The Guide to Getting It On (11 page)

One of the disappointments older men with erection problems can have with erection drugs is they aren’t able to recreate the rock-hard erections men had when they were young. But for 20 year olds without erection problems, drugs like Viagra and Cialis don’t have the difficult job of raising the dead. So the drug is more able to create a porn-like erection.

Nature didn’t create erections to be like baseball bats. Normal is not porn perfect. And no matter what your age, if you don’t need erection pills, don’t take them. The latest research is showing that when men who don’t need erection drugs start using them, they can end up giving themselves a needless dependency on the pills, when the money would be better spent on flowers and romance. The following personal account from a reader echoes this very concern:

“I was dealing with a pretty complicated personal life, along with stress and mild depression. So my erections weren’t as consistent as I would have liked. My doc prescribed Viagra, at my request. I was able to take it and get a good effect from very small doses, which means it was probably just working as a mental crutch.

Later I found myself with an interesting feeling of psychological dependence on the Viagra pills. They made me lazy. I didn’t have to worry about relaxing, clearing my head, being present, the pills did all the work. Plus, I would psych myself into problems, by worrying about not taking the Viagra, then worry myself into having problems, and then feeling shitty if I had problems and hadn’t taken it. It was a very interesting dog-chasing-its tail syndrome.

So when they describe folks as addicted to Viagra, I get it. Even for young men, it can serve as a psychological crutch, taking off a lot of the very significant pressure we feel to get hard at a moment’s notice. Even now, after not taking them for months, if I have the slightest twinge of low response, I can start to panic, and this can create a cascade effect where I keep thinking about how that little pill would solve everything…”

In case you are concerned about your erections not being perfect, take solace in knowing that after receiving 5,000 sex surveys from women over the past ten years, it’s difficult to remember complaints about a lover’s ability to get an erection.

Also keep in mind that as soon as a guy thinks more about what he can do for a woman with his penis than what he can do for her with his fingers, lips and imagination, then you can pretty well assume his lover will be finding herself increasingly bored with what happens in bed. When it comes to good sex, the perfect penis is the most expendable part.

Penis Perceptions Driven By Porn

Dr. Stepanie Buehler, a therapist with many years of experience, recently reported the following to the author of
The Guide
about the increasing number of normal young men who are scheduling appoints with her because:

“They believe they should be studs who are able to perform any time, anywhere, with anyone at a moment’s notice.”

These normal young men think there is something wrong with them because they can’t perform like the guys in porn. This is particularly sad because one of the things women want most in a potential partner is a good personality. However, men in porn aren’t defined by their personalities. All that counts is their penises, which better be erect and better be able to come on command.
NOTE:
Unfortunately, porn is also helping drive unreal expectations in some women about the sexual abilities of men!

Dear Paul,

My boyfriend always wakes up in the morning with an erection. But when we start having intercourse, it goes down. He doesn’t have this problem any other time. What’s up? —Gretta in Marietta

Dear Gretta,

Sometimes a dog barks when he’s happy; sometimes he barks when he’s upset. It is a wise owner who knows the difference. Contrary to how it seems, the kind of erection your boyfriend has when he first wakes up is little more than a limp penis trapped inside of a raging hard-on. It happens because he wakes up while in the middle of a dream.

Men usually have three or four erections during a normal night of sleep. These erections are caused by the changes in the body that happen during REM or dream sleep. So rather than being caused by a dream about sex, sleep erections are automatic. Men get them whether they’re dreaming about being chased by wolves, or kissing the love of their life. So your BF is basically waking up with a leftover sleep erection.

Although his penis looks hard and feels hard, it’s not the kind of erection your guy gets when he’s been thinking about you all day. In fact, sleep erections don’t involve the same neurology as erotic erections. So even if it seems like your man is ready for action, treat his penis like it’s a floppy one that needs to be aroused. Try kissing or playing with it before jumping his bone(s). This will help turn it into a waking-state erection and might help prevent it from going down.

Since his erection was not born from sexual desire, don’t assume that your boyfriend feels like having sex. He might feel better if he could pee and brush his teeth. On the other hand, he may be just fine boning the babe of his dreams with a full bladder and dragon breath.

A Wet Warning — Ain’t Love Grand!

Every once in a while a girlfriend will ask a guy if she can stand behind him and hold his penis while he pees. This is a completely normal request born of completely normal curiosity. But be forewarned that you are sometimes giggling so hard that the entire bathroom becomes a target. On the other hand, women sometimes do a better job of aiming the thing than we men. As for penile calligraphy skills, one female friend of this Guide loves grabbing her husband’s penis and writing their names in the snow with its amber stream.

First Ejaculation

Before starting puberty, a guy can stroke his little pecker until it falls off, and his orgasms will mostly be dry except for maybe a few drops of clear, slick, slightly viscous fluid. During puberty, this changes until he produces an adult-sized wad when he has an orgasm. Instead of being clear and thin, it’s white and thick. Instead of being a drop or two, it’s a teaspoonful or two that oozes all over the place.

The process of going from a few drops to a full wad can be quite wonderful if you know what to expect and know it’s normal. It can be disturbing if a guy hasn’t been told about ejaculation and masturbates for the first time after entering puberty. By then he’s fully loaded and ready to shoot. Porn on the Internet is so prevalent that some young guys might be better prepared for their first wad than some of the following readers were, and some of today’s pre-pubescent porn watchers might feel something is wrong because they aren’t able to ejaculate yet:

“I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was about eleven and discovered this new feeling when I rubbed this silky part of my blanket over my penis, so I kept doing it. Eventually, I got this intense feeling in my groin and then there was this goop everywhere. I was completely freaked and grossed out. I thought that I broke myself, but was too afraid to tell my parents.”
male age 24

“I had heard about masturbation while sitting in the back of the school bus. When I tried it just the way the kids told me, it was almost like pain. For weeks I would stop short of actual orgasm for fear that I would do some sort of internal damage to myself. Finally, one day I kept rubbing through my fear and found that I enjoyed the hurting tremendously.”
male age 25

The Couch-Potato Penis

As things get older, they start to petrify or harden. This is true for logs, fossils and the human brain. Unfortunately, it is not true for the human penis. As a penis approaches its fifth decade, it tends to petrify less fully than it did earlier in life. It also squirts less fluid during ejaculation. Some women will cling to this information like a ray of hope, while others will be disappointed. Whatever your situation, it shouldn’t make much difference. As the bearer of the penis gets older, he becomes wiser in the ways of love. By then, he can compensate with wit and wisdom for what he loses in hardness and volume.

Older men don’t always make an effort to stay in good shape. It’s being out of shape, rather than increasing age, that often causes the couch-potato penis and decline in libido. However, age alone is responsible for changes in ejaculation, with the middle-aged man sometimes feeling nostalgic for his teenage genitals, which could sometimes propel ejaculate two feet or more.

Bebop & Squirt — Men & Multiples

Most males experience orgasm as an overlapping two-part process—sensation and ejaculation. Some guys have learned to separate the two events, experiencing a series of orgasmic sensations before they finally ejaculate. According to Dr. Marian Dunn, who interviewed a number of men with this ability, the one common thread was that their partner remained in a state of high sexual excitement after the man’s first feeling of orgasm. This seemed to provide an essential path of feedback that the man could feel in his penis as it remained inside her vagina.

Some of the men had small ejaculations with each orgasm, while others didn’t ejaculate until the end. Some of these men had been able to do this all of their lives; others had learned it recently. The men who had always been able to do it assumed that all men could and were surprised when a sexual partner pointed out the difference.

This should not be confused with delayed ejaculation, a situation where the man wants to have an orgasm but is unable to.

Hormone Advisory: The Impact of Testosterone

The bulk of men’s testosterone is produced by the testicles. What do we know about the impact of testosterone (T) on men’s behavior? A male with higher T is more likely to be on the football or rugby team than a man with lower levels of T. He’s more likely to be aggressive, want to show off more to women, want to pump iron, and he’ll probably want to have sex more often than a guy with lower T.

Men with high levels of testosterone are also more likely to be in prison and they are more likely to be unemployed. Men with lower or more moderate levels of T tend to be more agreeable and less reactive than men with high T. So a general or a diplomat whose effectiveness depends on consensus building rather than impulsivity is more likely to have a lower level of T than a soldier who loves the rush of battle. Along these lines, a prosecuting attorney is more likely to have a higher level of T than a patent attorney.

A male with lower T is more likely to be introverted, is less likely to perform extreme skateboard tricks and is less likely to do dangerous, risky and otherwise stupid things. However, there is no association with T level and courage or bravery. So the terms “he’s got balls” or “grow a pair” really aren’t accurate. Nor does having low T have anything to do with cowardly behavior or with being a sissy.

Perhaps more important than the absolute levels of hormones is how the person has been socialized to behave. There are also situations when our hormones increase as a response to the sexual feelings we are having, rather than it being the hormones that are causing the feelings.

Men and Estrogen

Contrary to what you might think, testosterone in men is also converted into estrogen. The estrogen is very important for how a man feels. So if a healthy twenty-year-old male were to suddenly lose his testicles and not produce testosterone, he would suffer negative effects from having no estrogen in addition to having no T. He’d essentially go through menopause. He would have hot flashes and his bones would become brittle. These are things that estrogen protect men from experiencing—in addition to feeling depressed and having little sex drive which would result from his having so little testosterone.

Guys & Horniness

It is sometimes assumed that the average male wants to have sex every hour of the day as long as the opportunity presents itself. There are some guys for whom this axiom simply doesn’t apply. It could be the man has a nervous system that’s sensitive enough to be impacted by some of the really disturbing things that happen in the world. Or maybe he is tired and needs a good night’s sleep. Whatever the case, it is sometimes difficult to drop everything and have sex. There are plenty of times when it’s just as nice to cuddle up close to a sweetheart and enjoy falling asleep in each other’s arms.

How Often Do Men Think about Sex?

Two of the more common urban myths about sexuality that refuse to die are that men think about sex every seven seconds, and that men think about sex way more than women do.

Researchers have found that the college-age males they studied think about sex once an hour on average, and the women they studied think about sex once every two hours. Naturally, this can vary greatly from person to person and from hour to hour.

To help put it all into perspective: college students think about sleep and food as often, if not more often, than they think about sex. Also, not all sexual thoughts are created equal. They can range from a brief and fleeting stirring that lasts a millisecond or two, to an elaborate sexual fantasy that can cause a tent in your pants or a flood between your legs. Researchers need to explore whether there’s a difference in the kind of sexual thoughts men and women have, and which types of sexual thoughts we have more of.