The Guide to Getting It On (10 page)

Of course, there are plenty of women who have their own insecurities. Is getting breast implants or wearing a padded bra all that different from this guy’s need to have a big penis?

The Diagnosis & Cure

How do you distinguish a man who takes his penis too seriously from one who doesn’t?

The man who doesn’t take his penis too seriously doesn’t flake out when it comes to doing the dishes. He may have various passions in life, often sports, music, business, gaming, or trying to fix things (sometimes successfully), but these usually help to center rather than isolate him. Sex with him is a natural extension of your friendship. It makes all the sense in the world.

As for “curing” the kind of man who takes his penis too seriously, you can’t. Hard as you might try, no human being has ever changed just because someone else wanted him or her to. It’s something that has to come from within. Friends and lovers can sometimes help if they are willing to call the guy on his nonsense, but they can’t make the changes for him.

Sexual Awareness: Hood Ornaments vs. Wet Triangles

When it comes to sexual awareness, the penis is positioned like the hood ornament on a car. It’s difficult to ignore what your hood ornament is telling you when it’s making a tent in the front of your pants. Sometimes we guys aren’t even aware that we are sexually aroused until we feel ourselves starting to get hard.

Women are not conditioned from early childhood to associate sexual arousal with specific body cues in the way that men are. While their genitals often swell and lubricate, no flags get waved. Most of the changes happen on the inside and can be chalked-up to a nice tingly sensation between their legs. Besides, “good” girls are often taught to ignore their body’s sexual cues.

While the penis can be a reliable indicator of sexual excitement, it does have its share of false positives, and occasional negatives.

How a Penis Gets Hard

The penis has three long chambers inside of it. Two of the chambers are responsible for making it hard or rigid. They are called the corpus cavernosa. They run parallel to each other up the shaft of the penis. Think of a double-barrel shotgun, and that’s how they sit next to each other. These two chambers or cylinders are made of spongy material that are covered by a thin but extremely tough exterior. To get an erection, they fill up with blood. As a result, the blood pressure in an erect penis is way higher than the blood pressure in the rest of the body.

The third chamber is made of a similar spongy tissue and it encircles the urethra, or the tube that you pee and ejaculate through. While this third tube expands during erection, it doesn’t get hard or rigid like the other two tubes. If it did, it would crimp shut the urethra and there’s no way a guy could ejaculate through it.

This third column, which is called the corpus spongiosum, also forms the head of the penis. While the head of the penis expands or mushrooms during erection, it stays relatively soft.

Unwanted Wood

“For some reason, out of nowhere, your penis starts to get hard, and it is extremely difficult to stop.”
male age 25

“It’s totally embarrassing. You just want to get up and go, but you can’t. So you start pulling on your shirt or sweater to try to cover up the bulge. You become very self-conscious; you think everyone is looking at your crotch.”
male age 43

“It’s like being in an elevator with an umbrella that will not go down.”
male age 42

“It can physically hurt when your penis is trapped in your jeans pointing downward and it suddenly gets hard for no reason whatsoever.”
male age 26

“Most of my memories of unwanted erections were at school, generally during class, and I was terrified that someone would notice.”
male age 24

“I travel a lot for business and sometimes wake up erect after a flight. It’s terribly embarrassing. If I can’t think the damn thing down, then I have to go through the tricky maneuver of flipping it up, trapping it under my waistband without being noticed, and then keeping my briefcase in front of me when I stand.”
male age 25

Women usually assume that the presence of a hard-on means that a man is sexually aroused, and that no rise in his pants means he isn’t. If only it were that simple. Consider the occurrence of the unwanted hard-on. The average teenage male is capable of getting a totally unwanted hard-on in the middle of an algebra test for absolutely no reason, unless he is a member of that rare breed who finds polynomial equations sexually arousing. When you are a young man, hard-ons just happen; nobody is more befuddled than the possessor of the penis. To say that all hard-ons are a sign of sexual arousal badly overstates the case. One reader took a bad grade in an early-morning high-school class because he couldn’t go to the chalkboard due to his unwanted erections. His only thoughts were of frustration, not sex.

In addition to getting unwanted hard-ons, there are times when a man can feel highly aroused, yet either fail to get hard or have it go limp when he needs it the most (floppus erectus).

Hiding an Unwanted Erection

A large portion of unwanted erections have little to do with being sexually aroused, and guys usually have no more control over them than women do over getting their periods. So thinking about awful things like french-kissing your grandmother isn’t going to bring a raging hard-on down because it’s probably not about sex to begin with. Pinching yourself until you bleed won’t help, and jerking off more often than you already do won’t change anything. For unwanted erections in public, camouflage is the only answer.

If unwanted erections are a problem, avoid wearing sweat pants in public places. Wear pants that are have more rigid material like denim, because the sweat pant material is more likely to drape around your erection and show it off. You might avoid tight pants as well.

Baggy untucked Ts or sweat shirts have been saving young men from boner embarrassment since the beginning of time. The same is true for a briefcase, backpack or laptop bag with long straps that you can casually shift in front of your crotch. If your erection feels comfortable in the up direction, a lot of guys will put their hands in their pockets and nudge it under the waistband of their briefs or boxers. Men call this maneuver the ‘waistband tuck’.

Since you can’t prevent unwanted erections, it helps to have ways to hide them.

False Negatives: When Gravity Dings the Dong

Confucius says

If limp dick is worst thing that happens to your relationship, you live charmed life.

Hopefully your lovemaking isn’t solely dependent on the man’s ability to get hard. If it is, your sexual relationship might be somewhat limited. It’s also disconcerting to think that your entire sex life might be centered on the whims of the average penis, hard or soft.

Regarding the biology of erections, it is perfectly normal for a hard penis to partly deflate every fifteen minutes or so. Regarding the psychology of erections, be aware that hard-ons have been known to fly south for varying periods of time, from a single day to who knows how long.

The most unhelpful thing a woman can do when a guy can’t get it up is to become defensive. Women often assume that erection failures mean the man doesn’t find them attractive or that he might be gay. These are possibilities. But there are a billion other reasons for not being able to get an erection, from fearing you won’t be good in bed to what just happened on Wall Street. Physical problems like diabetes can also be a factor.

Given the stress of living in the modern world, it’s a wonder we men are able to get it up as often as we do. And given the lack of tenderness or excitement in some relationships, an unerect penis might be a signal that the man and woman need to get closer emotionally.

While most of us have been raised to think of a limp penis as a sign of failure, perhaps it might be more productive to view it as an opportunity to bring a man and woman together. (For a more complete discussion of male hydraulic failure, see Chapter 56:
When Your System Crashes
.)

Betty on Dick

The following passage is from Betty Dodson’s classic
Sex for One
from Harmony Books. In addressing the issue of misbehaving penises, Ms. Dodson speaks with welcome concern:

“Although I ran only a dozen men’s groups, the experience helped me to let go of my old conviction that men got a better deal when it came to sex.... I thought they could always have easy orgasms even with casual sex, and I envied their never having to worry about the biological realities of periods or pregnancies. But the truth is that not all men are able to be assertive studs who make out all the time.... The most consistent sex problem for many men in the workshops was owning a penis that seemed to have a will of its own. An unpredictable sex organ that got hard when no one was around and then refused to become erect when a man was holding the woman of his dreams in his arms....”

If this situation sounds familiar, tell your man that there probably isn’t a woman alive who wouldn’t be happy to receive a long, lingering back rub and oral sex in the place of intercourse. Or what about a go at an extended orgasm from Chapter 15:
The Zen of Finger Fucking?
In other words, if his woody won’t work, let him know in no uncertain terms that there are plenty of other ways to please you sexually.

This Guide’s philosophy:

Never, ever let a recalcitrant penis ruin sex for either of you!

When Young Men Use Boner Drugs Recreationally

Ordinarily, a discussion of using erection drugs should be in the chapter on erection problems. But there is an increasing number of younger men who don’t have erection problems but take erection drugs for recreational purposes. This might be due to unreal expectations that their penis needs to be like that of porn stars, who are probably taking erection drugs themselves.

The problem is that once young men who don’t need erection drugs start taking them, they become less confident in their own erections. They expect erections that are harder than normal and quicker on the rebound. So they give themselves a false expectation of what an erection is supposed to be, and they start to lose confidence in themselves to get it up without taking boner drugs.