• Gerudo@lemm.ee
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    12 hours ago

    I read somewhere that when the pair who were husband and wife went up, officially on record, no they didn’t do the deed.

    Other astronauts who have been asked about the couple answer it “well there wasn’t too much privacy, so it’d be difficult”. Not exactly a no.

    We all know they banged for science, but NASA probably just wants it kept hush hush for whatever reason.

  • ch00f@lemmy.world
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    14 hours ago

    From the book “Packing for Mars” by Mary Roach:

    In a memoir, astronaut Michael Collins relates a story of a physician back in the Apollo era who recommended regular masturbation on long missions, lest astronauts develop prostate infections. The flight surgeon for Collins’s moon mission “decided to ignore that advice,” and ignoring seems to have been the basic approach to the human sex drive ever since. It’s the same way at the Russian space agency. Cosmonaut Alexandr Laveikin told me he too had heard that lengthy abstinence could cause prostate infections, but that the space agency pretends the issue doesn’t exist. “It’s up to yourself how you will deal with it. But everybody is doing it, everybody understands. It’s nothing. My friends ask me, ‘how are you making sex in space?’ I say, ‘By hand!’” As for the logistics: “There are possibilities. And sometimes it happens automatically while you sleep. It’s natural.” John Charles told me he’d heard about the link between prostate health and “self-stim” --at NASA, there’s an abbreviation for everything-- but never heard any formal discussion, pro or con, of orbital masturbation.

    • EvilBit@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      Always upvotes for Mary Roach. Everyone should read her breakout work, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.

        • EvilBit@lemmy.world
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          2 hours ago

          Alas, that’s my least favorite of hers that I’ve read so far. Her angle is to all the questions you want answered, then get the answer. Spook, being about the unknowable, means the answers are a lot less fulfilling. Still a worthwhile read, just not her best in my opinion.

    • XeroxCool@lemmy.world
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      10 hours ago

      I’m amused by the use of “automatically” when I’ve always heard it in my terrestrial life as “involuntarily”. Changes the implication in a positive way, I’d say. Involuntary means you can’t stop it. Automatic means it’s supposed to happen.

  • zephorah@lemm.ee
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    16 hours ago

    This occurred a while back. I was standing at a nurses station, when the technician watching the heart monitors announced that a patients heart rate had jumped from 80s to 140s

    For those who don’t know, parameters are 50-100. 40s if you’re an athlete. And the heart rate is generally allowed to go to 129, in a hospital, if you have no symptoms.

    This individual jumped from 80s to 140s. This being a significant change, staff ran to the room to check the patients well-being and found this patients girlfriend riding him in the hospital bed.

    The question you should ask is how much privacy do they want?

  • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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    14 hours ago

    Did you know that you can orgasm without the associated spike in heart rate? Takes some practice, but you can even separate ejaculation and orgasm, and still have both.

    It’s alllll about how much you’re willing to practice. It comes down to breath control combined with awareness of each stage of arousal and managing the two.

      • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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        12 hours ago

        I’m not sure I can.

        Reason being that you have to start paying attention to your arousal stages. I can’t see you, and am not willing to watch a stranger masturbate on cam, so the best I can do is to link to the Wikipedia on Arousal cycles and advise you to go very slowly.

        See, a lot of what happens during the plateau segment of arousal is involuntary. Not all of it though. More importantly, you can kinda hijack some involuntary actions of the body by changing semi involuntary activity like breathing. You can’t underestimate how much you can do simply by using breath control

        Controlling your breathing influences heart rate, blood pressure, brain waves, digestion, all kinds of things that we can’t just change by thinking about it. But, because we can control our breathing, we can change things indirectly

        Then, when you start paying attention to how evert part of the arousal cycles feels, rather than just enjoying it, or trying to get to orgasm as the goal, you start connecting to the things you can control directly as well as being able to apply breathing and meditative techniques to influence the involuntary parts.

        Take as an example the spasms of the pelvis that occur during orgasm. Those muscles can be contracted voluntarily. That’s called a kegal exercise. Doing those exercises is one part of the process. As you learn to do that, you also learn what the precursor sensations are. When you’re approaching orgasm, you’ll feel those muscles start to “tingle”, for lack of a better term. It isn’t actual contractions, it’s the muscles getting increased blood flow, and the nervous system priming them.

        That signal is just one that you have to not only learn to identify, but learn how to both stop and eventually put on hold. Stopping is easy enough, you just contract them voluntarily. That’s one of the ways people delay ejaculation in the first place. If you’re getting close but your partner isn’t, contracting those muscles and not relaxing them puts a stop to the incipient orgasm for a while. With enough practice, you can delay orgasm and ejaculation almost indefinitely (with caveats, which would be at least three paragraphs and nobody likes reading on screen like this, so I won’t add stress to my fingers doing it lol).

        That single step allows you to eventually learn how to identify and control the triggering of the prostate and testicles that leads to ejaculation. Then, you can learn how to disconnect those triggers from the orgasm itself. They aren’t the same thing, but they’re linked via the nervous system.

        That link is what allows you to use breath control and meditative techniques to isolate them and hold one or the other back.

        Usually, what happens is that you’ll hold off ejaculation and enjoy the orgasm. Sometimes without ejaculating at all. But, you can do it the other way, where you’ll hold off the general orgasm but still have the release of semen. If you look up “ruined orgasm”, you can see that the two aren’t perfectly synced in the first place. Just by ceasing stimulation, it’s possible to ejaculate but miss the burst of pleasure that accompanies orgasm.

        Doing it voluntarily, under control means that not only will you ejaculate without orgasm, but you’ll maintain arousal, keep your erection, and be able to keep going without the hypersensitivity that occurs post orgasm (insert when you nut but she ain’t stop meme here). The thing is that unless you’re one of those guys that cam ejaculate and do so again quickly, chances are that you won’t be able to also enjoy another ejaculation with orgasm later. Doing it the other way around, by delaying ejaculation but experiencing orgasm, you end up being able to have multiple orgasms and then still enjoy ejaculation with orgasm as a finale.

        Some of the methodology of doing all that is part of tantric sex practices. Indeed, that’s where anyone interested should start looking. It’s the easiest path to learning the sex specific aspects of breath control and body awareness. That’s compared to learning it as a general meditative practice and then applying that to the sex part of things.

        It is also much easier to learn all of it while masturbating rather than during sex. Even if you’re having sex with someone that’s practicing their own tantric goals, and is willing to work on yours, there’s a delay between you sensing an event, saying something, them hearing it and then altering their activities. It’s a split second between the sensation and them stopping, but that’s how long a trigger can take. You can go from on the edge of transition into orgasm to orgasm in maybe a quarter second.

        Even if you’re receiving oral, and they pull off entirely, there’s still a good second or two before they’re off. With vaginal or anal stimulation, you/they may not be able to withdraw in time, and it is very difficult to stop that orgasm when you still have someone wrapped around your cock, no matter how still they are. It’s still stimulation. Until you get the process down, that stimulation is going to progress the arousal cycles. So masturbation gives your the most ability to totally stop external stimulation in a split second.

        Another benefit of all of it, for some people, is what’s called a hands free orgasm. It’s possible to use nothing but muscle control, imagination, and practice to have an orgasm (almost always with ejaculating, it isn’t realistic to separate them when you’re using the same techniques and muscles to get there as you would to separate them) without your genitals being touched by anything but air. I’ve never been able to do that reliably though.

        You see what I mean? This stuff isn’t friendly to forum comment communication. It’s not even book friendly because so much of it is internal, and even someone in person is going to struggle to guide you without also participating. Like, you can feel a lot of the events as they occur if you’re touching someone’s genitals. You can feel some of it internally if you’ve got a finger in contact with their prostate. Mind you, I’ve never taught another guy; that’s based on my partners wanting to understand the process when they don’t understand how I can have an orgasm but not ejaculate.

        Tangentially, women are surprisingly resistant to the idea sometimes. Some entirely refuse to believe that not only can men separate the two, but that we can have multiple orgasms without ejaculating.

        I guess three summary is that you’d have to find books about tantric sex to get started, and combine it with knowledge of the arousal cycle in yourself

        • Maldreamer@lemmy.world
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          50 minutes ago

          You mentioned some caveats while holding off, could you elaborate on that when you are free or provide a link to which I can read.

        • GrammarPolice@lemmy.world
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          11 hours ago

          I was expecting some one or two sentences about breath control and kegels - which you did include. But i wasn’t expecting a whole fucking essay. I’m going to take all you’ve said and put the effort in. This genuinely seems like legit advice.

          • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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            11 hours ago

            I figured out how to orgasm without ejaculating or at least hold most of it back when I was in college. My girlfriend at the time and I would go 4-5 times a night sometimes. It was pretty great. Unfortunately she was crazy and no one I’ve been with since then has had the drive to repeat that. It makes me sad sometimes to think about how much I’ve missed out on because I couldn’t find a compatible partner.

  • shalafi@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    “I’ll give you a buffalo nickel if you’ll calm down just a little bit.”

    • LavenderDay3544@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      If you read the article, they were almost never awake at the same time since they were on different shifts. That was mostly likely done on purpose.

  • NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    sex in space?

    Well, not exactly. There’s these bulky suits, you know, they get in the way.

    Inside the ISS it might be a different story.