At a time when the president of the US brags in the State of the Union address that abstinence is on the rise, it is nice to know there are sites like Teen Wire to give young people much needed information and reassurance.
Excerpt from their "masturbation myths":
Masturbation releases stress and physical tension. Many people masturbate to relax, and it can help some people fall asleep.
Orgasms — whether they're from masturbation or sex play with a partner — can act as a natural painkiller. One study from 2001 found that orgasm can ease migraines faster than medication. Some women masturbate to relieve menstrual cramps. Research has also shown that orgasms may even prevent endometriosis, a disease of the uterine lining.
One recent study found that frequent ejaculation from masturbating may reduce a man's chances of developing prostate cancer.
Update: featured comments:
Pascal R said...
I browsed the site. For a doctor, some things are naturally very basic/obvious. But for an american teen, or any teen for that matter, I think it's an excellent site and give it my warm recommendation.
9:52 PM
eolake said...
As an educated man from a very liberal country, I still found tidbits that made me think. To the average teenager, the site must be a revelation.
This must be an EVIL site to the religious right. It shows explicit drawings of genetalia! If that doesn't make killers out of our kids, what will? (The military?)
12 comments:
I browsed the site. For a doctor, some things are naturally very basic/obvious. But for an american teen, or any teen for that matter, I think it's an excellent site and give it my warm recommendation.
As an educated man from a very liberal country, I still found tidbits that made me think. To the average teenager, the site must be a revelation.
This must be an EVIL site to the religious right. It shows explicit drawings of genetalia! If that doesn't make killers out of our kids, what will? (The military?)
I got a book when I was 10. :) My mom offered to discuss it with me when I'd read it, but that was way too scary. :) Though then again, I wonder if we were really "typical" American.
Naah! The military can't make killers out of our children! Remember, war is just like a videogame. (Today's U.S. wars, that is.) As proved by nice, innocent young Mike Teevee...
And videogames don't corrupt because of the violence, only if there is (gasp!) nudity in them! Remember the Grand Theft Auto "Hot Coffe" scandal? Got almost worse than the Janet Jackson "nipplegate".
P.S.: I may have already mentioned this, buy my parents told me everything there was to know (to their Seventies knowledge) when I was perhaps five or six. With all relevant images. It is litterally amazing how far back my guffawing schoolmates seemed to me when we became teenagers. Typical example: I tell them a dirty joke, and they start with collective idiotic laughter way before the punchline... because it's already dirty!
Once, a younger friend told me a joke in which the punchline was *just* dirty. After a puzzled moment, I realized the best was to laugh politely, because HE certainly wouldn't "get it". Better that I be the one seeming a little thick, right? :-(
"A real friend is someone who will help you move a body." And who would never sadden a buddy.
Time to slip in one of my own aphorisms, in the hope some day they become apophtegms:
«Knowledge is power, and reading is the beginning of knowledge. The fact that some societies keep women [or other categories] uneducated and illiterate should tell us something very important...»
I think illettrism is frighteningly widespread in some communities of today's Western world...
Knowledge is power, simply because ignorance is always a weakness. I'd never be afraid to know something (except State secrets, maybe). To me, there is no "forbidden knowledge", only dangerous knowers. It always comes back to what you do with science, technology, intelligence... or sexuality. But at least, you can KNOW what you are doing. And you have to. Whoever you are, you owe it to yourself.
"Until next time, take care of yourselves... and each other." (Jerry Springer)
"explicit drawings of genitalia"...
Well, I must be horribly perverted by now, because during my whole childhood and teen age, and until this very moment, several times a day, I have looked at REAL-LIFE genitalia. But what can I do, hunh? A guy's gotta go to the bathroom! And wash from time to time.
Besides, if you never look at your body, you might miss some very important early medical signs...
That counts double for women. Trust me, ladies : use a mirror, look, see, and learn. Dare to touch, too. For your own health. And palpate your breasts regularly, go ahead, don't be shy! Doctor's orders. :-)
"Many people masturbate to relax, and it can help some people fall asleep."
Some anxious children do it too. By instinct.
I heard once of a culture in which mothers actually do this to their baby boys to relax them and get them to sleep. Oddly enough, they don't do it to girls. Seems they have some taboo.
I've also heard of cultural suggestions that a mother would have to "train" her male child's foreskin by regularly pulling it back so that the opening won't be "too small" later on, when the boy grows into a man and experiences an erection that he might wish to utilize. As I understand it, this is a preposterous myth, and that uncircumcized males' foreskins will open quite properly without mom's interference, unless the entire apparatus is malformed (which is what, one in a million chance? I dunno) in which case mom's intervention won't be helping anything anyway.
This silly myth has been parrotted to me by a variety of young mothers in my age group, who all have used it as an excuse for circumcizing their children.
Which I found barbaric, honestly. First, the reasoning doesn't follow -- the (erroneously perceived) need to aid the child unless you mutilate him wouldn't justify mutilating him just to get out of a little work. What, because my little girl will have to learn to pee-pee on her own one day, I should outfit her with a lifetime permanent catheter?
Second, the justification itself is false -- the perception that there was a requirement for motherly intervention of that sort was incorrect in itself. I mean, didn't they talk to a doctor? Another generation of genital mutilation in the developed West.
I speak as a circumcized guy, and now that I know how my penis was "designed" to work by nature, I "miss" my foreskin. Not that I actually remember ever having had one ... hmm ... wonder if I don't "work right"?
Anyway, the more information, the better. There ought to be some websites (but who gets valid medical information from the internet? geez ...) for those mothers out there, too!
When I was about twelve I got a book, too. It was mildly informative; more so in the idea, that it was OK to not know what the heck was going on, than in actual information. It had funny pictures. It was also quite politically correct -- suggesting, for example, that it was OK for people to be sexually attracted to animals or inanimate objects, which I guess it is, but the way the book put it, it made it sound like you'd get away with talking about it around the water cooler and nobody would look at you askance ...
Oh, the taboos we have in our societies. Why on earth did we let the world's only remaining thermo-nuclear and economic super-power be founded by the Puritans in the name of religious freedom? Puritans -- religious freedom? Can you say oxymoron ...
"Why on earth did we let the world's only remaining thermo-nuclear and economic super-power be founded by the Puritans in the name of religious freedom?"
Alas, it happened the other way round : thermonuclear power came later. Religious freedom at the time might have avoided the necessity for them to emigrate to the "Western Indias"...
But no worries young knight, with Iran's progress, there shall be balance once more between Order and Chaos in the World.
Okay, so Puritan Order and Muslim Fundamentalist Chaos are opposite mental disorders of the same kind, and we're all stuck in the middle. Not even I have all the answers. No, really. Maybe it's just the foreshadowing for the sequel adventure game?...
"It has been a millenium since World War 3, and the Earth has returned to the Stone Age. Technology is lost. Your quest is for a mysterious legendary artefact called "the Encarta" that could restore Knowledge to our world...
On another topic, I believe there is one requisite about the foreskin, though. At birth, it is still adherent to the glans, and normally the parents are supposed to do one very simple and harmless thing : regularly pull it back, gently, so it'll progressively separate as it should. Nothing as extreme as a surgical intervention!
I still bear the memory of the consequences of my parents NOT doing this. Basically, they realized one day, when I was already much bigger than a baby, that it still didn't pull back. Then, for some reason, they thought it had become very urgent. So, it was accomplished in one single afternoon, with a mild antiseptic. Ouch. How I wish somebody had told us then, that I could just do it little by little and by myself... and that it would become rather pleasurable too!
Ah, well. I wasn't really traumatized. Losing my baby teeth was about as unpleasant. I just learned a very valuable lesson (the hard way) about the inadequacy of rushed overzealous interventionism.
Say, do you think President Bush reads this blog? ;-)
Oh he mails me regularly. A big fan, but that man has some queer ideas.
Eolake,
Is that a joke or is it serious?
About Bush? A joke.
LOL!
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