He Comes Next (4 page)

So back to our soft-wiring: All relationships basically go through three stages: lust, romantic love, and attachment. Lust is what gets us into these predicaments in the first place. Lust is unfocused, looking for action. But once lust finds its focus, it develops into infatuation. In these first two phases, lust and romantic love, some really powerful chemical processes compel us to hook up and then get hooked on each other. Romantic love paves the way for the attachment phase, the sense of stability we need to mate and raise our young. But in many ways, the attachment phase works against the romantic love phase. This is where free will comes into play, as well as the high divorce rate. Once those sparks start to wane, we tend to get freaked out and confused. We tell ourselves that our relationships are broken. We feel helpless, rejected. So we cheat. Or we settle into silent recrimination. Or else we cut bait entirely. We don’t know how to move forward into the attachment phase, while maintaining the excitement of the romantic love phase. Nature pulls the rug out from under us, and we can’t seem to find our footing. So we jump on another rug altogether. We are a culture that loves to fall in love, but doesn’t know how to stay that way.

But guess what? While nearly half of all marriages end in divorce, the vast majority of those who get divorced end up getting remarried. The soft-wiring of pair bonding kicks back in. You’d think we’d get it right the second time around, right? Wrong. A staggering two out of three remarriages
also end in divorce
. Our hearts are in the right places (we want to be in long-term committed relationships), but we make the same mistakes over and over again. Hence, we are a society that effectively enshrines serial monogamy over lifelong relationships.

Desire is the launch-pad for the process of sexual response. But don’t think of desire as a compartmentalized aspect of that process—only the beginning. Says Dr. David Schnarch of this limited definition of desire in the
Principles and Practice of Sex Therapy,
“It subtly narrows clinical thinking of desire as “willingness to get started” (initiatory eagerness) rather than enhancing desire during sex. The result is a paradigm that encourages utilitarian sex…and ignores couples’ common complaint of boring, meaningless sex devoid of passion, eroticism and intimacy.” Desire is more than just a starting point. It’s the beginning, middle, and end of sex (and all the little steps in between), as well as the erotic glue between sexual encounters. Desire doesn’t just give rise to sex; desire is borne of sex as well.

Schnarch advises us to “focus on 1) desire during sex, rather than just initiatory problems, 2) desire for one’s partner rather than desire for sexual behavior, and 3) consciously chosen, freely undertaken desire rather than biological drive or natural function.
This approach recognizes human sexual desire as the most complex manifestation of sexual motivation among all living things
.”

IMAGE

Excitement

Now that we’re beyond the murky depths of desire, the road ahead becomes a bit more straightforward (albeit “wobbly” at times). In men, genital stimulation often causes an erection within a few seconds.

Yes! The penis is highly concentrated with nerve endings, and it’s possible for a man to reach orgasm with a soft erection or even none at all. In my treatment of premature ejaculators, many young men complain that, while they don’t experience a lengthy refractory period (the time necessary to become aroused again) and can often muster a second or third erection quickly, they often reach orgasm again prior to becoming erect. When a man experiences ejaculation from a soft erection, his ejaculation may lack propulsion, but he still experiences it nonetheless.

Did you know that all men experience three different types of erections? Count’em: three.

The first type, produced by erotic stimuli, is considered a psychogenic erection, or what I like to think of as a “brain erection.” Men also experience reflex erections as a result of direct genital stimulation, what I like to think of as a “body erection.” And finally, they experience spontaneous nocturnal erections during REM cycles, explaining why guys are often into morning sex—they wake up in the midst of a nocturnal erection.

It’s worth understanding each of these different erections because all three play a role in arousal. As an example, when men become bored with sex, it’s often due to a lack of fresh psychogenic stimuli within the relationship—in other words, a loss of erotic creativity.

Reflex erections are caused by the stimulation of nerves in the genital area, which will activate nerve fibers in the penis, initiating the first part of a reflex circuit and continuing to the lower spine. Once received and sent back to the erectile tissue in the penis, the circuit is completed and voilà! Enter the hard-on. Sometimes a man can be so depressed or stressed out that he’s closed off to both psychogenic and reflex stimuli. That said, he will often still wake up in the morning with a nocturnal erection, and I advise women to use this as a starting point. Hey, if he’s got it, use it. As we discussed a little earlier, sex can be a springboard for increasing desire. An exciting sexual encounter today is what tomorrow’s desire-based fantasies are made of.

For this reason, I sometimes counsel patients to take advantage of the reflex erection and to focus simply on physical stimulation, as there’s truth in the idea that sex begets more sex. Some men just need to be physically jumpstarted, so, as per the slogan for Nike, just do it. As simple as it sounds, one of the best ways to break out of a sex rut is to have sex. This is especially true of men, where studies of the brain during sexual stimulation, using a technique called positron emission tomography (PET), reveal that men appear to focus significantly more on the sensations transmitted from the genitals to the brain than do women. As Gert Holstege of the University of Groningen told the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology conference in Copenhagen, “This suggests that for men, the physical aspects of sex play a much more significant part in arousal than they do for women, for whom ambience, mood, and relaxation are at least as important.” This idea—that sometimes arousal can create desire, rather than the other way around—is also borne out by the research of Rosemarie Basson, a Canadian sex researcher and therapist, who observed that couples in long-term relationships often do not experience as many spontaneous sexual thoughts or fantasies as they used to. Says couples counselor Michele Wiener-Davis in her important book on the subject of mismatched libido,
The Sex-Starved Marriage
, “being touched in stimulating ways often leads to arousal. Arousal triggers a strong desire to continue being sexual. Hence, desire
follows
arousal.” I once read somewhere that sex is both a poison and its own antidote. When couples aren’t having sex or the kind of sex they’d like to be having, the silence, anger, and resentment between them is indeed a poison. And sometimes simply having sex or talking about the sex you’d like to be having, is indeed the antidote.

Love at First Hard-On?

From Romeo and Juliet to
Titanic’s
Leo and Kate, we are drawn to the romantic notion of love at first sight. But is love at first sight a specifically male way of seeing? Are men more likely to experience the phenomenon than women? In my surveys of couples, when asked, “At what point in your relationship did you know for sure that you wanted to spend the rest of your life with each other?” invariably the guys were much more likely to have had definitive feelings at the outset, whereas most women said they needed time to make up their minds.

Indeed, scientists have observed that, when falling in love, there is greater activity in the parts of the male brain associated with visual processing than there is in the female brain. Says anthropologist Helen Fisher, “When the time is right and a man
sees
an attractive woman, he is anatomically equipped to rapidly associate attractive
visual
features with feelings of romantic passion. What an effective courtship device.”

So when it comes to sex, do men and women see differently? And does visual stimulation play a much greater role in male sexual excitement than in female arousal?

When Pfizer conducted its clinical trials of Viagra on men, in conjunction with porn, they came to the unequivocal conclusion that visual stimulation plays a key role in male sexual excitement. When they conducted similar clinical trials with women, the porn did little to spark desire. Is it as simple as concluding that men are visual creatures and women are not? Or is it that women need more than
just
visual stimulation, whereas men do not? Or maybe women are indeed just as visually oriented as men, but much of the porn is male-centric?

Most of the women I’ve spoken with say that porn can be a turn-on, but it’s not something they’d watch on their own; it’s part of the larger experience of being with a
particular
guy. There’s even data to support that women are playing a larger and larger role in selecting porn with men. But I surveyed over a hundred men and women and asked them each, “Have you ever ordered a porn film alone in a hotel?” All of the men had done so (except for those who had never stayed alone in a hotel where porn was offered), but interestingly, only a tiny percentage of women had done so, and more out of curiosity than an interest in being aroused.

But there’s a very vocal, and quite possibly correct, camp that insists that women
are
as interested in porn as men, but that porn caters largely to men’s interests, consequently alienating women. In the 1980s, Candida Royalle, a pioneer in adult film making, started making porn for women. In her own words, this is what she set out to do with her Femme Fatale Films:

Does her prescription work? Here’s what she had to say about a scene from one of her films,
Urban Heat
, that was put to the test in a clinical environment:

Candida Royalle is still going at it. Joining her today is a new generation of porn created by women for women, from Impulse Films to CherryBomb to PlayGirl TV, which is an entire porn network created for women. Lee Migliara, spokeswoman for Playgirl TV, made the following comments about porn for women: “Women want to see more storylines. They want to see less closeups of genitalia. They want more fooling around. They also want to see better clothes.”

Um…does that mean women are just looking for better fashion in porn? The jury’s still out on whether women are as visually stimulated by porn as men and if sales of female-centric porn will ever come marginally close to that of their male-centric counterparts. Hopefully it will prove to be a deliberation worth watching.

A Hose by Any Other Name Would Smell so Sweet

While men may be more visually oriented than women when it comes to sexual attraction, there’s been clear science to support that women have a keener sense of scent than men and that olfactory stimulation plays a much stronger role in women than in men. In short, follow your nose; it always knows.

In one of my surveys of sexual attitudes and behaviors, I asked both and women to rate various factors in sexual attraction, including features such as eyes, breast size, sense of humor, fashion taste, and so on. In the vast majority of responses I received from women, “his smell” rated extremely high on the list and was often cited amongst the top five factors in sexual attraction, along with confidence, height, a sense of humor, and a handsome face. In men, a woman’s scent was consistently rated among the least important factors in sexual attraction.

But that doesn’t mean that men don’t respond to scent without realizing it. A recent Swedish study concluded that men and women respond differently to two odors that play a role in sexual arousal: a testosterone derivative produced when men sweat and an estrogen derivative found in women. These odors are thought to be pheromones, chemicals emitted by one person that trigger a reaction in another. According to the
New York Times,