It’s been a few weeks, but I’m back on the blog, bringing you interesting tidbits about love, relationships, sex–and how to find your way to all three of these rather important things.
Da Vinci's famous picture about sex (click for a larger image)
At MissPivot, we are constantly “sharpening the saw,” as Mr. Covey recommends, and lately I’ve been reading the book How We Do It: How the Science of Sex Can Make You a Better Lover by Judy Dutton. It seems there is no limit to what we can learn about human behavior.
Or about human anatomy. Dutton talks about an interesting drawing by Leonardo da Vinci from around 1492, which I have included in this post: “Coition of a Hemisected Man and Woman.” Yes, when Columbus was sailing the ocean blue, Da Vinci was doing his best to figure out what goes on inside when people have sex.
Dutton has this to say about the drawing:
At first glance, this X-ray style rendering of the penis inside a vagina [...] looks amazingly accurate. A closer look, though, shows that Da Vinci didn’t quite get everything right.
[T]he penis contains two tubes: one for semen, one for urine. Another tube extends from the penis up to the brain, based on the widely held belief at the time that semen originated in a man’s head. There’s also a tube winding from the woman’s right breast down to her vagina, because of the popular belief that breast milk was formed from menstrual blood. Da Vinci might have been a genius in many areas of life, but clearly, sex was not one of them.
Harsh! My personal guess is that, with this drawing, Da Vinci helped take the knowledge of his time–which was probably awful–to a slightly higher level. No small feat, right? (Dutton, by the way, is taking the sex knowledge of our time to a higher level too, so I highly recommend her book!)
In any case, I think the moral of the story is that the facts of anatomy and sex and behavior are by no means obvious to us, and it’s only through careful study that we have made progress over the years.
Also, a lot of what we think we know about love and relationships and how to get them and maintain them just isn’t true. On the other hand, there is a lot of knowledge available that could greatly benefit people… if only they knew about it!
This blog is all about helping you know about it!
TTYS,
MissPivot
Drawing by Leonardo Da Vinci, photographed by Luc Viator; used with permission
