The New Male Sexuality (2 page)

In bed she acted like I thought only men were supposed to act. Touch me here, lick me there, let me put this condom on you, let’s move over here, turn around, take me this way, now let’s switch to that way. I have never in my whole life done so many different things and been in so many positions. I had two fantastic orgasms and have nothing to complain about. But my question is, what am I, as the man, supposed to be doing?

It’s not that all women are behaving more aggressively. Many are not, but in a way that only makes things more confusing. As a forty-four-year-old client put it:

The one sure thing I know about life right now is that it’s bewildering. It’s not clear what it means to be a man or a woman, how to have a relationship, or even how to act in bed. I see lots of people trying to get clear by reading John Gray’s books, but I don’t think that helps. Things are in flux; there are no answers. While I know that’s the truth, I wish it were otherwise. It’s so much hassle the way it is.

Challenging, too, because men and women alike are experiencing grave difficulties in making relationships work. Half or more of marriages end in divorce, and I don’t know anyone who would argue that singles and live-ins are any happier. An old-fashioned guy might say, “So what’s that have to do with sex?” The answer, as more and more men are understanding, is practically everything. Good sex usually takes place within the context of a good relationship. And despite propaganda to the contrary, men are heavily dependent on their relationships with women. If these relationships are not going well, that in itself is a problem.

But life and this book are about more than challenges and problems. There are also many opportunities and sources of excitement for today’s man.

NEW SOLUTIONS FOR MEN’S SEXUAL PROBLEMS

The last ten years have been a period of intense creativity and progress in the study of male sexuality. The new solutions that have had the most media presence have been the pharmaceutical ones, especially Viagra.

Viagra is not the first pharmaceutical sexual aid. Far from it. But this blue pill caught the public imagination like no other drug. In the three
months after its introduction on April 10, 1998, three million prescriptions were filled, making it the most popular drug ever introduced in America. Men who wouldn’t have dreamed of injecting a drug into their penises to induce erection were clearly more than happy to pop a pill.

Viagra is changing not only the state of some men’s erections but also how we think of sex. The penis, which was always conceded to have a mind of its own, is being brought under voluntary control. For better or worse, being too old, too tired, too anxious, or too upset no longer need keep a man from getting erect. This in itself is not sufficient, of course, to guarantee good sex, but there’s no question that Viagra has been a godsend to many men who had thought their sex lives were over.

Although the media, having discovered the term
impotence
, can’t seem to repeat it often enough (as in “the impotence pill Viagra”), the effects of Viagra extend far beyond men who might be considered impotent. For example, some men are using it to overcome their “stage fright” the first time or two with a new partner. And listen to this man’s account of his weekend escapades:

I think I’m starting to show the effects of age even though I’m not yet forty. Tania and I have had this ritual since the beginning of going away every few months for a weekend of sex. But in the last year or two I found that by the last day, my mind is willing, as they say, but the flesh is weak. It’s not the end of the world. I can always use my fingers or tongue on her, but there are times I’d really like to be inside her again. Viagra does the trick. No matter how many times we’ve already fucked, it always gets me another hard-on.

As I write these pages, clinical trials are starting on the use of Viagra in women. What a brave new world seems in the offing, with Viagra-aroused men coupling with Viagra-enhanced women.

New solutions have also emerged for the other perennial sex problem for men: staying power. Since the 1950s there have been sexual exercises that a man could use with his partner to learn better ejaculatory control. While these exercises are effective, they require time and effort. In the first edition of this book I said only a few cautious words about a then recent development, the use of small doses of antidepressant drugs to help men last longer. Although these drugs seemed effective with some of my clients, there hadn’t been much research and I didn’t want to raise unrealistic expectations. But in the intervening years it has been demonstrated that they do indeed work, either on their own or as part of a sex therapy program.

Nondrug sex therapy has also become far more sophisticated and effective since it was introduced by Masters and Johnson in the early 1970s. Over the past twenty-five years, a wide range of new therapeutic methods has been incorporated—including various cognitive therapy interventions, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), meditation, neurolinguistic programming, and relaxation training—to deal with fears, traumas, and relationship difficulties. Where appropriate, traditional and newer tools of sex therapy are used in combination with Viagra and other chemical helpers.

In short—as you’ll see in the pages that follow—there’s hope for almost every man and every couple with a sexual problem.

BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF RELATIONSHIPS

Sex therapy has also been powerfully enhanced by our better understanding of relationships, and it is one of the primary goals of this revised edition to show what it takes to have the kind of relationship that supports and encourages satisfying sex. It has become abundantly clear that—very short flings with strangers or near strangers aside—good sex depends on having a decent relationship. Although men aren’t always happy to hear this, you simply cannot have good sex in the long run when partners don’t know each other, don’t spend a lot of fun time together, and don’t regularly show their care and concern for each other. When sex therapy fails, the most common reason by far is not a lack of therapeutic technology or therapist skill, but rather a strained relationship. Even Viagra has failed to make a difference in some cases; yes, it produced erections, but it didn’t make the partners want to make love, or automatically create good sex.

In this new edition, I draw on the brilliant work of John Gottman, of the University of Washington, who has been studying couples for twenty-five years. Gottman has given us what we never before had: real data about how happy couples interact and how their behavior differs from that of discontented couples. As a result, I am now able to pass along not only my own observations from twenty-eight years of working with couples in therapy but specific guidelines that have been scientifically verified (to the extent possible given the infinite variability of human behavior).

By incorporating such new understandings, we sex doctors are helping more people than ever before. When I called one male client a few months after his therapy ended, he kept repeating, “It’s nothing short of a miracle.” His wife gave the specifics:

We are absolutely delighted. After the chemo for his prostate cancer, we thought we’d never have sex again. When we tried to do anything sexual, there was so much tension and anxiety on both our parts; the whole experience was agonizing. But the shots have been very helpful with his erections [this was several years before Viagra], and the main thing is we’re making love in a way we never did before. We talk more, we’re more open, we get downright silly at times, and we have far more fun, not only in sex but all the time. It’s truly wonderful.

MEN ARE MORE OPEN

I have seen encouraging signs of change in men in the last few years, and this is another reason that sex therapy can be more effective. Many men whose fathers never expressed a feeling, made a bed or a sandwich, or even considered getting medical or psychological help for problems are doing precisely those things. Many men are questioning their priorities and values. I have known men to turn down much-desired promotions at work so that their children could remain in the same school or their wives could continue in their jobs.

Men seem much more receptive than even ten years ago to the relating skills I teach in my therapy and have included in this book. They may be uncomfortable and awkward at first, and they become reluctant at times, but they have come to understand that, no matter how “girly” this stuff seemed when they were younger, they need to listen, talk, share, and open up with their loved ones. And younger men, those born after 1960, as a group seem very much open to their own feelings and those of others, and to what were once called “feminine” values and characteristics.

It’s exciting to me as a therapist that most of the men I work with these days don’t have to be talked into trying to be more communicative and sensitive. They are already sold on the idea. What they need is the practical how-to of doing these things, and that is what I try to supply.

In this regard, one specific tool that’s been beneficial to many men is scripts—examples of how to talk to your partner about various issues, some sexual, some not. We men simply have not had enough examples in our own upbringing and in the media of how to express our desires and go after what we want while at the same time being sensitive to the other person’s needs and not trampling on her rights.

A NEW MODEL OF SEX

We men now have opportunities to enjoy a sexuality superior to anything we’ve had before. The traditional model of sex, the one most of us were trained in, focuses on male performance. The man has to make the right moves, has to get and keep an erection for as long as necessary—however long that might be—and now that women are entitled to sexual satisfaction, he also has to provide an ecstatic experience for his partner. This model puts enormous pressure on the man to perform and leads to unnecessary anxiety and fakery of all sorts (pretending to be interested when he isn’t, pretending to have knowledge he doesn’t, and even pretending to have orgasms; women aren’t the only ones who do this).

For men, the traditional model of sex amounts to playing against a stacked deck. The results have been widespread anxiety among men about performing, lots of joyless sex, and even a fairly large group of men who’ve given up sex altogether; it was just more than they felt they could deal with. For years my caseload has been full of couples in which it’s the woman saying she wants more sex and the man rejecting her advances, a topic I address in the chapter on problems of sexual desire and frequency.

Maybe we men need to start stacking the deck on our side. Throughout the book I offer the elements of a new model of sex, one that emphasizes pleasure, closeness, and self-and partner enhancement rather than performance and scoring. This model broadens the acts we usually think of as sexual and also how we go about them. Good sex doesn’t have to stop at the traditional foreplay-intercourse routine. There are whole menus of choices that can give pleasure and fit the relationship and situation precisely. This model has a lot to offer both men and women because it allows us to more closely integrate sex with the rest of our lives and values, to be free of performance pressures and anxiety, to be more honest with ourselves and each other, and to feel better about what we’re doing.

In recent years we have learned a great deal about how society influences young girls as they grow up and how this helps to account for the behavior and problems of adult women. A great deal of understanding and sympathy has been generated for girls and women, and I believe we have all become wiser and more compassionate as a result.

But not much has been said about what society does to boys and men. Males are still assumed, by themselves and by women, to have a better deal. They are the privileged ones, with all sorts of perks and power that women usually don’t have, and they make more money and have more options in many areas.

I suggest that it’s not easy being a woman or a man and that our training and treatment of men has been as misdirected and harmful as our training and treatment of women. The pressures and problems are somewhat different, but both sexes get battered in the process. My goal is to help both men and women come to a more compassionate understanding of what it’s like to be a man, in bed and out.

THE SELF-HELP PROGRAMS

Although this is a self-help book—that is, it contains suggestions and exercises for making changes in your life—some people also need competent professional help from a therapist or physician. This applies particularly to those in relationships mired in hostility and those who may have a physical basis for their sexual difficulties. Even in such cases, this book may resolve the problem or give some assistance. In fact, I’ve been pleased over the years by how many doctors and therapists have made it assigned reading.

The suggestions and exercises are based on more than twenty-five years of experience working with men individually and in groups, with couples, and with women individually. While most of this work was in my private psychotherapy practice, I also draw on nine years of experience at a large sex clinic at the University of California, San Francisco, and in conducting scores of workshops on sexual enhancement. All of the suggestions and exercises in the book have been tested time and again by me and other therapists, and only those that have proven themselves are included here.

The instructions are detailed and comprehensive. I try to give sufficient information so you’ll know exactly what to do and what to be aware of, and what problems may arise and how to deal with them.

But be warned: Reading alone rarely changes behavior or resolves problems. You need to follow the suggestions and do the relevant exercises if you want to make changes. I realize that those who have an urgent problem may want to zoom right in on the self-help chapters, but that is a mistake. You would do better to read the book straight through before turning to specific exercises.