A recent study set the national average length of time a man ejaculates at 2 minutes. Wow! That is quick, especially, since on average, a woman takes 10 times longer to climax. So this huge disparity in time most likely leads to some pretty “meh” sex and unhappy relationships. So this raises a big question. Why is this happening? Is it the way nature intended?
There are many reasons men, on average, last about 2 minutes before ejaculating. Pharmaceutical companies want us to suspect the usual suspects of genetics, health, substance abuse, medication, and biology, but these are factors that tend to play a supporting role. For many men, the main issues are psychological, cognitive, and behavioral. The problems of negative thinking, shame, guilt, fear, and anxiety inhibits normal sexual response and behavior. Psychology plays a huge role in sexual dysfunction because the genitals of either sex are not the most important sex organs in the body, the brain is. Almost all sexual responses take place in the brain including arousal, orgasm, and desire.
The psychosexual issues start developing in a child at an early age well before puberty. A child who is taught sex and masturbation are bad, evil, and sinful acts will grow up to have issue with sex in some way. All these negative beliefs about sex become ingrained into a child’s mind; thus shaping the child’s sexuality before the child even reaches puberty. For example, a 5-year-old child touches their genitals, in response the parents respond negatively, and then disciplines the child thereby causing the child to feel shame for touching themselves.
Around middle school, boys begin to masturbate. Boys who are raised in sex negative homes, tend to masturbate in secret because they feel they are doing something bad. If caught he may get punished in some way or possibly get a lecture from the parents (I mean, who really wants that); so to avoid being caught they rush to finish. This behavior leads to the habit of getting to ejaculation as quick as possible. This gets amped up with the increased arousal of a nude partner. The consistent sprint to the big “O” and ejaculation creates that over-bearing need to ejaculate and a loss of ejaculatory control once fully aroused.
As a boy reaches 17-years-of-age, the national average age of first intercourse, the boy has learned from his peers all the myths about performance, size, and stamina. Now, the teenage boy has to live up to unreasonable expectations, anxiety, and pressure those myths cause. The combination of negative feelings, pressure, and bad habits along with a teenaged boy’s supercharged hormones controlling ejaculation can become an impossible task! Especially since most boys never learn how. Ultimately pre-mature ejaculation issues may improve with experience over time but can become a chronic issue that can and will adversely affect a boy’s sexual enjoyment, happiness, mental health, and romantic relationships later in life.
Speedy masturbation does another terrible thing; it teaches boys that sex is all about ejaculation. As a result of quick masturbation, boys do not learn the pleasures that live between erection and ejaculation. Masturbation is sex, releasing the same chemicals as partnered sex. All of these chemicals are good for you like oxytocin, norepinephrine, and serotonin. However, the brain needs time to build up its chemical levels, so the chemicals can be released to the body during orgasm. Therefore, the longer the encounter lasts the more the over all sexual experience will be satisfying.
So what can we do to increase the time a man can go before he ejaculates? Lets start by looking at the male sexual response and a common misconception. First, orgasm is NOT the same thing as ejaculation. The fact is they are two separate bodily functions that happen at about the same time. The male orgasm has two stages; emission phase and expulsion phase separated by the point of no return[1]. The emission phase is a series of muscle contractions around the prostate and pubococcygeus (PC) muscle forcing semen into the urethra. Next the expulsion phase that occurs with muscle contraction that forces the semen to be ejaculated out of the penis. The best way to explain this process is with the sneeze reflex. The sensation of burning and irritation that happens right before a sneeze, ultimately forces one to sneeze. The sensation is like the orgasm, and the sneeze is like the ejaculation. When a person is going to sneeze there is a point in which you can disrupt the sneeze reflex and the person will not sneeze. The same is true with ejaculation
If a man can learn to control his ejaculation, a world of endless pleasure can open up for him. For starters, multi-orgasms are not only possible for women but can be for men as well. The sexual inhibitive crash that comes with ejaculation called the refractory period is not triggered by the orgasm, but rather the ejaculation. If a man can orgasm, but not ejaculate, he can keep on going and have orgasms until the next ice age (ok, maybe not that long, but you get the point). However, once he ejaculates it’s game over and the refractory period begins. In order to gain ejaculatory control he will need to breath and relax into sex so that he can extend and slow the arousal process. Once a man can control his arousal he will be able to maintain his ability to contain his sexual energy even during higher and higher levels of arousal.
Premature ejaculation is a problem of nature (in that nature plays a part), but the real story of the 2-minute-ejaculation-average lies in nurture. We need to change the way we teach sex education because if we teach sex comprehensively in a sex positive way, we can take the hurry out of the orgasm and sex. Once men can learn to enjoy the whole experience of sex rather than the few orgasmic seconds, we can enjoy new heights of pleasure that 2 minutes just cannot provide.
[1] The Point of No Return- the point of male arousal where he will ejaculation will happen no matter what. Some compare it to falling over an orgasmic cliff.