depressed and vaguely unhappy; their bodies seem heavy and lumpy, and they’re listless and tired for a day or two. This feeling can be produced by a combination of psychological and physical factors, and a boy may find that a girl acts a little differently during her period. The best remedies are aspirin and a little mild exercise. She can do nearly everything she’s accustomed to doing, except it’s probably a good idea not to exercise too violently on the first day. A healthy girl can exercise, go to classes, work, go to parties, or do anything else she likes while she’s menstruating. She only needs to be a little careful about getting chilled, because her body is more susceptible to chilling at that particular time. She’ll feel better if she gets enough sleep, and if she takes in more fluids than usual — fruit juice and milk, for example — and if she avoids rich, starchy food. But that’s good advice for anybody.

Some girls are bothered and feel self-conscious about the odor of menstruation and the increased activity of the sweat glands that accompanies it. Personal hygiene is an easy answer to that problem. Use deodorants under the arms. Some girls like pads, others prefer tampons, which seem to be the most popular today. It’s often helpful to lubricate the tip of the tampon before insertion. Even with minimal flow, tampons or sanitary pads should be changed every four hours

A few girls menstruate a time or two after they become pregnant, but in the great majority of cases it stops when pregnancy begins..

Menstruation isn’t the only kind of discharge to come from the vagina. There may be, sometimes, a slight bloody staining between periods, but it’s nothing to worry about. It may happen as the egg leaves the ovary and moves down into the uterus. A girl may even feel a little brief pain on one side or the other. However, that isn’t true of all girls, or women, and those who experience it may have it for as little as a half hour or as long as a day. But if there’s genuine bleeding between periods — that is, much thicker and darker than the staining — or if the periods are very difficult, a girl should consult her doctor at once.

Another kind of vaginal discharge can occur. It’s a seepage of fluid ranging from white to yellow in color, often with a noticeable odor plus some itching or burning. That’s sometimes caused by a fungus growth resulting from germs that have found their way into the vagina. A doctor can cure it easily with medication. If this problem occurs, girls shouldn’t feel so embarrassed that they won’t even tell their mothers. If they don’t do anything, the infection may continue for some time. But it’s no more special than a minor infection anywhere else in the body. Tell your mother and get it taken care of promptly by a doctor.

Some girls wash out their vaginas with water as a matter of personal hygiene. Some girls use water containing an antiseptic. Some girls force water into the vagina from a squirting plastic cola bottle, or a douche bag that look like a hot-water bottle with a tube, or even from a faucet or a needle shower. But I should add here that too frequent use of such washing out can be harmful, in the opinion of most doctors, because it washes out natural lubricating liquids from the vagina. Unless there’s some infection, they advise against it. It’s just as effective to use soap and water outside the sex organ to cleanse the secretions that form, particularly around the clitoris and inner lips.

Between forty-five and fifty-five, usually, women stop producing an egg cell every month. This isn’t a serious loss at that age, especially since menstruation also stops. But the female hormone (estrogen) may also somewhat diminish, and this can produce uncomfortable feelings. It's started menopause, or “change of life” or “the change,” as it’s commonly known. Physicians have learned how to treat this normal stage of a woman’s life with additional hormones. In any case, once more contrary to popular belief, her sexual life will not change unless she chooses; it will go on exactly as it did before menopause.

This is how your sexual computer works, and how your friend’s works, too. As I’m sure you already know, adolescence can be a joyous and happy time, but also a period of change and adjustment, which is often painful. For some it means anxiety and fear. The boy and the girl who have a good knowledge of their bodies will find it much easier to enjoy the process of growing up — and every girl or boy has to go through it.

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