Men & Women Who Can't Come
Frigidity is an ugly word applied to women who receive no pleasure from sexual relations. It should not be applied, as it occasionally is, to women who have difficulty achieving orgasm. There are many women who reach orgasm only occasionally but who nevertheless
bring warmth to lovemaking and obtain pleasure from it. Orgasm is essential, but it can be overstressed. It would be fairer to women and at the same time more accurate, to use the word non-orgasmic. There is, after all, such a massive variation in human sexual responsiveness that to classify any particular experience as good or bad, right or wrong seems perverse. Surely it is an individual matter?
There are undoubtedly more non-orgasmic women than there are impotent men. We know that women crave love and also its physical expression in kisses and embrace. Why is it that so many women, for whom love is all-important, cannot transition from foreplay to orgasm? What is wrong?
First, there are emotional inhibitions. There are still mothers who teach their daughters that sex is "not nice," though, fortunately, they are rare. A more common difficulty is that because women are brought up to protect their virginity (or at least not to give themselves lightly), they develop deep defense mechanisms. At the same time, they are single that tend, at an unconscious level, to go on operating in adulthood. The conditioned attitude cannot be reversed overnight.
A second important reason that some women have difficulty unlocking sexual response is a failure in sexual pleasure, particularly in lovemaking technique. Responsibility rests heavily on the man, but the woman should also be prepared to seek the bodily sensations and rhythms that awaken her sexuality. Male tenderness (an unfashionable quality today), patience, and skill will earn rewards if the woman is open to them.
A third cause is childhood sexual abuse, which can have many effects: one of which is disgust and revulsion at the idea of sex. In such cases, work with a good psychotherapist is needed.
The clitoris is the key to female orgasm, just as the penis is in the male. The woman who earlier in life has discovered erotic pleasure in her clitoris should have little trouble achieving orgasm in a sexual relationship. This seems to warrant the conclusion that self-stimulation or masturbation helps form neurological pathways that promote orgasm. Medical writers see value in a woman finding relief in self-gratification or experimenting with erotic arousal when a response is slow. Some women have discovered orgasm for the first time through the use of vibrators of the kind sold for home use. Having discovered the sensations of full sexual response in this way, the woman should carry the neuromuscular lessons learned into the rich psychophysical intimacies of sex with a loving partner.
The genital kiss - cunnilingus - often brings full success in awakening a woman's sexuality. She may also be able to take advantage of the desire aroused by a full bladder. There can be organic or endocrinal causes of anorgasmia, but they account for only a tiny fraction of cases. There are, too, a small number of cases where intercourse is painful due to inflammation of the vagina, urethra, and vulva. But far and away the majority of cases of lack of orgasm are due to the two reasons given earlier - psychic blocks to release or inadequate technique.
A woman may be non-orgasmic with her man but hotly passionate with a lover. Some women can only have orgasms with their men by imagining the presence of a lover. A fascinating case history was reported: a woman patient was frigid with two men over thirty years. Then, at the age of seventy-two, she began extramarital affairs, and at the age of seventy-four, she told the doctor that intercourse with her lover, two years her senior, was producing full sexual response and intense orgasms.
It usually takes weeks, months, and sometimes years for a woman to attain full sexual response and orgasmic capacity. So many men have said that mature women make the best bed companions because experience means so much! It takes time for a woman to discover and establish her sexual rhythms. A man finds his more or less instinctively: this fact of the woman's rhythm in attaining orgasm has not been sufficiently stressed or understood. A man is equipped to achieve it easily. That a woman has also to find the sexual rhythms of friction and stimulation that trigger her orgasm is often forgotten.
Each woman has to find her particular rhythm before her clitoris will produce orgasms, a fact that often gives rise to a vague feeling of uneasiness. The suggestion that she must take any initiative in sexual activity is, even now, somewhat unusual. A description of male behavior in sexual intercourse is illuminating at this point. Men know by instinct that movement of the penis in the vagina is the essential stimulus for their sexual sensation, these movements are spontaneously executed in an individual pattern of the owner, and they are how sexual sensation in the penis is built up and orgasm produced. A woman is no different: she needs to be willing to believe that she herself has her own natural pattern of sexual movements which will bring her off; it then only remains to find and describe a simple method by which she can guide her man's fingers in the clitoris region, and so discover for herself, and teach her man, the particular rhythmic movements which evoke the keenest sensations, and eventually produce an orgasm.
One last point: the be-all and end-all of sexual activity is not orgasm. It is easy for women who cannot attain orgasm or who reach it rarely to develop anxiety that can only add to the difficulty by adding to psychological pressures already inhibiting orgasmic release.
In human sexual relationships, with their rich emotional overtones and variety of sensual interplay, the pre-orgasmic stages are an integral and important part of lovemaking. Ideally, the buildup of sexual tension should lead to the explosive release of orgasm - but a woman need not become distraught if at times she does not reach this conclusion. For some women, the absence of orgasm impoverishes and frustrates existence to the point that may require professional counseling. It is indisputable that the absence of orgasm limits the human experience, but some women adapt to its absence and still enjoy worthwhile sexual relationships.
A man should be on guard against taking his woman for granted sexually. She is not there as an object for his physical gratification, a sort of superior instrument of masturbation. It is dangerous to think about "rights" in this connection; that sort of thinking belonged to Victorian times. Relationships are either equal partnerships or not worth having at all.
Male Problems with Sexuality
Impotence is being classed as "a disorder of civilization." Few things are as powerful a blow to a man's ego. Life imposes stress: worries, anxieties, frustrations, and competitive pressures can reduce the libido to a level insufficient to maintain normal sexual response. The resulting impotence may be brief or prolonged. Sometimes a woman does not discover that a man lacks potency until after they're in a relationship. Similarly, a man may be ignorant of his future wife's anorgasmia. The difference is that whereas a frigid woman can have intercourse, the impotent man is dependent on an erection of his penis adequate for the task.
Failures of potency throw the average male into acute despondency. He has the added torment of having virility promoted and celebrated on all sides of our culture. Films, television, magazines, and newspapers seem to conspire to taunt him for his lack of manhood.
Doctors and psychologists are aware that deep depressions accompany sexual disorders - especially impotence - more strongly than with malfunctioning of any other part of the body. Any lack of virility evokes an acute sense of shame. To doubt a man's potency is often the greatest hurt one can do him. And boys or men with small (whether real or imagined) penises may develop crippling inferiority complexes. On the matter of potency, many men have something of the schoolboy in them. In the male talk, manliness is equated with sexual prowess and penis size.
Actually, potency is difficult to measure. Many men who call themselves impotent nevertheless have involuntary morning erections, which prove they are capable of erection. Is a man who has morning erections impotent? Or a man who suffers erection problems with his wife but not with his mistress?
The psychological or emotional factors are clearly all-important. Fear, disgust, and other inhibitory emotions freeze the sex drive, whose flow can only be released when these emotions are not present. Sexual fear destroys much of the potential sexual energy of mature men and women and renders them impotent or anorgasmic. The high incidence of premature ejaculation, frigidity, impotence, and sexual neuroses inhibits sexual happiness for so many men and women today. Fear may be due to childhood conditioning, shyness, timidity, lack of experience, or the thought of infection or pregnancy. Most men have a fear of impotence itself, conscious or unconscious.
The man who doubts his potency will not be able to give sex the relaxed attitude needed; if he has failed before, all his attention will be focused on his errant penis. Fearing that it will droop causes it to droop! Erections can come only when he takes his attention off the question of potency and devotes it to satisfying his sexual needs and possibly his partner. The woman, in turn, must do all she can to relax the man, insisting that there is plenty of time and that the important thing is their being together. Women can perform such delicate tasks beautifully.
Some men are potent only with women who wear specific clothing. Here a man's first sexual experience is usually the conditioner. He becomes sexually fixated on some particular aspect of it. The man who marries a second time chooses a woman with physical resemblances to his first wife. This is an example of sexual conditioning. And men are often attracted for life to women resembling those with whom they had their first sexual experience.
Emotional stresses, working on the nervous system through paralysis and fatigue, cause temporary impotence. Even the most virile men have temporary failures through partial erection or total loss of erection. A mature man can accept these with a shrug and not exacerbate the problem through needless anxiety.
The most beneficial treatment for an impotent man is the love and lovemaking of an understanding and affectionate woman. She will understand that impotence is a terrible blow to the male ego and seek to reassure her mate of her love. She will be aware that relaxation is his chief need. When they are together in bed she will speak softly and stroke soothingly. She will bring to lovemaking those gentler womanly qualities (a very clever and well, nice, piece of writing there, indeed, having read more, this woman - whoever she may be - is insightful and clever) that men have long found precious. She will welcome the opportunity to take the sexual initiative and display her loving skills. Her mouth will open sweetly to his kisses. Her fondling of the most intimate parts of the male body will be deft and soothing. All the arts of feminine lovemaking will be employed without a single sign of anxiety or impatience. (Mind you, she may not exactly approve of my writing....) The man in turn will also show patience and aim for lovemaking that makes up in warm tenderness what it lacks in fevered passion.
If the man can attain a weak erection, intercourse is still possible when the couple adopts a position where the woman can trap the penis by closing her thighs, or, better still through the squeezing action of the vaginal muscles. Even if penetration is impossible, there is no reason why lovemaking should still not be enjoyed. One partner can at least reach orgasm as required. Women can be stimulated by cunnilingus, masturbation, and fondling: she does not have to have penetration of the vagina by the penis! Her sexuality is rooted in the clitoris, breasts, vulva, perineum, thighs, and back.
The couple can agree to adapt to the reality of the situation and make love in the ways now open to them. If they do not give way to irritation or anxiety these may lead to a return of virility and normal sexual relations. Meanwhile, there are new sexual paths and pleasures for them to explore together.
Premature Ejaculation
The average American male ejaculates within two minutes of insertion of the penis into the vagina. Many ejaculate in ten to twenty seconds. As satisfaction for both partners is the aim of intercourse, premature ejaculation is usually measured about the time taken by a woman to attain orgasm. This varies from a few seconds for a woman fiercely aroused by foreplay to twenty minutes (perhaps more) for a woman who needs stimulation to the clitoris to reach orgasm. In the former case, ejaculation would be premature before or immediately on entry, and in the latter case any time before twenty minutes, an expectation way beyond most men.
Most men ejaculate within two minutes. Why? There are a few physical factors that can be responsible. There may, for example, be a glans penis that is oversensitive; circumcision has been proposed as an answer to this problem. Some, but not all, doctors say that circumcision reduces sensitivity. But far and away most cases of hasty ejaculation arise from poor self-control. Over-eagerness may be to blame; adequate foreplay, preparing the penis for entry, is essential.
Typically, as a relationship progresses, the male achieves greater self-control. The old saying that "practice makes perfect" applies. It may be said that this is partly due to lowering sexual excitement as a man becomes used to a partner's body and caresses. There is probably some truth to this, but so what? Are we to take the overheated passions of a new affair as the norm for sexual relations? The fact remains that a man can train himself to exercise greater control in sex and prolong it to a degree sufficient to achieve simultaneous orgasm from time to time.
Effective lovemaking has a definite rhythm - moving from tender foreplay to mounting passion, to intromission, to another rhythmical. series of thrusting movements, with short pauses for gathering control, and finally rushing headlong to an ecstatic orgasmic explosion. Both men and women require practice to find the right rhythms. When the man finds himself experiencing premature climax or arriving at the very edge of orgasm - the point of no return - too soon, he should lie still, his partner likewise, breathing quietly and easily, until the moment passes and he can resume his thrusting movements. If he cannot reach ejaculation, he should satisfy his partner and then seek a remedy (see below).
This control can be rehearsed in foreplay. As his partner massages his penis gently with her fingertips, the man may indicate in some way when he has been brought close to orgasm. The gentle fondling of his cock can be resumed when the wave of desire has receded to a safe distance. Relaxation, fully letting go, and breathing calmly bring a man back from the brink of ejaculation; if a man panics and tenses his penile muscles and breathes more rapidly, orgasm is hastened rather than delayed.
A useful tip for couples experiencing difficulty in synchronizing their orgasms - when the wife comes later - is for intercourse to take place without anxiety to the point of male orgasm, then to have sex again as soon as possible. This is because a woman usually achieves orgasm more rapidly on the second attempt and the man's orgasm is usually delayed. A couple should have two tries in this way once or twice a week than single coitus four or five times a week without the woman reaching orgasm. And of course, a woman can be brought to orgasm by masturbation if she has missed out, but the repeated intercourse method is still worth trying.