The New Naked: The Ultimate Sex Education for Grown-Ups (10 page)

Have you watched people walk down the street in a big city lately? Are they striding confidently, heads held high, eyes on the horizon? Nope. Their heads are all bent down as they check their email and surf the Internet. Do they look strong, confident, sexy, and attractive? Nope. They look miserable, squinting with concentration as they peer at that all-too-important tiny, glowing screen for the latest text or email that, let’s face it, can wait 99.9 percent of the time. I think the only people truly ecstatic about
this terrible posture are the chiropractors and massage therapists hired to treat it.

In a few short years, our lives have become dominated by digital technology. As soon as the phone or computer or tablet chirps or beeps or otherwise lets us know that someone or something has communicated, we jump. I’ve had patients in my office who can’t tear their eyes off their smartphones. At the risk of sounding old school, I’ve been at intimate dinner parties where people are so astonishingly rude that they answer a call in the middle of the salad course.

I’ve been disturbed in the theater and at the movies by people turning on their phones in the dark. I’ve had phone conversations where I can hear the surreptitious tap-tap-tap of a keyboard when I’m trying to make an important point. It’s maddening, and it’s not helping us have better lives, especially not better sex lives. In fact, a June 2013 survey by Harris Interactive found that nearly 20 percent of Americans age eighteen to thirty-four use their smartphones during sex, and nearly one in ten American adults overall uses them during sex. The survey didn’t ask what the phones were used for. Porn viewing, maybe? Email checking, just as likely.

I find that absolutely astonishing—and terrifying. Who wants to make love to a phone? What kind of foreplay are you having if your partner is constantly on the phone or glued to a computer? How can he be “there” with you if his mind is elsewhere? It’s impossible to be in the moment, right there with a real person, when you’re tethered to virtual reality.

My advice is to set up bedroom rules for all digital devices. Whatever you do, keep them out of the bedroom when you’re having sex. If you must use them during the rest of your quality
time together, use them to engage the other person, such as sending a sexy text or showing a cute picture that will make him or her smile or laugh. Ultimately, turning your devices off will help turn you on.

In
Lesson 1
, I talked about how masturbation can wreak havoc on a man’s ability to have a great sexual relationship with his partner, as well as the emotional issues behind performance anxiety. In this lesson, I’m going to tell you more about the physiological reasons for bad sex. I know how much misinformation is out there and believed even by educated and savvy adults, so it’s time to get educated!

When you’re thinking about what a penis is and how it works, picture a tire. Yes, a
tire
, like one of the four on your car wheels. The inner tube of a tire is like the inner workings of the penis. The rubber skin on the tire is like the penis’s skin. You have to fill the inner tube to get a tire to inflate. The tubing of the air pump at the gas station that will fill the inner tube is the equivalent of a man’s blood vessels around his penis, and the pump itself is similar to his heart.

That’s an important fact to know. When a man becomes
aroused, nerve signals trigger the release of a gas called nitric oxide, which then allows the arteries feeding the penis to open the floodgates and let the blood pump in. A normal erection will last as long as a man is sexually stimulated, or until he reaches orgasm. Then the reverse effect takes place and the blood drains out.

Erections are vital for a penis to stay healthy. When a man is just going about his business, his flaccid penis gets hardly any blood flow. That’s a good thing because otherwise he’d be walking around with a permanent hard-on, which wouldn’t be good for anyone. But a flaccid penis can’t get the oxygen it needs on its own to keep its tissues healthy. The surge of blood during an erection supplies that vital element and also helps remove metabolic waste products that may have collected there.

And you thought his erections were just about sex! Cut your partner some slack when he has erections in his sleep. It’s not because he’s dreaming of Victoria’s Secret models. It’s his body doing what it needs to do to keep his penis healthy and functional.

Everything in our body is connected to something else, so problems with a penis aren’t necessarily
in
the penis. They can be anywhere. If something is going on with the pump (the heart), such as high blood pressure or heart disease, the penis won’t get enough blood and any prospects of sex will go limp, literally. The body needs the pump to pump properly. Gotta have a good heart to have good sex!

You may also be surprised to know that the female anatomy is the same as the male anatomy. The clitoris has the same structure as the penis. It also needs the heart working properly so that blood flow is sufficient for you to have an orgasm. What this means is that men need to have a healthy cardiovascular system for optimal sexual
health—and women do, too. (And yes, this means that if you don’t get any exercise or need to lose weight, now is the time to start!)

Let’s look at some interesting details about the penis.

I get asked this all the time. Contrary to the implications of the slang term “boner,” the penis doesn’t contain a bone—so technically speaking, there’s nothing to “break,” even though an erection feels fairly hard. However, the outermost layer of the penis (just below the skin) is loaded with ligament-like tissue that can get bent during sex, perhaps during a particularly strenuous session or simply by somebody shifting positions at precisely the wrong moment. This can result in excruciating pain. Doctors refer to the injury as a “fracture” (for expediency, I guess), but it’s really a serious strain or tearing of the outermost penile tissue.

If this happens to your guy, get him to a urologist as soon as possible. The penis might seem to heal on its own, but scar tissue can occur, leading to what’s called Peyronie’s disease. This is a condition in which the penis has a bend or a severe curvature when it’s erect. Peyronie’s disease can be very painful and make sex very difficult, and it needs medical attention from a urologist because it can’t be fixed on its own.

The penis-size topic comes up with such devastating frequency that I wrote a book about men and their penises called
Size Matters:
The Hard Facts about Male Sexuality That Every Woman Should Know
. There is huge variation in penis and testicle size, and men should be reassured to know that even if they worry that they’re too small—which nearly all men do, even those who are visibly well-endowed—most are absolutely average in size.

Men don’t usually believe this fact, but bigger is not necessarily better when it comes to an erect penis. A normal adult penis is about three inches long when flaccid and between four and a half and six and a half inches long when erect. The overwhelming majority of men fit into this range, which is good because a penis of that size fits best into the average vagina.

A penis longer than six inches can thrust into a cervix, and that can hurt. But more importantly, only the outer third of a vagina is laden with pleasure-producing nerves, and as you know, your clitoris is outside your vagina. So, even a man with a tiny flute can make a woman very happy if he knows how to play it properly. Since the source of most women’s orgasms is the clitoris, your partner may need to directly stimulate you there (and you can help him out).

Trust me, if a man concentrates on foreplay instead of penis insecurities, size will
not
matter. Make that clear to him if your orgasms aren’t proof enough! You can also help by telling him how much you love his penis, just the way it is. It’s part of him and you adore every bit of him. Repeat this often enough so that he believes you, because this topic can bring out the worst of a man’s insecurities.

You might also want to tell him that in a study done in 2005
and reported in the
Journal of Urology
, ninety-two men who’d come to a hospital clinic convinced that they had a “small-sized penis” were evaluated by researchers. Not one of them was actually “small.” They were all perfectly average and perfectly normal. The men just thought they were small, and once they were told by researchers to stop worrying, they did!

Are larger or taller guys naturally more well-endowed? That’s another question that I frequently hear. My answer is always the same: A man shouldn’t worry about his height correlating to his penis size because that’s a myth. All of the scientific studies about penis size I’ve ever read (and that’s been a lot of reading over the years!) found
no
correlation between a guy’s height or build and the size of his penis.

In Masters and Johnson’s classic studies, the largest penis of the 312 men was about five and a half inches long when flaccid and it was hung on a guy who was 5'7" and weighed 152 pounds. The smallest penis, measuring just two and a half inches when flaccid, was on a guy who was 5'11" and weighed 178 pounds. You’d have thought those statistics would have been reversed!

I’ve often seen ads in men’s magazines, usually with a handsome, smiling man and lots of exclamation marks, telling men that yes, they can increase their penis size. Sometimes, patients even bring in these ads and look at me hopefully. I hate to tell them the truth. In fact, I can’t tell you how many men have fallen for this age-old scam, and it’s time we set the record straight. Sadly, no, you
can’t
make your penis longer than what your genes and Mother Nature have endowed you with.

Various vacuum devices can produce an artificial erection, but they can’t make the penis “bigger.” However, they can make a man suffer tremendously because excessive use can leave blood trapped in the penis, leading to gangrene and even death…and that is not the way any man wants to go.

There is also a surgical procedure that can increase the apparent length of the penis by snipping the suspending ligaments. This lets a flaccid penis hang lower, providing an illusion of greater length, but this leads to a floppier penis when erect, so I rarely recommend this be done. Instead, I explain that a man’s penis is as unique to him as the shape of his eyebrows or the color of his hair (or, depending on his age, however much hair he still has!).

However, the width of a penis can be increased by increasing the blood flow to it (which is what Viagra and other drugs do)—and this is what women really want. A small penis that is fully engorged tends to be much more satisfying, as most of the sensory nerve fibers in the vagina are found right as you enter the vagina or about an inch inward. A well-rounded penis is going to provide more stimulation there than a long, skinny penis (or what
one female friend referred to as a “pencil dick”). The other thing a man can do, of course, is become such a skillful lover—making it clear that he knows that sex is not just about the penis and the vagina—that size is not even thought of as an issue.