A short YouTube video by sex therapist Vanessa Marin (with Xander Marin) addressing the myth of “belly button sex” — the mistaken belief that intercourse or pregnancy can occur via the navel. The hosts explain why this is anatomically impossible, describe harms (injuries, prolonged infertility, embarrassment) that can arise from such misunderstandings, emphasize that lack of sex education underlies the problem, and clarify that penile–vaginal penetration is required for conception (speaking about cisgender men and women in this explanation).
Chapters
All right, we just have to get straight into this one today. Have you heard of belly button sex? So leave us a little wink emoji in the comments down below if you have, and a question mark emoji if you have not. So if you have not heard about belly button sex, then buckle up because, yes, there are actually people trying to have sex in their belly buttons.
But first, before we tell you all about it, we just want to say hi if you're brand new here, especially because this might be a weird one to start on. We are Vanessa and Xander Marin. Vanessa here is a sex therapist and we've been together for 14 years. If you see our little dogs, these are our pugs, Maggie and Winston.
And we are here to give you the tools, tips and techniques that you need to create a truly extraordinary relationship in, inside of the bedroom and out. So if you are interested in that, then just go ahead and hit that subscribe button right now.
So what is belly button sex? Here's the deal. Some people think that you have sex and get pregnant through your belly button. Here's the thought process. There is some logic, I guess, behind this. So the belly gets large when you're pregnant, right? So a lot of people therefore think that this means the baby is in your stomach and, and that the most straightforward path to your stomach is through the belly button. So if you need to have sex in order to get pregnant, then having intercourse through the belly button is probably the quickest or easiest way to get there. Right?
Okay, so let's be real here. Like, this sounds really funny. I mean, the mental image of people, like, trying to have sex with a belly button, it's pretty ridiculous, right? But, like, the truth is that this really does have awful, awful consequences. So there are a lot of male, female couples, couples who are struggling with infertility for months, even years because they're not having penis and vagina intercourse. There's no way of getting pregnant through the belly button. There have been reports of women having injuries to their stomach, men having injuries to their penis because they're working so hard to try to make penetration happen in this tiny little area that just is not going to have any sort of penetration happening. And there's just like a lot of embarrassment and humiliation that comes along for people when they realize that they've been having sex in the wrong way.
So the bottom line is that this is the kind of damage that a lack of sex education can do. This is why people are trying to have belly button sex, because they have never learned, they've Never had any education on how to actually have intercourse or what the male and female anatomy really is.
And again, like, I know the idea of belly button sex might sound really ridiculous. There's a temptation to write it off as, like, that's just a few people who, like, don't know what's going on. But as a professional sex therapist, I have seen a lot of couples who had confusion about how intercourse actually works. So I remember once working with a couple who had been having sex for two years with him sliding in between her labia. So he wasn't going in, he was just sitting, lighting. In between the labia, there was a different couple who was having sex. The guy was between her thighs. So I just, you know, share that to illustrate, like, it's not just a few people and it's not just the belly button. There's a lot of confusion for a lot of people. Again, because of this lack of education, these open and honest conversations, which is what we are trying to fix with this account. But there are a lot of people who just don't realize something that might seem very obvious to a lot of us.
Yeah. And so for clarification purposes, in case you're watching this and you just want to know, absolutely for sure, intercourse is when a penis penetrates a vagina.
It's not the only way to have sex, of course. And then we're only talking about CIS men and women here. But, yeah, for that clarification. Yeah, penis and vagina, intercourse. That's how we, you know, conceive a baby. That's how it works. Not between the labia, not between the thighs. Gotta go up into that vagina. So that wraps up our video on belly button sex.
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