We all love sexual activity. It’s great, it’s fun, it’s pleasurable, it has numerous health benefits, and it’s something that you can do alone or with a friend. However, there are some things about sex that aren’t covered in your typical sex education class. Hopefully some of the things you are about to read will give you something to strive for, something to help you pick better people to date, and something to scar you for life because of how gross it is (See #1).
1) It is possible to get pregnant without a vagina
In 1988, doctors were amazed when a 15-year-old girl living in the African country Lesotho came to them will all the symptoms of a woman in labor. The odd part? The girl didn’t have a vagina, thanks to a birth defect called Mullerian agenesis. Doctors delivered the baby via Cesarean, but decided to ask the girl about how she might have become pregnant if she didn’t have a vagina.
It was revealed that the girl was in the hospital 278 days earlier with a knife wound to her stomach. The average pregnancy lasts 280 days. The girl remembered that just before she was stabbed, she was engaging in a little bit of oral fellatio with her new boyfriend when her former lover caught them. She was then stabbed.
When she got to the hospital she had an empty stomach, meaning there was almost no stomach acid present. Doctors found two holes from a stab wound that opened up her stomach to her abdominal cavity, then cleaned the wound and then stitched her up.
So, how did she get pregnant?
In a report published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, doctors hypothesized that the pregnancy occurred when the spermatozoa (jizz) entered the reproductive organs by spilling out of the knife wound into her stomach, into her reproductive organs!
2) Really great sex can give you amnesia
A study published in the Journal of Emergency Medicine in September 2011 revealed a peculiar case about a 54-year old woman who experienced complete memory loss after having sex with her husband. The woman was admitted to the Georgetown University Hospital emergency department, claiming she could not recall anything that occurred within 24 hours before her having an orgasm. The authors of the report diagnosed the woman with global amnesia, a rare and sudden episode of memory loss.
In other words, the sex she had literally blew her mind.
“Transient global amnesia is caused by a scrambling of the memory circuits in the brain, often brought on by physical or emotional triggers,” said Dr. Carol Lippa, a professor of neurology at Drexel University Medical School. “In post-coital cases, transient global amnesia may be related to change in blood flow in the vessels that feed the brain’s memory formation areas – sort of a remote consequence of the altered blood flow that occurs during sex.
Experts have said that there isn’t a known reason why transient global amnesia occurs, but it doesn’t have any long term effects. About three to five out of 100,000 people experience this condition each year.
3) Sudden heart attacks are rare, but mainly occur when a man is cheating on his wife
A study published in 2012 by the University of Florence states that sudden death while having sex is more common when a man is cheating on his spouse. Researchers hypothesized that because the man is in an unfamiliar place, his excitement level is increased, as opposed to when he’s at home having sex with his life. Researchers also suggested that older men who are having an affair are more likely to have a heart attack because their younger sexual partners might be more demanding in the bedroom.
“Extramarital sex may be hazardous and stressful because the lover is often younger than the primary partner, and probably sex occurs more often following excessive drinking and/or eating,” researcher Dr. Alessandra Fisher told the Daily Mail.
In fact, a study released in January 2012 found that after analyzing 5,559 autopsy reports, people who died abruptly from heart complications found that 75% of those cases died during sex while engaging with someone other than their spouse!
4) OKCupid has determined that vegetarians are more likely to enjoy oral sex
OKCupid is a free “friendship” website, but it is mostly used for dating and finding someone to have sex with. Users can answer member-created quizzes and multiple-choice questions to reveal more information about who they are and what they like, and can also use this information to find out more about other OKCupid users.
In 2011, OKCupid released some of the information that they had gathered from some of the quizzes on the website to release to the public. One of the graphs revealed that vegetarian women are more than twice as likely to enjoy giving oral sex as non-vegetarian women. Vegetarian men are also more likely to enjoy giving oral sex, although it isn’t as dramatic as a difference. It’s funny, isn’t it? You’d think a vegetarian women would try to avoid putting sausage in their mouth.
Another study revealed that people who used Twitter everyday on average had shorter relationships than people who did not use Twitter. However, the survey doesn’t reveal if Twitter users are more un-dateable than non-Twitter users, or if Twitter users are pickier with who they are dating than non-Twitter users.
Oh, and by the way, another study revealed that the odds of someone who uses Twitter frequently masturbating today are 2:1. The odds of someone masturbating today that doesn’t use Twitter, is a little higher than 1.5:1.
What’s with all the horny people on Twitter?
5) Sex is moderate exercise! Having sex burns almost as much energy as jogging
Antony D Karelis, a professor of exercise science at the University of Quebec at Montreal, decided to undertake a study to look at how much energy is actually exerted during sex. Karelis said that there had been many rumors about how much energy was used during sex, but he says that nobody had measured an accurate number.
Karelis asked 21 young heterosexual couples from a local area to jog on a treadmill for 30 minutes, while he and his researchers monitored their energy expenditure among other things. Next, Karelis gave his volunteers armbands that gauge energy expenditure among other things. The couples were then sent home for a month and told to have sex at least once a week while wearing the armbands. After each session, the couples were asked to fill out a questionnaire about how each session made them feel, physically, and psychologically, especially compared to running on the treadmill.
As it turns out, jogging requires more exertion than sex, but sex isn’t far behind. On average, men burn about four calories a minute while having sex, and women burn around three per minute, during sessions that lasted from 10 to 57 minutes. The men burned 9 calories per minute jogging and women burned about 7.
Karelis concluded that sex is worth encouraging to people who hate working out. Ninety-eight percent of Karelis’s volunteers reported that sex felt more fun than jogging. The other two percent, well, they must be doing something wrong if they prefer jogging.
It’s cool to know that every time I have sex, I burn about 8 calories.
[Sources, Header image via Shutterstock]