What Happens To Your Body During Sex

Just like you can’t build a better vocabulary without knowing the difference between a vowel and a consonant, you can’t build a better sex life unless you know the difference between the prostate and erectile tissue.

Understanding your sexual system will improve your love life because if you know what’s going on then you’ll know how to make it better. For instance, if you know that muscle contractions are the main source of orgasmic pleasure, then you can find out which muscles to exercise to make those orgasms more powerful.

If you know that the plateau stage is where most sexual activity takes place, then knowing how to stay there will help you last longer in bed. Being aware of your body can help you determine when and if you should go to the doctor and what to ask him or her when you get there.

It’ll also help you understand their answers better. Better yet, it can alleviate the embarrassment you might have about your genitals. It helps to know you’re not the only one with a curved penis, for example.

Knowledge can also heal sexual embarrassment by throwing daylight on the myths that darken your self-esteem. Are you feeling inadequate about the size of your penis because you ‘know’ the average is 6 inches? Well, it isn’t.

Knowledge has the power to educate, illuminate and enlighten. So onward! Or inward! Or outward!

The most astounding thing about men and women is  that despite how differently we look, our bodies are mirror images of each other. Males and females start out as identical blobs of tissue when the sperm enters the egg. Even with ultrasound, you can’t tell the difference between male and female babies until the 15th week of pregnancy.

The same tissue that turns ovaries in women turns into testicles for men. The same tissue that forms vaginal lips in women forms scrotal sacs in bed. The same tissue that turns into a penis in men turns into a clitoris for women. In fact both the penis and clitoris have a glans and a shaft and become engorged with blood when sexually stimulated. So much for penis envy.

Although there are major differences in the way we experience sex, the journey is remarkably similar. Almost all men and women go through a four-step sexual response cycle. Five if your partner lets you roll over and sleep.

Arousal

Sex starts with seeing, thinking, touching, smelling or fantasizing about something or someone that turns you on. A new Mercedes, maybe. A guy who makes the sky long for the blue of his eyes, or a guy who makes wilted flowers stand to attention when he walks by.

Extra blood starts pumping to key areas of the body – your genitals, lips, earlobes and other parts. Men get an erection when the two large cylinders of spongy tissue in their penis fills with blood. These cylinders are covered by a tough fibrous sheath and when they fill up with blood they push against this sheath, much the way pumping air into a tire pushes against its rubber walls, creating something strong enough to take a ride on. The muscles in the scrotum contract, moving the testicles up towards your pelvis.

Plateau

In this stage, everything increasingly swells, lifts and darkens. You’re kissing, you’re touching, you’re having a ball. Pleasure fluctuates with highs and lows but never ends. It’s perfectly natural for erections to wax and wane in the plateau stage.

For instance you may lose your erection while going down on a guy even though you love doing it. No worries. All it means is  giving oral sex doesn’t keep you hard. You’ll get it back.

The plateau stage is where most of the manual, oral, and penetrative sex happens. Most people want to establish residency here because it feels too good to leave.

Orgasm

As you advance from the plateau stage the pleasure peaks and then you start gasping toward ejaculatory inevitability– the point where nothing is going to stop your orgasm – – not even your mom walking in on you.

Here’s what happens: everything starts to contract. Your testicles ascend until they press against the wall of the pelvis. The prostate, seminal vesicles and vas deferens squeeze themselves silly, pouring their sperm and seminal fluid like bartenders who can’t keep up with the orders. The head of the penis becomes Deep Purple while the shaft increasingly stiffens. Breathing, blood pressure and heartbeat increase as the total body response to ejaculation takes over.

Involuntary spasms in the legs, feet, toes, stomach, arms and back can take over. The pelvic muscles go through a series of rhythmic contractions, ejaculating semen through the urethra as a series of spurts. And that, in a nutshell, is how every other thought that men have during the day ends at night.

While men go through a refractory period. Women don’t. Women can almost immediately have a second or third or more orgasm, one after the other.

Resolution

You know how everything contracts during orgasm? The opposite happens during the resolution phase.  It’s as if your body got shot to the moon and now it’s gravity’s turn to teach you a lesson.

The blood flows out of the penis and the scrotum descends. Pulse, breathing and blood pressure rates return to normal. As I said earlier women can have another go at sex right away. Men usually can’t as they go through a refractory period in which they can’t get erect.

For some it’s a minute or two; for others a day or two and for most, somewhere in between. By the way just because women can have sex right away doesn’t mean they want to as many find their parts become too sensitive.

At any rate, the tension released by orgasm feels exquisite. That’s why the first letter in orgasm should be spelled ‘Ohhh’.

Men tend to become somewhat catatonic after orgasm. They get drained of glycogen, a vital source for energy.

Resources

The Debut Of Our New Gay Sex Advice Column

If you’re looking for warmth and compassion, you’ve picked the wrong sex column. Try books like Chicken Soup For The Cock.

This is going to be a sex advice column with fangs. It’s a resurrection of an old column I used to write called, Need Wood? Tips for Getting Timber.

Throughout the years I wrote the column I managed to enrage just about every gay group in existence. There’s a reason for that. I make fun of people who aren’t used to being made fun of, I’m judgmental as hell, I leer (if it’s possible to leer in print) and I brag a lot.

Oh, and I give accurate medical advice.

That’s what enraged the critics the most, I think. Yanking threads off the fabric of gay piety would be one thing, but I do more than that. Thanks to my panel of board-certified physicians, therapists, and psychologists, I club my politically correct victims with medical facts, not just common sense. And if there’s one thing that easily offended hate, it’s being clubbed with common sense.

I write this column the way men talk about sex. Brutally, with a sense of entitlement, and a breathtaking gift for the gratuitous insult. Sound familiar? It’s you and your friends at  Brunch.

Smarm Alert!

Gay sex advice, when it’s published at all, has that kind of “everyone is beautiful in his own way” and “isn’t it all wonderful,” Kumbaya hogwash that makes even the biggest dick pigs cough up what they’re swallowing.

At first, it was hard to get papers to carry the column. “It’s too controversial,” said one editor, worried about all the headaches that come with controversy. “Can’t you tone it down?”

Well, no. I offered to throw in a year’s supply of Advil in a bottle of Insta-spine, but he declined. Years later, the column became one of the most successful syndicated properties in the gay press.

You won’t really learn how to be a better lay with this column. I mean, there’s plenty on techniques but that’s not the point of the column. The point is to show the real struggles, the real problems, and our real behavior or rather misbehavior close parent in the face of our all-consuming desire. In other words, this isn’t a manual; it’s theater.

From the inane to the insane, from the good to the bad, from the ingratiating to the infuriating, the questions and answers in this column will leave you laughing, crying and sometimes spitting nails.

Many of the questions come from guys who are not “out” to their doctors, making honesty and forthrightness a scarce commodity during office visits. They’re also too embarrassed to ask their friends, particularly if it’s a painful and potentially shaming problem like having a small penis or being hiv-positive.

I Like To Watch

The letters give you a voyeuristic glimpse of other people’s sex lives. The questions tend to run a lot longer than those in other advice columns because, in my humble opinion, the questions are often more interesting than the answers.

I said “often” not “always.” Give me some credit, for chrissakes.

Critics–and there were many – loathed my column because they felt society-at-large already judges and ridicules gay men, and here I am joining them.

If I were making fun of men loving each other, they might have had a point. But I don’t make fun of male love. I make fun of the way we go about getting it, maintaining it, losing it, and looking all over for it again.

Nothing is more entertaining to me than watching gays rationalize the excesses of their vanity and their promiscuity. That’s why I relish whacking the piety pinata. I love watching the canonized candy that sprays out of it.

Look, when straight men don’t tell the truth about their sexual lives we call them liars. When gay men don’t, we call them “dissidents.”

The truth is, we won’t allow ourselves to be honest about our sexual natures. We won’t allow ourselves to say that we’re sexual beings, and that the organizing principle for most of us is to get us some man meat.

We’re not allowed to say, for example, “Yeah, we hit on this idea to use abandoned warehouse space, awful music and mind whacking drugs to get laid more often.” Instead, we say bullshit things like “Oh, I go to raves because they give me a sense of belonging, or because it’s a “difficult and necessary Spiritual Journey.”

We’re the only group I know that can make the pursuit of plain old dog-yard scrumping sound like some noble, spiritual quest for a better life.

What Are We Afraid Of?

Both gay men and straight men are afraid to admit we want to have as much sex with as many people as we can. Where we diverge is in the strategies we use to cover up our inconvenient natures. Straight men pretend they don’t really feel that way; gay men admit they feel that way but for righteous reasons.

I constantly get letters from people who marinate in what Philip Roth called the “Ecstasy of sanctimony.” No group drips with this kind of moist sexual self-righteousness like the kink crowd. Well, with the possible exception of the safe-sex Nazis. Or the “just say no to drugs” crowd, or the monogamy mama’s or the… Wait, I’m running out of groups.

My point and I do have one, is that we’re humorless hypocrites when it comes to sex and I consider it my life’s mission to poke fun of the hypocrisy  till it goes away.

When it comes to sex all of us, at some point, fall off the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down. Consider me the guy who helps you up, dust you off, and shows you a better tree to climb.

While making fun of you the entire time.

Hey, it’s enough that I’m helping.  I have to be nice, too?

I get a lot of satisfaction from writing this column. What could be more rewarding than liberating people from their fears, their preconceptions, their hesitancies? What could be more rewarding than helping people achieve a deeper understanding of their nature, their problems, their struggles? What could be better than knowing you help someone overcome their shame and have a more rewarding sex life?

How To Respond To Profiles You Like

Making that first move certainly ain’t easy, especially when you realize that the boys who seems especially intriguing to you are most likely intriguing to everyone else too.  

Contacting somebody behind the profile is the online version of approaching somebody you don’t know at a bar (minus the nervousness).  It’s important to come across friendly and set the path to more conversation. 

It’s the little things that will make the difference between hearing your inbox chime incessantly or hearing nothing but crickets.  So before you reach out and hit send, make sure you follow these tips:

Keep it Short and Sweet. 

Long first messages convey too much interest.  Besides, what can you possibly write that won’t sound like boilerplate?  As rule of thumb, your first message should be a short sentence or two.

Here’s why:  It doesn’t matter.  He’s going to take one look at your pictures, headline and profile and decide pretty quickly whether he wants to continue or not.  The job of the first message isn’t to impress him; it’s to let him know you’re interested.  

 I can’t believe I have to say this but I’ve seen it happen too often not to mention it:  Do not cut and paste your profile into the email and act like you just composed it.   He’s not going to be impressed when he checks your profile and sees you plagiarized yourself.

Make sure it’s not all me, me, me. Your profile? It’s all about you. But now it’s time to take the spotlight off yourself and show interest in the person you are writing. 

Refer to something he’s written in his profile to show that you weren’t just photo-shopping (even though you probably were!). Don’t be afraid to flatter (but don’t gush!). A well placed (but not creepy) compliment can go a long way.

Ask questions.

Always ask an open-ended question or two; they are likelier to lead to a response.  This is critical.  The natural response to being asked a question is to answer.  So ask away.  And no, “hung?” is not an acceptable question!

Stay positive. 

Be positive and upbeat.  This is not the time to impress him with the fact that nothing impresses you.  Don’t kvetch, complain or bitch.  That’s for later, when you’re married to him.   

Watch your mouth. 

Nothing will get you tagged faster as an “asshole” than making comments about politics, religion or race.  Don’t do it.  Avoid irony and sarcasm too.  It rarely translates well on text, especially between strangers.  

Let’s talk about this funny thing a bit more.  You’re probably thinking, “Yeah, I can be sarcastic or funny as long as I use an emoticon so he’ll know I’m kidding.”  Let me tell you something, if you have to use an emoticon to let somebody know you’re being funny, you’re not being funny.  And the risk of trying to be funny –on text, to a complete stranger – is that you’ll come across as cheesy or worse, insulting. 

Spell Check! 

Imagine getting a text like this:   “Hi. Thanks for righting. You seam grate.”  Or worse:  “Congradualations!  I love you’re prophyle.  Would you like to get some brekfiss with me sometime?”  

A text or email with bad grammar is going to get you an instant delete or at the very least, a slow response.  If you’re that bad at grammar, put it through spell check! 

Sending a first email with a misspelling is like showing up to a date with your shoelaces untied.  If you’re an awful speller, be up front about it.  I have a friend who’s dyslexic who likes to write this on his header:  “I’ll buy you a drink for every typo.”  

Personalize Your Message. 

Don’t be a copy and paste dater. Always read their profile to pick up some information.  If you see something interesting, pull it apart, tease him or simply relate something he said to what you’ve experienced. 

Try To Get Off Text or Email As Soon As Possible. 

The goal of contacting somebody is to advance to the next step—a phone call or a meeting.   If you keep going on email, you’re going to be very sorry.  Research shows the longer you wait to advance to a phone call or meeting, the less likely it’s going to happen. 

There are other reasons to get off email, text or for that matter, instant messaging.  First, you’re fooling yourself if you think you can tell something about somebody by the way they write.  It is not possible to bond with somebody over email or text.  It’s an illusion.  The only way to tell if you like somebody is to MEET THEM.

If the goal of the first contact is to express interest, the goal of the second message is to get his phone number. If he coughs up his phone number (or even his email) you’re getting a lot closer to a first meeting. 

Notice I said “meeting” not “date.”  You want a First Coffee or First Drink, not a First Date.  A date connotes an investment of time and energy that neither one of you is probably willing to make at this point.

So how do you ask for a phone number? 

Here are a few examples:

“Hey, you.  I’d rather talk than type.  Maybe we can carry this conversation over the phone?”

“Maybe you should give me your phone number so I can continue to tease you over the phone.  Maybe you can you use your voice to redeem yourself  ;>)”

“Hey, I don’t come on here much anymore.  You should give me your number.  That way I can tease you more efficiently.”

“Hey, my hand hurts from all this typing!  Can we move this to a phone call?”

“I’m not much of an email person. I prefer to chat over the phone.”  

“I want to hear the voice that goes with your fabulous typing.”

Why not offer your phone number?  

You could, and as a last resort, you should.  But if you put the burden of contact on them, there’s a very good chance they won’t have the guts to call.

Next week in the series: What to say in your first call or text off the app,

Gay Dating Resources

Gay Dating Advice
Gay Texting Tips
Gay Body Language
How To Meet Guys

Are Gay Dating Apps Racist?

As my team collected the data to publish an unbiased review of these apps, we found something really interesting: Gay dating apps are as self-segregating as we are in public.

It’s a given that there are white bars and black bars and never shall the twain meet. Sure, you will see some African-Americans in mostly white bars and some white folks in mostly black bars. But the truth is, our bars are as segregated as straight churches. [Read more…] about Are Gay Dating Apps Racist?

Can Enzyte Make Your Penis Bigger?

As a sex advice columnist I’m furious at Enzyte for exploiting male insecurity. But as a media consultant, I can’t help but admire the company’s marketing strategy.

Their packaging?  Brilliant come-on.  They’ve made a supplement look like a drug.  Under FDA rules drug companies have to list their chemical compositions.  For example, Viagra’s got to print “Sildenafil Citrate” under its brand name, usually in parentheses. Well, Enzyte lists their chemical composition, too.  “Suffragium Asotas.”

Only problem is, there isn’t a doctor in my medical panel that’s ever heard of Suffragium.  There’s no such chemical. In fact, Suffragium is Latin for “Applause.”  Perfect, for a company trying to give us a standing ovation.

[Read more…] about Can Enzyte Make Your Penis Bigger?

The Misery Of Waiting For Your HIV Results

I sat in the clinic waiting room, scared.  Shifting from side to side, I glared at the clock on the wall, angry it wouldn’t tick faster. Twenty minutes they promised me.  That’s all they needed to tell me whether I lived or died.  Whether I spent the rest of my life on toxic medicine or in eternal gratitude. [Read more…] about The Misery Of Waiting For Your HIV Results.

3 Words That Will Instantly Improve Your Body Image

In the course of doing research for my book on how a woman’s body image affects her sex life, I was struck by a profound conclusion arrived at after reviewing 20 years of academic studies: Being thinner won’t make you happier.

If it were true that losing weight improved body image, studies would show that thinner women are more satisfied with the way their body looks than normal weight women. But they aren’t. Studies consistently show that underweight women are nearly as dissatisfied with their bodily appearance as normal or overweight women.1 [Read more…] about 3 Words That Will Instantly Improve Your Body Image

Teaching Sex On National TV

There were three challenges to doing a sex makeover series on TV (The Sex Inspectors on Channel 4/UK).  The medium demands that viewers see more than hear.  But how do you show viewers how to have better sex without turning them on or grossing them out?

Second, every couple we helped basically had the same problems—some variation of mismatched libidos or passion gone stale.  How many ways can you address the same problems without making it look like we’ve done six variations of a single show?

Third, how were they going to use me appropriately?  The producers were well aware of the first thing audiences would ask when they found out I was gay–what could they possibly learn from me?

[Read more…] about Teaching Sex On National TV