Q & A (January 2012)

Art Fleming gave the answers,
But I couldn’t get the questions right.  –  “Weird Al” Yankovic, “I Lost On Jeopardy”

Oddly enough, I received these two questions within minutes of one another; I felt both of them might be of interest to many readers.

I am currently in a relationship with a woman I care for very much, but sexual intercourse is painful for her.  She has no problem getting naturally lubricated and aroused, but upon initial entry she experiences pain which soon reduces to discomfort but never completely stops.  She is always encouraging me to finish fast, which can be a problem as I tend to take a long time (30-45 minutes) due to being less sensitive from circumcision.  I’ve tried lubricant, oral sex, cowgirl position to allow her control (but she prefers doggy style), long massages to relax her, etc but nothing works.  I cannot discuss this with her because she’s a bit shy about it (we live in an Asian country).  Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

It sounds to me as though your lady has a physical problem of some sort.  Human sexual anatomy, especially female anatomy, is complex and there are any number of minor issues which might not be noticeable to her outside of intercourse.  What she needs is to take the problem to her gynecologist; I understand this may be difficult for you to bring up to her and equally difficult for her to admit to the doctor, but if she becomes aroused and has no psychological aversion to sex, it’s almost certainly something physical and a doctor may be able to help her clear it up.  Some young women never visit a gynecologist until they become pregnant; if your girlfriend is among them, she might seek a referral from her mother or an older sister or friend rather than just picking one blindly (assuming one is allowed to choose one’s own physician in your country).

Even after her problem is overcome, though, I need to tell you that 30-45 minutes of intercourse is excessive for most women.  Men hear or read that women like sex to last a long time and think that means we want to be pounded for hours; with rare exception, that simply isn’t true.  For women, “sex” means the whole experience, not just intercourse; when we say we want it to last a long time we mean a long time from going into the bedroom to leaving it again, NOT a long time between penis entering vagina and being withdrawn again.  For most women, five to ten minutes of actual rooting is plenty, and the longest preference any woman has ever expressed within my hearing was about twenty minutes.  Even experienced ladies like me tend to start getting raw after that, and exceeding a woman’s comfort threshold can become very painful very quickly; the body just wasn’t designed to take more than about 20 minutes of intercourse because it’s already 2-5x longer than most men need.

Your difficulty in climaxing in a timely fashion has nothing to do with your being circumcised; 95% of the men I’ve been with were circumcised and had no such problem.  It could be some physical abnormality, but in my experience most such issues in men are psychological rather than physical.  Men often worry so much about finishing “too fast” that they go exactly the opposite way, which causes just as many (if not more) problems than premature ejaculation.  So while your lady is checking with her doctor, you also need to work on focusing your attention during intercourse on what you’re doing rather than anything else, and recognizing that she sincerely means it when she tells you it’s better for her if you finish quickly.

A few nights ago I was taking a long walk through a poor neighborhood when a homeless young woman (early 20s) asked me for spare change.  I very often give $5-$10 to homeless people, but I had no cash and so couldn’t help her.  Walking away, I wondered if she would sell sex (I could have gone to an ATM).  The most I could have offered her would have been about $50 US.  It’s a fantasy of mine to hire a real escort, but if this young woman had agreed I would have felt shabby, and worse, exploitative. This puzzles me because in principle it’s the same as any other sex work, which I have never thought of as being demeaning to the worker or a matter of shame for the john.  Perhaps you can untangle this for me.

It’s difficult for even the most freethinking individual to escape influence from the culture in which he is embedded.  You hear all the time nowadays that for a man to hire a woman for sex is “exploitation”, and even if you don’t believe that consciously it’s hard to shake completely.  Add to that your natural generosity (which might unconsciously rebel at the thought of attaching “strings” to your charity) and the fact that since she didn’t suggest sex first, you might feel like a cad for “tempting” her into doing something “wrong” (cultural influence again) with the lure of money.

From a practical standpoint, it’s probably a bad idea for a man to be the one who suggests a commercial sex transaction to a woman he isn’t absolutely sure is a professional; you don’t want to insult her, and if she’s never done it before and ends up hating herself for it, it’s much better for all involved if it was her idea rather than someone else’s.

One Year Ago Today

“A Manufactured War” demonstrates that CNN’s participation in the promotion of “sex trafficking” hysteria is only the latest example of the tradition of “yellow journalism” started in the last few decades of the 19th century by people like William Randolph Hearst.