You are mature when you are ready to leave the realm of ‘solitary pleasure’

Dear Eppy,

I am a 25-year-old now male. I had never had sex with anyone else in my whole life. But I do masturbate frequently. During this activity, I realize that I ejaculate very fast. I sometimes ejaculate in less than three minutes. Please, does this mean I will be having premature ejaculation problems when it comes to real sexual intercourse?

Worried Tom

Dear Worried Tom,

In the book Synopsis of Psychiatry by Kaplan and Sadock, premature ejaculation is only described in connection to the activity of sexual intercourse with a partner. Premature ejaculation was not described in connection to the activity of masturbation. The book implied that the “timing” of ejaculation becomes a problem only if the ejaculation does not satisfy the man and the woman in sexual intercourse. Therefore, if you masturbate and you have an ejaculation after 15 seconds, then it isn’t considered premature ejaculation because you have satisfied your goal of reaching the point of pleasure.

Did you know that it is normal for males to have quick ejaculation? Jannini, Simonelli, and Lenzi in their article, “Sexological Approach to Ejaculatory Dysfunction” published by International Journal of Andrology, explain that the male genital is designed to ejaculate quickly to deposit semen as quickly as possible into the female. This is supposedly how animals are designed. But because men aim to derive pleasure, they learned to control ejaculation.

Premature ejaculation is a problem only when two people are involved. When a person goes through life normally there is no way but for that person to mature. The sign of maturity is when you are ready to leave the realm of “solitary pleasure.” Maturity makes you want to derive from and share pleasure with another human being. Traditionally, the other human being is a female.

Interacting sexually with another human being means two people should enjoy the activity and derive pleasure from it together. If the man ejaculates even before he penetrates the genital of the woman, then we have two people not finding pleasure in the activity. Now, we have a problem called premature ejaculation. It also becomes a problem because if the male ejaculates outside of the vagina then semen was not able to get into the female genital, which stops reproduction.

To go back to your problem, at this moment I don’t think you need to be concerned about premature ejaculation yet because you did not say that you ejaculate even if you didn’t want to. You have never had sex with anyone. It is different when you’re in front of a partner because you will have to focus on someone else during sex. In masturbation, you only have to focus on deriving pleasure for yourself.

However, to help you determine if you have premature ejaculation problems, consider the following:

a) Did you finish college or beyond that (such as a master’s or Ph.D.)? Premature ejaculation is mostly seen in men who are college-educated. It seems that men with lesser education do not have this condition as a problem as much as educated men. Kaplan and Sadock think that a possible explanation is that these educated men are too concerned about satisfying pleasure in their partners. However, this is just an opinion.

Men with premature ejaculation, most of the time, achieve orgasm and ejaculation before they wish to.

b) Do you have other sexual disorders? Thirty five to 40 percent of men with other sexual disorders have premature ejaculation as a main complaint.

c) Men whose first sexual contact or whose sexual exploits were such that they had to reach climax quickly may experience premature ejaculation. For example, they could be peeping through a window while masturbating. The concern of being caught hurries them to ejaculate quickly. Another example is having sex with girls with low sexual impulse control because you will have to have sex in places where you can be caught. For example, having sex inside the car.

However, if you do have premature ejaculation problems, there are many researches about premature ejaculation showing that there is a cure for this condition. For example, in the study entitled, “Silodosin and its potential for treating premature ejaculation: A preliminary report,” published in the International Journal of Urology, it seems that silodosin was able to help men with premature ejaculation by extending time before ejaculation occurs.

In this study, using eight patients, silodosin was administered two hours before sexual intercourse. All eight patients reported that their premature ejaculation concerns had lessened. Meaning, ejaculation was suppressed for a longer time than when they were not given silodosin. EPPY

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E-mail: eppygochangco@gmail.com.