Lack of erection
We've all been there, without any doubt: the moment where you're in bed with
a woman offering you sex, but unfortunately your penis is
resolutely soft and there's no sign of an erection anywhere. Why does this
happen? First of all, we men are under pressure to perform. After all, we tend
to think that sex cannot happen without an erection, so sex must depend on our being hard, upstanding and ready. But this discounts the
possibility of mutual masturbation, finger penetration, oral sex and simple
skin-to-skin intimacy, all of which can be rewarding forms of sexual behavior.
Second, our self-esteem may rest on our
ability to get an erection on demand: if a man's penis remains flaccid when a woman
wants sex, it means he's less of a man - or at least, we seem to assume it does.
And yet, statistics show that on average one time in
every five sexual encounters a man fails to get an erection. With such a high rate of non-erection, how can a
guy's failure to get an erection possibly mean anything about his manliness?
Third, there's an idea created by the
tabloid press and magazines, and indeed popular culture in general, that "real
men" can satisfy a woman on demand every time she wants sex. So if you don't live
up to this image of maleness as presented in popular culture, once again you're
less of a man, aren't you? The paradox is most women define manliness by virtues
other than the hardness of a guy's penis: strength, tenderness, consistency,
compassion, clarity and directness being just some of these qualities.
The simple fact is that this fear of inadequacy
or performance anxiety is the greatest emotional problem in effective
sexual functioning. (There are some other, physical, reasons for not getting
hard, like diabetes damaging the nerve cells and cholesterol narrowing the
arteries of the penis.) The way it works is this: you feel anxious, and you detach
from what's happening. Instead of being right there, in the experience, it's
almost as if you're watching it, evaluating and observing it with a critical
eye. Fear of failure crowds out the sensual pleasure you could be getting from
sex, and without any sense of sexual pleasure or arousal, your anxiety grows,
your erection can't happen, and you then get into a cycle of negative
expectation ("I'll never be hard again, so I won't even try to have
sex...")
From recent times right back to the
1950's, sex therapists helped their clients overcome performance anxiety with a
technique called Sensate Focus, a process about getting back in touch with yourself
- quite literally. It means losing the pressure of the expectations around sex
by agreeing with your partner that for a couple of weeks, you'll enjoy touching
and caressing, but you quite definitely won't be sexual. This allows the
partners to recapture the sensuous experience of touching each other without any
suggestion of sexual expectations, and to
overcome any fear of intimacy that may have developed after an erection didn't
appear on demand. The partners take turns to give and receive touch, focusing on
being right there in the moment, not emotionally detached and watching what's
happening from some higher psychological viewpoint. If you want to know more
about sensate focus, you can find it on Staying-power.com.
This is a website that tells you all you need to know about curing premature
ejaculation: it also includes a
detailed description of how sensate focus works and how to do it.
More recently, though, sexual therapists
have seen the advent of Viagra and other drug-related answers to the problems of
performance anxiety. I believe Viagra can be a great help in cases of loss of
confidence, since it promotes an erection and allows a guy to get his
confidence back. There's more to curing performance anxiety
than taking Viagra, though. For one thing, every man has bouts of sexual anxiety
at some point in his sex life without finding his penis subsequently
wilting every time he has sex. To cut a long story short, therapists now believe
that the lack of erection may be telling its owner something important. Sexual therapists
report that a flaccid penis seems very often to be associated with five major life changes:
a relationship that's going off track, divorce or separation, death of a spouse
or partner, employment problems, and poor health.
The last four are obvious, but the first one may be significant - if you're with
a partner and none of the other factors apply, and you're not tired or stressed,
maybe the message your penis is giving you is that your relationship is past its
sell-by date.
In some cases the relationship never
reached its best-before date; in fact it should never have been a relationship
at all. A colleague who works with teenagers finds boys of 15 or 16 coming to
him saying "I was with a girl I really liked, and I was really turned on,
but when we started to have sex I just couldn't get it up". He thinks many
of these guys should still be playing with their skateboards; they're just too
young to be having sex, or deep down they know they don't like the girl they're
with. In short, he says, you can try and fool yourself, but the penis never
lies.
Another thing you might care to keep in
mind is that focusing too much on your partner (as opposed to focusing on your own
pleasure) can be bad for your sexual performance. You have to have a certain
amount of selfishness to get highly aroused, and if you're highly aroused your
partner will be too. Spending too much time thinking about her will not help
you; so if you're having erectile problems, you might want to be a bit more
selfish in getting your needs met.
Premature ejaculation
An ignominious problem, indeed, for many
of the same reasons that I mentioned above - pressure on men to perform, social
expectations, and fear of failure. This time, even though you have an
erection,
you ejaculate far too early for either you or your partner to be really
satisfied. Often the problem is fear or anxiety.
But coming too quickly isn't just caused by
anxiety, of course. Among young men, premature ejaculation is so common that
it can be considered normal. There are basically two methods to use at
home for curing your tendency to ejaculate quickly, both of which depend on
lessening your sensitivity to sexual stimulation. In the first, you get aroused
by masturbation, then when you feel you are about to come, you stop stimulating yourself
and wait until your arousal has dropped. In the other, your partner gives you a
firm squeeze just underneath the coronal rim of your glans till you're less
excited. It's not a method I recommend, as it is simply rather unpleasant. Maybe you'd do better to go here
and get the full instruction with pictures.
Failing that, go to your doctor and ask
him if he knows about anti-depressants and ejaculation. That's not because
premature ejaculation will make you depressed, though it may do, but because SRI
drugs given out for depression slow down the sexual responses. He might be
willing to help you if he's fully informed about how the drugs can help.
Delayed ejaculation - or inability to ejaculate
at all
This might sound delightful to you,
especially if you're a premature ejaculator, but to a man who can't ejaculate
during sex it's not a bonus in any way at all. This is anorgasmia,
the inability to reach orgasm.
Like everything about human sexuality, it isn't
a simple problem. For one thing, it's several problems which look similar. But
for some men, the problem only occurs with their long-term partner; if they have
an affair, they can come normally. For others, the problem is not partner-specific.
Generally, sexual therapists think that there's a big emotional aspect to this,
of which the man concerned is often very unaware. It comes down to his attitude
to women in general or his partner in particular.
Men
in this position often seem compelled to try and satisfy their partner, even
when they don't experience her presence or touch as sexy or stimulating.
It's about a reversal of priorities, a belief
in the man's psyche that his partner's pleasure is more important than his own,
or a sense that he has a duty to please her at all costs. He may resent doing
so, or feeling so driven, but he still seeks to please her at the expense of his
own pleasure. In essence, his penis is no longer his own: it somehow has no
sexual function other than to satisfy his partner.
To be continued... |