Talking sex with your doctor isn’t always easy. Whether you are afraid she or he will judge you,  you just don’t feel comfortable sharing the intimate details of your life between the sheets, or you can’t think straight with a speculum between your legs, many people get tight lipped in the doctor’s office. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have questions.

After so many of you wrote in to ask Dr. Lissa Rankin questions during CollegeCandy’s STD Awareness Day, we thought we’d bring her back more regularly. So, every Thursday she will be answering your questions. The ones you couldn’t ask your doctor in person and didn’t really trust the Yahoo community to answer for you. Just leave your questions in the comments, or send em over to us. (We’ll keep it all anonymous for you.) Dr. Lissa will answer anything – really, anything – about sex and other lady things. Don’t be shy; she’s waiting for ya!

Q: How Much Sex Is Enough Sex?

A: So many people worry that they’re not having enough sex- or that they’re having too much.  Take two people getting it on with the same frequency – twice per week.  One may be completely frustrated because she wishes she was doin’ the bump daily. The other may be resenting the pressure from her partner and wish she could scale it back to once a month.  Truth is, we’re all SO different.

So What’s “Normal?”
According to the Kinsey Institute, 18-29 year olds have sex an average of 112 times per year, 30-39 year olds an average of 86 times per year, and 40-49 year olds an average of 69 times per year.

Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Sex?
Absolutely. If sex or masturbation are leading you to miss school or work, causing you to fall behind in your responsibilities, or damaging your relationships, you may have a problem.  Other behaviors associated with sexual addiction include multiple affairs (cheating on your partner), multiple or anonymous sexual partners and/or one-night stands, consistent use of pornography, unsafe sex , frequent phone or computer sex (cybersex),  prostitution or use of prostitutes, exhibitionism, obsessive dating through personal ads or the internet, voyeurism, stalking, sexual harassment, or rape.  If this sounds like you, there are treatment programs such as the twelve step program Sex Addicts Anonymous (SAA) to help people with sexual addictions.

What I Think
If you and your partner are both happy, it’s enough. Nuff said.  If one of you is dissatisfied, it bears exploration, because those seeds of discontent breed trouble ahead in your relationship.  Can you talk to your partner about it? I know sex is hard to discuss, but can you touch base periodically and check in?  If you and your partner disagree about sexual frequency, can you make compromises?  So often we make assumptions about our partners that simply aren’t true.  Maybe you wish you could have sex twice a week, but your partner only wants it every other week.  Maybe you assume your partner just isn’t that sexual, when in truth, your partner just doesn’t always want to put in the hour-long ordeal of loads of foreplay.  What if you could just have a quickie every now and then- just to tie you over?  Would you be willing to sacrifice quality for quantity?  Or is it all about quality- and quantity be damned?

It can be challenging to find the balance between fulfilling your sexual needs, meeting the needs of your  partner,  having autonomy over how much sex you have, and keeping up with your other responsibilities.  As long as you and your partner are content, no one’s getting hurt, you’re protecting your body, and sex isn’t getting in the way of the rest of your life, there’s no need to worry about how much sex everyone else is having.  Many people are completely happy abstaining, and others get in on like rabbits.  Just be safe, pay attention to your intuition, and don’t stress about everyone else.  If you’re happy, safe, and healthy, it’s enough.

[Check out Dr. Lissa at www.owningpink.com]

Speaking of fantasies, RDJ just admitted to Now Magazine that he used to be a compulsive masturbator!  Which is really pretty strange!  [Our exclamation points are because we don't know how to process this information!]

“I was a compulsive, serial masturbator, but it was the best thing I could have been. I utilized that organ and rode it for everything it was worth.” 

Hmm.   Awkward.  Downy goes on to say this:

“[masturbating] no longer a motivating factor for me. My union with [my wife] is sacred. Almost always, guys want to get laid. They have a girlfriend, they want to f*ck her friend. But I’m not that guy.”

Good to know that he don’t want to eff his wife’s friends.  Also good to know that he believes marriage is sacred.  Weird to know that he used to tug it all the time.

Some people enjoy sharing, I guess.

I’ve talked about American Apparel before. Those ads that look like porn with bad lighting? Those models who may or may not be underage but who are definitely bored and affected?Well, it gets better.

A contributor for Jezebel (one of the funniest gossip sites out there) recently wrote about her experience working at the enigma that is A. Apparel, proving that it’s not just their ads that are pretensions and strange.

“I thought cocaine was kind of scandalous when I started working at American Apparel. And so I naturally found it kind of scandalous that a major coke dealer actually served as a kind of informal HR chief for many of the American Apparel stores in New York.” The Jezebel story begins, going on to explain about the monstrosity that is Dov Charney—the Canadian founder of A.A.

Stories that Charney “masturbated in front of a reporter, berated girls for not finding him hot enough “pussy” with which to staff his stores, [and] took certain female retail employees as glorified concubines whom he would house in special American Apparel apartments and whose shitty retail wages he would subsidize with special allowances” were all apparently true, as well as his famously annoying voice, which was “shrill and weird and babyish.”

A sex addict with a baby voice who’s also an asshole? Sounds like he could be in the running for one of the worst bosses in the history of retail. Or the world.

When there’s a disgusting idiot helming a company who says things like “It is imperative that the people who wear our clothes are really attractive, vain hipsters, and any priority they exhibit that runs counter to looking really awesome should be a warning sign that maybe they should not work here”, it’s not hard to see why A. Apparel is so ridiculous.

I mean, how can a place have good energy if “vain hipsters” who don’t care about anything except “looking awesome” run things? Sure, the chain is successful, but someday (and someday soon) short shorts for guys and gold bodysuits for girls are going to go out of style.

And nobody will care. Except the people who have closets full of them. They might cry.

Oh, and PS? If you’re ever going to take a journey inside A.A (say perhaps, for Halloween? Which is the only reason I’ve ever gotten close to the Mecca of attitude), make sure to wear earplugs. Unless you really dig booming electropop by artists you’re not cool enough to know.

Like the people surrounding it, the music at American Apparel leaves much to be desired.