THE MECHANISMS OF DESIRE AND PLEASURE
Unlike other mammals, which generally only have sexual intercourse during the rutting season or when the female is on heat, and always as a means of reproduction, humans rarely make love specifically to reproduce: they do it for pleasure.
Desire is a necessary precondition for satisfying sexual intercourse. But this notion of desire is a very vague one, and varies a great deal with age.
A thirteen year old boy masturbating for the first time has no sense of desire for a particular girl, or even for girls in general, but this does not prevent him having spontaneous erections. In the adult erection is an external sign of desire.
At the age when young people have their first experiences with the opposite sex, the notion of desire is still rather vague. The desire is linked to the chosen partner, but only superficially; it can easily be switched at a moment’s notice to a different person.
This is the time when most boys, and many girls, go through a whole series of short-lived relationships.
Then a particular couple-relationship is formed and stabilizes. If there is a good sexual balance between the two, there is a good chance the relationship will last, even if there are incidental episodes with other lovers along the way.
At first, desire is strong enough to produce frequent spontaneous erections. The couple makes the most of these to enjoy themselves as often as they can.
With habit, familiarity and age, the spontaneous erections become less frequent. But this happens very gradually, and the couple do not particularly wonder what is happening. In fact, it is desire that is diminishing. It is natural that it should, and that in the end it should die entirely. Man is born impotent and dies impotent!
Luckily, however, as the desire diminishes, the couple are accumulating sexual experience in general, getting to know their own and their partners’ bodies more thoroughly, and getting to understand more about that feeling known to human beings alone of all the animals – eroticism.
It is now known that men’s desire is directly linked to the male body’s production of a hormone called testosterone. As the body ages, less and less testosterone is produced. Some time between the ages of fifty and seventy testosterone production may stop almost entirely, at the stage sometimes known as the “male menopause” or andropause. This is the time when erection becomes infrequent and difficult, lasts only a short time, and is often accompanied by premature ejaculation.
This relative impotence is organic and non-selective: it does not apply to the man who has no erections with his wife but can get one with another partner. On the contrary -many an andropausal man can get a satisfactory hard-on with his wife, if she knows by experience how to arouse him, but gets nowhere with a new partner, however young and attractive, if she does not know how to eroticize her lovemaking.
This discovery of the role of testosterone is of crucial importance. It means that impotence can be effectively treated when the cause is a lack of desire (though there are other possible causes). It is too early to say whether this hormone treatment can have undesirable side effects. For the moment it seems to be inadvisable only for men with high blood pressure.
The only objection to regular booster injections of testosterone Could be that they prevent the brain from commanding natural testosterone production, so that a low rate of hormone production would fall irreversibly to zero.
One of the problems couples need to recognize after a few years of life together, when increasing age has already dealt a body-blow to the seductiveness of both, is that our desire is partly dependent on our bio-rhythms. One should not make too close a comparison with the mating seasons of animals, but it is known, for example, that a woman’s desire is strongest at ovulation and during the first few days of her period. Women are also more excitable in summer, and men in winter; men are randy in the morning, women are randier at night.
Which is not to say you cannot get any joy from a man on a fine summer evening! But every woman who becomes aware of the first signs of flagging enthusiasm in her man should take account of these rhythms to choose the moments that hold most potential for their sex life.
Now let’s look at the mechanisms that come into play when two partners feel desire and begin to make love.
Sexologists agree that there are four stages in the orgasmic cycle: excitement, plateau, orgasm and resolution. These phases can be more validly applied to women; in men the plateau phase is often non-existent or artificial.
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Tags: Erectile Dysfunction, Men’s Health