Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dr. Ruth Westheimer is a beloved global celebrity--she has been the most visible sex therapist in the world for more than thirty years. Dr. Ruth has taught at Yale, Princeton, and NYU. She is a bestselling author whose wisdom and wit have been showcased on radio and television and in more than thirty-five books, including "Sex For Dummies" and "Dr. Ruth's Top 10 Secrets for Great Sex."

Dr. Amos Grunebaum is one of New York's leading obstetricians and gynecologists. He is an Associate Professor of Clinical Ob/Gyn at the Weill Cornell Medical College as well as the Director of Obstetrics and the Chief of Labor & Delivery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and the Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City.

Pierre Lehu is a writer and publicist who has been working with Dr. Ruth for three decades.

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If you want to have a happy and healthy sex life, having a good understanding of your own body and making the most of your visits to your doctor's office are vitally important. Celebrated sex expert Dr. Ruth Westheimer teams up with prominent gynecologist Dr. Amos Grunebaum in this comprehensive and accessible guide to women's sexual health.

Combining the latest medical information from Dr. Amos with Dr. Ruth's reassuring and refreshingly candid style, this book gives you everything you need to take charge of your health. You'll learn all you ever wanted to know about your vagina and reproductive organs as well as your menstrual cycle. You'll find clear discussions of issues related to every stage of a woman's life, from planning or avoiding pregnancy to perimenopause and menopause. You'll learn what can go wrong?including sexually transmitted diseases, cancer, endometriosis, and other conditions?and what to do about it. And you'll discover simple ways to spice up your sex life and enhance your sexual pleasure with your partner.

For many women, visits to the gynecologist can cause anxiety or embarrassment, so Dr. Ruth and Dr. Amos relieve the worry by explaining every step of a routine pelvic examination and Pap test. They show you how to partner with your doctor by being an active participant in your health care and treatment. You'll find out how to talk to your gynecologist, how to prepare for your appointment, and what questions to ask about what concerns you, whether it's about a puzzling symptom, diagnosis, or sexual matter. Throughout the book, stories from Dr. Amos's practice clearly show how you can safeguard and improve your health and your sex life by knowing about your body and communicating with your doctor effectively.

No matter what your age or living situation, Sexually Speaking is an invaluable, practical reference you will turn to for wise guidance.

Aus dem Klappentext

If you want to have a happy and healthy sex life, having a good understanding of your own body and making the most of your visits to your doctor's office are vitally important. Celebrated sex expert Dr. Ruth Westheimer teams up with prominent gynecologist Dr. Amos Grunebaum in this comprehensive and accessible guide to women's sexual health.

Combining the latest medical information from Dr. Amos with Dr. Ruth's reassuring and refreshingly candid style, this book gives you everything you need to take charge of your health. You'll learn all you ever wanted to know about your vagina and reproductive organs as well as your menstrual cycle. You'll find clear discussions of issues related to every stage of a woman's life, from planning or avoiding pregnancy to perimenopause and menopause. You'll learn what can go wrong--including sexually transmitted diseases, cancer, endometriosis, and other conditions--and what to do about it. And you'll discover simple ways to spice up your sex life and enhance your sexual pleasure with your partner.

For many women, visits to the gynecologist can cause anxiety or embarrassment, so Dr. Ruth and Dr. Amos relieve the worry by explaining every step of a routine pelvic examination and Pap test. They show you how to partner with your doctor by being an active participant in your health care and treatment. You'll find out how to talk to your gynecologist, how to prepare for your appointment, and what questions to ask about what concerns you, whether it's about a puzzling symptom, diagnosis, or sexual matter. Throughout the book, stories from Dr. Amos's practice clearly show how you can safeguard and improve your health and your sex life by knowing about your body and communicating with your doctor effectively.

No matter what your age or living situation, Sexually Speaking is an invaluable, practical reference you will turn to for wise guidance.

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Sexually Speaking

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

Probably more people are having some sort of sexual difficulty on any given day than have the common cold, yet good information about a problem related to sex is so much more difficult to obtain. In this chapter I'll give you some basic tips on how to have a happy, healthy sex life.

I've been writing about sex for some thirty years now, and so many people have told me how I've helped them improve their sex lives. Here's hoping I can do the same for you. Sadly, too many doctors in the United States are not given the proper training in talking about sexual matters with their patients. They don't learn it in medical school or during their training as gynecologists. We seem stuck with too many prurient attitudes left over from the Victorian era, so instead of simply considering sex a part of our daily lives that deserves the same attention as any other bodily function, we act as if sex is shameful and something not to be discussed, even with a doctor whose field includes all of the organs involved in proper sexual functioning.

As you know, I talk about sex from morning till night and have been doing it publicly for more than a quarter of a century, yet even I still get embarrassed sometimes. From time to time, I have to force myself to say the words vagina or orgasm or masturbation. In fact, when I give a lecture, I usually get the audience to say those words out loud because it helps break the ice. So I fully appreciate the reticence that a doctor might have about the subject of sex, and I certainly understand any embarrassment you might feel. Yet while most people get sickened at the sight of blood, doctors learn to get over such feelings, and surgeons can cut open a body without thinking twice about it. I don't blame doctors for their lack of training on sex, but I do blame the medical establishment, which doesn't offer the proper training to young doctors. Although I've been calling for doctors to have more training for many years now, even when I do grand rounds at hospitals and speak to the doctors, young residents still tell me that the training they get in the area of sex remains lackluster, to put it gently.

You could potentially excuse this state of affairs by saying that a lack of sexual knowledge isn't life threatening, and as long as a couple can reproduce, it's just not that important and so not an area that doctors need to cover very thoroughly. But you'd be wrong, because, of course, sex is important. It's part of the glue that holds a relationship together. A sexless marriage is not a stable one. If you're in an unhappy marriage, you'll be under a lot of stress, and stress has definite negative consequences on your health.

Sexual problems can also make it more difficult to actually form relationships. Both men and women who have sexual problems may find themselves alone, and although being single is not life threatening, either, it certainly affects the quality of your life as much or more than many other illnesses. How many people would give up having a life partner in exchange for getting rid of their hay fever, for example? If people think sex is important, then so should the medical community.

Then there's the question of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), which can not only do great damage to your body but can also be life threatening. If doctors are not involved in their patients' sex lives, then whatever message they try to pass on regarding STDs will not get through. If patients are afraid to talk about sexual matters with their doctors, they may not bring up STDs, either. STDs, without a shadow of a doubt, affect a gynecologist's practice. To give but one example, it is vital to know whether a pregnant patient has herpes.

Although I shouldn't need to prove that good sexual functioning is important and should be assisted by the medical community, there is no escaping the fact that as a whole, women do not get the support they need because the topic of sex continues to be one that doctors are not properly trained to handle. While in some instances it helps if the gynecologist is a woman, just the fact that a female doctor is speaking to a female patient does not ensure that good communication about sex is taking place. In fact, some women may feel more comfortable talking to a male doctor about certain issues, including sex.

Patients could help change this situation. If doctors were faced with daily questions about sexual functioning, they would get used to answering them, and they would study the sexual issues they were being asked about. Yet patients also feel embarrassed, so they don't raise the questions they have about sexual functioning. This combined embarrassment of both doctors and patients makes the topic so rarely part of the doctor/patient relationship.

Hopefully, by reading this book, you'll have a better idea of what to do to get the help you need from your doctor. If you are a doctor reading this book, maybe you will learn to change the way you handle your patients' sexual problems. The door of communication between patient and doctor can't be opened until patients have a good understanding of their own sexual functioning, so that's what I'm going to tackle first.

Orgasm

Because it is required for a man to have an orgasm in order for our species to reproduce, evolution has made certain that most men don't have a problem in that department. But a woman can get pregnant without ever having an orgasm, so it is far more common to find women who encounter difficulties when trying to achieve sexual satisfaction. Yet the very fact that women can have orgasms even though these are not needed for reproduction tells you that orgasms are important to a woman's well-being. The clitoris is the seat of a woman's potential to have an orgasm, and the fact that every woman is born with a clitoris means that every woman should be able to have an orgasm.

While on rare occasions there are women who cannot have orgasms because of some physical reason (most often a disease, such as diabetes, or severe depression), for the most part the two main causes of a woman's inability to have an orgasm are either ignorance or psychological problems or a combination of the two. Both of these factors are well within the purview of a gynecologist's expertise.

We've all seen couples making love in the movies. The man is on top of the woman, and the two are thrusting at each other, both having tremendous orgasms. If a couple bases their own lovemaking on what they've seen on screen, they would assume that both partners would always have an orgasm from intercourse in the missionary position, that is, with the man on top. Now some couples can do this, but the majority of women do not get enough clitoral stimulation from this type of intercourse to have an orgasm. As a result of this mistaken belief, in millions of bedrooms couples are having sex and the woman is not having an orgasm. Because so many women blame themselves for this situation, thinking that they are deficient in some way, they end up faking orgasms, which guarantees that this nonorgasmic sex life will continue forever or at least as long as the woman is with this particular partner.

The cure for this situation is...