The Guide to Getting It On (113 page)

Scabies

Saying “scabies” is much easier than saying
Sarcoptes scabiei var. hominis,
which is the name of the parasitic mite that causes scabies. The scabies mite is a tiny arachnid that is barely visible to the human eye. The male and female scabies only mate once. That’s all it takes for the female to be fertile for the rest of her life. Thank goodness it’s not the same for human females.

Scabies-related nastiness begins when the female burrows under a person’s skin to lay her eggs. Every day, two or three of the newly hatched mites will crawl out from under the skin and make short burrows on the surface of the skin called moulting pouches. The skin will respond by breaking out into a pimple-like rash that’s made up of red pustules that can be very annoying and itchy. It’s also possible that the eggs and mite poop that are in the upper layer of the skin can cause itching.

You can have scabies for four to six weeks before you start having symptoms. But if you’ve had scabies before, the symptoms will often appear much sooner if you are reinfected. People who are infected but don’t yet have symptoms can pass on scabies to others.

Aside from the garden variety type of scabies, there are Crusted Norwegian Scabies which are highly contagious. This kind of scabies often targets people whose immune systems are compromised. These scabies form crusts which are highly infectious.

While scabies have an affinity for skin around the genitals, scabies can inhabit virtually anyplace on your body. They particularly look for skin folds, like on wrists, elbows, armpits, fingers, toes, nipples and knees.

Since scabies outbreaks can occur in preschools and nursing homes, transmission of scabies is by no means limited to sexual activity. However, rubbing a scabies-infested crotch against a partner’s uninfected crotch is a way to share the scabies love. Scabies can also spread via clothing, towels and bedding, but the risk is not very high unless the person has crusted scabies. Then, all bets are off.

Scabies is treated with a cream or lotion that’s called a scabicide. Unfortunately, you can only get scabicides by prescription. Follow the instructions carefully. All sexual partners and other household members should be treated, especially anyone who has had prolonged skin-to-skin contact with a person who is infected. The itching should stop in two to four weeks. If it doesn’t, reapply.

Never use a treatment for scabies on humans that is intended for animals. While animals do have scabies, they have a different kind than humans. Humans can not get scabies from animals.

Scabies cannot live away from human skin for more than two to three days. So when it comes to clothes and bedding, you can either wash them in really hot water and use a hot dryer, or simply wait at least 72 hours as long as there is no human contact with the infected items. In 72 hours, the scabies on clothes and bedding will have died. So fumigation and dry cleaning are not necessary.

Other Sexually Transmitted Infections

When it comes to new diseases, we don’t know what’s out there. So rather than focusing on one type of disease, why not try to keep your entire body healthy? First and foremost, this means not doing recreational drugs such as crystal meth, poppers (nitrile inhalants) or shooting anything into your veins. The reason for avoiding recreational drugs is that there is a strong association between using recreational drugs and getting sick. People who party and do drugs tend not to use condoms, nor do they always exercise the best judgment.

Keeping your entire body healthy means staying fit, eating well and avoiding all non-essential drugs, including antibiotics if you don’t need them. If you aren’t monogamous, it means using condoms during oral and vaginal intercourse as well.

Anyone who has been in more than one sexual relationship during the past year should have a check-up for sexually transmitted infections. Talk to your healthcare provider about a throat culture if you have been performing oral sex and a rectal culture if you’ve been taking it up the rear. It’s a good idea to get routine checkups even if you use condoms and don’t have symptoms, or if you had symptoms but they went away.

Know yourself, enjoy yourself, and protect yourself.

Gnarly Sex Germs in History

Some people believe that AIDS is the most deadly sex disease that ever was. Sadly enough, the prize goes to syphilis. Even a couple of popes died from syphilis.

Before 1492, when Columbus came to America, there had been no recorded cases of syphilis in Europe. But syphilis did exist in the part of the New World where Columbus and his crew landed. Shortly after Columbus’s return, a vicious strain of syphilis began to spread throughout Europe, quickly killing a sizable portion of the population. Smallpox got its name because the lesions it caused were small compared to those of syphilis, “The Great Pox.” During its first fifty years in Europe, from about 1493 until 1550, syphilis was a savage killer.

In what may have been one of the first recorded instances of biological warfare, the Spanish army seems to have sent syphilitic prostitutes to infect the Italian army.

After 1550, syphilis went from being a quick killer to a slow killer, more like the syphilis we know today. Instead of finishing off its victims in short order, syphilis began to linger in the body for years after the initial infection, eventually targeting organs like the heart or brain. Syphilis remained a potent killer for four hundred more years (from 1550 to 1940).

In the 1920s, a medical doctor received the Nobel Prize for infecting syphilis patients with malaria. The high fever caused by the malaria helped burn out the stubborn syphilis infection. Unfortunately, there was no cure for the new cure. Some scientists speculate that more people died from the attempts to cure syphilis than from syphilis itself. Until the discovery of antibiotics, popular syphilis therapies included treatment with arsenic and mercury.

Syphilis is less of a problem today because it can now be treated in its early phases by antibiotics, which weren’t discovered until the 1940s.

Lonely Shepherds, Scared Sheep

Folklore has it that syphilis was originally caused by lonely shepherds who prodded their sheep with something more personal than carved wooden staffs. The reason for the sheep/shepherd rumor is a simple matter of poetry. In 1530, a great physician, poet, and scholar named Fracastor wrote a poem about the disease of syphilis which hadn’t been named syphilis yet. In the poem, a 16-year-old shepherd boy named Syphilis made the horrible mistake of building an altar on the wrong plot of land and praying to the wrong gods. This was the 1530s equivalent of wearing the wrong colors in a gang-controlled neighborhood. It angered the god Apollo, who struck the youth’s genitals with a chancre-laden thunderbolt.

Fracastor’s poem tells about the rapid spread of the “new” disease:

“I sing of that terrible disease, unknown to past centuries, which attacked all Europe in one day and spread itself over part of Africa and Asia...”

This sounds like AIDS!

In five hundred years, people will think of our modern efforts to fight disease in the same way we think of strange cures from the past. But before you are too harsh on ideas like infecting syphilitic patients with malaria to cook the infecting virus, keep in mind that our main defense today against sexually transmitted diseases is even more crude. We have the technology to send motorized vehicles to Mars, but the best we can do to protect ourselves from sexually transmitted infections is to put a plastic bag on a penis.

NUMBERS:

National STD Hotline: (800) 227-8922

National Herpes Hotline: (919) 361-8488

National AIDS Line: (800) 342-AIDS

WEBSITES:

The website for the CDC (Center for Disease Control) at

www.cdc.gov/std

The Sexually Transmitted Infection part of the Links section at:

www.Guide2Getting.com

A VERY Special Thanks:
to Angela Hoffman, birth control and sex education expert, for much help over the years; to Matthew Grober at Georgia State University and Adam Safron at Northwestern. Also to the people at the CDC for providing so much helpful information about sexually transmitted infections on their website at
www.cdc.gov/std
.

CHAPTER

54

Dyslexia of the Penis—Improving Your Sexual Hang Time

I
t’s easy to understand why most men would be too embarrassed to call a healthcare provider about premature ejaculation. The receptionist always wants to know why you want to see the doctor.
“Uh, ‘cause I cum in about three seconds?”

Worse yet, most healthcare providers know more about the rings of Uranus than they do about premature ejaculation. That’s why this chapter is kept as up-to-date as possible, and why some of the world’s top researchers are consulted. Perhaps you and your doctor can learn together.

Terms like premature ejaculation, PE, early ejaculation, and rapid ejaculation are used interchangeably, but they all mean the same thing. You’d think it would be easy to define premature ejaculation, but it wasn’t until 2010 that a diverse group of researchers and clinicians finally agreed on a working definition. Even then, their definition is more limiting than many of them would have wanted. You’ll see why in the pages that follow. You’ll also see that there are many myths and misperceptions about PE.

This chapter begins with a look at what PE is and ends with the treatments that are currently being used. It even talks about acting out forbidden fantasies, which the average piece on premature ejaculation would never mention in a million years.

Partners of Men with PE

One of the biggest problems with premature ejaculation is that a man’s partner is seldom part of the conversation or the solution. That’s not good. This chapter is for sexual partners as well as for men with PE. Hopefully you’ll both read it and discuss the sections that are meaningful for you. There’s no reason why PE needs to ruin your enjoyment of sex.

ISSM on Jizzing

According to the International Society for Sexual Medicine (ISSM), premature ejaculation is when a man usually comes in less than a minute, has little if any control, and feels distress as a result.

Depending on whose statistics you use, almost 98% of men are able to last for more than a minute. This leaves between 1.5% and 2.5% of men who qualify as having PE. If you add another thirty seconds to the ISSM definition and include men who come in less than a minute and a half, up to five times as many men have premature ejaculation, as long as they feel a lack of control and it’s causing them distress.

ISSM realizes that its 60-second cutoff leaves out a lot of men who are legitimately concerned about early ejaculation, including men who can last longer than a minute but have little control beyond that.

The reason why ISSM has taken such a conservative approach is that it wanted to limit its definition to what is truly known and can be validated with research. Otherwise, there is a chance that PE would not be accepted as a legitimate diagnosis in the medical world. Treatment would not be reimbursable and drug companies might stop their research. On the other hand, using only a minute as a definition of PE allows drugs that don’t work very well to appear to be more effective than they are. That’s statistics for you.

The Problem with “What’s Average”

In a study of nearly 500 couples from five countries who timed their intercourse, half of the men lasted for less than six minutes, and half for more. The lion’s share of the men lasted between two and nine minutes. Few men lasted longer than eighteen minutes. Condom use and circumcision did not have an impact one way or the other.

Interestingly, the men over-estimated the amount of time it took them to come by an average of 31% or almost two minutes. So guys who actually came in six minutes thought they lasted for close to eight.

A lot of PE researchers don’t think it’s relevant to list an average time for intercourse. That’s because there are guys who last for a minute and who satisfy their lovers with all the things they do rather than just intercourse. On the other hand, there are plenty of men who can last for ten or more minutes and aren’t satisfying lovers.