Word: coitus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...view, a much stronger case can be built on the premise that sexual expression is primarily a social phenomenon. Far from asserting a primordial urge, it varies from culture to culture and from individual to individual. In Polynesia, what the West calls foreplay is epilogue, not prologue, to coitus. Gagnon notes that for some writers-among them Lawrence, Hemingway and Mailer-sex is as much a political as a procreative process; Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover struck a calculated blow against the morality of the time. To prostitutes, it is only a livelihood, and frequently no more...
...means let's have sex in fiction. Let's take coitus out of the closet and off the altar and put it on the continuum of human behavior." That was Author John Updike talking, in George Plimpton's quarterly Paris Review. Said John: "I plotted Couples almost entirely in church-little shivers and urgencies I would note down on the program and carry down to the office Monday...
...receiving increased scientific support. A husband-wife team of physician and psychologist, Dr. Michael Newton and Dr. Niles Newton of Chicago, point out in the New England Journal of Medicine that the survival of the species originally depended upon "the satisfactions gained from the two voluntary acts of reproduction-coitus and breast feeding. These had to be sufficiently pleasurable to ensure their frequent occurrence." There never has been any argument about the pleasure of coitus, but the satisfactions of lactation were submerged in the prudery and false modesty of the Edwardian era, and the later feminist drive to achieve equality...
...physiological responses in coitus and lactation are closely allied, say the Newtons: "Uterine contractions occur both during suckling and during sexual excitement. Nipple erection occurs during both. Breast stimulation alone can induce orgasm in some women. Nursing mothers not only report sexual stimulation from suckling but also, as a group, are more interested in as rapid a return to active intercourse with their husbands as possible...
...Actor Yan Brian recited a passage from Thus Spake Zarathustra while climbing a ladder, male dancers struggled for balls of rolled-up newspapers, a black-clad hag buzzed around on a scooter and recited folk poems. Men and women frugged wildly to rock-'n'-roll music, imitated coitus to electronic pings and a soft-voiced reading of the Song of Songs, staged a mock war between classical and modern ballet, and ended looking up expectantly while the noise of jet engines screamed overhead. Then, during ten minutes of bravos from the audience, they all slowly, slowly walked offstage...