Archive for November, 2008

Old Folks Need Sex in Nursing Homes Too

The older we get, our society tends to peg us as “sexless” and as beings not capable of having sexual urges any more, or having dramatically reduced urges to have sexual intercourse or intimacy, but this quite frankly just isn’t true.  There are of course people who have always had a low libido, and this most likely will not change for them as they age, and there is also of course a natural decline in your sexual urges as you get older, but nonetheless, you still have those feelings and they should be acted on, because sex is always good for the soul!

I like to envision my self as an older person who still likes to have sex and still feels the urges to have sex, but for many of us, we tend to even think of ourselves as sexless creatures when we reach age 70 or 80.  We think that sex somehow becomes impossible at that age.  Yes, while it’s true that our bodies aren’t quite as limber and maybe don’t look as youthful and lithe as we’d like them to, we still have the perfect capability to have sex, and what’s better, we are older and more experienced and tend to know what we like, so it’s much more productive than when we were younger in many ways!

This topic has come up as conversation at nursing homes as of late, with employees at these places of retirement and health care for the elderly wishing for a better education on how to deal with the sexual politics at a nursing home.  Yes, sexual politics still happen at nursing homes too!  Older people are still having sexual liaisons with eachother, and that’s perfectly fine, it’s nothing to flip out about.  In fact, it’s their right to do so as much, and as often as they want, as long as they aren’t trying to do it in front of other people or do anything else that’s illegal, like anyone else is not allowed to do.

Many nursing homes make it difficult for these senior citizens to find absolute privacy if they either want to engage in sex with a partner, or even self pleasure themselves, which is something that people have said they still do and still want to do well into their 70’s and 80’s.  They are trying to figure out how to make the subject of nursing home sexuality not such a taboo subject any more, and to afford their residents the privacy and right to do so as they see fit. 

The problem of the semi pricate rooms and the way they are set up so as to not offer the most privacy when couples want to enjoy eachother is also being addressed.  I wonder how many men in nursing homes are on impotence drugs like Viagra, Cialis and Levitra?  That would also be an interesting survey, because these drugs are popular among the older age groups of men since many of them lose their abilities to get an erection. 

Men 70 & Over in Mexico City Get Free Impotence Drugs

Well, it might pay to live in Mexico City these days if you happen to be a man that is seventy years old or more.  Men of this age group are going to be getting access to free Viagra, Cialis and other impotence and sexual enhancement drugs from community elderly health care centers.  Officials say that sexual enhancement drugs are important to the city because sexuality is a huge addition to their way of life and adds a lot of spark to the latino community.

Funny, because high sexuality is a cliche mark of the Latino culture, and this just adds to that cliche – not that that’s a bad cliche to be known for!  Once men pass the age of fifty or so, they start to have more problems with impotence and premature ejaculation, which is a prime reason why prescriptions for drugs for impotence and sexual performance skyrocket past this age group.  The reason for the problem is usually that older men have more problems with circulation, and getting a hard on and maintaining one is all related to your blood flow.

Viagra and viagra alternatives work to get the blood circulating faster.  For this reason, they may also increase blood pressure while in use which is why men with known heart problems are cautioned to stay away from impotence drugs that work this way, since they may actually increase the heart rate too much and cause a heart attack in certain individuals with pre-existing circulatory and heart problems or heart disease that causes the heart to be more prone.

The important part of this Mexico City handout is safety, and it looks like they have that all taken care of, since all men who are eligible for the free products much undergo a physical assessment before they are allowed to take any drugs home with them.  It’s looking like over 100,000 men will be eligible based on demographic age number gathering so far, which is quite an order to fill, but there will be some happy older men once the program takes effect! 

Shortage of Sperm in the UK?

Stop the press!  There appears to be a reported shortage of donated sperm in the UK at the moment.  Yes, men can donate their sperm to sperm banks and become a sperm donor for artificial insemination if they’d like.  How do you feel about that? What if you became the biological father of someone you never meet, would you be ok with that?  Well, lots of men are, because sperm banks never really seem to have a shortage of donations of sperm/semen.  Except for now, the United Kingdom appears to have a shortage of the precious half of life making cellular structures.

The British Fertility society has reported that there is actually a shortage in willing men to give their donations of sperm lately, for reasons not totally known.  Well, actually a big potential problem, and something that may need to be repealed if they are going to have any success in the future collecting sperm samples from donors, is that Britain has passed a law that does not allow totally anonymous sperm donations.  This means a man’s privacy is not completely protected if he chooses to donate his sperm. 

That fact could definitely be offputting for thousands of men who want to give their sperm.  Men who wish to not be identified as a sperm donor by children who were fathered by their sperm sample through insemination cannot any longer be guaranteed that they will never be contacted because the knowledge is available to the kids when they become eighteen years old.

To put perspective on the sperm donor shortage, the number of women needing artificial insemination to get pregnant in the UK per year is in the thousands, and the number of male sperm donors is only in the low hundreds.  I’d say that’s a pretty bad ratio, wouldn’t you.  Maybe they’d take US men if they get desperate.  Heck, maybe they’ll start offering some cash for it! 

Prostate a Pleasure Center for Men?

It seems almost cruel that the prostate, which is fairly out of reach during conventional types of foreplay between sexual partners, is a key to intense male pleasure and multiple orgasms (such as the kind available to men after taking something like Deer antler plus).  However, through research, they have found the prostate, which is about the size of a pecan, is in fact a majorly sensitive area of a man’s body (ever heard of milking the prostate, ew, I know, it doesn’t sound appetizing at all, does it?)

In fact, the prostate gland is such an intense pleasure center when it is manipulated, that some have called it the male G spot, which is the equivalent to the infamous female G spot, where the female can be provided great sexual pleasure when it is manually stimulated, however this area is pretty close to her other outward sexual organs, so it’s not too hard to access by her sexual partner, so it’s more of a known thing.

Not everyone knows this, but the male orgasm actually begins with the prostate gland.  When a man gets sexually aroused, his prostate fills with fluid.  As the swelling of the prostate gland fills with more fluid, the pleasure vibrations and pulses become very intense, working right up to the moment of orgasm.  Men who have had their prostates stimulated directly usually report the same thing pretty much :  a mind blowing orgasm of which they’ve never known any parallel, so you can see why this is an area of interest for many men and their partners to find out what it’s all about for themselves.

Too bad it’s a little harder to actually find and access than a woman’s G spot, but if ther partners can discover it’s location and figure out how to really work it, then they can have something that’s just between them that produces a lot of pleasure for years to come.  The only thing I’d worry about is if this might somehow not be good for the health of the prostate.

Can Circumcision Scar the Penis, Causing Loss of Sensation?

Circumcision has certainly been a hot topic to discuss since it became the status quo for infant boys in the past thirty or so years, perhaps even more.  It was started as sort of a hygienic procedure so that men would not have to worry about pulling the foreskin of the penis, something all boys are born with, back when they are cleansing it, and as a preventive measure for men against STD’s and the spreading of STD’s since it was thought the foreskin of the penis could spread disease more easily since germs, bacteria, and even viruses could sort of hide away in this fold of skin longer than they could on the smooth surface of a circumcised penis.

There has been much debate about whether circumcision is actually of benefit or not when it comes to both hygiene and the spread of STD’s for men.  Some say that it does not make a lick of difference when it comes to the spread of certain sexually transmitted diseases whether a man is circumcised or not, and some say that it may make all the difference whether he spread disease to his partners because his penis is uncircumcised.  Some fall in the middle and say it’s pretty much the same whether you are or are not. 

So, it’s really basically left up to the parents of boy babies whether they want their children circumcised or not, so for most men the decision is made for them.  For some, it is a personal decision when they get older if their parents chose not to have the child circumcised for personal beliefs and convictions or for religious reasons, for example. 

When these boys become men or become old enough to make their own decisions, sometims they choose to go ahead with an adult circumcision, which of course is much more painful, and there is a higher degree of risk when it comes to whether the full grown male penis may suffer a loss of sensation to to abrasion of the tip of the penis, where sensitivity and feeling is it’s most heightened. 

Adult males who are not circumcised may make the choice to get “snipped” because they do believe it is more hygienic, and sometimes they will even do it simply because they feel self conscious whenever they disrobe in front of a woman since this is not the norm per today’s standards by most people’s thought process.  Women are pretty open to it though, and although when they see their first one in person they may not know exactly what to expect, they still nonetheless are not too taken aback. 

Most Women Don’t View Low Libido as Big Deal

While most men would view a low libido as a potentially serious problem, or at the very least, something they would want to fix right away, most women don’t look at the case of a low female libido as a huge deal.  They feel like they’ll just deal with it, where for men it’s more of a blast to the ego, and they also want to have that libido so that they can enjoy sex once again, or at least so they can want to have it more often so they can enjoy it. 

Low libido in women is the most common sexual dysfunction among women in fact, but many women don’t even view it as that much of a problem.  Perhaps this was how God programmed them, so that they would not forever be churning out babies, and putting their bodies through all that time and time again.  That’s how a lot of women view it, but they also admit that it’s just not high on their priority scale unless their partners are really upset and it begins to cause relationship problems that are serious enough to warrant some sort of preventive treatment action.

In fact, only a little over 10% of women with low sexual libido are actually bothered by it enough to seek treatment of some other sort of female sexual enhancement product that does not require a doctor’s prescription -a sort of female Viagra if you will, but one that does nto require a prescription.

A major problem with diagnosing “low libido” in women is that it’s hard to say what just isn’t normal to the individual.  For example, maybe your partner thinks you have a low sex drive but you have always had the same sex drive and feel that it’s ok the way it is.  Or say a doctor compares one patient’s reports of sexual desire frequency to another patient’s frequency reports of sexual desire and one has a much higher frequency. Can’t we just chalk it all up to differences between individuals instead of a “problem”. 

Many women feel that way, and feel as though they are viewed as the one with the problem, or the “weird” one when in fact they feel their sexual appetite is totally normal.  How do you guys feel about your partners?  Let us know if you have any stories that might help shed some light on the female sexual appetite and psyche here today, I think it’d do a lot of men good knowing it’s not really anything they’re doing wrong, it’s just than women are different than men sexually speaking. 

Men and Vitamin E, Selenium

An ongoing study that was commissioned by the government has recently been halted because it wasn’t shown to be doing any sort of benefit to the parties involved, which were all men taking vitamin E and selenium supplements in the hopes that the study would confirm what science had hypothesized about the two supplements, which was that they could help to prevent prostate cancer in men.

The other reason it was stopped, beside the fact that it had not shown any benefits as far as prostate cancer prevention, was that the men who were taking just vitamin E were getting slightly higher instances of diabetes, and the men who were taking selenium only supplements were getting slightly higher instances of prostate cancer.

I’m wondering if this study was strictly controlled though. We all know how variable men’s diets can be, and what of genetic factors and other things like environment and lifestyle that weigh in often times in ways we don’t even know when it comes to cancers, degenerative nerve disorders and other diseases that are lifestyle related.   Could it not have been some confounding factor (something outside of the study that the scientists studying the factors had no control over or knowledge of), or was it a flawed experiment to begin with?

Those are of course answers we as the general public never know about these studies and I guess that’s the only thing that irks me about studies on herbal or natural alternatives to men’s health, and women’s health for that matter.  The authors of the study did say though that the small differences in the diabetes and the increased risk of prostate cancer were small and not statistically significant, so at least they added that disclaimer in there.

As far as selenium, this mineral is only needed in trace amount in the body, and I’d almost wonder how much of this they were giving to the men who were on the selenium and vitamin e both, versus the men that were just on the selenium.  If I’m not mistaken, this is the mineral that was found in abundance in the batches of a certain supplement that was recently recalled which was making people’s hair fall out because it contained much more than is needed by the human body.  It was also making people’s fingernails fall out.

New : Tips on the Male Orgasm

We have a new page here at MEM and of course it’s devoted to our favorite topic, how to get men to orgasm better, faster and more effectively.  It’s all about what to do and what not to do for those of you who are wondering how to get your male partners to have better orgasms and enjoy sex more with you – and you’ll reap the rewards too of course !

See it at Male Orgasm Tips. 

Beer That’s Got Cancer Fighting Properties?

Well, it used to be that tipping back a brew on the weekends was looked at as a bad thing in terms of your health, especially if you overindulged in it.  Not that beer is all bad, the hops and grains used to make it do have some sort of nutritional value, just not very much.  Beer is kind of high in calories and it also has the notorious if not dubious distinction of giving men that thing we all hate but all seem to get eventuallly unless we’re professional athletes “beer belly”.

Scientists are now trying to make a beer that’s healthier though.  I didn’t see anythiing about reducing it’s calories any further, which would be great considering even one light beer ranges from 70 to 80 calories, and that really adds up after a night of beer drinking!  However, what they are doing is putting more nutritional value in the beer, making it more akin to drinking a red wine, which is rich in antioxidants and also has been thought to have beneficial effects on the heart health as well.

It’s a team of six students (wow, smart kids!), that are doing the research to try to make beer into a healthier drink.  They are using reverse engineering to try to give the beer a component that is in red wine that gives red wine it’s notorious health benefits, called resveratrol.  Figures a group of college kids would think of making beer healthier.  They probably started this as a dare or a joke or something, and now who knows, it may end up being a lucrative money maker for them if it succeeds!

Speaking of beer, pretty soon Christmas Ale comes out, and I’m pretty excited about that.  A friend of mine is bringing it over next sunday on our football day for the group of us.  I know it’s not the healthy stuff, but it sure does taste good!  Resveratrol, the chemical compound that they are adding to the healtheir version of beer, is known for it’s cancer fighting benefits, which also of course means it will probably be beneficial for warding off the most common male related cancer, which is prostate cancer.  They say that antioxidants help keep cancer away, and that goes for all types of cancers.

California Has E-cards for STD’s System

Leave it to California to always be the most progressive state in the US, and they’re at it again apparently with a very progressive idea on how to get people to notify their sexual partners if they have been diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease recently and need them to also be tested so they can catch it early if necessary. 

Admittedly, an ecard is not the most personable or upfront way to do this, but officials are hoping that it takes the fear factor out of people telling their past partners that they should get tested if they have tested positive for something.  It may seem somewhat dubious, but we are in an age when anonymity is greatly coveted and a lot of people are too afraid to come forward with this information for fear they will be met with anger or resentment.  Can’t blame them! 

It makes it anyonymous also, so the partner or past partner does not know who it is from, leaving them to guess at who it may be from their past.  There’s even one card that says something to the effect of “who, what, when, where, it doesn’t matter” and that they recipient just needs to know there may be a chance they are infected. 

People who want to use this free service can go to inSpot.org and sign up for their specific ecard and who they need it sent to.  This of course relies on the fact that the sender knows their past partner’s email address and takes the initiative to send the ecard if they do find they either tested positive or think there is a high risk they may have an STD.

Not only does the card notify recipients of an initial possibility that they need to be tested, but it also sets the recipient up for regular notifications, so it’s not just a one time thing.  As far as any complaints about misuse, no one has really complained too much, except a few people who think they have received the card in error, or maybe they have been sent the card as a joke, but this has been minimal the program’s sponsors say.