The Guide to Getting It On (120 page)

Contrary to what the erection ads show, hard-on problems happen to men of all ages, from teenagers on up. For instance, it’s not unusual for erection problems to occur at the start of a sexual relationship. Call it performance anxiety, call it fear—it’s not unusual for a man to need a couple of weeks or months to find a comfortable groove. Giving him any less time to get it up is silly and shortsighted, as long as your relationship is solid and there is a strong sense of mutual attraction. The real danger is not with the lack of erection, but with what each of you makes of it. Short-term problems can become long term-problems if the man sees himself as a failure or the woman needs his erection to validate that she’s desirable. Consider the following from a young man in his early twenties:

“Last week we had attempted sex again. Once again I went from an erection down to completely unerect in a short amount of time. It happened when she said do you want to have sex. I had a feeling of uneasiness run through my entire body. It’s almost like when you blow past a cop doing 80 and you get that feeling in your chest. It’s a penetrating feeling through my body, that I won’t be able to get an erection and it becomes self-fulfilling and self-defeating. I don’t have control over my body and that is what is so frustrating.”

A combination of sex therapy and a Viagra-like drug might be the approach of choice for this young man.

Several kinds of erection failure are discussed in the pages that follow. Whatever the cause, hopefully a man will be able to utilize moments of hydraulic failure as an excuse to explore and please his partner with his fingers, mouth and imagination. At the same time, a partner’s lips and caress can feel incredible on a penis that’s soft, and there are plenty of sexual fantasies the two of you can act out that don’t require a penis at all.

Rising from the Ashes

There is an interesting sex problem that some men have that is called delayed ejaculation. We talk about it in more in Chapter 55:
Delayed Ejaculation
. Fortunately, there are things that can be learned about what goes right by investigating problems such as delayed ejaculation.

While the “average man” ejaculates and goes soft in approximately three to nine minutes, men with delayed ejaculation can often stay hard for forty minutes or more of serious thrusting. Some keep going for longer. By the way most men think of it, if five minutes is good, forty minutes would be eight times better. Yet that’s not how it is for the men with delayed ejaculation. They have sex less often than five-minute men and they don’t enjoy it nearly as much. Even though they have magnificent hard-ons, there is little magic and awe when their partner is saying “enough already.”

Likewise, if you look at all of the men who are prescribed Viagra, more than 50% stop taking it, even if it helps them get hard. What we have learned is that it’s not always a good idea to give a man an erection without a few sessions of sex counseling first. When it comes to making love, relationship issues trump penis issues. When you haven’t had sexual interaction with a partner in a couple of years, suddenly introducing a hard penis into a bedroom can create as many problems as it solves. The man might be horribly anxious about performing after all these years and the woman might wonder if he’s really turned on by her or if it’s the drug. There can be hundreds of other issues.

So hopefully you will stop thinking that a hard-on can fix all that ails you. Erections are marvelous wonders, but a satisfying relationship they do not make. Unfortunately, when the penis doesn’t get hard or when it comes too fast or too slow, it becomes it’s own vortex that sucks up all of the energies that a couple could otherwise use in pleasing each other. There are plenty of situations where a woman would be perfectly satisfied with her partner if he would focus on her instead of on what his penis is not able to do.

Suggestion If a penis stalls out, try not to give it the power to ruin your sexual intimacy. Easier said than done, but what about necking for a long time, finger fucking, oral sex, using a vibrator or dildo, tying each other up, or acting out a fantasy? That way, a potential downer might evolve into something sweet and hot. Success in life is often about what we are able to make of our shortcomings, even when it’s hanging between our legs. The biggest problems with impotence isn’t the lack of erection. Rather, it’s a lack of playfulness and resourcefulness on the part of the man and woman when they are confronted with a penis that’s being contrary.

When Your Posse Won’t Ride

Books on sex often use terms such as “self-hatred,” “self-loathing” and “devastating” to describe how a man feels when he is—gulp—impotent. You know, the horror when he can’t get it up. (So you won’t think you are all alone, guys with premature ejaculation often feel this way as well.)

Perhaps this Guide is way out of step or maybe it’s just insensitive, but
devastating
is what happens when your wife or child dies or when you’ve just been told that you only have six months to live.
Self-hatred
is what you feel if your business flops or if you’ve just blown your life’s savings on something really dumb.
Self-loathing
is what you experience when you’ve had a major stroke or accident and can’t feed or bathe yourself or wipe your own rear.

Call us callous, call us rude, but we can think of about a thousand things worse than if a man’s hard-on takes a hiatus, even if it’s forever. Sure, it’s frustrating and even humiliating at times, but so are a lot of other things in life. You still have your fingers and mouth for giving pleasure, and you still have what’s in your heart to love your partner with. And if you can’t count at least five things in your life to be thankful for, even if your penis never gets hard again, then your priorities are in seriously bad shape.

Contrary to what you’ll read elsewhere, penis problems, regardless of the cause, are an opportunity to have better sex rather than worse. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways that modern medicine can help a recalcitrant penis to get hard, but it seems a shame to employ a quick cure without allowing yourself and your relationship to grow in the process. You won’t believe how many times Viagra-like pills will result in better erections but not in better sex for either partner.

People who survive heart attacks and cancer learn to approach life differently as a result of the disease. A woman who is overcoming orgasm problems has to welcome a new way of embracing her body and her sexuality. It’s a journey, a process. Impotent men, on the other hand, just want their dicks to get hard—no learning, no journey.

The Sufis have a saying that you have to let yourself die before you are truly born. Sometimes a guy has to give up his penis as a symbol of masculinity before he can get on with his life. Sometimes he has to realize that there’s more to being a man than getting an erection or lasting for a prescribed number of thrusts. Then he sometimes has to convince his partner.

This is not to say that a man shouldn’t inquire about the various remedies that modern medicine has for erection problems. He should also have a full physical to make sure that the erection problem is not a symptom of something else. If there are medical problems, they need to be treated.

Note:
No kidding about getting a physical exam. Men who begin to experience a gradual increase in impotency might be seeing the first signs of an impending stroke, heart attack or diabetes. Impotence may be a better predictor of cardiovascular disease than the stress test. The arteries in the penis can start to gum up before those in the rest of the body. A physical exam may allow physicians to help a man before something bad happens to his most important organs—his heart and brain. Also, researchers are now finding a high correlation between obesity and impotence. Who knew that the drive-thru at McDonald’s could do your dick in?

A Modern Medical Approach to the Great Groin Grinch

If your penis is impotent, it is likely that you are muttering under your breath that we can take our Sufi logic and stuff it where the sun don’t shine. You want a traditional Western approach. You want a magic bullet that does not require introspection or lifestyle changes. Good enough. The advice that follows is a spoof on a modern medical approach to fixing erection problems. While it conveys some wisdom, it still focuses on fixing the penis instead of helping the man behind it and the woman in front of it. It is an approach that attempts to turn the clock back to a time when the penis worked just fine. It’s a regressive fix rather than a step forward, one that is oblivious to lessons that might be learned or frontiers of trust that are waiting to be crossed.

Dear Dr. Goofy,

My bowling partner recently started having erection problems and is too embarrassed to seek help. Can you offer advice? —Bob from Boston

Dear Bob,

If your bowling partner has stopped throwing strikes for more than a couple of weeks, it’s a good idea for him to take his pokey pecker to a physician for a checkup. It’s smart to rule out underlying medical conditions.

Modern medicine has decided that more than 99.999% of erection problems are due to physical causes, from diabetes to who-knows-what. Doctors can fix almost anything, unless your friend is a cigarette smoker. If that’s the case, he might as well call a mortuary and have himself interred.

Is your friend able to get erections at all, like in the morning upon waking or when he jerks off? To explore this further, his urologist might send him home with a device he attaches to his penis when he sleeps. The device won’t help to get him off, but it does tell if he has erections in his sleep and for how long. If a man can get a rigid sustained erection in his sleep or while masturbating, the plumbing below his belt probably works. Then a question to explore is if the problem resides in his psyche.

Some physicians will send your friend home with samples of Viagra—or Levitra, Cialis if they have stock in Glaxo or Lilly. If the pills don’t work, then they’ll do a work-up. Or they might give your friend’s penis an injection that’s a pecker-picker-upper. Don’t worry, no one’s going to pull out a syringe with a hollow nail for a needle and say, “Drop your drawers.” It’s an itty-bitty wisp of a shot that hurts less than getting a pubic hair stuck in your zipper. If the penis gets hard and is able to stay hard, then the underlying plumbing is intact and the problem can probably be fixed with a prescription.

If the shot does not make the penis hard, or it gets hard but doesn’t stay hard, then it’s likely there is a circulation problem. This can range from hardening of the arteries (strange term for when it happens in the penis!) to leaky valves. More tests would need to be done to peg the exact cause.

It is also possible that there is a neurological problem which is disabling the body’s ability to begin the hard-on process. This is similar to when you turn the ignition key on your car and nothing happens. Another thing to check is if your friend is taking medications that might be cold-cocking his penis. Suspicious meds range from alcohol and heroin to prescriptions and over-the-counter drugs. Some say that Tagamet can do a dick in. (Your friend isn’t one of those meth-abusing party boys, is he? Recreational drugs can be very bad for a penis.)

If they can’t find anything medical, they may consider the unlikely possibility that your friend’s erection problem stems from emotional causes or a combination of something emotional and physical. To explore the emotional possibilities, some questions are in order. For instance, what was going on in your friend’s life around the time when his soldier stopped marching? Did his ability to get an erection decline gradually, like the fall of Rome, or did it shut down all at once, like Bear Stearns, Wachovia or Lehman Brothers? Was there a change in his job status? Did his insurance company cancel him without cause? Did his team not go to the Superbowl because of a lousy call in the closing seconds? Was there a change in his relationship with his partner? Did his wife leave him for another man? Did she leave him for another woman? Was he pulled from an important project, or did he lose a promotion he had his heart set on? Did he receive an unkind inquiry from the IRS?

Also, it is helpful to inquire about his relationship with his spouse. If he instantly says, “Naw, it’s fine,” ask him to describe some of the things that are fine about it. See if he conveys a sense of love and fondness, or if he sounds like he’s reading the instructions on a bottle of Kaopectate. If the relationship has fallen on–dare we say–hard times, then he and his wife need to focus on fixing that rather than on fixing his penis, which is merely the messenger.