A woman I once knew confessed that almost every man she had slept with over the age of thirty-five had some form of erectile dysfunction. Either they would get hard and then go limp a few minutes later, take 20 minutes or more to get erect from direct stimulation, or just never get hard at all. I've heard all the Viagra jokes, seen the Bob Dole commercials, seen the sit-com one-liners about it happening to everyone. Still, I was surprised to hear that this tacky bit of cultural floss actually has a kernel of truth in it.
I remember the first time I couldn't get an erection with a woman. I was twenty-five. We had been kissing for a couple of hours one sweltering August afternoon. It was with a woman I had been dating for a few weeks but hadn't had sex with yet. "Do you want to put something in me besides your fingers?" she asked. Yeppers.
We had made our way to her bed. She was naked and I was in an ugly pair of plaid boxer shorts. I watched her walk to a dresser across the room to get condoms. It was ninety degrees inside and humid. We had been out late the night before, drinking and dancing. I still had a hangover and I felt the achy tickle of a cold coming on. As soon as she left the bed, I felt a strange reaction in my body. It felt tired, like some kind of mule after a long haul. The distraction of fooling around and the immediate touch of another body had been enough to cover it up, but now that she was on the other side of bedroom, rooting through her sock drawer, there were no distractions left. I felt like I needed a nap.
This was also the first time I had seen her naked. I was attracted to her. She was beautiful, stubborn and lilting at the same time; she was a walking, talking lemon drop. But when I saw her naked that first time, walking across the room in the afternoon light, I was disappointed. It all seemed so different when I was tasting her saliva, and feeling her body against mine with eyes closed. Everything was so new, and I had been swept away with my own flush of romance. I wasn't quite ready to reconcile the figurative feel of her with the literal, functional impression of her body, standing at a dresser like it was a cupboard filled with flour.
When she came back to bed with a handful of condoms, I started to panic. I realized I had lost my half-erection during the minute she had been gone. I took the condoms out of her hand and pulled her back into bed, hoping that kissing and foreplay would get my lazy afternoon boner back. This was my first encounter with the vortex of the disappearing boner. As soon as you're conscious of the fact that it's gone, the fixation on its continuing absence hangs over your head like a cackling crow. Every minute or so my subconscious would bubble up, "Nope, still no erection."
After much straining, angst, and blowjobs (which didn't quite do it), I finally forced my mule back into his yolk. I slipped the condom tenuously down over my penis, torturing myself with the idea that this one would melt away like the one before it. There's a lot of pressure involved in having a penis. If men put hideously unreasonable expectations on women by validating sexual tripe like Playboy and Hooters, the converse is that we've boxed ourselves into a role of being rock steady pipe layers. Virility served twenty-four hours a day or my name isn't Joe Namath.
I haven't had many episodes of impotence since then. The most distressing part of my penile performance over the last few years has been a gradually increasing refractory period. But I've noticed that I want to switch positions more frequently now. A little too long spent in one posture and I start to lose track a little. A brief image of my penis made up of quicksand flashes through my head, and that's enough to move into something else.
Then I wonder, what will things be like in five years? Or ten years? Will I start popping hard-on pills if when I'm forty and my mule is more interested in grazing? Would it be demeaning to my partner if my erections became more scattershot? Can you have sex without penetration? Can intimacy and eroticism take a form outside of the throbbing masthead without being somehow less? I'm a little bit frightened of the idea of having a teenage erection attached to my wrinkly, liver-spotted fifty year-old body. When I was young I had sex like a young man. As I get older, it doesn't seem unnatural that the sex should change accordingly.
I just don't know what that means. How do old men have sex?
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Sex Machine: Why Women Suck in Bed
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