|
The Myth of the Male Orgasm
It's more common than you think.
by Hillary Louise Johnson
Sexual responsiveness between partners varies for reasons ranging from skill and technique to psychology and anatomy. I have been in sexual relationships with men in which I could readily climax through vaginal intercourse, but I also had a long-term relationship with a partner — I’ll call him Eddie — whose anatomy and mine rarely conspired to bring either of us to orgasm the old fashioned way.
For women, the inability to climax during intercourse is now widely accepted as “normal,” but according to The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the American Psychological Association’s bible, my ex-boyfriend Eddie would be characterized as having a classifiable disorder known as Male Orgasmic Dysfunction, defined as an inability to climax “despite adequate sexual desire and arousal.”
The manual cites the case of a man called “The Professor” as a typical example of this dysfunction: “He had no trouble in attaining and maintaining an erection and no difficulties in stimulating his partner to her orgasm, but he could never be stimulated himself to ejaculation, and would finally give up in boredom. He has always been able to reach ejaculation by masturbation, which he does about twice a week; but he has never been willing to let a partner masturbate him to orgasm.”
And there, pun intended, is the rub, or rather the lack thereof. Perhaps the real dysfunction here is the shame that prevents the professor from sharing masturbation with a partner. Which is exactly how Eddie and I dealt with our poor pelvic fit. Where thrusting failed, fingers came in quite handy; we had twenty between us, after all.
To complicate matters further, Queen likes to point out the second great myth of the male orgasm: the assumption that ejaculation equals orgasm.
  (1 votes, average: 4 out of 5) Loading ... |
Email to a Friend
Share on Facebook
Digg It
Delicious
Newsvine
Stumble
Reddit
1 sarah // Jun 3, 2008 at 1:17 am
it’s kind of disturbing and yet comforting in a way - that not only do women experience this. I just hope when my boyfriend claims he’s about to climax, he’s for real!:)
2 BB // Jun 1, 2008 at 5:48 pm
I come so fast I avoid sex now all together due to the embarrassment. It sucks. I envy guys that don’t come.
3 dora_rice // Jun 1, 2008 at 9:47 am
Sorry but that some women come as easy as men is just not true. The way the vagina is build verifies that. I am not getting into the anatomy of the sex organs of a woman, but that she can come as quick as a man by just plain humping is a myth.
4 Cobarde anónimo // May 31, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Boy, I can relate. I’m a guy who more than once thought I was in a peculiarly inverted relationship because my female partners came more easily than I did. Sometimes it’s been a “problem,” because it affected my partner’s and my pleasure; other times it’s been no big deal.
Subjectively it seems to me that a number of things can contribute to my being a slow comer: boredom or fatigue, obviously; meds, which sometimes interfere with orgasms even if erections are unaffected; what Dan Savage calls “death grip,” or the need for high pressure and friction that I’ve acquired through a lot of years of masturbation; and self-consciousness, which is only heightened if I try to take the advice given above to the “Professor” and put my orgasm directly in my partner’s hands.
With time I’ve learned to stop worrying and enjoy my own pace. It’s some consolation that I’ll never have a partner complain that I come too quick. And my quirk has helped me realize that my orgasm isn’t central to what I love about sex with a partner. Intimacy and her pleasure are more important to me than whether I come. Given enough time and the “death grip,” I can always have all the orgasms I want by myself anyway.
5 Jack Off // May 30, 2008 at 11:24 pm
What’s an orgasm?
Read All 14 Comments on The Myth of the Male Orgasm