Premature ejaculation

Go, go, go! Said the bird,

Human kind cannot bear very much reality


This subject has been on my mind for a long time.

When you check out, in this utterly benighted world we inhabit in relation to all things sexual, what is meant by “premature ejaculation”, you will read that it is an “inability to control male orgasm” (as if it should be controlled) or a “persistent tendency to climax within a timeframe subjectively perceived as too rapid” (I paraphrase but that’s the sense, or should I say the thrust ;-))

Apparently, according to one source, 30-40% of men suffer from this problem (what the others suffer from we are not told, but I have my ideas about it).

I doubt these sufferers find the advice they are given very helpful. Though certainly “relaxing” must have something to do with it.

What is particularly bemusing to me about this and numerous other problems of daily life, is how much we know about it and yet how confused and confusing is the advice that we are given from apparently authoritative sources.

As we well know from Reich, and as any conscious self-examination (if you have the problem) will quickly reveal, premature ejaculation is the result of a stasis of sexual energy within the pelvic musculature. As excitement builds, this musculature, which is armored to resist excitement, cannot contain the energy for very long. It is a shallow vessel, and it quickly overflows.

Endeavoring to desensitize the penis is a perverse response, though many men (from early childhood) have done so very comprehensively. What is needed, clearly, is to resensitize the rest of the body so that its capacity for pleasure is considerably increased.

The healthy state of man should be that energy can flow throughout (and indeed beyond) the body, as the various elements of the muscular system communicate syntonically and somatic innervation proceeds freely.

Why does the musculature develop armoring and prevent this flow occurring?

Well, T.S. Eliot has answered that question in the poem from which the quotation at the top of this posting is drawn.

I do not particularly think I “suffer” from the condition of “premature ejaculation” taken literally. Though this is an entirely subjective assessment. But this “condition” is, I am afraid, only the tip of a very frozen iceberg. The reality of the whole human race – regardless of whether individuals within it experience one or other sexual dysfunction – is that it has a very limited capacity for pleasure, much less ecstasy.

This is why enlightenment is such a distant goal.

The repression of the capacity for pleasure starts in early childhood and is reinforced throughout the child’s and young adult’s formative years. Experiencing pleasure brings us into conflict with too much else in our environment and places us in a dangerous state of dissociation from the body politic. The power of ecstatic humanity is hardly something to be tolerated by brutalized society. It must be crucified – and invariably it is.

Yet the quest for ecstasy – mankind’s spiritual quest – is universal. It proceeds from the Unconscious and is the deep nature of the sexual drive.

Freud teaches that this drive takes a mental form which is a function of experience, and that most of these mental derivates of the drive go on to be equally repressed. Compulsive behavior develops from an association of certain practices with indirect drive satisfaction in the past, even if those practices no longer provide satisfaction in the present. The drive, nonetheless, persists; ecstasy is never banished; it cannot be banished because it is pre-mental in nature. It creates, however, a state of tension when its flow is impeded; and it is this state of tension which we seek to dissipate because we find it uncomfortable.

My experience is that this is certainly not limited to sexual situations. There is a constant process of rise and fall in the level of ecstatic energy in my body; when it increases beyond a certain threshold, irresistible behavioral scripts kick in to ensure its discharge. There is an incapacity to allow this energy to flow into the directions it should naturally take: ecstasy, and compassion. Instead the result is an emotional, lustless quagmire: neurasthenia.

It is easy to see that this ebb and flow of vital energy is a precise counterpart to, and indeed identical with, premature ejaculation. It is inconceivable to me that the sexual issue could be validly addressed in any other way than by increasing the capacity of the entire organism for pleasure in every moment of life.

A momentous but unavoidable program with huge social ramifications. Perhaps I will be the next martyr. In many ways I already am. We all are. But I will not give up.