He Comes Next (3 page)
I must admit that, while I have yet to meet a woman who has suffered from penis envy, there seem to be plenty of
guys
who fall prey to this tendency. So perhaps Freud was onto something after all given that he was, just a man, who, like most men, walked through life primarily flaccid. From surreptitiously checking out one another’s members, to envying the long-johns depicted in porn to ancient erotic renderings of exaggerated phalluses, men have long measured and compared their alleged virility based on penis size and turgidity.And for those women who have chanced to ponder what it would be like to have “one of those things,” here are a few “Member Musings:”
“If I had a penis, I’d pee standing up and wouldn’t worry about whipping it out in a dark alley or behind a tree.”
“I’d donate sperm.”
“I’d make my boyfriend go down and swallow!”
“It would be interesting to penetrate, rather than be penetrated.”
“I’d rule the world!”
“I’d make Donald Rumsfeld squeal like a pig!”
Dear Ian,
My boyfriend won’t let me get on top during sex because he’s afraid I’m going to “break” his penis? Is that even possible?—Tania, thirty-six, attorney
Yes, believe it or not, it
is
possible to break one’s penis, though highly unlikely. Interestingly, male anxiety over breaking one’s penis is far more prevalent than actual occurrences and a not entirely uncommon fear.Broken penises usually happen when an erect penis is thrust against a harder object, like a pelvic bone, for example. You’ll know if he’s broken his penis because you’ll likely hear a “cracking” sound; he’ll lose his erection, and his penis will bend to one side or the other. If it were to happen, he would need immediate medical attention and possibly even surgery—all in all, not a fun visit to the emergency room.
I have yet to meet any man who has ever actually broken his penis, though I have worked with patients who were born with Peyronie’s disease, a congenital condition that causes a curvature of the penis due to fibrosis (hardened tissue). I have heard of only one case of a broken penis, where the woman, far larger and heavier than her sexual partner, pounced on her boyfriend with reckless abandon in a female-superior position and succeeded in fracturing his member. Needless to say, after an embarrassing trip to the ER and proper healing, the couple was less energetic in their romps.
As far as sex positions and broken penises go, the female-superior position is one of the least likely to land him in a penis splint (yes, they often need to “set” a broken penis) because most of the pressure (and pleasure) is a function of rubbing the clitoris against his pelvic bone. But if he’s nervous about the position, start in the standard missionary or side-to-side position and let him penetrate you fully and then
gently
roll on top.Going South: The Road Less Traveled
Continuing our journey down the shaft of the penis toward the abdomen, we now reach the scrotum, which contains the testicles, or testes.
Typically, the left testicle hangs lower than the right because the left side descends first during birth. Approximately 75 percent of men hang to the left (although clearly this lefty disposition doesn’t translate at the polls).
And talk about central air-conditioning: When exposed to heat, the scrotum loosens and pushes away from the body; but when exposed to cold, the scrotum pulls into the body and tightens.
F
rom the Annals of Terrorized Testes:“She gobbled up my balls like she was sucking dumplings!”
“Don’t squeeze; caress!”
“Focus on the scrotum—the skin—not the testicles. Tickle, graze, nibble, pinch lightly.”
“Every time my girlfriend touches my balls, I start to have a panic attack. It feels great, but it’s also torture.”
Sexual arousal also causes the testicles to be pulled up into the body to protect them during sex. As mentioned earlier, if you want to test the cremasteric muscles, touch his inner thigh and just watch his testicles run for the scrotal hills.
From the scrotum, we continue our journey deeper into protected areas—hot-zones that abut (no pun intended) the taboo. The perineum contains the root of the penis.
Positioned between the scrotum and the anus, this area is sometimes called the “t’aint” because “it t’aint one or the other.” But regardless of what it t’aint, it is most definitely an area rife with nerve endings and erectile tissue that swells during arousal with the infusion of blood to the pelvic area. It’s also possible to stimulate the prostate—known as the male G-spot—through a perineal massage (that is, if he’ll let you). With the scrotum to the north and the anus to the south, this area is typically more heavily guarded than Guantanamo Bay.
He Has Kegels Too
Both men and women have a PC (pubococcygeus) muscle, which is responsible for the health of the pelvis.
Exercising this muscle regularly will
naturally
prolong sex and allow him to distinguish better between orgasm and ejaculation and lead to a more intense climax. As men age, they sometimes complain of orgasms that are less intense and pleasurable. One reason for this loss is the steady weakening of the PC muscle. That should be motivation enough. So the next time he heads off for the gym, tell him that weight lifting isn’t the only exercise he should be doing.If he wants some guidance on how to do them, tell him to practice by first stopping the flow of urine midstream—that will help him locate the muscle.
From there, he should do reps of kegels, gradually increasing the overall amount, as well as the length of time he holds the contraction. He can do them anywhere, but sometimes it’s fun to practice them together.
When you’re having intercourse, you’ll both benefit from stronger kegels: He’ll be able to last longer, and you’ll feel it against your G-spot when he does them inside you. And remember that your kegels will feel great on him, particularly if you squeeze them while he’s pulling out of you or, even better, having sex that involves mutual squeezing, rather than thrusting.
Butt Why?
Like the perineum, the anal entrance is rich with nerve endings and a source of tremendous pleasure, but it’s also protected (to say the least). Think of it as the
Heart of Darkness
of male sexuality. Mess around with him there, and he’s likely to get as loopy as Marlon Brando in
Apocalypse Now
.The prostate gland is a walnut-size gland that lies below the urinary bladder and produces prostatic fluid. The white, sticky fluid forms most of the volume of semen and serves as its delivery mechanism.
The prostate is also a source of pleasure, one that can be stimulated through anal touch. Often called the male G-spot, I prefer to call it the
P-spot,
as in protected rather than prostate. If you and your partner want to enjoy this intense nugget of pleasure, you will have to travel about one to three inches inside his rectum toward the front of his body (his stomach). For less intrusive pleasures, you can also stimulate the prostate externally through perineal massage.Beyond the anus, there’s the entire buttocks and the gluteus maximus muscles that run through them, which are often tight with tension. Additionally, there are bands of fibrous tissue (rectus ambdominus), aka the “six-pack,” situated beneath the abdomen in the groin area. As Dr. Louis Schultz observed in
Out in the Open: The Complete Male Pelvis
, these bands form a sort of interior jock strap, which, when overly tight, can restrict oxygen from reaching the area and contribute to a numbed sensation.When exploring the male body, it’s important to look beyond his penis and consider the entire pelvic region. In most sex, the penis drives, if not drags, the other parts along for the ride. The other parts are left overly tense, or flaccid, and somewhat desensitized. Through a combination of factors, both physiological and psychological, the male compulsion to protect or guard this area can hobble sexual experience. By opening up the pelvis and engaging his entire pleasure platform, you can help him enjoy a heightened “out-of-body” sexual and sensual experience very much rooted
in his body
.
Male Sexual Response:
A Protected Process
W
HENEVER I
talk to men about their adult anxieties and dys-functions, invariably the subject shifts back to memories from their teenage years: embarrassing erections, troublesome wet dreams, and masturbation traumas. Many of the men grew up with brothers and sisters stealing precious moments of privacy. Others experienced their own anguished versions of
Portnoy’s Complaint
, with intrusive mothers banging at the bathroom door, demanding to be let in or berating them for stained sheets or underwear. No matter what your partner’s personal experiences, his discovery of arousal’s fierce hold and irrepressible timing no doubt caused him some trauma, embarrassment, and hardship during critical points in his psychosexual development. Hormonally driven cravings are often experienced as uncontrollable urges, from boyhood through early manhood, an unwieldly force to be managed stealthfully and quickly, rather than a source of joyous self-exploration.
Although the process of arousal, also known as sexual response, is nuanced and progressive, it’s typically experienced as a mad rush to orgasm. The focus is on destination, rather than journey, and what should be appreciated and savored is often consumed ravenously like a condemned man’s last meal. Men deprive themselves of the time to luxuriate in fantasies and desires that are personal and individuated and frequently turn to the generic visuals of porn to catalyze the process. More and more men are turning away from their intimate relationships as a source of sexual exploration and settling, instead, for erotic junk food. They often reserve their innermost fantasies for static, airbrushed images and anonymous encounters in chat rooms. Men are more “graphic with their graphics” than they are with their sexually evolved, eager-to-explore partners.
PONDERING PORN
“I feel like porn has sort of fucked up my sex life. I feel like I don’t know how to slow down or appreciate all the parts of the process that lead up to orgasm. I get aroused so quickly, I fast forward straight to the money shot, and I’m done. I don’t watch any of the foreplay because I’m already ahead of it. I just want to get straight to the orgasm. And when I’m with a girl, I get nervous and scared because I’ve gotten sex to this place where it’s totally defined by orgasm.
—Matt, twenty-seven, graphic designer
“When I was a kid, I jerked off to magazines, but at least then, I had to fill in the gaps around the pictures. And I remember that as I was masturbating, the girl in the magazine would turn into the girl I had a crush on or, later in life, the woman I was going out with. The photos were a sort of a starter. But back then masturbation was an extension of my erotic life. With movies, it became easier. I didn’t need to fill in the gaps. Masturbation was less work, and I guess I got lazy. I let the images do all the work instead of using my imagination. But the orgasms also became less meaningful, more disposable. I didn’t feel any connection to my own inner erotic life. I wasn’t masturbating anymore to my own past or current experiences, real women I had been with or wanted to be with for that matter. I kind of lost my sexual history, as well as my erotic creativity. Now with the Internet, I feel like it’s all so…external. I’m kind of lost in all the visuals. I don’t think I’ve jerked off inside my own head, without porn of some sort, for years. But it’s also lonely and hollow. I always hear that masturbation is healthy, but I wonder if that’s true—at least the way I go about it. Masturbation used to be a way of going inside myself, now it’s a way of avoiding life. I used to feel energized and vital after masturbating. Now it just makes me depressed.”
—Jonathan, thirty, Web content manager
As we discussed earlier, for most men, sexual stimulation and gratification are almost entirely focused on the penis, to the exclusion of other erogenous zones in the pelvic area and across the body. During arousal, men—like bulls in a china shop—crash through to the point of “ejaculatory inevitability,” missing out on all the subtler experiences. Ejaculation and orgasm become inextricably linked, when, in fact, they are separate processes. Male sexuality becomes orgasm focused, rather than pleasure oriented.
This male process of sexual response, as reinforced by masturbation, is often incompatible with a woman’s. The differences manifest in the relationships we form. Some of us embrace the challenge and recalibrate our sexual behavior to mesh with our partners’ needs. Others wallow in happy ignorance, owing to a partner’s fear of rejection and consequent willingness to fake it. Then there are those who can’t disabuse themselves of their adolescent fantasies, who retreat into porn-centric safety, denouncing any woman who cannot achieve orgasm through intercourse as frigid, unsexy, or aberrant. Often, these ostensibly desireless men, who’d rather spend the night online than deal with a real-life woman, are not so much lacking in desire, as motivation for something more.
“It’s easier to masturbate. I don’t have to worry about her.”
“I can just get it over and done with.”
“I don’t have to deal with all the issues of the relationship.”
“There’s no pressure or anxiety when I jerk off.”
“The sex in my head or on the Internet is better than the sex in my bed.”
Many men develop a sexual shorthand with their partners, a sex script that offers the path of least resistance to consistent gratification, one that reduces them to sexual automatons in which sex is familiar and routine. The orgasms may even be simultaneous, but they are emotionally and creatively hollow, no better in qualitative terms than the sexual release each partner could have had on their own. This is the world of the lonely orgasm.
Desire
Sexuality researchers Masters and Johnson determined that the human sexual response cycle consists of four distinct stages: excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution.
But experts concur that there’s another stage as well, one that overpowers the others: desire.
Desire is the most mercurial and mysterious of all the phases. In fact, when Masters and Johnson first defined the sexual response cycle, they didn’t even include desire. One of the reasons for this is that desire and excitement (often used interchangeably with the term “arousal”) are closely interlinked, especially in men. Give a guy an erection, and he wants to use it; hence the success of Viagra and other erectile stimulants, such as Cialis and Levitra. Stimulating arousal or excitement often stimulates desire itself.
But when Pfizer tested Viagra on women, they were unsuccessful and ultimately abandoned their hopes of developing a female version of the little blue pill. Interestingly, Viagra had some of the same physiological effects on women as it did on men: It stimulated blood flow to the genitals. But whereas in men, this physiological arousal quickly led to desire (with just a bit of prodding through, say, a porn magazine or erotic video), it by and large did not create desire in women. For men, desire and arousal are virtually one and the same. Give a guy a hard-on and he wants to use it. But for women, desire usually requires components that don’t necessarily need to be present for men: intimacy, affection, trust, humor, respect, and security among others. Men appreciate those qualities, but we don’t necessarily
need
them to get turned on and have sex. This difference in how men experience desire explains why men are more easily able to compartmentalize between sex and love.
Though there may be some truth to the statement that men are more easily aroused than women, we should not fall prey to the assumption that guys are walking hard-ons, always ready for action. While men may be able to have sex without emotion, that doesn’t mean they don’t want the emotion or cannot refocus the lens of their arousal to encompass these emotions.
As an example, I meet with many guys who have cheated or are thinking about it. Many have told me that they’re not looking for sex, so much as an emotional connection they’re no longer getting at home. Men may be more easily aroused, but that does not make them any less fundamentally interested in romantic or emotionally based love. And desire is the phase that keeps sex interesting and fresh over the long term. Desire is what starts the ball rolling…and keeps it rolling for that matter.
As a relationship progresses, it’s more important than ever to remember that male desire for sex doesn’t begin in the genitals; it begins in the mind. Yes, Pfizer was right: Desire and arousal are generally more closely interlinked in men than in women. But as time goes on, sexual experiences substantially redefine the nature of that link. What starts out as a small gender gap can become an abyss when a man’s locus of sex becomes singularly associated with the goal of erection and orgasm. Viagra and porn can become a quick substitute for actual desire and intimacy. But the gender gap can also be diminished when the primary focus of sexual interaction is placed on building and sustaining desire.
In the next chapter, I’ll specifically discuss the brain chemistry of the mating process, and why a loss of desire (relative to the infatuation phase) is a perfectly natural and ultimately manageable part of a healthy and fulfilling love life. But in a world wrought with clichés about male sexuality—“men are dogs; they’ll screw anything”—the worst thing a woman can do is take desire for granted and assume he
should
want you just because, well,
he has a penis
!
Dear Ian,
My husband has little desire for sex and has been taking Viagra, but it’s just not working. He’s more upset than ever. What can he, we, do?
—Kirsten, thirty-five, journalist
Let me reassure you: I see this type of scenario all the time. Viagra works on the hydraulics of arousal, but not desire, itself. In fact, Viagra exacerbates the pernicious gap between actual desire and physical arousal, causing chronic abusers to focus on the mechanics of “getting it up and off” instead of figuring out whom and what turns them on. Properly used, it helps a guy achieve a hard-on when he can’t do so for physical reasons. Viagra does
not,
however, stimulate desire. Sometimes it can help nudge desire along, but sexual appetite begins in the brain. Viagra won’t make him want to have sex with you. For that, you have to look at your relationship. You must examine the level of excitement and erotic creativity you bring to your intimate encounters as well as other factors, such as stress, diet, and depression. Depending upon his age, he may also be experiencing male menopause (known as andropause), which is characterized by low testosterone levels and consequently low desire.
A Bird in the Hand…
I often deal with women who are frustrated by the fact that their husband or boyfriend claims to have no interest in sex, but then they catch him masturbating. They feel betrayed and lied to: “How could he say he has no desire when he masturbates? Clearly he has an interest in sex, just not with me,
right
?”
Wrong
. The fact that he’s masturbating is a really positive sign: It means he still has a libido. He hasn’t lost interest in sex; it just means your relationship needs some sexual maintenance, a tune-up, perhaps a fuel injection. With a little creativity and a lot of communication, you can breathe new life into your tired old sex routines by learning how to explore what turns him and you on together (more of this to come in Part II).
The truth is that when you fell in love, there were some very potent chemicals fueling the process and making desire a no-brainer. Now you have to work at it. But with that work (which is actually a whole lot of fun) comes a deepening of your relationship as well as a potentially more exciting, dynamic, and varied experience of sex. It may not be the euphoric, chemical-addled sex of infatuation, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be better or at least different.
I meet so many couples in their fifties and sixties who insist that the sex they’re having now is better than ever before. Sure they’re the first to admit that sex has changed. But they also say that sex has become more creative and tender, less orgasm driven, more sensual, and ultimately intimate. Some of this has to do with the fact that as men age, their testosterone levels decrease, while estrogen levels increase. So he’s naturally discovering a softer side of sex. The men who are the happiest are the ones who ultimately accept and embrace these natural changes and discover new paths in their sexual journeys.
People change. Relationships change. Why should sex stay the same?
The fact that you may have taken desire for granted in the past is a mistake, an all-too common one that’s easily made (and rectified), with a little effort and determination. Why do you think so many divorces occur within the first five years of marriage? Because of the desire gap. In the next section, I’ll elaborate on the structural dynamics of the mating process. But for now, know that in general, relationships go through three phases that are genetically soft-wired into our relationship DNA. I say soft-wired because while I believe in the power and necessity of natural selection and determinism, I believe just as strongly in the power of social forces and free will. The truth is that humans are among the 3 percent of mammals that tend toward monogamy. That’s right, the other 97 percent basically “fuck and flee.” But of that 3 percent, humans are the only species that exercise free will in their decision to be monogamous. We are the only species that doesn’t follow preprogrammed hard-wired rules in how we pair bond; we make choices. And frankly it’s much easier to follow a rule than it is to make a choice.
