Before my hysterectomy (Thank you, Jesus!) I would have to change pads at least every hour – and these were the heavy-duty size, worn two side-by-side at a time. I bled a whole lot more than teaspoons/tablespoons! And, for the record, you can feel when you’re passing chunks of tissue…usually a sign to exit for the bathroom. I could not wear a tampon comfortable after my second kid because the vaginal opening tore so much and the doctor stitched it up wonky, so the tampon never fit right after that.
And being a country farm kid, after riding horses bareback for years, the hymen was toast.
So it really is a man’s status that arouses a woman. :dubious:
What, like, “married”? 
To add another data point: I’ve had periods where I hardly needed a pad at all (I’ve never been interested in wearing tampons - I’m afraid I’ll forget it’s there!) and I only changed it once a day, just cuz the pad was worn, but it was still basically clean. I can usually run around naked while on my period.
On the other hand, I knew a woman who said she’d had to be hospitalized before because she was bleeding so heavily.
I sleep on my back. And I seriously doubt that sleeping on my side would make any difference.
See, I knew it! You guys got to go out and play while we had to hear about “staying fresh”. “Fresh” was the euphemism for clean and not stinky, I finally found out.
I don’t know what was covered in the “real” sex education - which in our school district occurred in our third year of high school - because I’d been kicked out for being pregnant.
“Ur doin’ it rite”
I’m going out on a limb in this post, and some of you may disagree with parts of it.
Some posters have brought up anal sex, and the mystery of some women finding pleasure, even to orgasm, in it. There are multiple reasons for that, or factors in it.
There’s a muscle called, among other names, the levator ani. It runs from the pubic bone, forward of the urethra, to a point behind the anus. In women, the urethra, the vagina, and the rectum pass through it. When you intentionally stop the flow of urine, you are tightening the levator ani. At the same time it clamps the urethra, it also tightens around the vagina and a point just inside of the anal sphincter. That’s the Kegel exercise. During orgasm, the levator ani tightens rhythmically. That’s one thing that links anal sensations to vaginals sensations.
If you look at your charts, whether in a book or on the back of a Tampax box, you can see that the vagina and the rectum run parallel, and very close together. You’ve been in an apartment or motel where you could hear your neighbors talking. Imagine if the walls were not just thin, but flexible. If your neighbor leaned on the wall, you could feel the bulge his hand made. The lady’s interior is like that, sorta. Instead of a bed, TV, and end tables, the vagina has no furniture. When nothing’s in there, pushing on the wall of the anal canal pushes on both walls of the vagina.
So, a penis in the anal canal, pushing toward the vagina can push on the lady’s G-spot. (This depends on factors such as the angle of insertion.) You can see how an orgasm from anal sex is possible, with or without a taboo on anal sex.
For many women, anal stimulation is not only ineffective, but intolerable, guys, so don’t get your hopes up.:smack:
I didn’t know until recently that it was possible to induce lactation by having a baby suck on a non-lactating woman’s nipples. Not right away, of course, but after a bit of repetition.
At least that was what I was told by a woman I know who had adopted a newborn and had done that exact thing.
I’m actually a bit surprised that I seem to know more about women than quite a few people here. I mean I think I’m out of the ordinary in that I hadn’t been intimate with a woman until about a year ago (when I was 29, and it was a one night stand), but I still knew pretty much everything mentioned in the posts so far. I guess I wasn’t 100% sure about menstrual flow rates, but the range mentioned here gibes with my intuition.
I learned several years ago, from this very board, about something men endure called “sticky sack.”
Evidently, I was informed, when men wear boxers in hot humid climates, the sweat from their nether bits can cause the scrotum to stick to the side of a man’s thigh. Obviously, some fellas would have no reservations at all about reaching down and unsticking the bugger, but this Doper in particular was trying to be discreet about it, which resulted in a hilarious but educational post about how he had to invent a weird little sticky sack dance to unstick his dangly bits from his leg.
I mentioned this IRL to some male friends about a week or so later. You should have seen the looks on their faces. I think this Doper had broken some sort of secret Guy Code or something. My guy friends were shocked that I was aware of the sticky sack phoenomenon. So shocked in fact, he asked me, “How did you know about that?” It may very well have been my answer, “SDMB” that caused him to register here.
And for the boys: Not every woman’s cycle is exactly 28 days long. Mine is approximately 23 days. One of my good friend’s cycle is 21 days. Yes, boys, that’s having a period roughly every three weeks, which leaves your margin of error (in terms of unprotected sex) much smaller. That 5-6 day period of fertility occurs more often, which increases the chances of becoming pregnant. The upside to that, for me, is that I’ve always been blessed with very light 2-3 day periods. None of this 5-7 day chunky day nonsense. For me. YMMV
When I was married I had to explain to my wife that when I was shifting things around in the swimsuit area that I wasn’t playing with myself but trying to free the boys. She laughed for at least a half an hour.
This is why I get so annoyed with the hackneyed complaint about baseball players “scratching themselves.” They aren’t scratching, they’re adjusting. Pack your goodies into a hard plastic shell and then do some calisthenics and see if you don’t need to do a little housekeeping down there.
This seems to be a really common misconception, and I just don’t get how one can get to a point where they understand the basics of sex and reproduction while simultaneously believing that everything exits from the vagina. How is a girl supposed to pee when pregnant? The hole is plugged up to keep the baby in. (And actually, it’s plugged up all the time except for menstruation and ovulation days, although I wouldn’t necessarily expect a guy to know that much detail about the girl bits.)
But still. Y’all know many women use tampons during her period, right? Did you think we pull them out and change them every time we have to pee? (And for women who think this… how do they explain to themselves how they still manage to pee with the tampon in?)
Utterly, utterly baffling. 
I heard that one is lower because your dominate side is naturally a little tighter than the other.
I may have to make this my signature line.
Given that zippers can cause so much pain, why don’t more men’s pants have buttons instead? The only ones I’ve ever noticed were button fly jeans or military uniforms (BDUs etc., not dress uniforms).
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Zipped Wang Syndrome is pretty unusual if you don’t go commando.
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Button flies are annoying if you need to piss really bad.
Buttons are sort of a pain, there’s too many of them. And it’s hard to button up fast if you get caught in a compromising situation. 
Reads like a candidate for the Literary Review’s award for Bad Sex in Fiction, doesn’t it?
Something else – women often need to adjust themselves, too. External bits, sanitary stuff. They just wait for a private space to do it. Well… most of them.
Good god, thank you. I can’t believe how many replies this got and no one pointed this out. Made my brain hurt.
For some of us, it did break the hymen. And yes, it hurt. A lot. (I had swimming practice in an hour, otherwise I would have stopped trying, it hurt that much.)
Also, while hymens tend to be perforated (have holes through them), not all hymens have the same kind of perforation. Annular hymens are basically a ring of tissue around the edge of the vaginal canal with a large-ish hole in the middle. A septate hymen has a thin band of tissue across the middle of the opening. There are also hymens with multiple smaller holes through it, like it’s been shot with buckshot. 
Rarely, hymens come with no holes (imperforate), which have to be broken before or during menarche, or else the stuff doesn’t come out and leads to nasty infections and stuff. Some hymen diagrams.
Also, blood is thicker than blue-dyed water, and menses contains tissue, mucous, and clots, too. I hated pads because nearly all of it basically just sat on top, and did not get absorbed, so it would just smear around as I moved. Which not-infrequently involved smearing onto clothing, and even when it didn’t, I’d have to wipe for ages (or take a shower) to get it all off my skin. Yuck.
A quickie overview of the Billings Method which explains how human fertility works (especially look at the “fertility” and “how the method works” sections). Or if you want to spend lots of time on it – more in-depth info.