The Hook Up: It's Not Just You

It may be­cause I am a proud owner of a vagina, but I have heard the dis­cus­sion of the elu­sive na­ture of the fe­male or­gasm more times than I can count. That’s not to say this isn’t an im­por­tant issue; it is in­deed trick­ier to fig­ure out what makes a vagina tick than a penis, even if we ig­nore our so­ci­eties’ trou­bled his­tory with fe­male sex­u­al­ity. But what about when a guy can’t come? What do you do when your penis will not stay hard? Why won’t any­one think about the men?

On AskMen.​com, there is ad­vice on how to fake a male or­gasm, an act usu­ally re­served for a lady bored of in­ef­fec­tual jack­ham­mer­ing or ex­pec­tant glances up from in be­tween her legs. Read­ing the ar­ti­cle, I flashed back to a scene in a frat bath­room (the site of many of my best con­ver­sa­tions). My friend was ex­plain­ing from the bath­room stall that her new boyfriend was ap­par­ently un­able to or­gasm.

“I can’t break up with him be­cause of it,” her voice floated over the door. “But every time we hook up, we both just end up frus­trated.”

And then, there is the more com­mon prob­lem of main­tain­ing bon­ers. For some rea­son, the stereo­type per­sists among men and women that col­lege-aged men’s penises are al­ways up and ready for ac­tion. How­ever, few are strangers to the hook up that fin­ishes un­com­fort­ably due to a dick that won’t stay hard.

Good news: Hook-ups don’t have to end this way! The as­sump­tion that mal­func­tion­ing penises are an issue re­served to the over-60 set leads to a weird blame game when it ac­tu­ally hap­pens with peo­ple our age. If you pull down the boxer shorts to see a less than stiff ba­nana, don’t blame your­self. Same if a guy isn’t going to cum. It is not due to some de­fi­ciency in sex­i­ness on your part, so don’t take it per­son­ally. Don’t blame the man with the tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties ei­ther; no one can con­trol these things. Fi­nally, please do not use this as a rea­son not to wear con­doms. A latex coat might make some dicks less than agree­able, but not as much an STI would.

So what should you do? First of all, don’t freak out. Whether it is your own penis or a part­ner’s, this is a com­mon and nat­ural prob­lem. Flip­ping out will only in­crease stress lev­els and make the dick even less likely to obey the brain not only now but also next time. Take a deep breath, ac­knowl­edge the issue and move on. Your cock’s being tem­porar­ily out of com­mis­sion doesn’t mean your fin­gers and mouth can’t help your friend enjoy him or her­self!