“Oh, we don’t need a condom,” my new lover informed me the first time we hooked up. Delicately, he explained that he couldn’t actually finish inside a woman—vaginal sex just didn’t do it for him. “Well, you gotta wear one anyway,” I said, trying to hide my skeptical reaction. “Even if you can’t knock me up, you can still give me an STI.” He reluctantly put one on, and our evening of passionate love-making began. Turns out, he wasn’t just making up some BS excuse not to put a sock on it: Just as he’d predicted, he wasn’t able to finish.
Whether you’ve been in this situation or not, you can imagine, I’m sure, that this is a hit to a gal’s ego. It’s hard not to take this personally—or, at the very least, as a challenge. I finally tapped out when I was on the verge of carpet burn, and the pain became stronger than my desire to prove him wrong.
“So how do you finish then?” I dared to ask.
For the next 20 minutes, I became essentially a stripper (without any take home wads of cash), shaking my ass round and round and giving him my most seductive glances while he pleasured himself on the bed. Part of me felt sexy, but most of me felt cheap—an objectified woman to be consumed from five feet away, not a partner entangled in an intimate act.
This was my first introduction to what would soon become a regular occurrence: feeling rejected by guys who find themselves unable to finish via my warm cozy vagina or mouth, preferring their hand instead. It’s an experience officially dubbed “delayed ejaculation,” which experts say is becoming more common. Just like erectile dysfunction—an inability to get it up or keep it up—the causes behind DE can be physical or psychological, neither of which have a damn thing to do with how good you are in bed.
Women have this bad habit of internalizing and blaming ourselves for everything people do, especially men (thanks patriarchy!), and I’m no exception. It’s my default. Especially in situations like the one with my striptease hookup, it’s nearly impossible not to feel like you and your vagina aren’t at least a teensy bit to blame. It took speaking to sex experts and about a dozen brave men I know who have this problem to finally realize that the self-blame is bullshit: It’s almost never about you.
Porn Isn’t the Real Problem
Porn and the death grip (the pseudo-scientific idea that masturbating too hard can leave a dude desensitized) have been blamed almost entirely for the spectrum of sexual dysfunctions plaguing anyone with a penis. While too much porn can absolutely cause problems, it’s an oversimplification of the issue, according to the experts. Porn is usually only a problem if men are watching too much of it—like every day, several times a day, says Cathline Fernet-Quinet, a French sexologist. The truth is that delayed ejaculation can be caused by a number of factors that have nothing to do with porn (or with you): depression, anxiety, certain medications, alcohol. Jenni Skyler, Ph.D., a certified sex and relationship therapist in Colorado says the problem is often a psychological one. “It’s almost always an issue involving shame or anxiety,” she says.
