Sexpert Knowledge: Weird Facts You Never Knew about Sex
Where would we be without sex? Well, the short answer is we wouldn’t be here at all, but aside from providing us with the beginning of our existence, sex is extremely beneficial to your wellbeing if only because it’s the focus of some weird and wonderful facts. Let’s take a look at some of the coolest things you never knew about sex and sexual health.
1. The basics: Ok, you probably know the basics of sex, but here’s how the numbers stack up. If you’re a woman, you only – as you’re likely already aware – release one egg a month. If you’re a man, on the other hand, your production is much more prolific. In just one ejaculation, you emit anywhere between 30 million and 750 million sperm.
2. Getting piggy with it: However many sperm men expel in a single ejaculation, you fellers have nothing on pigs – a single swine ejaculate contains about 8 billion sperm cells.
3. Mission impossible: With so many pregnancies being unintended or “happy accidents,” the stats surrounding the sheer possibility of conception are mind-boggling. In order to get a single sperm to a ready egg, it has to arrive in the small three to six-day window in which women are fertile. The sperm rarely remain viable for more than two days or so, but they can hang around in the reproductive tract for up to five days.
4. It’s getting hot in here: When you’re ovulating, this process heats up your body by as much as half a degree Fahrenheit. Before ovulation, your body temperature lands between 96 and 98 degrees F (35.5 to 36.6 degrees Celsius), but right after ovulation, your body temperature rises to an average of 97 to 99 degrees F (36.1 to 37.2 degrees C). This is why many women who try to conceive, or try to avoid conceiving, take their temperature every day to detect ovulation.
5. Animals in the bedroom: Aside from being frowned upon, bestiality has been found to be detrimental to your wellness. In 2011, a study found that having sex with animals – be they chickens, pigs or horses – might raise men’s risk of penile cancer. This is possibly because these acts cause microtrauma to the penis and lets foreign microorganisms in. This includes the human papilloma virus (HPV) which can cause cancer in humans.
6. It’s a bit nippy: Nipples are proven erogenous zones, and it seems like the big man upstairs knew what he was doing. Brain-imaging research on women has shown that the same area of your brain that registers nipple stimulation also registers stimulation from your vagina, cervix and clitoris.
7. Let’s talk about sex, baby: While you may be worried that sex education encourages children to go out and give sex a try, in fact the opposite is true. A 2012 study published by the non-profit Guttmacher Institute found that any sex education at all delays teen sex.
8. The more the merrier: However, before you pat yourself on the back for teaching your teenager the birds and the bees, delaying sex doesn’t stop adolescents experimenting in more than pairs. Yep, a 2011 study found that one in 13 (7.3%) teen girls aged 14 to 20, have had a group-sex experience. The study, which was published in the Journal of Urban Health: Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, also found that these girls were also more likely to have been exposed to pornography and childhood sexual abuse than their peers. More than half of that group reported being pressured into the multiple-sex-partner situation and, perhaps most worryingly of all, 45% indicated no condom was used during their most recent group-sex encounter.
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