For a good laugh, if you’re as warped as I am, Google-image “armpit sniffers.” It’s a real job.
p.s. IASTR that Mrs. Duggar had at least two twin pregnancies.
It is, indeed. We had a team of “trained sniffers” who worked with us in our R&D department; they were nearly always women (who typically have better senses of smell than men do), and they underwent training to be able to essentially use their noses as calibrated scientific instruments, making them able to accurately and consistently assess a level of odor.
I once saw a newspaper story about some scientists who were trying to come up with a standardized odor unit. I sent the story to Dave Barry, who was still writing his column at the time, suggesting that it was easy - just count the smell rays.
I also briefly dated, years ago, a man who had worked in the FemCare division of Kimberly Clark, and they had several registered nurses whose job it was to measure women’s private areas relative to products they were marketing, and they also sold adult diapers and employees did indeed test them for comfort by wearing them under their clothes. He said that if he was in the cafeteria and heard a “crinkle crinkle”, he knew they’d be wearing some product. He also said that he never heard of anyone deliberately, ahem, fully testing adult diapers, not on purpose anyway.
I recall Dave Berg’s look at life in Mad magazine - or maybe I think in the National Lampoon parody of Mad - “any kid who had a pet dog did not need the birds and bees explained to them…” A Black “Censored” box with 6 paws sticking out the bottom.
Well yes, definitely, she was trying. I found her case to be a morbid/interesting scientific experiment, I guess, since I’d long wondered what the outcome would be if the average woman didn’t resort to any cheating methods like fertility-enhancement clinic treatments but had what must have been lots and lots of sex during the entire possible-to-conceive timeframe of each month for most of her fertile lifespan. I had thought it would result in something like 25-30 pregnancies, but I guess that she has demonstrated that it’s probably slightly under 20.
When my sister and I were kids, I had a pet dog, a spayed female, who had a tendency to pull the throw pillows down from the sofa, and mount them. My sister and I were too young to know anything about sex, and so, we talked about the dog “dancing with the pillow.”
And, then, when I was about 10 or 11, we had a visit from a couple of our cousins, who were teenagers. They saw my dog do her thing with a pillow, and shouted, "Holy crap, the dog’s humping the pillow!!’ My naivete was shattered instantly. 
Back a century ago, there was a Canadian lawyer named Charles Vance Millar who left the bulk of his considerable fortune to the woman who, in the ten years following his death, had the most babies. I’m sure that Cecil wrote a column on it, but I can’t find it through any means now.
I’d heard from people who watched their show that they tracked her fertility for times when she was most fertile.
I was in seventh grade sex ed class in1967-1968 I was incredibly naive, and knew nothing about human sexuality. So we had this book and it had a very detailed, physiological description of intercourse. As I visualized this I couldn’t believe it, so I asked, in class, if this was accurate. Of course I was laughed at, and the teacher was embarassed and told me to ask about it after class. I did not.
And really, the FIRST thing I had visualized was…eww… my parents do that?
I do not know about STIs (as regards the OP) but I learned the hard way why it is a bad idea to use hair removal cream on your genitals (which they explicitly say not to do on the label).
Painful lesson but one that suggested to me there is some difference in the skin down there (no permanent damage in my case but…ouch).
Yep. Body lotion burns, but a certain shampoo I used didnt harm me at all. Maybe because I was young.
I should add this means if you dont have actual lube, dont substitute.
I don’t remember a SD column on it, but Wikipedia has a page on the Great Stork Derby.
The Forester is said to be favored over the Outback.
Averages can hide a lot - I don’t doubt that those groups averaged 8.5 children per woman. And maybe 8.5 is about as high as the average can get - but no matter what population you are talking about , there will be women with no children or only one or two. Which means there will be women with more than 8.5 children. I’m pretty sure the average woman could have twenty children if she never did anything that would lessen the chances. But I’m not sure how many women don’t do anything that would lessen the chances - breast feeding is not a reliable method of birth control, but just because it’s not reliable doesn’t mean it has no effect at all. And I know that if I had four kids under five , there would absolutely not be lots of sex going on.
I recall an article about cervical and uterine cancer, which suggested that one problem nowadays is that between earlier onset puberty, good nutrition leading to later menopause, and less pregnancies the result was women had maybe twice as many periods as in the Goode Olde Days.(Implication that periods tended to increase the risk of cancer, due to the frequrnt shedding of the uterine lining, meaning more cell division?) Poor nutrition often led to missed periods and lack of ovulation back when.
Most cervical cancer is caused by HPV, which there is now a vaccine for.
Yes, but the theory was the trigger was the uterine lining regenerating each period. The more often the lining regrows, the more likely there will be a time one of regrowths will trigger the virus (or rather, the virus interferes with the growth process) and cause a cancerous growth - as I understood the article from some 30 years ago. This was I assume an attempt to explain why, while there were such cancers going back in history, there are more today. They used various inputs, such as data on first periods and menopause, and also there was a culture in Africa that isolated women during their periods and actually kept records of who was using the isolation house and when… If I’m remebering the article correctly, their conclusion was that for various historical reasons - late onset, early menopause, pregnancies and miscarriages, poor nutrition and low body fat - periods happen a lot more today that they did before good nutrition and birth control.
The link between sex and cervical cancer was established, IIRC, in the 1800’s with the observation by one doctor that it was almost never seen in celibate nuns.
Yep. I wish I had been celibate so much more than I was. This from someone who twice went 10 years abstinate.
Or at least, a link. Nuns having a much lower rate could mean that the risk is proportional to the number of sex acts, or proportional to the number of partners, or it could be a binary between virgins and non-virgins, and so on, and it still leaves the question of the mechanism open. For that matter, while it’s easy to imagine that celibacy would be related to a disease of a reproductive organ, it wouldn’t have been definite: Nuns probably have a lot of differences from the general populace, health-wise, and so they might be at lower risk due to diet, or lower stress, or many other potential factors.
We’ve figured out most of the details since then, of course, but they wouldn’t all have been known right away.
re: questions I wish I hadn’t asked in sex ed - a teacher explained that a woman is only fertile for a few days every month for the years between puberty and menopause, roughly 40 years. So after a quick calculation but before I had time to think about what I was about to ask I said, “Then a woman could only have 480 children?” also to uproarious laughter.