Many nutritionists say that watermelon is one of the healthiest and freshest ingredients that we can find in the nature. This flowering plant in combination with another two ingredients is perfect instigator of pleasure.

How to make natural Viagra?

According to Italian scientists, the juice of watermelon is itself a “natural Viagra” due to the fact is helps the libido to increase in men who have mild to moderate erectile dysfunction.

Journal “Urology “ recently published a study where is showed that the organic compound – citrulline, which can be found into the watermelon, represents amino acid with an incredible ability for improving blood flow, even in the penis without the side effects that Viagra owns.

In addition to that, the watermelon is composed of 92% water and is abundant in vitamin C. It is interesting that is contains only 71 calories per serving and is the perfect food for people who want to lose weight and to those who struggle with impotence.

Your recipe for preparation of natural Viagra, with ingredients which are very often available in grocery stores. These ingredients are very potent aphrodisiacs.

Ingredients:

• watermelon
• pomegranate juice
• lemon

Method of preparation:

• You should cut the watermelon into small pieces and put the pieces into a juicer.
  The white stuff inside the shell of watermelon is also very high in concentrated Citrulline and should not be wasted and need to be juiced.
• Pour the watermenlon and pmengranate juice into a pot. Leave it to boil for a few minutes then squeeze the lemon juice into the pot.
• Mix it well. You should continue boiling until most of the liquid evaporate and the content in the pot reduce to about half.
• Leave it to cool down for about an hour or so. After that, transfer the potion to a washed and cleaned glass bottle and store it in a cool and dry place such as a refrigerator.

How to use:

• In the morning, on an empty stomach and before dinner, you should drink 1/3 cup of this juice.

This great mixture consists of natural ingredients that will improve your blood flow to the intimate part and will improve your performance.

This remarkable homemade Viagra can be used by both man and women, at any age.

Source: www.healthyfoodstar.com

I you live in the city, you would never wear anything that’ll be ruined by a subway seat anyway, but yeah, accidents happen, and you want to be wearing something that won’t invite awkward comments. Like an oversized black muumuu.

Someone in the JCPenny design department either doesn’t get their period or they get it too much, because a photo of a very suggestive skirt from their catalogue recently went viral for recreating a menstruating lady’s worst nightmare.

The pic is on Imgur under the title “Really could’ve picked a better place for that “flower” design…” Dot dot dot, indeed.

Maybe designers always have female anatomy on the brain. They have to if they want to design a dress that fits. It’s their subconscious that’s going to a different place. Exhibit C: this vagina dress:

In fact, men wore the shoes first, and for hundreds of years the only women who ever wore elevated heels were courtesans. So how did the shoes eventually end up in practically every woman’s closet?

High Heels History: Ancient Egypt

Murals from this ancient period depict nobility of both genders wearing heeled footwear, which literally elevated their wearers from the lower classes, who would normally be barefoot. In some professions, however, the choice in footwear stemmed not from a desire for social differentiation, but matters of practical concern: butchers, for instance, would wear heels so that they could avoid coming into contact with bloody animal carcasses.

Ancient Greece And Rome

During Ancient Roman times, cork platform sandals called buskins were used as an aide in theatrical productions: as with the ancient Egyptians, the platforms were worn by actors to convey their characters’ class differences to the audience. The shoes were also used to identify prostitutes, and thus the footwear became associated with prostitution in these societies.

The Renaissance And Beyond

By the 15th century, heels were already popular among male Persian equestrians. “When the soldier stood up in his stirrups,” said Bata Shoe Museum curator Elizabeth Semmelhack, “the heel helped to secure his stance so that he could shoot his bow and arrow more easily.”

When the Persians arrived in Europe, they found a public eager to adopt their footwear. Not only did the shoes aid in warfare, they were practical: heel-wearers were less likely to step in street grime than their non-heeled counterparts.

Given equestrian sports’ association with the upper class, European male elites — regardless of their affinity for horse riding — began to wear the heels as well. These men liked that heeled footwear made them tall, and therefore more imposing.

Likewise, the women who regularly and intimately interacted with these men — such as courtesans — began to mirror their male counterparts’ apparel as a way to signal their social status to others. Thus the heel, then a symbol of powerful masculinity, became a women’s accessory as well.

Donning these heavily symbolic accessories, courtesans during the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries were essentially “elevated” from a common woman’s status and afforded many of the same privileges as men, such as the ability to enter libraries. All the while, these women took their heels to new heights: the shoes they wore, called chopines, could be up to 18 inches tall. These uber-heels were mostly made of wood or cork, but some styles were banded with metal.

If these shoes seem impossible to walk in, that’s because they were: in fact, one of the only reasons that these women could wear these shoes was because they did so almost always in the company of a man they were escorting, using him for balance. If a client wasn’t available, she could have five or six of her male servants prop her up.

High Heels History: Heading Toward Modernity

By the 18th century, the heel’s popularity had begun to decline. This was a turbulent time, rife with political revolutions, and the shoe’s potential to suggest class division was soon regarded as a bad thing. As historian Jennifer Wright noted, “The French revolution came. Democracy became fashionable and it started to seem unfashionable for anyone to tower over anyone else due to their social station.”

As the Victorian and Edwardian eras came, men began to regard the shoes as “impractical,” a trait that was — at a time when women were commonly and intensely regarded as physically and emotionally weak, frail and often hysterical — associated with women. Heels became gendered, and men abandoned them for more “practical” footwear.

Heeled footwear for women continued to evolve, though, with the first high heel manufacturing company opening in New York in 1888. Over the next several decades, particularly through wartime, “impracticality” led not to the heel’s abandonment, but its use by women of wealth, with heels once more an acceptable symbol of class and status. “One of the best ways that status can be conveyed is through impracticality,” Semmelhack said.

Heels thus influenced 20th century cultural ideals about the female form: the aesthetic effect of stiletto heels on a woman’s legs became synonymous with pornography, and after WWII, the pinup look made its way into street style, with high heeled shoes becoming a common look for women across most socioeconomic backgrounds, whether at home or in the workplace.

For old Hollywood starlets and pinups, the stiletto heel (named for the stiletto knife) became the totem of femininity. Brought into fashion in 1953, the shoe was first designed by Roger Vivier, whose heel he called “the needle.” (Fun aside: Legend has it that Marilyn Monroe shaved a quarter inch off one of her stilettos so that she’d walk with a more pronounced wiggle of her hips.)

As the heel became an essential part of a woman’s daily wardrobe, smaller, more manageable heels and pumps became commonplace. The 1960s saw the advent of the “kitten heel,” which could be worn even for tasks at home, like cooking and laundry.

The 1970s brought about the stiletto’s chunkier counterpart, the platform shoe, fashion’s response to the growing popularity of disco, which demanded that a woman be able to dance for long periods of time.

The 1980s and 1990s saw a resurgence of the stiletto as a feminist statement of power (paired often with sky-high hair and shoulder-padded power suits). Christian Louboutin became famous for his red-bottomed heels during this time and high heels became a fashion industry unto themselves, a trend that carries through to the present day — but only for women.

However, knowing that heels have a rich history with women and men, one does have to wonder if they will ever become fashionable for both genders again. Semmelheck doesn’t see why not. “If it becomes a signifier of actual power,” Semmelheck says, “then men will be as willing to wear it as women.”

SUPERMAN?

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Adderall and similar medications have a reputation of abuse by women dieting and college students cramming. Slightly less known misuses include athletes using it as a performance enhancer, party kids taking it to curb the sedating effects of alcohol, and creative artists relying on it to produce a higher quality and quantity of work.

I fully admit that all five of these contexts apply to me. I have an addiction to Adderall and abuse the drug because I’m a stripper; it not only helps me work into the wee hours, but makes me a more social and entertaining person, which wins over customers and results in more income.

The first time I used a stimulant ADHD drug was when I was cramming for high school finals. A classmate gave me 5mg of Ritalin. We had a study group planned for the evening and I was the blatant freeloader who’d been slacking all semester.

As I listened in on the rapid review, I was amazed at how well every last factoid sunk in. I was absorbing everything like a sponge and still can’t think of a time I retained information so well. The Ritalin didn’t have me hooked but I knew this drug had performed a near miracle on me, landing me a B+ on the final.

In college, I took the ADHD test offered by student services and was diagnosed but the health care center wouldn’t prescribe me stimulants. I tried the useless drug Strattera, but after giving that some time, I realized I could shop around for another doctor who didn’t necessarily have to know about my alcohol abuse history.

I ordered a copy of my diagnosis test results and thanked god for HIPAA laws. Gaming the system to score, man!

I wasn’t consistently on Ritalin throughout college but I have a strong memory of quadruple-dosing on my 20mg pills when I had back-to-back finals. Yes, I felt like a crackhead but man, do you know how convenient it is to not experience hunger and be fully immune from distractions while cramming?

I had all my books, plus my laptop and other valuables spread out at the library and didn’t want to pack up the whole shop just so I could eat elsewhere without fear of being robbed. I was in the motherf*cking ZONE during that all-nighter and nothing was going to take me out of it.

I was awake without eating for 36 hours, the price one pays for procrastination.

Immediately after college graduation, I found myself sharing Ritalin with my friends. Three of us went to a rather shady house music event at a warehouse. We popped them so we could stay up all night and make the two-hour trip back home.

But between age 23 and now, I’ve had different kinds of drug treatment that either did or didn’t include Adderall because I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder. Bipolar and ADHD have tons of overlapping symptoms, such as impulsivity and hyperactivity. They coexist in my case, though I was told rather patronizingly during my bipolar mania hospitalization that I’d been “misdiagnosed” as ADHD.

Since my bipolar diagnosis, I’ve had many doctors refuse to prescribe me Adderall because it can trigger mania, which I struggle with more than depression. One hospital’s specialized bipolar clinic actually suggested Adderall, which I didn’t dare ask for, having spent the better part of a year being talked down to, infantilized, and stuffed with awful sedatives.

Since this past June, I’ve been alternating between Adderall XR and Adderall short-release pills. I’m currently on the XR, but I’m constantly pining for the other kind, which does the trick more quickly and effectively.

I requested the XR this past month because, despite the higher price, I thought it would be a smoother experience without making me so embarrassingly high-strung. But I forgot that the first time I took the XR, I wasn’t relying on a strip club for income, just the escorting, which involves fewer work hours and less of a “party girl” persona.

Unfortunately, since running out of fast-acting Adderall a week ago, my strip club hustle has plummeted. I can’t think of anything interesting or entertaining to say to customers. It’s all small talk instead of making them laugh or giving off sexy, horny vibes.

There are easily attainable ways to improve my situation: make a point to be more social, skip the wine aisle at the grocery store, take advantage of my new ClassPass addiction, improve my marketing copy for the escorting business, buy organic groceries, have a spa day.

But these distractions don’t address the real issue. When you have a troubled brain, too much time alone with your own thoughts is literally dangerous. I wouldn’t hesitate to voluntarily hospitalize myself if it came to that.

Where on earth was that random photo taken? Google’s freaky new artificial intelligence machine can figure it out.

Computer vision specialist Tobias Weyand and his colleagues at Google created a deep-learning program called PlaNet, and trained it to identify locations where photos were taken based on visual cues.

Putting the Art in Artificial Intelligence: Photos

Imagine the ultimate game of “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” Only way harder. The Googlers started by dividing up the globe into a grid, excluding the oceans and polar regions. Then they created a database for PlaNet that contained 126 million geolocated photos pulled from the Internet, Technology Review reported.

Since PlaNet is an artificial neural network, it can learn. So the team taught the network how to identify a photograph’s location on the grid just using information contained in the pixels.

To test PlaNet’s accuracy, Weyand and his team fed it 2.3 million geotagged Flickr images. From there, PlaNet narrowed down 48 percent of them to the right continent, 28.4 percent to the right country, 10.1 percent to the right city, and 3.6 percent to the actual street.

OK, so maybe it can’t accurately locate every single random image on a map, but consider everything in that Flickr mixed bag: building interiors, pets, food. And while the results might not seem all that great at first, they became remarkable when the Google team pitted their machine against 10 smart, well-traveled humans.

The machine won more than half the rounds — and had better accuracy.

“PlaNet outperforms previous approaches and even attains superhuman levels of accuracy in some cases,” the team wrote in their abstract about the machine. You can test your own abilities with online games like GeoGuessr. Might want to set an alarm first, though, because that one is kind of addictive.

A.I. Takes a Stroll Through Amsterdam

The team says that PlaNet doesn’t need much memory, either. Their model only uses 377 MB, which means it could go into a smartphone, Technology Review reported.

I remember trying out Google Googles several years ago and quickly realized it was mostly limited to displaying info about well-known places. PlaNet has different potential. The technology could end up being like a Shazam for photo locations. You can run, Carmen Sandiego, but you can’t hide from the Google machine.

via Technology Review

When Matt Blum began photographing women nude, he didn’t intend to start a movement. He just wanted to make good photography. But over the last ten years, Matt and his wife Kat Kessler have built something that has become both an artistic, captivating collection of photography and a project making bold statements about body-positivity and self-love.

The Nu Project is an online archive of nude photos of ordinary women around the world. The entire project is volunteer based: women invite the photographer into their home for the shoot, and agree to have the photos included on the project’s online gallery free of charge. Viewing the images is free and the online galleries reach 2.8 million visitors a year, half of the traffic coming from audiences outside the states. In 2013, the Nu Project published a book collection of their favorite images over the past seven years (available on Amazon). They’re publishing a second collection this Fall.

What’s most remarkable about the Nu Project photos are their powerful depiction of the ordinary. None of the women photographed are professional models, and the photo “set” is often their unkempt apartment, complete with unmade beds, sprawled magazines, and dirty dishes still sitting in the sink. Women happily pose baring their cellulite, their tan lines, their belly creases as they laugh. Women pose washing dishes, reading magazines, watering the plants, cuddling their lover, or playing with their toddler.

And through these simple depictions, the project makes viewers reconsider what deserves to be captured in a photo, what deserves to be displayed and proudly shared for the world to see. Doing so, it has created an empowering resource for woman seeking proof that what constitutes a “beautiful body” is far more diverse than media suggests.

To make the photos geographically diverse, photographer Matt Blum and editor Katy Kessler have traveled all throughout South America and Europe coordinating shoots with local women to include on the website. According to Matt Blum, the photographer behind the project, women volunteer for a variety of a reasons: anything from a history of body issues, to simple curiosity of trying something new. The only commonality between all participants is that they have the openness and trust to welcome Matt into their home to do his art.

“We never had any governing principles that have stayed consistent, other than the fact that we wouldn’t exclude anyone.”

Many other artists have begun using the internet to combat negative and inaccurate depictions of the female body and begin confronting the insecurities it creates with projects like We Women or Let Me Love Me, a Facebook Page dedicated not to women, but to people of color.

Through working on the project, Matt has noticed differences in perspectives from women in different areas of the world. But he also believes some ideas are common everywhere:

“In Latin America people are far more conservative about nudity whereas in Europe, people are far more liberal about taking their clothes off. And yet, the idea of the media focusing on similar body types, that’s universal. Europeans still don’t see real bodies in the media. In 2015, across the globe, people react to and respond to this idea.”

Matt hopes to continue exploring the themes of confidence and vulnerability in his future work. He is now currently working on an a project expanding the idea of nudity to include photographs people baring any aspect of their lives they don’t often allow others to see. To see more photos, visit www.thenuproject.com.

Have you ever been caught up in the shackling woes of a digital romance? An online love affair? A relationship that transpires via the art of text?

The type in which you incessantly message one another to the point of compulsion. You Facebook message ad nauseam.

You find yourself living in between fiery, hyper-sexualized, blazingly passionate emails with a person you may not have ever even encountered in the flesh.

You are complete and utter strangers. Yet you feel this wildly electric connection. They have awoken something deep within you. Something you thought was dead. Something that hasn’t arisen in years.

You feel almost addicted to the sticky, sweet sounds of “new message” alerts as they preciously radiate from the speakers of your beloved smartphone.

It’s a fleeting high. Like drugs.

Your eyes dilate. Your energy inflates. Your vision crystalizes. The world suddenly seems more manageable. You’ve become a fiend for typed-out words from a faceless lover.

It doesn’t matter how your digital romance begins. It could be with someone you briefly met in a crowded bar while traveling to an unfamiliar city.

The two of you somehow exchanged phone numbers while waiting for a fresh cocktail. Cut to a week later, and you’re obsessively texting with this stranger that you can hardly remember talking to.

Sometimes it happens with an old flame from high school who lives on the other side of the country.

It was 3 am one solo Sunday night, and you were sleeplessly trolling Facebook when you stumbled upon that gorgeous, familiar face.

Manic, and tired and bleary eyed, you decided to send her a brief and innocent private message. Just a “Hi, how are you?” sort of thing.

Cut to three days later, and somehow, the two of you are amidst a hot Facebook affair. Throughout the course of your nine-to-five workday, you’re sexting her your dirtiest sexual desires.

Or it could be the mysterious entity you matched with on Tinder last week. You were feeling overcome with loneliness and unsettling feelings of acute vulnerability last Thursday… so you decided to swipe right for once in your damn life. And BOOM. It’s a match.

Cut to today, and you’re pouring your heart out to one another over an online hookup app.

The point of origin is irrelevant. Because you, you are in deep. You’re stuck. You’re fixated. You’re in a digital romance.

And while you just might be safe from the slew of STDs that penetrate the real world, you have caught a surprising and dangerous infection: feelings.

Unexpected feelings that have manifested online.

It feels good to feel. So what’s the problem?

Digital feelings aren’t real feelings.

It’s an affair that isn’t rooted in reality. It’s rooted digitally, and digital roots don’t run deep.

So if digital feelings aren’t real feelings — why are we so enthralled?

How is it possible for a person we don’t even know, a person whom we hardly have borne witness to with our keen, naked eyes, to attain the powerful ability to conjure up such deep emotion within us?

Because this person is playing out our fantasies, baby. And it’s far easier to fall in love with a fantasy than it is an actual person.

It’s easy to project a fantasy on to what isn’t directly in front of us.

When real, living, breathing, fully realized human beings are in front of us, we can’t project our illusions on to them.

They are multi-faceted, deeply flawed, imperfect little creatures. They have opinions that are exclusively their own. They crave things we might not crave.

On the contrary, when we only interact with someone at a distance, we are free to let our fantasies run wild.

We inflate the weight of their beauty and brainpower in the safety of our heads because they’re not sitting in front of us, proving us wrong.

We can fill the empty spaces with whatever we want.

Digital love is a profile picture; real love is a tagged picture.

Digital feelings can make us feel like we are head-over-heels in love. And it’s easy for people to love us back quickly and recklessly too.

Because we’re not our full, real selves in the digital world. We’re the perfectly curated version of ourselves. We are able to bend our identities to fit into their fantasies.

They aren’t looking at our puffy faces after a night of drinking too much. They’re not witnessing us in the throes of the Sunday scaries when we’re teeming with relentless anxiety about the looming work week.

No. Not at all. We’re simply sending them pretty pictures of ourselves in pretty lighting.

We make sure our profile pictures on Facebook are impossibly gorgeous, right?

It’s always the picture that best displays our personal styles, and bodies and faces in the perfect softening filter.

Tagged pictures are a far different story. They capture us unfiltered and off guard.

In tagged pictures we’re often drunk with one slanted eyed. We are laughing our faces off in a deranged fashion. We are dressed in terrible clothes looking like the definition of a creep. Glowing in an unflattering light.

They aren’t perfect. They are anything but perfect. But they are real. And more often than not, it’s what we actually look like.

The goal is to find someone who can find beauty in our tagged pictures. A digital romance doesn’t give our partner a chance to even fall in love with our real selves because we don’t let him or her see us as we really are.

No one can live up to his or her profile picture.

We are able to perfectly construct our sentences.

We are able to calculatedly construct our words when we’re engaged in a digital romance. When we’re conversing in person, we don’t have time to think.

We don’t have time to stew up the wittiest answer. We don’t have the luxury of re-reading our partner’s words.

Person-to-person, we can only say what we’re feeling in the heat of the moment. Which is usually the closest thing to the raw truth.

Our partner might not want to hear our truth. In fact, if our partner did hear it, this person might decide he or she doesn’t even like us.

I’ve conducted the “perfect” text message responses for my friends to send over to their digital lovers. There is no way to even know that words we receive over text are authentically theirs.

The real danger of the digital romance.

So why does it matter? Why can’t we take a dip in the digital pond? It’s fun. It feels good in here.

Yeah, it’s all fun. Until it’s not.

We become so deeply engrossed in our digital romances, often for dark reasons.

They prevent us from having to face our unhappy realities. They’re akin to a Xanax: They work to temporarily stave off the pressing fear of being alone and the bouts of relentless anxiety.

But just like a Xanax or a strong drink, when the buzz wears off… we’re often left feeling worse than before.

We become heartbroken because we are losing our fantasy. The falsified feel-good.

We projected everything we wished and hoped could happen on to a digital person. A figment of our imagination. Once the fantasy evaporates, we’re forced to look into the mirror of our lives. Without a filter.

It’s hard. It’s hard to face the fact that we’re unsatisfied at work. It’s hard to confront our loneliness.

But the only way to be truly happy is to take an honest look at our lives so we can figure out what proactive changes we need to make in order feel at peace.

We need to stop looking for quick fixes and shortcuts to love and fulfillment. We need to fall in love with our real realities, not our digital “realities.” We need to cultivate wholeness within ourselves.

And when we do finally get our hands on the real thing, when we do find someone whom we love in the in harsh rays of light — it’s the most exhilarating feeling of all.

It’s okay to meet someone online. This isn’t about shaming those who date online. I’m all for it. Hell, I do it.

This is about being able to decipher the difference between illustrious, self-created fantasy and reality.

Nothing holds a candle to honest, imperfect love. Nothing feels as good as something tangible you can hold in your arms.

Real love loves the real you. You deserve someone who loves the imperfect, wonderfully f*cked up YOU. Not the perfectly curated you. The beautifully flawed, dynamic, one-of-a-kind you.

Source: Elitedaily.com

COSTA RICA CONFIDENTIAL – I doubt we could ever see something like this in Costa Rica, but we can dream, can’t we.

(uk.reuters.com) A man in Austria, fed up with what he says are punitive tax payments, has offered free sex to customers at his Salzburg brothel.

“First and foremost it is a protest against the tax authorities,” said Hermann Mueller, owner of the Pascha brothel in the city.

“I am very interested to see how they will tax me – if there is no income, what taxes will they take?” Mueller asked.

“We are not paying taxes any more. Effective immediately: Free Entrance! Free Drinks! Free Sex!” the Pascha establishment posted on its website.

The Oesterreich newspaper last week showed a picture of men queued up outside to take advantage of the unusual offer.

It quoted Mueller as saying he would compensate from his own pocket the up to €10,000 (£7,168) a month that prostitutes working at the club will forego.

Mueller, who also operates brothels in four other cities in Germany and Austria, has complained in past media interviews about what he says has been punitive taxation and regulation of his businesses.

He said he had paid nearly €5m in taxes in Salzburg alone over the past decade. Salzburg’s tax office was not willing to comment on the case, citing data protection reasons.

Your spam folder is probably full of the offers. (Mine certainly is.) But none of the emails promising to let you “please your partner” by making you a “giant for girls” with “strong erections” say a thing about how the penis gets erect in the first place. Here’s how it really works.

First of all, let’s acknowledge that the process depends on healthy tissues and a complex interplay of neural signals, interweaving the responses of, to use a car analogy, the nervous system’s analogs of accelerator and brake with a whole suite of competing signals inside the brain. It’s a dance that sometimes leads to mixed signals, and although it’s fascinating, I’m not going to cover that here. From here on in, simply assume that the penis is healthy and all the signals it’s getting from the brain say “Go!”

A Penis Anatomy Primer

There are actually three erectile structures inside a human penis. One, called the corpus spongiosum, runs along the bottom of the organ from base to tip, where it spreads out to form the glans. The urethra runs through it (inspiring its name in older papers, the corpus cavernosum urethrae), and although the corpus spongiosum engorges with blood during erection, it doesn’t do much to make the penis stiff. That job belongs to the two erectile structures on the upper side of the penis, the corpora cavernosa.

The corpora cavernosa are like conjoined twins: they run side-by-side down the length of the penis, fused together where they touch. But while the tissue around the outside of the corpora is leak-proof, the wall between them is more like a beaded curtain, with tons of openings that let blood flow freely between the two sides. Near the base of the penis, each corpus cavernosum flares away from its twin, forming a pair of “legs” that tie themselves firmly to the pelvis. This anchor gives the penis a solid base to resist all that rhythmic pushing that happens during sex. The arteries that supply the blood for erection enter the corpora cavernosa here, slipping in at the back away from all the action.

Each corpus cavernosum is a hollow tube, its center filled with a spongy network of open spaces, smooth muscle, and small arteries. The central spaces fill with blood during erection, which might make you think they’re the most important part of the enterprise — these are, after all, the tissues that drugs like Viagra target. But you’d be ignoring another, equally important element. Blood, by itself, can’t raise anything’s pressure: it needs to push against something. And the only thing it can push against is the corpora’s thick outer wall.

The wall of the corpora cavernosa, called the tunica albuginea, isn’t your average sheet of connective tissue. Like other connective tissues that surround and separate organs, it’s mostly made of a protein called collagen. But in each layer of the tunica albuginea, those collagen fibres are densely packed and highly organised. Rather than pointing any which way, each strand of collagen lies stacked next to its neighbours, as orderly as the pasta inside a box of spaghetti.

Primed for Action

A penis stays flaccid as long as the smooth muscles inside the vascular spaces are contracted. Contracted muscles keep the tiny arteries inside the erectile tissue squeezed shut, making blood move at a trickle instead of a flow. The lack of blood keeps blood pressure inside the cavernous space low — lower than the average blood pressure in arteries throughout the rest of the body. And as long as the volume of blood moving through the space stays small, there’s not enough inside the organ to really push on the tunica wall.

While the wall is relaxed, it’s bunched up like a wadded up sock. The collagen fibres inside the wall are folded up, too — each fibre looking a bit like a strip of accordion- folded paper. The combination of low blood volume and loose, bunchy tissue gives the penis its “flaccid” character: flexible, a bit stretchy, and considerably smaller than when it’s deployed for sex.

Rapid Deployment

Everything changes when the brain flips on ‘arousal.’ The signal that told smooth muscle to squeeze down vanishes, arteries open up, and blood rushes into the central cavernous spaces, eager to equalise the pressure difference between penis and body. As blood enters, it fills the available space and starts to push on the wall.

The wall doesn’t push back. Instead, it stretches as the collagen fibres inside of it expand and unfold. As the tunica albuginea expands outward, it squeezes off the drainage veins that leave the corpora cavernosa, trapping blood inside and increasing the penis’s length and girth.

Brake for Erection

Obviously, this process doesn’t go on forever. There’s a stop point, a stable size where the penis will max out its growth. That point comes when the collagen fibres in the wall fully unfold.

A collagen fibre is like a steel cable; if you pull on its ends, it will resist (and transmit) that force. And like steel, collagen is very stiff when it’s fully loaded. So while the folded collagen fibres inside the wall didn’t resist the push of blood filling the penis, once all those folds are gone the extended collagen fibres act like a brake. The wall tissue rapidly becomes very stiff, stops expanding, and pushes back if more blood tries to enter the central space. With no more space to fill, blood pressure inside the corpora rises to match the blood pressure of the rest of the body. Since all of the spaces in both corpora cavernosa are interconnected (remember the beaded curtain?), the pressure inside every part of the structure rises together, making the penis stiffen as a single unit.

And now it’s ready for action.

(I will note that this is probably also how the clitoris gets erect — penis and clitoris are homologous tissues!)