When a man can delay his ejaculation and extend intercourse, a couple are likely to experience lovemaking as more intimate and rewarding.

Whether a woman can reach orgasm through intercourse or not is an irrelevance. That’s because both men and women prefer ejaculation to be controlled until both the man and his partner want him to come.

Let’s Put Rapid Ejaculation Into Context

 

In 1943, Bernhard Schapiro, who’d worked extensively with men who complained about ejaculating too quickly, wrote a paper which suggested that premature ejaculation was some kind of psychosomatic problem.

In other words, just as some people would suffer a bad back when subjected to stress, some men experience premature ejaculation when under stress.

Schapiro attributed an early ejaculation to some kind of inherent weakness in the body’s system, which allowed the psychosomatic problem to manifest in this way.

Schapiro’s work was most remarkable because he was the first medical man to describe two types of premature ejaculation which have now become known as lifelong and acquired.

Lifelong premature ejaculation is the sort of sexual dysfunction a man experiences from his first sexual experience onwards.

By contrast, acquired premature ejaculation is – as the name suggests – acquired later in life and is sometimes accompanied by erectile dysfunction.

But little more was published on the subject for another 13 years until Dr. James Semans published a paper in 1956.

In this, he turned from understanding the causation of premature ejaculation to a practical method of treating it which he called the stop-start method.

As you may already know, this method involves the stimulation of a man’s penis by his partner until he reaches the point of no return.

That’s the point at which he knows he is going to ejaculate and nothing will stop it. Then the man removes his partner’s hand and and stimulation stops until his level of arousal has diminished.

In technical terms, the point of no return is marked by what are known as “pre-ejaculatory sensations” or “premonitory sensations”.

It is these which tell a man when he’s about to ejaculate. And men with PE (or those who ejaculate too quickly for their or their partner’s liking)  often lack awareness of these sensations. They find that their ejaculation happens as they often describe it, “almost spontaneously”, “coming from nowhere”, or “happening without warning”.

Treatment For PE May Be Easier Than You Think

To return to Semans’ stop-start technique: when the man feels that his pre-ejaculatory sensations have diminished or stopped altogether, and his arousal has dropped, his partner begins to stimulate his penis again.

The procedure moves on from dry stimulation with no lubrication, to masturbation with lubrication, which more closely resembles the environment of the vagina, and then to vaginal containment (i.e. the insertion of the penis into the vagina without movement).

The next stage is one of limited thrusting with the woman on top, with the man stopping his movements every time he approaches the point of ejaculation. And finally, the couple achieve full intercourse with normal thrusting.

This procedure of graded stimulation with pauses to allow the man’s arousal to drop can be very effective in curing premature ejaculation.

However, it requires both self-discipline – that is to say, the discipline to overcome the urge to thrust and ejaculate as quickly as possible, which is extremely powerful for most men – and usually also some kind of counseling or therapeutic “discussion” to eliminate the negative emotions associated with premature ejaculation.

Semans’ work didn’t attract a great deal of attention at the time, possibly because most of the therapists who tried his approach didn’t incorporate discussions with the man and his partner into their therapy.

However, if you read Semans’ original account of his work, it’s clear that he engaged in extensive “counseling” of his clients. This may be the “glue” which ensures the stop-start treatment is successful.

Without support, men and their partners who try this technique tend not to sustain any improvement in intercourse duration for more than a few weeks, if they even achieve success in the first place.

The fact that a counseling or therapeutic approach of some kind is a necessary adjunct to behavioral training was confirmed in 1970 when Masters and Johnson published a technique called the squeeze technique.

In actual fact the squeeze technique is really the stop-start technique, with the addition of a squeeze.

During sexual activity, whether that’s manual stimulation or intercourse, the man or his partner also squeeze the man’s penis between thumb and forefinger.

The squeeze is applied to the man’s penile shaft just under the coronal rim on the dorsal surface and on the frenulum on the ventral surface.

The Squeeze Technique, The Stop-Start Technique & Counselling – A Complete Package To Stop Premature Ejaculation

This technique actually reduces a man’s desire to ejaculate very significantly, and it may also reduce the rigidity of his erection slightly.

It’s a very effective way of allowing a man to continue making love for longer.

When applied in real life situations, the woman or the man himself squeeze the penis just before the man reaches his point of no return, in the way described above for about four seconds; the couple then wait another 30 seconds or so until stimulation begins again.

Stimulation may be masturbation or intercourse, but is always a graded progression of sexual interaction. This goes from manual stimulation without lube (masturbation, in other words) through to full intercourse.

But intercourse itself is specifically prohibited until a man has developed the ability to significantly delay his ejaculation.

Once again, vaginal containment without thrusting is a significant element of this process.

It allows a man to get used to the sensations of having his penis inside the moist and warm environment of his partner’s body without responding to that stimulation with a reflex, spontaneous or rapid ejaculation.

To be effective, vaginal containment needs to be carried out for several minutes, possibly for 10 minutes or even longer, during which time the man moves only enough to sustain his erection.

In general, men who try this technique of vaginal containment report that there is a moment when they experience a distinct change in the sensations they are experiencing.

It’s hard to describe exactly what this is, but it’s probably best described as an understanding and acceptance that this penetration of the woman by the man is actually normal.

In other words, a man begins to feel that sex – or penetration – doesn’t necessarily need to lead to a rapid ejaculation, and that this is not only enjoyable but also can be experienced without a spontaneous reaction of uncontrolled ejaculation.

In feeling terms, the physical sensations reported by men shift from being “sharper”, more arousing, more acute, to a duller, more general warmth.

 I interpret this to mean that there is a drop in the level of sexual arousal a man develops when he is inside his partner.

When you think about it, this is actually a representation of normal mature male sexual behavior.

In some ways it is a physical metaphor for a kind of transition from adolescent boy-sexuality where even the prospect of having intercourse with a woman is too exciting to cope with (resulting in a rapid ejaculation), to a more adult-masculine sexuality.

In mature sexuality,  a man takes on the rightful role of a mature male who expects to be able to engage in intercourse with a woman on equal terms and with complete ejaculatory control.

Once again, of course, part of this transition to mature male sexuality is about dealing with the emotions that surround premature ejaculation.

In my experience it’s never a purely physical condition: it’s always accompanied by some kind of emotional issue.

This is usually anxiety, especially performance anxiety about satisfying a woman.

Another manifestation is anxiety about the very act of intercourse – in other words, some kind of fear of failure or of letting the partner down in some way. You can read more about the effects of premature ejaculation here.

What Are The Respective Roles Of Men And omen In Controlling Premature Ejaculation?

A key factor here for me is that when the man feels this fear, he is somehow taking responsibility for the woman’s sexual pleasure.

Now, although the belief that somehow the man has a “duty” or responsibility to pleasure the woman (aka bring her to orgasm) during sex is commonplace in our society, it’s actually wrong.

Culturally, a man may feel a responsibility for a woman’s sexual pleasure, but socially and emotionally, a woman’s ability to achieve orgasm is more or less her own responsibility.

We would not assume a woman’s job was to give a man an orgasm, would we? No, and the idea of a man Giving a woman an orgasm might also be ridiculous. BUT! That’s how most couples see sex.

Even so, for a woman to assume that it’s a man’s responsibility to “give her” an orgasm, or to “take her” to orgasm, or whatever, is very interesting…. is it socially determined, or something more fundamental about how men and women relate to each other?

What’s more challenging, of course, is that men take on this responsibility and then develop a fear of failure because of it. This is based on the fear of not providing “her” with an orgasm and being seen as inadequate.

In many cases, men tell me that they actually fear a partner’s anger or annoyance if she doesn’t have an orgasm.

In this way, sex becomes a challenge for the man because he’s not able to fully focus on receiving his own pleasure.

During sex, part of his mind is consumed with what he takes to be his responsibility to pleasure his partner.

Problem is, couples in this situation rarely have a very good level of communication about what they’re thinking and feeling during sexual activity.

That means women often fail to provide guidance to their male partners to tell them what they want, the stage is set for sexual conflict and failure.

It’s almost as though the woman expects a man to be a mind reader, and to be able to provide her with sexual pleasure regardless of whether or not he’s sufficiently knowledgeable and skilful to do so.

Such a situation can produce high anxiety, frustration, and resentment, and no doubt guilt and shame too, all of which can  contribute to premature ejaculation.

The reason this happens is because although emotional arousal and sexual arousal may feel different, they have a very similar effect on the man’s nervous system: they are both arousing.

This means that a man who is experiencing high levels of emotion will most likely be well on the way to his point of no return even before he sexually engages with his partner.

By contrast a man who begins sex in a relaxed frame of mind, without any particular stress or heightened emotional arousal, will take longer to get to his point of no return, the point of ejaculatory inevitability.

Returning to Masters and Johnson’s technique, it’s interesting to note that as long ago as 1970 they were suggesting that in most men premature ejaculation was the product of anxiety, and was not a natural condition, but a learned activity. For more information about  delayed ejaculation treatment, check this out.

As an example of this, they mentioned that behavioral traits of early ejaculation might be learned during the adolescent years.

That’s when sex was often furtive and hurried, and frequently conducted in uncomfortable situations where there was a lot of anxiety about being discovered – such as the back seat of a car! Not much has changed, I suspect, in our times!

Clearly the implication of this observation is that premature ejaculation treatment should be two-fold. First, it needs to incorporate bodily training to delay the man’s physical responses to sexual stimulation. Second, it also should involve some kind of therapy or counseling to help him reduce his performance anxiety.

In the decades since Masters and Johnson did their pioneering work, a number of different therapies have been tried for premature ejaculation.

These range from Gestalt therapy to Transactional Analysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy.

But there has been very little scientific investigation of the effectiveness of different techniques using well-designed controlled studies.

To take but one example, the suggestion that hurried adolescent sexual experiences might well “train” a man to ejaculate quickly seems both logical and intuitively correct.

But when Waldinger researched this question, he found no evidence whatsoever to support the idea. In other words – common sense may seem appealing, but it may not help us understand exactly what causes premature ejaculation!

The squeeze method is the most effective form of treatment for premature ejaculation, a fact which has been confirmed several times. 

Why, then, do so many therapists report that the benefits do not last?

Well, what differs between Masters and Johnson’s application of this technique and other practitioners’ work seems to be the closeness of the relationship they had with their clients.

Masters and Johnson reported improvements in ejaculation latencies which lasted indefinitely.

Once again this appears to be because they established intimate and close connections with their clients in a residential setting.

Such intimacy was not a feature of the work done by other therapists, who seem to have regarded the physical training alone (without emotional support of some kind) as sufficient to cure premature ejaculation.

If you have a relationship issue which might benefit from some kind of relationship expertise, check out these dating and relationship tips for men. They have the ability to transform how you feel towards your partner, and she towards you.