Performance anxiety - lack of erection, premature ejaculation, and delayed ejaculation.
The social pressure has always been on men to perform, to " lead" sex from start to finish, including "giving" the woman an orgasm somewhere en route. This produces performance anxiety which can disrupt sex. And most men still feel some anxiety when it comes to sex with a new partner. There are many ways this can show itself, but three of the most common are lack of erection, premature ejaculation, and delayed ejaculation.
Lack of erection
We've all been there, without any doubt: the moment where you're in bed with a woman offering you sex, but unfortunately your penis is resolutely soft and there's no sign of an erection anywhere. Why does this happen? First of all, we men are under pressure to perform. After all, we tend to think that sex cannot happen without an erection, so sex must depend on us (or rather our cocks) being hard, upstanding and ready. But this discounts the possibility of mutual masturbation, finger penetration, oral sex and simple skin-to-skin intimacy, all of which are forms of sexual behavior.
Second, our self-esteem may rest on our ability to get an erection on demand: if a man's penis remains soft when a woman wants sex, it means he's less of a man - or at least, we seem to assume it does. And yet, statistics show that not getting hard happens on average one time in every five sexual encounters. With such a high rate of non-erection, how can a guy's failure to get hard possibly mean anything about his manliness?
Third, there's an idea created by the tabloid press and magazines, and indeed popular culture in general, that real men can service a woman on demand every time she wants sex. So if you don't live up to this image of maleness as presented in popular culture, once again you're less of a man, aren't you? The paradox is most women define manliness by virtues other than the hardness of a guy's erection: strength, tenderness, consistency, compassion, clarity and directness being just some of these qualities.
The simple fact is that this fear of inadequacy or performance anxiety is the greatest emotional problem in effective sexual functioning. (There are some other, physical, reasons for not getting hard, like diabetes damaging the nerve cells and cholesterol clogging up the arteries of the penis.) The way it works is this: you feel anxious, and you detach from what's happening. Instead of being right there, in the experience, it's almost as if you're watching it, evaluating and observing it with a critical eye. Fear of failure crowds out the sensual pleasure you could be getting from sex, and without any sense of sexual pleasure or arousal, your anxiety grows, your erection can't happen, and you then get into a cycle of negative expectation ("I'll never be hard again, so I won't even try to have sex...")
From recent times right back to the 1950's, sex therapists helped their clients overcome performance anxiety with a technique called Sensate Focus, a process about getting back in touch with yourself - quite literally. It means losing the pressure of the expectations around sex by agreeing with your partner that for a couple of weeks, you'll enjoy touching and caressing, but you quite definitely won't be sexual. This allows the partners to recapture the sensuous experience of touching each other without any suggestion of sexual expectations, and to overcome any fear of intimacy that may have developed after an erection didn't appear on demand. The partners take turns to give and receive touch, focusing on being right there in the moment, not emotionally detached and watching what's happening from some higher psychological viewpoint. If you want to know more about sensate focus, you can find it on Staying-power.com. This bills itself as a website that tells you all you need to know about curing premature ejaculation: and that's probably true, by the way, but it also includes a detailed description of how sensate focus works and how to do it (I know this because I own the website).
More recently, though, sexual therapists have seen the advent of Viagra and other drug-related answers to the problems of performance anxiety. I believe Viagra can be a great help in cases of loss of confidence, since it promotes a hard erection and allows a guy to get his confidence back. I've certainly seen it help several guys.
There's more to curing performance anxiety than taking Viagra, though. For one thing, every guy has bouts of sexual anxiety at some point in his sexual career without finding his prick subsequently wilting every time he has sex. To cut a long story short, therapists now believe that a soft penis may be telling its owner something important. Sexual therapists report that a limp penis seems very often to be associated with five major life changes: a relationship that's going off track, divorce or separation, death of a spouse or partner, employment problems, and poor health in oneself or one's partner. The last four are obvious, but the first one may be significant - if you're with a partner and none of the other factors apply, and you're not tired or stressed, maybe the message your penis is giving you is that your relationship is past its sell-by date.
In some cases the relationship never reached its best-before date; in fact it should never have been a relationship at all. A colleague who works with teenagers finds guys of 15 or 16 coming to him saying "I was with a girl I really liked, and I was really turned on, but when we started to have sex I just couldn't get it up". He thinks many of these guys should still be playing with their skateboards; they're just too young to be having sex, or deep down they know they don't like the girl they're with. In short, he says, you can try and fool yourself, but the penis never lies.
Another thing you might care to keep in mind is that giving too much to your partner (as opposed to focusing on your own pleasure) can be bad for your sexual performance. You have to have a certain amount of selfishness to get highly aroused, and if you're highly aroused your partner will be too. Spending too much time thinking about her will not help you; so if you're having erectile problems, you might want to be a bit more selfish in getting your needs met.
Premature ejaculation
An ignominious problem, indeed, for many of the same reasons that I mentioned above - pressure on men to perform, social expectations, and fear of failure. This time, though, your penis stays hard but you shoot your load far too early for either you or her to be really satisfied.
But quick coming isn't just caused by anxiety, of course. Among young men, premature ejaculation is so common that it's normal. And in our animal ancestry quick ejaculation made good sense - it stopped our ancestors being caught with their pants down, so to speak, by a bigger, more powerful male rival while all their attention was on the pleasures of reproduction. Sad for us that we've inherited this tendency to rapid ejaculation.
There are basically two methods to use at home for curing your tendency to ejaculate quickly, both of which depend on lessening your sensitivity to sexual stimulation. In the first, you get aroused by masturbation, then when you feel you are about to come, you stop stimulating yourself and wait till your arousal has dropped. In the other, your partner gives you a firm squeeze just underneath the coronal rim of your glans till you're less excited. It's not a method I recommend.
Failing that, go to your doctor and ask him if he knows about anti-depressants and ejaculation. That's not because premature ejaculation will make you depressed, though it may do, but because SRI drugs given out for depression slow down the sexual responses. he might be willing to help you if he's fully informed about how the drugs can help.
Delayed ejaculation - or inability to ejaculate at all
This might sound delightful to you, especially if you're a premature ejaculator, but to a guy who can't ejaculate during sex it's not a bonus in any way at all. The way it happens is this: some men find they just can't come, even though they have rock hard erections and they pound away for....well....for ever, really. Some may be able to ejaculate with a good hard hand-job, but some just can't come at all. This is anorgasmia, the inability to reach orgasm.
Like everything about human sexuality, it isn't a simple problem. For one thing, it's several problems which look similar. But for some men, the problem only occurs with their long-term partner; if they have an affair, they can come normally. For others, the problem is not partner-specific. Generally, sexual therapists think that there's a big emotional aspect to this, of which the man concerned is often very unaware. It comes down to his attitude to women in general or his partner in particular.
According to Bernard Apfelbaum, an experienced sex therapist, partner-specific anorgasmia is (at least sometimes) a sign that a man either dislikes, or resents, or feels hostile towards, or has emotionally rejected his partner, or that he does not wish to impregnate her, or that he wishes to deny her the pleasure of seeing him achieve orgasm through intercourse. He says they are encouraged to think that they should fulfill their wives' expectation of successful intercourse no matter what the reason they can't come, and that they should be more giving - even to the extent, presumably, of giving their semen to their wife when they don't want to...
What's more, men in this position often seem compelled to try and satisfy their partner, even when they don't experience her presence or touch as sexy or stimulating. Apfelbaum summed it up like this: "In all my cases, the retarded ejaculator is a classic example of the partner who is unable to take, to be selfish, or...to be responsible for his own satisfaction. It is only when alone that he can enjoy his own sensations without worrying about the partner's satisfaction....He is the workhorse of sex...doing the work of 10."
Needless to say, if this is true, it means there is a lot of hidden anger and a lot of guilt floating around somewhere in the relationship. And a man who feels guilty because he cannot orgasm may at some level believe his orgasm is designed to fulfill the woman's needs and desires rather than his own. So what it may come down to, then, is that a man who experiences anorgasmia is not sexually aroused or excited by his partner, but he is still able, for some reason as yet unclear, to get an erection, penetrate and thrust away for long periods. Yet at the same time he isn't "with" his partner, and he's certainly not joined in an act of sexual union. He feels responsible for her pleasure, while resenting the responsibility or feeling angry about her sexual dependence on him, and he withholds his full participation in sex from her as an expression of his anger.