All relationships take hard work and go through rocky patches. And when you have invested time and energy into a relationship, you want it to work out, regardless of how bad things have become. But this means it can be hard to recognise when a relationship is failing and when you should let go. So what are the signs of a dead-end relationship? We ask the experts for practical tips to guide you through. Lack of respect Respect plays a vital role in a relationship because it shows that each person understands the other and...

  To masturbate means to stimulate yourself in a sexual way. This can be done by hand, or with sex aids – some highly-sexed women can even do it by rubbing their thighs together. And a tiny minority of women can do it with no genital contact at all, but simply through caressing their breasts. Such stimulation often leads to orgasm, but not invariably, as many women enjoy stroking themselves and experiencing pleasure that does not necessarily culminate in a climax. Most men have masturbated, often beginning at a fairly young...

 What is a female orgasm? We're writing this explanation in the assumption that you – the reader – are male. But what follows will be of interest to a lot of female readers too. What happens in a woman's body during a climax is very like what happens in your (male) body when you ejaculate. In other words, there's a feeling of increasing excitement, building up to a point where everything 'blows' in a great blast of ecstasy. This 'orgasmic moment' is characterised by surges of contractions in the sex organs, occurring almost...

What is female ejaculation? Female ejaculation is a controversial subject. Female ejaculation is a phenomenon in which fluid shoots out of the vulva or vagina at the moment of orgasm. It is sometimes known as 'she-jaculation'. You may have heard the terms 'gushing' or 'squirting'. It's a controversial subject, not least because pornography writers (most of whom are male) have repeatedly suggested that all women ejaculate at orgasm. This is completely untrue! Even today, erotic novels tend to give the impression that every...

   In the last few years, it has become apparent that the average man's penis is not as long as had been thought previously. For decades, medical books and articles in the press have confidently stated that penile length is generally about 6.5 inches (16.5 centimetres). As a result, a lot of males who are slightly shorter than this have felt rather inadequate. However, it now seems that the statistics on which this 'average' was based could well have a serious flaw. It is this: the figure was originally calculated by...