"Sex is Mostly Between Your Ears, Not Your Legs
The largest, most important and most active sexual organ of the body isn’t a penis or vagina. It’s the brain and its structures.
The brain is responsible for our emotions, our perceptions (including of pain and of pleasure), our memories; for regulating and controlling our central nervous system, our cardiovascular system, our endocrine system and our senses. The hypothalamus of the brain is responsible for the secretion of hormones that influence sexual feelings and response, like oxytocin, vasopressin, serotonin and dopamine. The brain receives and processes messages from your sensory organs, giving you and other parts of your body information about how something (or someone, including yourself) looks, sounds, tastes, smells and feels to you. It's also the brain that sends and receives signals regarding blood pressure, heart rate, body temperature and how we breathe: all huge parts of sexual function, experience and response.....
Sexuality is physical and sensory, but also chemical, emotional (yes, even for anyone who says sex isn’t at all emotional for them), psychological, intellectual, social, cultural and multi-sensory. That's all brain stuff. It’s not just what we feel if we touch ourselves or someone else touches us a certain way and how the brain influences those sensations, but all we think and feel about it, including messages others have given us, all our previous sexual experiences and experiences which may have influenced our sexuality, our hopes and fears, our sexual fantasies or expectations, how we feel about who we’re with if and when we have sexual partners, how we feel about our sexual selves as a whole and everything going on with us hormonally and physically when we are sexually stimulated – whether we’re aroused without any kind of touch, or if touch is also involved -- in any way. No matter what other parts of our bodies are part of what’s going on with us sexually our brain is our biggest, most important and most active sexual organ....
Tingly Bits
You might have heard someone use the term “erogenous zones” at some point. That’s a term popularized in sexology in the 60's and 70's to describe areas of the body of high sensitivity which people often (but not always) find particularly sexually stimulating....
Lists of erogenous zones can sometimes be arbitrary – when someone lists them, sometimes they're just making a list of what they personally like best -- but for many people, typical erogenous zones include the lips, tongue, palms and fingers, the soles of the feet, the inner thighs, nipples, neck, ears, armpits and the genitals. Our skin, as a whole, is really an erogenous zone. Mucocutaneous regions of the body (made of both mucosa and cutaneous skin) are also often particularly sensitive: parts like the foreskin, penis, the external clitoris, the inner labia, the perineum, mouth or nipples. Just so it’s clear, there is no absolute relationship between gender and where on your body you feel sexually sensitive: people who are or who identify as male can and do enjoy nipple stimulation, while some people who are female or female-identified do not, for instance."
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