How To Last Longer In Bed For Men!

What Are The Effects Of Men Not Being Able To Delay Climax During Sex?

For men of all ages, it seems that premature ejaculation (PE) is becoming an issue of considerable importance.

Once a problem confined to the secrecy of the bedroom, men's lack of "staying power" is rapidly becoming a talking point everywhere in society, including Internet forums, television programs, newspaper columns - and perhaps even gaining respectability as a conversation topic among close male friends.

So why is men's inability to delay ejaculation during sex receiving this level of attention? Part of the reason is undoubtedly the fact that people - women, I guess this means - are no longer prepared to put up with a sex life that is less than fulfilling.

The widespread information surge about sexual issues in recent years, thanks partly due to the easy availability of porn on the internet, and the lessening of sexual inhibitions this has produced, means that topics such as the length of time for which men can or should delay ejaculation have become more commonplace, easier to deal with, and certainly easier for people to discuss - even if few men still seek treatment or appear to wish to learn how to extend the length of lovemaking.

Sidebar: Video - Lily Allen singing about premature ejaculation. Could that be what your girl thinks of you?

Don't Delay - A Cure IS Available

Research has demonstrated over and over again that many men fail to seek any effective treatment for this problem - and boy do they need it, because it's a really disruptive sexual dysfunction.

As we shall see on other pages of this website, not being able to delay coming can lower self-esteem issue. Intercourse usually stops when a man comes.

It's not so much about the fact that a woman can't reach orgasm through sexual intercourse, because this is not very common anyway, but more about the fact that lovemaking doesn't last as long as it otherwise might; the intimacy of the union is abruptly broken before a woman has gained a sense of true connection with her partner.

We should also be aware that one of the reasons why there's so much information about sexual dysfunction around at the moment is that many drug companies have been funding research into ejaculation dysfunction with the objective of achieving greater profit through the medicalization of a condition that may be caused by social or psychological issues.

You see the point? Finding a way to delay ejaculation could produce a massive income stream for any drug company, and that may explain the persistent efforts of Johnson & Johnson to win approval from the FDA for Dapoxetine, an SSRI, aka "selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor", a class of drugs originally developed for the treatment of psychological issues such as depression.

It's no coincidence, perhaps, that this issue has been renamed with a neutral set of initials - PE.

This way of referring to a sexual dysfunction that can be both embarrassing and delay the development of a man's sexual self-confidence causes less shame and makes it sound more like a neutral condition that is both socially acceptable and can be treated.

(This perhaps mirrors the way you erectile dysfunction has become known as ED: the neutrality of that term makes ED seem less shameful, potentially less difficult to deal with, and more socially acceptable.)

Video - what PE is, how to cope, and what it means

 

But the interesting thing, of course, is that there have always been premature delay treatments of one kind or another - anesthetic creams which are applied to the glans of the penis have been around for decades, and Masters and Johnson were talking about sexual psychotherapy back in the 1950s and 60s.

Another interesting thing is that these treatments - commonly known as the stop start technique and the squeeze technique - can be very effective in slowing down intercourse. The reason they don't achieve more widespread acceptance (and use) is because couples don't have the persistence to keep on using them.

Partly this is about motivation - it seems to be a lot easier for a man just to relinquish his self-control and give in to his desire to ejaculate when he feels his impending ejaculation during intercourse.

Heck, all men know how irresistible and compelling the desire to ejaculate is during sex.

It's the product of millennia of human evolution - Mother Nature wants the woman pregnant, so at the point where you're about to ejaculate, it's an instinctive response; but like many instinctive responses, we men can control it - by taking a decision to actually develop staying-power, the desire to shoot your load can be overcome, put aside, and gratification delayed for the longer term benefits of achieving greater self-control during intercourse.

The desire for a simple rapid and easy solution for every sexual affliction, without perhaps much effort on one's own part, has driven massive "off label" (i.e. unauthorized) use of antidepressants of the SSRI family to allow men to delay ejaculation in recent years.

Whether this is ethical, or even acceptable is another question: it's certainly not a rewarding way to achieve a higher level of masculine self-acceptance, self-esteem and sexual self-control.

 But maybe any way to delay the inevitable moment of climax makes men feel so much better that they overlook the fact that they perhaps demean their own masculinity and their own power by accepting a solution that is drug based - pharmacological - and affects the brain in other ways.

Furthermore, if anyone or any entity - a drug company, for example - publicizes something hard enough and long enough, with a point of view that seems superficially reasonable, people will eventually begin to believe what they say.

Perhaps this is why Dapoxetine (an SSRI) has gained so much acceptance: it works quickly, it has a short half life, and it can be taken as needed.

Video: 10 secrets to having great sex: the benefits of a great sex life (which includes long lasting intercourse!)

Delayed by Drugs!

Wow! Surely this has to be the remedy for all men who ejaculate rapidly? Well, maybe, but let's bear in mind that this drug affects brain chemistry; it's not a chemically or biologically neutral product; it's interfering with the fundamental chemical activity of the brain of every man who takes it.

And the bizarre thing about all this of course is that as we've said on this website there isn't actually a clear definition of what "premature" actually means.

And if you can't even define a condition, you can't have any real idea how widespread it is.

Therefore it's in the drug companies' interests to define premature ejaculation with as low a time threshold as possible (sex that lasts 3 minutes? Or 2 minutes? Or 90 seconds?).

That way, men are caught in the definition, more men who represent the  potential market for treatment.

Has anyone actually researched the question as to what constitutes a normal time between vaginal penetration and ejaculation?

Well, of course many people have, and the fact that there is still no clear answer may indicate that despite the statements made above, sexual repression and sexual inhibition do still prevent us discussing how long sex should last with honesty or clarity.  At least, with enough honesty and clarity for a clear picture of what is "normal" to emerge!

Something so fundamental as sexual intercourse in human relationships could hardly avoid being influenced by cultural and social factors.

So, while some studies have indicated that an average duration of intercourse is about seven minutes in certain Western countries, the time regarded as average for intercourse in other cultures is very different.

Another problem is that the time between penetration and ejaculation is measured by the woman with a stop watch - and this is during one of the most intimate interactions that a male and female couple can have!

So what degree of reliability are we expected to ascribe to measurements taken on a stop watch by a woman while her male partner thrusts into her vagina, unless she's totally detached from what he's doing?

And if she's detached enough to operate a stop watch accurately, how is that attitude likely to affect her partner's willingness to delay or otherwise control his ejaculation?

It all begins to seem like an absurdity! Hoping an experimental protocol such as this will produce any kind of reasonable data -- leaving aside the possibility that people lie to save themselves embarrassment and shame -- seems ludicrously optimistic.

And even if we did accept seven minutes as the average length of time for intercourse (and seven minutes is a lot longer than many studies have demonstrated as an average duration of intercourse), then how are we to interpret the fact that in the Middle East rapid ejaculation is apparently viewed as a sign of virility, so the reported frequency of premature ejaculation is significantly lower than in, say, Latin America, where presumably men regard long-lasting lovemaking as a sign of masculinity?

The simple fact is, the definition of premature is ultimately highly subjective.

Meet Dr Marcel Waldinger - Without Delay!

One man who has spent a lot of time researching ejaculation timings is Dr. Marcel Waldinger, a neuropsychiatrist in the Netherlands, who also runs a sexual health clinic.

He takes the view that the number of men in the population who are actually experiencing premature ejaculation is a lot lower than reports from studies sponsored by drug companies might lead us to believe.

His methodology is to measure the intra-vaginal ejaculatory latency time as he believes that this is the only objective measure of whether a man is a premature ejaculator or not.

However, the interesting thing about this approach is that although he disregards other factors such as issues of sexual satisfaction and the men's subjective judgments about their level of self-control, many people would regard those things as absolutely fundamental to defining the condition.

Indeed, PE has traditionally been defined in a way that requires either one or both of the partners in a sexual relationship to be experiencing emotional distress because of the man's rapid sexual responses.

The implication is that even if a couple only achieve thirty seconds of lovemaking but both are fulfilled and happy with this, than the man is not a experiencing PE - at least in terms of the classical definition.

Does this matter? Yes, I think it does, for several reasons. First of all, it's actually interesting and useful for men to have a benchmark against which to judge themselves as lovers.

The absence of such information may cause distress and confusion when a man has no sense of how he performs sexually compared to all his peers.

Unless his friends are being honest about their sexual performance, and talking about it openly, he won't know whether two minutes, five minutes or ten minutes is a satisfactory delay during lovemaking.

And even if he does manage to make love for ten minutes but his partner doesn't reach orgasm, he still won't know if he's achieving a satisfactory sexual performance or not.

Clearly the implication is that reliable and accurate information is essential for men to decide whether or not they wish to seek treatment.

But in addition, Dr. Waldinger points out that for as long as drug companies are sponsoring research, and as long as there is a potentially great financial reward for the medicalization of sexual dysfunction, then the prospect of objective and realistic research being conducted may be considerably diminished.

That may be a trend compounded by the difficulty of obtaining government financing for valid sexual health research where either social or economic trends mitigate against the distribution of funds for that work.

It's even been observed by one researcher that Johnson & Johnson employed so many urologists, psychologists and other scientists that when the FDA looked at their application for the licensing of Dapoxetine as a premature ejaculation drug, they may have been unable to find any researchers in the field who didn't have a conflict of interest!

And the other aspect of learning to stop premature ejaculation we should keep in mind is that men who believe they are affected may actually feel bad about themselves because of their sexual performance.

Premature ejaculation is commonly a problem for men in the early stages of their sexual careers: a scene in the original American Pie film where the lusty teenager ejaculates before he gets anywhere near the shapely and desirable body of the Swedish au pair might be less of a joke we would like to believe!

But there are men much older than this who also ejaculate with minimal sexual stimulation, or consistently reach orgasm before they wish to do so, and many of them would probably be willing to consider delaying their ejaculation by any means, including the use of drugs like Dapoxetine.

PE is sometimes associated with relationships which are experiencing difficulties, but whether it's the disappointing sex or the interpersonal problems that come first is unclear.

Not that this means PE doesn't need to be tackled.

In fact, all sexual psychotherapists and clinicians dealing with men who consistently ejaculate too early during lovemaking agree that the consequences of it can be serious both for the men concerned and their partners.

A rapid and untimely ejaculation is not just some kind of lifestyle issue - it's a serious sexual problem, at least for some couples.

Men who have little sexual experience or who are single maybe reluctant to date women because they feel shamed by their lack of sexual control; couples may experience disruption of the intimacy of lovemaking due to the man climaxing early.

A 30 year old man who came to see me because of his tendency to climax too early explained that he had been completely humiliated by a woman who he dated, took back to his apartment, and with whom he came after only a few seconds of lovemaking; she simply got up, dressed, and left his apartment without uttering another word.

Another man, aged 42, who is married and in a satisfactory, fulfilling relationship explained to me that every time he made love to his partner, his tendency to ejaculate too soon was on his mind, and his quick-fire trigger response to sexual stimulation had been a massive burden all his adult life.

Even though he and his wife had great sex, and although he was able to make her orgasm during intercourse, their lovemaking always took the same form: he stimulated her to orgasm with mouth or fingers, then entered her after she had reached orgasm, so they could enjoy a brief moment of physical intimacy.

But How Easy Is it To Delay Ejaculation?

One of the difficulties in delaying ejaculation is that sex is so variable between couples.

What is satisfactory for one couple may certainly not be for another, and what constitutes a fulfilling relationship for a particular couple may barely begin to fulfill the needs of another.

In this context it's easy to see how the prospect of prescribing a man a drug for the rest of his sexually active life might be a far from desirable solution to a condition that perhaps could be resolved with only some short-term psychotherapy.

Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of the Citizen's Health Research Group in Washington certainly questions the need for prescribing Dapoxetine for men who are quick off the mark in bed: "Why," he says, "would you wish to take a drug for the rest of your life..... this is all a massive hype."

But despite Johnson & Johnson's efforts to obtain a license for Dapoxetine for the treatment of premature ejaculation, it remains unlicensed in the United States at the time of writing.

It seems that those experts who are propounding the view that lifestyle issues and psychotherapy are more important in curing rapid ejaculation will hold the upper hand for some time yet.

Clearly this is a problem which has many aspects other than purely physiological! And what of Masters and Johnson's behavioral techniques?

Well, they work, but for those men who cannot be bothered to learn how to prolong their time to ejaculation, it's easy to see why drugs might represent a quick and easy cure.


 

Home ] A Premature Ejaculation Cure You Can use At Home ] Ways To Delay: An Evidence Based Definition ] Diagnostic and Statistical Manual DSM IV Definition Of PE ] Kaplan and Masters and Johnson's Definition Of PE ] Treatments For Slowing Down Ejaculation ] Ways To Delay: The Effects Of Premature Ejaculation On Men ] How To Delay: A Better Definition Of Premature Ejaculation ] How To Keep Sex Exciting and Your Relationship Vibrant! ] [ How To Delay Ejaculation: Effects Of PE ] Delaying Ejaculation: Definition of Premature From The ICD 10 ] How To Delay Ejaculation: The Effects Of PE On Women In Relationships ] Ways To Delay: The Effects Of PE On A Couple ] Delay Your Ejaculation With Anesthetic Spray Lotions And Condoms ] How to Slow Ejaculation - The Squeeze Technique and The Stop - Start Technique ] Physical Problems As A Cause Of Premature Ejaculation ] Anxiety As A Cause Of Premature Ejaculation In Men ] Delayed Ejaculation and Erectile Dysfunction ]