He Comes Next (5 page)

If a couple’s “odor-prints” don’t match, they won’t make for a good fit. The source of a person’s unique odor, in fact, derives from his/her respective immune system. According to
Psychology Today
,

To test the theory that the DNA of differing immune systems drives sexual preference, Claus Wedekind, of the University of Bern in Switzerland, conducted a study in which women were asked to smell various clothes worn by different men and select the ones they found sexiest. The women selected the shirts belonging to men whose immune-system profiles most differed from their own. Proving the power of this discovery, many women also said that the favored clothes reminded them of current or ex-lovers. Interestingly, clothes belonging to men who had similar immunity profiles reminded the women of male family members, such as their fathers or brothers. Wedekind writes, “This indicates that MHC-dependent body odor preferences play a role in actual mate choice.” So when it comes to mating, it appears that opposites do attract. It’s better to pick a partner who is genetically dissimilar, and often the best way to find him is to follow your nose. No wonder that a woman’s power of scent is at its strongest during ovulation.

Hard Times Ahead

All of these drugs basically inhibit the enzyme PDE-5, and, therefore, they enable muscles in the arteries of the penis to relax and widen. This ultimately encourages blood to flow more easily into the penis to create an erection.

It’s no surprise that new competitors to Viagra have popped up (no pun intended), given that as many as 150 million men worldwide potentially experience erectile disorder.

Levitra takes effect more rapidly and supposedly has fewer side effects. Cialis lasts up to thirty-six hours, so couples don’t need to feel they have to have sex as soon as he pops a pill. We’re only just starting to get clinical data and reports back from doctors about how the competitors stack up against Viagra. Many men like to experiment and find the pill that’s right for them. Such explorations must happen under the care of a medical doctor, however, for none of these drugs are without side effects.

Since Viagra was introduced seven years ago, more than 23 million men have been prescribed the drug worldwide. Annual sales are worth nearly $2 billion, with approximately six prescriptions written per second. As the
New York Times
notes, the pharmaceutical industry makes no bones, as it were, about their intention to enlarge their customer base, contending that erectile disorder is now of epidemic proportion, and that “the face of ED now is a younger, seemingly much healthier guy.”

Yet if erectile disorder is, indeed, approaching epidemic rates, shouldn’t we look at correlations between the rise in ED and the rise in obesity, stress, and sedentary lifestyles? According to Dr. Irwin Goldstein of the Center for Sexual Medicine at Boston University, researchers should be looking at these fators. “Impotence can be one of the earliest signs that something else is not working.”

So, perhaps the flaccid penis is the new icon of the overweight, stressed out, sedentary American man and a condition that shouldn’t be medicated away with Viagra, but treated on a holistic level.

Whether a guy actually
needs
an erectile stimulant or not, advertising campaigns for Viagra and its ilk have exploited male anxieties surrounding “ideal” firmness and duration of erections, the very anxieties that often lead to ED in the first place.

Like people, erections don’t respond well under pressure. As one
New York Times
reporter noted, “Many men take Viagra to offset the pressure they feel to perform perfectly in a hypersexualized age.” But the irony is that Viagra creates an expectation of sexual performance that can only be met through the use of Viagra itself.

Surely it’s the power of this marketing message that emboldens young men in their twenties to say of Viagra, “I like how it makes me feel; it gives me power.” But would those men feel as powerful if they knew that the vast majority of nerve endings that contribute to female pleasure are located on the surface of a woman’s vulva and that no penetration whatsoever is required for a woman to be stimulated to orgasm? Without his erection or Viagra to stimulate that erection, a man may not feel as sexually virile, but he would possibily prove a more satisfying sexual partner.

As the
New York Times
noted of this Golden Age of the Erection, major pharmaceutical companies have launched multimillion dollar marketing campaigns to redefine erectile dysfunction as a quality-of-life issue for significantly younger men: “The response of the drug makers is, essentially, what’s wrong with that?”

Clearly, they aren’t asking the thirty million women who will be on the receiving end of those erections. In fact, the media rarely, if ever, alludes to the female perspective on erectile stimulants and how they are reshaping women’s intimate lives, altering “sexpectations,” and often relegating female pleasure to an afterthought. It’s as if all of those commercials depicting happy, contented wives basking in the glow of their husband’s newfound potency are being taken at face value and accepted as fact.

Prior to the pharmaceutical treatment of impotence, couples dealt with the issue through intimacy-building exercises, erotic creativity, and communication. Couples were encouraged to spend more time on desire-building activities, such as communication, foreplay, fantasy, and manual and oral stimulation. Men were encouraged to make love with more than just their penises. The irony is that while these activities didn’t always lead to consistent erections, they did often result in greater intimacy, stronger relationships, increased desire, and, yes, more female orgasms.

Before Viagra, men were significantly more likely to address erectile dysfunction holistically. Now, a little blue pill solves the problem. But it does so in a way that’s purely physiological, often to the detriment of psychological factors. It’s become a lethal part of our culture’s sexual shortsightedness and limited romantic attention span, or what I call SADD, sexual attention deficit disorder. As the
Journal of Canadian Family Physicians
recently noted, “Individual psychological, and couple, factors remain important causes. Combining medical treatments with individual, couple or sex therapy is often more helpful than prescribing medicine alone.”

Even so, it’s virtually unheard of for a medical doctor to recommend a program of sex therapy along with a prescription for an erectile stimulant. And as prescriptions for these drugs become more commonplace, there is far less communication about the condition itself, both within the doctor-patient relationship and the long-term romantic relationship. Instead, we rely on the cultural shorthand embodied in the pill itself, as well as its pervasive branding, to avoid the personal, often difficult, task of communicating about sexual issues and conflicts.

Viagra and its brethren not only reinforce the same old bad habits and often recreates the same old bad sex, but also refocuses the lens more intensely on coital sex, with the penis as its totem. As one woman noted to me about the introduction of Viagra into her sex life, “It’s like his penis is a trophy for a game he never played and shame on me if I don’t get in there and act like a cheerleader.”

With or without Viagra in their lives, many women have resigned themselves to orgasmless relationships and often resort to faking it in lieu of bruising the fragile male ego or prolonging an already uncomfortable or unpleasant activity. And because many of us were taught that intercourse is the “right” way to experience orgasm, many women feel that they are responsible for their nonclimactic state of affairs. With its focus on physiology rather than the holistic sexual landscape, Viagra continues to subordinate female sexuality to a phallocentric model, creating yet another reason for women to feel responsible, unsexy, inadequate, and guilty, rather than fed up and underserved, when their penis-pill-popping partners leave them unsatisfied.

So, if your guy is on an erectile stimulant or thinking about going on one or if you discover some little blue pills in his wallet, I urge you to use this as an opportunity to open up new channels of communication. Remember, a big part of why he’s taking an erectile stimulant is because he wants to pleasure you. But, as we discussed earlier, he needs to know that there’s more to sex than simply having an erection.

Plateau

As men cycle through arousal, they reach the plateau phase, which lasts anywhere from thirty seconds to about two minutes. The prostate and testicles swell, the pelvic floor muscles tighten, and men often release—a drop of clear fluid. He’s fast approaching the point of ejaculatory inevitability, a point in the plateau phase where, with or without further stimulation, he’s going to ejaculate. This does not occur with women. Even if a woman is teetering on the brink of climax, she can still lose her orgasm if there’s a sudden change in stimulation.

I think that men and women fundamentally misunderstand this important difference in their respective processes of sexual response. On the one hand, women often don’t recognize when a man has crossed the threshold of no return; even if there’s a change or total cessation of stimulation, he’s still going to come. Men, on the other hand, often think that a woman has reached a point of orgasmic inevitability and, therefore, cease clitoral stimulation at the mission-critical moment to enter a full-throttle rush to coital mutual orgasm, even though the process of sexual response can be interrupted right up to and into climax. In both men and women, the plateau phase is an intense and exciting period. The body and mind are on the brink of total surrender. But it’s also a phase that isn’t indulged in nearly enough. Men typically crash straight through to ejaculation, and women often get a taste of the orgasmic release to come, only to have it abruptly ceased, deferred, or abridged.

Hot sex is all about recognizing when he’s in the plateau phase and keeping him there as long as possible, often bringing him right to the edge of orgasmic inevitability, only to turn him back around.

 

TOP TEN THINGS YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SPERM BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK
^*

 

1. 1.
   Average volume of a single ejaculation: Around a teaspoon
   
2. 2.
   Main Ingredient: Fructose
   
3. 3.
   Calories: About 5
   
4. 4.
   Protein: 6 milligrams
   
5. 5.
   Fat: 0
   
6. 6.
   Average speed of expulsion: 25 miles per hour
   
7. 7.
   Average duration: 4 to 8 seconds.
   
8. 8.
   Average amount of sperm produced over the lifetime of a male: 14 gallons
   
9. 9.
   Average number of spurts: 4 to 8
   
10. 10.
    Longest money shot in video history: 27.5 inches
    

 

Orgasm

Put simply, a man’s orgasm is the sexual climax that occurs when the penis expels semen in a series of intensely pleasurable contractions. It’s simple:
The stronger and greater the number of the contractions, the longer and better the quality of the orgasm.
This is true for both men and women.

What does the male orgasm feel like? I asked a bunch of guys to describe their orgasms, and here’s what I got.

“An eruption.”

“Pulsating. Throbbing.”

“Intense. Quivering.”

“Focused in my penis, but spreads throughout my body.”

“An explosion, then tingling.”

Many studies have shown that male and female orgasms possess more similarities than differences. One study asked both sexes to describe the experience of orgasm and subsequently removed specific references to body parts and gender. The results were then given to a broad team of doctors and psychologists, with the challenge to distinguish which was which. The result? It was even impossible for a group of trained professionals to tell the difference between the men and the women.