Did I zap my clitoris to death with my vibrator? Or could he have flattened my clitoris area by trying to get the deepest penetration? He really likes it when I straddle him, and I enjoy that, too. Is it something wrong with me? I have not asked my doctor. I would be too embarrassed, especially at my age.
There might be a medical problem that you need to investigate. Just in case, please swallow the embarrassment and ask your doctor to run tests to see if something is going on that is interfering with your ability to reach orgasm. This might be an urgent matter, such as heart disease or diabetes, or a medication issue that can be adjusted.
That said, as we age, many of us experience increasing difficulty achieving orgasm. Our hormones are not the reliable helpers they used to be. Our body aches, other medical conditions, medications and anxiety about not reaching orgasm contribute to the problem. The point is that as we get older, most of us need extra clitoral stimulation. Their sole function is to make it easier to reach orgasm.
Why would your partner want to deny you that? I know that many men in heterosexual relationships are anxious about their partners using vibrators: What if she prefers it to me? Your partner wants to help you climax, so please stop faking orgasms! Anxiety is an orgasm-killer. Your relationship is still pretty new, so get your communication on track. Say your version of something like this:.
You give me so much joy that way! The only way I reach orgasm is with my vibrator. Can we please explore how to enjoy my vibrator together? There are also some things you can do yourself to decrease arousal time and increase your chance of orgasm:. I wish you the best. Send Joan your questions by emailing sexpert seniorplanet. All information is confidential. This has been going on for 40 years and I just go along with the program even though I am a sexy woman and love having sex.
Not sure why this is happening, but I do love it when it does! Just wish I could have one when I am with my husband. I just always wanted to come with him when I was awake. I do not take any meds and exercise regularly. In the past years my desire to orgasm has waned. No more fireworks. I think its just the natural aging process. Which sucks. Please share what you have learned! Sounds just like me. I go to four gym classes a week aerobic and yoga , and on the other days I go for brisk, half-hour walks.
She had me go for a brain MRI, which came out negative!! So, of course, I was wondering what was going on here…..?? Atorvastatin 40 is to reduce cholesterol.
Is the other one for blood pressure? Health problems do slow things down. Exercise can help blood flow. At first it hurted but then I got use to it. But, as time moved on the pain became greater. And I found myself enjoying it but, also I would avoided getting started. Then one day I stop feeling anything. Now I have no desires.
I love him, and loves me. Its slow growth of just 1 meter per year on average makes the large expanses it covers that much more impressive. And as you'll learn, its slow-moving progression is made possible by the sacrifices of those living around it. The Humongous Fungus is more than 2, years old and covers more than 3. Over hundreds and thousands of years, the world's largest living organism has slowly infected, killed, eaten, and engulfed countless trees and shrubs unlucky enough to be in its path.
Honey fungus is, after all, an infamous killer in the forest world. Its black rhizomorphs are like highways that allow white rot to travel from host to host. The "white rot" associated with Armillaria infects trees and shrubs by encircling, attacking, and ultimately killing their roots.
While this is happening, rhizomorphs continue onward, always seeking another host. While many parasites found in nature require a living host, Armillaria is a facultative saprophyte, so it can survive and live off of its hosts long after it's killed them.
This allows for almost limitless expansion without the need for self-regulation that's required by parasites that depend on a living host. Over months or years the attacked host dies. The Armillaria is especially pathogenic to softwoods like Douglas-fir Pseudotsuga menziesii , true firs Abies spp. The fungus' progress can be tracked by the expanding areas of dead and dying trees.
Infected and newly-dead trees sprout honey mushrooms in the fall and are easy to detect. The Humongous Fungus was discovered by taking samples from all the known infected trees in the park and comparing their fungal DNA.
When scientists discovered it was all the same DNA, they suddenly realized they were looking at the world's largest known living thing. A parasitic fungus! In an eye-opening study, biologists compared the genomes of Armillaria with other related species of fungus. Apparently Armillaria ostoyae has evolved devious genetic ways by which to sneak up on unsuspecting trees and hosts.
For example, the fungus can reabsorb chemical markers that would alert trees to its presence. This allows the rhizomorphs to "sneak up" on unsuspecting trees, bypassing the tree's natural defenses. They've also developed extra proteins for killing cells and eating the cellulose "glue" that holds plant cell walls together, gobbling them up without so much as a thought.
The fungus can come in the back door and begin feeding on and killing the host long before other parasitic competitors arrive. And even when the competitors arrive, the Armillaria ostoyae can create such a toxic chemical environment that they have to turn tail and run before they succumb themselves.
They break down dead, organic matter, and by doing that they release nutrients. Those nutrients are then made available for plants to carry on growing. In diverse forests, fungi kill and feed on only the weakest trees. But what can happen with a monoculture of trees all the same types of tree planted together in large areas is that disease or weather can weaken all of them at the same time. Question 1 is tendentious, by presupposing that we can only survive as people.
Question 2 is neutral. Four main sorts of answers to the persistence question have been proposed. The most popular are psychological-continuity views. They say that our persistence consists in some psychological relation. You are that future being that in some sense inherits its mental features from you—beliefs, memories, preferences, the capacity for rational thought, and so on—and you are that past being whose mental features you have inherited in this way.
There is also disagreement about what mental features need to be inherited. We will return to some of these points. But most philosophers writing on personal identity since the early 20th century have endorsed some version of this view. The memory criterion mentioned earlier is an example. Advocates of psychological-continuity views include Garrett , Hudson , , Johnston , , Lewis , Nagel 40 , Noonan , Parfit ; ; , Perry , Shoemaker ; 90; ; , , , and Unger ch.
A second answer is that our persistence consists in some sort of brute physical relation. You are that past or future being that has your body, or that is the same biological organism as you are, or the like.
It has nothing to do with psychological facts. Call these brute-physical views. That has to do with the evidence question. Their advocates include Ayers — , Carter , Mackie , Olson , van Inwagen — , and Williams —7, Some try to combine these views, saying that we need both mental and physical continuity to survive, or that either would suffice without the other Nozick ch. A different sort of proposal, narrativism , is that what it takes for us to persist has to do with the stories we tell about ourselves.
We understand our lives in terms of narratives about the momentous events in our past and their influence on our later decisions and character. They literally determine when we begin and end. Roughly speaking, a past being is you just if you now have narratives of the right sort identifying you with her as she was then.
A future being is you just if the narratives she has then identify her with you as you are now. Narrativists about persistence include Schechtman esp. DeGrazia ch. All these views agree that there is something that it takes for us to persist—that there are informative, nontrivial necessary and sufficient conditions for a person existing at one time to exist at another time.
A fourth view, anticriterialism , denies this. Psychological and physical continuity are evidence for persistence, it says, but do not always guarantee it and may not be required. The clearest advocate of this view is Merricks ; see also Swinburne , Lowe 41ff. There are anticriterialist views about things other than people as well. And there is debate about how anticriterialism should be understood Olson , Noonan , Most people—most Western philosophy teachers and students, anyway—feel immediately drawn to psychological-continuity views Nichols and Bruno give experimental evidence for this.
If your brain were transplanted, and that organ carried with it your memories and other mental features, the resulting person would be convinced that he or she was you. This can make it easy to suppose that the person would be you, and that this would be so because she was psychologically continuous with you.
It is difficult, however, to get from this thought to an attractive answer to the persistence question. What psychological relation might our persistence consist in? We have already mentioned memory: a past or future being might be you if and only if you can now remember an experience she had then, or vice versa.
This proposal faces two objections, dating to Sergeant and Berkeley in the 18th century see Behan , but more famously discussed by Reid and Butler see the snippets in Perry First, suppose a young student is fined for overdue library books. Later, as a middle-aged lawyer, she remembers paying the fine.
Later still, in her dotage, she remembers her law career, but has entirely forgotten not only paying the fine but all the other events of her youth. According to the memory criterion the young student is the middle-aged lawyer, the lawyer is the elderly woman, but the elderly woman is not the young student.
This is an impossible result: if x and y are one and y and z are one, x and z cannot be two. Identity is transitive; memory continuity is not.
Second, it seems to belong to the very idea of remembering that you can remember only your own experiences. To remember paying a fine or the experience of it is to remember yourself paying. That makes it trivial and uninformative to say that you are the person whose experiences you can remember—that memory continuity is sufficient for us to persist.
Suppose we want to know whether Blott, who exists now, is the same as Clott, whom we know to have existed at some time in the past. The memory criterion tells us that Blott is Clott just if Blott can now remember an experience Clott had at that past time. So we should already have to know whether Blott is Clott before we could apply the principle that is supposed to tell us whether she is.
There is, however, nothing trivial or uninformative about the claim that memory connections are necessary for us to persist. Neither move gets us far, however, as both the original and the modified memory criteria face a more obvious problem: there are many times in our pasts that we cannot remember or quasi-remember at all, and to which we are not linked even indirectly by an overlapping chain of memories. There is no time when you could recall anything that happened to you while you dreamlessly slept last night.
The memory criterion has the absurd implication that you have never existed at any time when you were unconscious. The person sleeping in your bed last night must have been someone else. A better solution replaces memory with the more general notion of causal dependence Shoemaker , 89ff.
We can define two notions, psychological connectedness and psychological continuity. A being is psychologically connected , at some future time, with you as you are now just if she is in the psychological states she is in then in large part because of the psychological states you are in now and this causal link is of the right sort: see Shoemaker Having a current memory or quasi-memory of an earlier experience is one sort of psychological connection—the experience causes the memory of it—but there are others.
The important point is that our current mental states can be caused in part by mental states we were in at times when we were unconscious. For example, most of your current beliefs are the same ones you had while you slept last night: they have caused themselves to continue existing. We can then say that you are psychologically continuous , now, with a past or future being just if some of your current mental states relate to those he or she is in then by a chain of psychological connections.
Now suppose that a person x who exists at one time is the same thing as something y existing at another time if and only if x is, at the one time, psychologically continuous with y as it is at the other time. This avoids the most obvious objections to the memory criterion. It still leaves important questions unanswered, however. Suppose we could somehow copy all the mental contents of your brain to mine, much as we can copy the contents of one computer drive to another, and that this erased the previous contents of both brains.
Whether this would be a case of psychological continuity depends on what sort of causal dependence counts. The resulting being with my brain and your mental contents would be mentally as you were before, and not as I was. He would have inherited your mental properties in a way—but a funny one. Is it the right way? Psychological-continuity theorists disagree Shoemaker —, says yes; Unger 67—71 says no; see also van Inwagen Schechtman gives a different sort of objection to the psychological-continuity strategy.
A more serious worry for psychological-continuity views is that you could be psychologically continuous with two past or future people at once. Any psychological-continuity view will imply that she would be you. If we destroyed one of your cerebral hemispheres, the resulting being would also be psychologically continuous with you.
Hemispherectomy—even the removal of the left hemisphere, which controls speech—is considered a drastic but acceptable treatment for otherwise-inoperable brain tumors: see Rigterink What if we did both at once, destroying one hemisphere and transplanting the other? Then too, the one who got the transplanted hemisphere would be psychologically continuous with you, and would be you according to the psychological-continuity view.
But now suppose that both hemispheres are transplanted, each into a different empty head. The two recipients—call them Lefty and Righty—will each be psychologically continuous with you. The psychological-continuity view as we have stated it implies that any future being who is psychologically continuous with you must be you.
It follows that you are Lefty and also that you are Righty. But that cannot be: if you and Lefty are one and you and Righty are one, Lefty and Righty cannot be two. And yet they are: there are indisputably two people after the operation. One thing cannot be numerically identical with two things that are distinct from each other. If you are Lefty, you are hungry at that time. If you are Lefty and Righty, you are both hungry and not hungry at once: a straight contradiction.
Psychological-continuity theorists have proposed two different solutions to this problem. What we think of as you is really two people, who are now exactly similar and located in the same place, doing the same things and thinking the same thoughts. The surgeons merely separate them Lewis , Noonan —42; Perry offers a more complex variant. For each person, there is such a thing as her first half: an entity just like the person only briefer, like the first half of a meeting.
They are like two roads that coincide for a stretch and then fork, sharing some of their spatial parts but not others. At the places where the roads overlap, they are just like one road.
Likewise, the idea goes, at the times before the operation when Lefty and Righty share their temporal parts, they are just like one person. Whether we really are composed of temporal parts, however, is disputed.
Its consequences are explored further in section 8. The other solution to the fission problem abandons the intuitive claim that psychological continuity by itself suffices for us to persist. It says, rather, that a past or future being is you only if she is then psychologically continuous with you and no other being is.
There is no circularity in this. We need not know the answer to the persistence question in order to know how many people there are at any one time; that comes under the population question. This means that neither Lefty nor Righty is you. They both come into existence when your cerebrum is divided.
If both your cerebral hemispheres are transplanted, you cease to exist—though you would survive if only one were transplanted and the other destroyed. Fission is death.
Shoemaker 85, Parfit ; 6f. That looks like the opposite of what we should expect: if your survival depends on the functioning of your brain because that is what underlies psychological continuity , then the more of that organ we preserve, the greater ought to be your chance of surviving. In fact the non-branching view implies that you would perish if one of your hemispheres were transplanted and the other left in place: you can survive hemispherectomy only if the hemisphere to be removed is first destroyed.
This seems mysterious. Why should an event that would normally preserve your existence bring it to an end if accompanied by a second such event—one having no causal effect on the first? If your brain is to be divided, why do we need to destroy half of it in order to save you? For discussion, see Noonan 12—15 and ch. The problem is especially acute if brain-state transfer counts as psychological continuity.
In that case, even copying your total brain state to another brain without doing you any physical or psychological harm would kill you. The non-branching view makes the What matters? Faced with the prospect of having one of your hemispheres transplanted, there is no evident reason to prefer having the other destroyed. Most of us would rather have both preserved, even if they go into different heads.
Yet on the non-branching view that is to prefer death over continued existence. This leads Parfit and others to say that that is precisely what we ought to prefer.
We have no reason to want to continue existing, at least for its own sake. What you have reason to want is that there be someone in the future who is psychologically continuous with you, whether or not she actually is you. The usual way to achieve this is to continue existing yourself, but the fission story shows that this is not necessary.
Likewise, even the most selfish person has a reason to care about the welfare of the beings who would result from her undergoing fission, even if, as the non-branching view implies, neither would be her.
In the fission case, the sorts of practical concerns you ordinarily have for yourself apply to someone other than you. This suggests more generally that facts about who is who have no practical importance.
All that matters practically is who is psychologically continuous with whom. Lewis and Parfit debate whether the multiple-occupancy view can preserve the conviction that identity is what matters practically. Another objection to psychological-continuity views is that they rule out our being biological organisms Carter , Ayers —, Snowdon , Olson 80f. This is because no sort of psychological continuity appears to be either necessary or sufficient for a human organism to persist.
Human organisms have brute-physical persistence conditions. If your brain were transplanted, the one who ended up with that organ would be uniquely psychologically continuous with you and this continuity would be continuously physically realized.
On any psychological-continuity view, she would be you: the person would go with her transplanted brain. But no organism would go with its transplanted brain. The operation would simply move an organ from one organism to another.
So it seems, anyway. It follows that if you were an organism, you would stay behind with an empty head. Even though this is never going to happen, it shows that according to psychological-continuity views we have a property that no organism has, namely possibly moving from one organism to another by brain transplant. Again, a human organism could continue existing in an irreversible vegetative state with no psychological continuity. If you were an organism, you could too.
But according to psychological-continuity views you could not. It follows that human animals have a property that we lack, namely possibly surviving as a vegetable. But a healthy, adult human organism seems a paradigm case of a thinking being.
If human organisms can think, yet as psychological-continuity views imply we are not organisms, three difficulties arise. First, you are one of two intelligent beings sitting there and reading this entry. More generally, there are two thinking beings wherever we thought there was just one.
Second, the organism would not merely think in some way or other, but would presumably be psychologically indistinguishable from you. In that case it cannot be true that all people or even all human people persist by virtue of psychological continuity.
Some—those that are organisms—would have brute-physical persistence conditions. Third, it becomes hard to see how you could know whether you were a nonanimal person with psychological persistence conditions or an animal person with brute-physical ones. If you thought you were the nonanimal, the organism would use the same reasoning to conclude that it was too. For all you could ever know, it seems, you might be the one making this mistake.
We can make this epistemic problem more vivid by imagining a three-dimensional duplicating machine. The process causes temporary unconsciousness but is otherwise harmless. Two beings wake up, one in each box. The boxes are indistinguishable. Because each being will have the same apparent memories and perceive identical surroundings, each will think, for the same reasons, that he or she is you.
But only one will be right. Suppose the technicians who work the machine are sworn to secrecy and immune to bribes. Did I do the things I seem to remember doing? Am I a nonanimal that would go with its transplanted brain, or an animal that would stay behind with an empty head?
The most popular defense of the psychological-continuity view against this objection is to say that, despite sharing our brains and showing all the outward signs of consciousness and intelligence, human organisms do not think and are not conscious. Thinking animals are not a problem for psychological-continuity views for the simple reason that there are none Shoemaker 92—97, Lowe 1, Johnston 55; Baker is a subtle variant.
If human organisms cannot be conscious, it would seem to follow that no biological organism of any sort could have any mental properties at all. Shoemaker argues that this follows from the functionalist theory of mind , , Another option is to concede that human organisms are psychologically indistinguishable from us, but try to explain how we can still know that we are not those organisms.
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