There can be psychological reasons why a man may find himself unable to come during sex. Sylvester was a forty-two-year-old referred to me by his psychologist. Sylvester was handsome, trim, and muscular. He had never married and had no children. He worked as a consultant for a major business firm and traveled around the country to help improve efficiency and profits for struggling medium-to-large companies. “I find their weak spots and turn them into strengths,” he explained.
“I don’t come during sex,” Sylvester said. “I never have. I’m single, and I meet a lot of women during my travels. I enjoy sex a lot—don’t get me wrong. But I can keep going and going all night and never have an orgasm with a woman. I’m convinced it’s psychological, but I figured I’d see you to make sure it wasn’t something physical.”
“Are you able to have an orgasm on your own?”
“Oh sure. That’s no problem at all.”
“Why do you believe it’s psychological?”
Sylvester sighed and shifted in his seat. “My mother raised me in a small town in Alabama, together with three older sisters, who
babied me. I never knew my father. When I reached a certain age I couldn’t stand that environment anymore.”
“I don’t notice a southern accent,” I commented.
“I took diction classes to lose the accent during my first semester at college. I thought it made me sound less sophisticated. Anyway, my shrink and I agree that my problem comes from being raised in a family of women.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I refuse to let a woman see me as weak. Once, in college, I did come during sex with a girl. It was awful. She stroked my face, and I thought I just might as well die and get it over with right there. I grabbed my clothes and ran out of the room.”
“Because she stroked your face?”
“You got it.”
Sylvester was determined to not have any weak spots , to use his consulting terminology. For him, losing control during an orgasm was something he desperately wanted to avoid, and he had successfully managed to do so since that first and only episode.
Sylvester failed to see the beauty of how sex can lead to intimacy—shared moments of literal nakedness when our unmasked nature shows up. We learn to cover ourselves with so much armor every day, and over years and years it builds up, closing us off from shared experiences, shared lives. For those who are open to it, the intimacy of sex can strip away those layers. Yet the closeness and tenderness that Sylvester’s college girlfriend may have felt for him at that moment of “weakness” was anathema to him, intolerable. Sylvester explained, “Consciously or unconsciously, I made a decision to never ‘give it up’ to a woman.”
I examined Sylvester, and we spoke a bit more. I agreed there was no evidence for a physical problem, and that his condition was likely to be psychological, as he had already concluded. He seemed satisfied with this assessment. We stood up, shook hands, and he started toward the door.
“One last thing before you go,” I said. Sylvester turned to face
WHY MEN FAKE IT 29
me. “After all these years, what made you decide to address this issue now?”
“My mother died last year. I don’t need to prove anything to her anymore.” He smiled with unnatural calm and strutted out the door.
For Sylvester, like Ramon, the failure to have an orgasm during sex was something he had trained himself to do, although for different reasons. It is fascinating how individuals can respond so differently to the same sexual event, such as an orgasm during intercourse, ranging from satisfaction (“Mmm”) to ecstasy (“Wow!”) to relief (“Finally!”) to revulsion (e.g., Sylvester’s reaction) to fear (e.g., of pregnancy) to self-reproach (“Ugh! I came too quickly!”). Sex for humans is complex, and men bring to it their own sets of personal histories and psychologies.