Go figure

I spend hours weekly trying to improve ‘my craft’ by reading, studying or attending workshops in my chosen profession of a sex therapist.  One timeless text I’ve been reading isBernie Zilbergeld’s The New Male Sexuality.  As I reflect on Bernie’s writings and the latest rush of clients that have passed my threshold seeking relief for what sexually ails them, one concern that comes [no pun intended] up [again, no pun intended] is that of sexual compatibility between men and women.  Let’s take a minute or ten and think this through.

Zilbergeld claimed there were a minimum of three anchor points that males are taught regarding their sexuality – that it should be private, secret and above all else impersonal. As boys we receive clear cultural messages that masturbation is normal for us even though we are never encouraged to discuss our self-pleasuring escapades, thus, we learn at an early age that sex [as described as erection and ejaculation] is not based on relationships.  We are encouraged by our peers, family members, friends and social media that as a man – we should sow our wild oats.  It becomes all about the numbers and performance [another problem I will address in a later Blog].  Most of us hit the masturbatory trail at puberty and again for most – always know where and how to return to that path regardless of our age or position in our relationships.  Yes, please read between the lines, most of us never stop masturbating our entire lives and it happens all the time in committed relationships.  I remember reading some research findings not long ago that stated that men in committed relationships tend to masturbate more often than those single people…Go Figure.

So let us Go Figure…why do you think that is?  This question also brings me back to the therapeutic office where the wife is complaining that she does not understand how her husband can think of anyone but her during their sexual interludes.  Let me restate one perspective, boys have received cultural messages that it is ‘ok’ to masturbate to images found in magazines, movies and the Internet.  They learn to self-pleasure as they reach puberty and continually reinforce this behavior with secret, private and impersonal images of those they do not know or if they do know – do not necessarily have any emotional connection with that person.  So here is this young boy finding sexual pleasure in the images he has been exposed to for years and years and the fantasies he has created within his own mind – this is how he has been introduced and indoctrinated into his sexuality. 

Conversely, the women did not receive those same messages but ones that link sexual activity with emotional and relationship stability with one person.  Eventually, when they come together [they wish – and again no pun intended] as a couple – somehow there is supposed to be these magical transformations [mixing oil & water] where his sexual desires and satisfactions will now focus solely on just her, leaving behind forever the multitude of impersonal, secretive and private images of his past that had been reinforced for years…Go Figure!...again remind me, how is this to happen?

Now at this point some of you will vehemently deny that you support such a notion of sexuality and certainly are not promoting these kinds of behavior.  To drive home my point, I want to share a statistic I picked a few years ago at a presentation by Stefanie Carnes [daughter of Patrick Carnes famous for his work – Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction] had made to a group of Mental Health Professionals interested in learning about sexual addiction/compulsivity.  She presented a slide titled – Number of Porn Pages by Country – the top five countries included Japan [5] with 2.7 million pages; Australia [4] with 5.7 million pages; United Kingdom [3] with 8.5 million pages; Germany [2] with 10 million pages; and topping out the number one spot was the United States standing like a giant above the rest with 245 million pages.  In spite of that number being the staggering one that it is, another point comes to mind living in the capitalistic society that we do.  From a production and inventory capacity we are creating a huge amount of product that will need to be consumed…and what better way to create the demand for the supply than to prime our males with the desire and want for these private, secret and certainly impersonal images, thus, continually developing our boys to men along the lines Zilbergeld discovered almost two decades ago. 

As men, as a society, as a culture we need to break this pattern so that our sons and daughters can enter sexual relations with realistic and emotionally and relation-ally aligned expectations.  It’s all about choices and attitudes…Go Figure!

Ready to change your attitude about sex and life, visit the Contact page on my website, SexHealthDoc.com!  I see clients in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and via the internet.  

History - Even a Sexual One Has a Way of Repeating Itself

Some years ago I was listening to a member of the graduating class of the Liberal Arts University I attended deliver her commencement address. This wonderful young lady gave such a moving and memorable speech.  The part that stood out for me most was the following line: “We learn so much about history but we never seem to learn from it!”  These prophetic words would visit me time and time again.  Much has been said and written about sex and yet we do not seem to learn from it. 

What I see lacking many times is the motivation to change.  I apologize ahead of time for using a mechanistic analogy but many times I can explain to an individual or couple how the sex “engine” operates but that does not change its function.  In other words, just knowing you have 6-cylinder does not change into a V-8.  So the real question we need to continually ask ourselves is how we can learn from what we know about sex? 

The Beiter Sexual Preference Indicator, BSPI tells us that women and men do take up their sexuality differently.  Men appear to be more restrictive in their sexual expression while woman appear to be more variable.  The cultural messages for both men and women differ and that would help answer the difference.  As I think about it from a male perspective, I am reminded that many men were introduced into their sexuality around three common themes: secrecy, privacy and impersonal. 

For many of us our first exposure to the sexual in life was through printed images be they paper or videotape, that is through magazines or movies.  There was usually no dialogue going on with anyone when were first exposed – no pun intended.  No one sat me down and said, “ok, here is what is going on and what you are most likely to experience physically and emotionally and sexually.”  It was a private moment and a secret one and we typically do not know the person we are being exposed to – pun intended.  Even if our masturbatory trail was discovered, i.e. wet dreams, dried semen on sheets, towels, t-shirts, etc. nothing was usually said, thus, enforcing a code of secrecy and privacy.  Now let us add on top of this scenario, years of conditioning that is self-pleasuring to the point of orgasm without an emotional or intimate connection to anyone and what do you think we get?  Now try and couple this with an individual who has been “conditioned” to think that sex is special and should be reserved for that one special person whom you plan on establishing a long term relationship with and the result is – no surprise - sexual dysfunction or an inability to connect.  However, for many there is a surprise and once again I want to remind you that we need to go back to my original point that we have learned much “about” but little “from” and in my mind – no wonder!

How do we connect two people with such dissimilar backgrounds and foundational sexual messages?  I assure you, the expectations are real and sometimes seem almost surreal.  Think about how males are conditioned to expect and associate pleasure from impersonal connections with images of individuals they do not know and how this has spawned and daily feeds the flourishing phenomenon of Internet porn compulsive behaviors.  We now know that exposing very young males to pornographic images as a means of educating them around their sexuality has life-long and sometimes devastating consequences. 

I see it every week in my clinical practice.  A wife discovers – through the history function of the family computer – her husband surfing the Internet looking at pornographic images at night after she falls asleep and he is reprimanded into therapy because he has betrayed the trust in their marital relationship.  When asked if he would be there [in therapy] if he had not been caught – the answer is always “no”.  Typically, the only thing he sees “wrong” is that he got caught and that she is emotionally upset, but he does not rest the status of the relationship as having had an affair.  Often for him it was no different than what he has been conditioned to do when he feels “sexual” and that is go into private, secret and impersonal mode.  Does it mean that he is dissatisfied with his sexual relationship with his partner sometimes yes and more often “no”. 

Unfortunately, it takes events of these magnitudes to start the often, continued awkward dialogues around sexuality and to go even further around what arouses us to the point of distraction.  Does it not seem obvious that we could save ourselves a whole lot of grief and aggravation if we would just start educating everyone earlier with clear and consistent messages about human sexuality?  

Want to talk?  Visit the Contact page at SexHealthDoc.com.

Hardwired or Conditioned?

A little ‘aha’ moment of mine.  As a boy, I was raised/conditioned to keep my emotions in check.  Basically, as males we are taught to avoid being emotionally vulnerable in any relationship.  We receive continual reinforcement to keep tears away, private or deny them completely, probably by age 10.  We are taught to ‘hang tough’, ‘take it on the chin’, ‘rub dirt on it’, etc. 

Vulnerability is not an option for most males or so we are lead to believe.  As a result, we typically build elaborate cognitive labyrinths to keep any emotions from seeping through.  This means we are implicitly lead to enter into relationships armed with this way of being – i.e. not feeling with our partners.  Many male therapy patients have stated such when reporting past successes when they really did not “feel” anything for their partner, or in other words were emotionally disconnected. 

The problem emerging for some men is when they truly do start to “feel” or become emotionally connected and/or vulnerable when getting intimately close to their current partner.  Anxiety levels spike as one feels emotionally vulnerable in ways that he typically cannot explain and had previously alienated himself from feeling.  As anxiety rises to the North – arousal and along with it erection usually heads for the Deep South.  Let me point out that my professional opinion about erectile dysfunction is that it is usually mislabeled.  If you have received a thorough examination from a competent urologist and you are able to masturbate without issue then guess what – the erection is working as it should or should not…where the problem becomes evident is when another person enters the picture – that is when the relationship with the ‘other’ becomes dysfunctional and not the penis.

The question remains is how do we educate/condition our males to permit a healthy exposure to becoming more accepting of vulnerability – emotional or otherwise?  Fathers have to teach their sons [what some if not most men do not even have a clue as to how] and we need to learn as a society to value emotions in all there wonderful variations and not limit them to a handful.   Just like the push in recent years has been to accept diversity, we need to do the same for the acceptance of and embracing of emotional diversity.

Connect with me by visiting the contact page at SexHealthDoc.com