The myth that we’re going to bust this month is one that you probably don’t even know you have, but I think it has probably affected, or will affect, if it hasn’t, your sex life sometime in your life – and not just you men who are listening to this but your partners’ lives. And I think it’s an important one that we address, so we’re going to address it this month. The myth is that a man must have an erection in order to have an orgasm and an ejaculation. But the orgasm part I think is the most important because that’s the pleasure part. And it’s a myth that not just men have out there who are ordinary guys, but it’s a myth that physicians actually carry around with them, and a lot of scientists don’t know about. We sexologists, of course, know it’s not true. And so that’s what we’re going to be dealing with in this session of myth-busting.

There’s many consequences from this belief. It’s a false belief. What happens is that if a man, whether he’s young or old, loses the ability to produce or maintain an erection, whether it’s for a night, or a week, or a month, or for the rest of his life, he and his partner, sooner or later, usually abandon their sexuality, certainly their shared sexuality. And often all sexual behavior is cast aside because the man and his partner believe that there is no real pleasure to be expected or experienced by him without his first having an erection. If the loss is for only an evening, well, what’s going to be lost is one opportunity to express love and caring in a sexual way or to experience sexual pleasure. That’s what’s lost. But if the problem is of some longer duration, or if one experience sets up a feeling of anxiety, and then a pattern of anxiety, then very often everything is lost because hugging and kissing and hand-holding and other affectionate or sexual gestures can become painful reminders of what the man believes has been irrevocably lost. And so sooner or later those gestures too are cast aside and affection is seen as just another expectation, another demand for what cannot be. So it all goes away, and what we have is people who are not touching each other anymore, not expressing any kind of physical affection, or maybe any kind of affection for each other, all because the erection is lost and with the erection any belief that the man can have physical pleasure.

So – what’s the fact? The fact is that men can have orgasms even if they have no erections whatsoever. An erection is not necessary for orgasm or, in fact, ejaculation, because they’re all separate events. They just happen to happen together, but they’re not inseparable – they’re not the same thing. Very simply put, this means that even if a man cannot produce any erection at all or can only attain or maintain a partial erection, with appropriate manual or oral stimulation he can experience a complete and fully satisfying orgasm and an ejaculation. Now, you might ask me “how is this possible?” And it’s a good question. Basically, the human sexual response has at least three different phases, and we’ll find out that in fact some of those phases also separate into other parts.

The first phase involves desire. You’ve also heard the word libido. And that’s the desire – the want – to have a sexual experience, the turn-on part. The second phase is comprised of excitement and arousal, and that phase includes erection, usually. The third phase encompasses the emission, which we’ll discuss later, and orgasm and ejaculation. Now until the mid- to the late-60’s, arousal, erection, and orgasm were quite naturally understood by the majority of medical people and the research communities to be simply an orderly sequence of events that were inextricably tied together. That is, you couldn’t have one without the others. That makes sense because most men, and you’ve had that experience yourself if you’re a man, whether you are a scientist or a physician, whether you are an executive or a taxi driver, or whether you are a factory worker, you had these responses – they went one after another in a very orderly fashion all the the time. And so it seemed that they went together and they just followed each other and they were all part of the same sequence of events. It took the work – sometimes secretive work, often very courageous work – of modern pioneers in the world of human sexuality, like Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, Helen Kaplan, and those who followed them to make it clear that erection and orgasm were separable events. Beyond this we’ll see that it has been shown that even the components of the last phase, or the orgasmic phase in men, that include emission, ejaculation, and orgasm, are also not necessarily tied together. They are also separate, and there’s a very interesting present, or surprise gift that goes with that as well, which is going to surprise you.

Now the revelation of the independence of arousal and erection from ejaculation and orgasm provided what might be considered the most important insight leading to the development of modern sex therapy. The independent nature of these phases of sexual response should have made front page news. Here’s the headlines that I see we could have had. We should have had headlines like – of course in America we wouldn’t have them, knowing how uptight we are and how puritan we are – but I can see headlines like “Orgasm Freed from Servitude of Erection,” or how about “Men’s Pleasure Liberated from the Demands of Erection” but as you know, we didn’t get any of that. In fact, hardly any physicians even found out about it. Because four decades later, after the original medical report, most people, and that includes physicians, are still unaware that with appropriate stimulation of the man’s penis, he can experience a full orgasm even when he has little or no erection. I know I keep saying that, but it’s very important and you don’t believe it, so I have to keep saying it over and over again! Although information about the independence of erection, ejaculation, and orgasm can be found in the textbooks of almost all college students, it’s tucked away there, in the human sexuality textbooks. What’s often missing is a clear statement that says that it is entirely possible to have a completely satisfying orgasm without any erection, and that you can ejaculate and experience the pleasures of orgasm whether you have an erection or not. And that all that is necessary is stimulation of the penis for the appropriate period of time. No “magic” is necessary, just a little understanding that this is all that’s needed. The textbooks don’t say that. Now, I’m not surprised because we are a very anti-pleasure society. We – you and I – all live in a society that is really anti-sex and anti-pleasure, so it is not surprising that the textbooks never really make it clear what they’re saying.

Now the anatomical basis for the independence of erection, ejaculation, and orgasm has been known and understood in some quarters long before it was applied to clinical practice. Studies have shown that the anatomical structures involved in these three important sexual events are separate. Erection primarily involves swelling of the blood vessels, and I’m sure you all have sort of an idea about that. Orgasm and ejaculation involve muscle spasms. That’s the primary component of orgasm and ejaculation – very different. Furthermore, these responses are triggered by different sets of nerves. So there are different nerve pathways that are involved in these things. In addition, the orgasm phase – which I told you I’d tell you about – alone has three different parts, which is just like the three different parts of erection, ejaculation, orgasm. And they turn out to be, voila, independent of each other. Now of course these three events also take place so close together that we consider them almost to be one event, but they’re not – they’re separate. In fact, people who have certain kinds of neural injuries or spinal cord injuries, that’s one of the ways we found out that they were separate – they would have one left, and two would be gone, and so forth. And that sort of gave us hints that these were separate.

The first part of these orgasm phase events is called emission. That’s when semen is collected from the testes and other internal organs. We have here a very interesting piece, what looks like a penis but really is a lingam – and it’s Tibetan, and it’s tantric, and it’s Buddhist. It’s a religious item, but so perfectly made that we can use it here as a model. The semen which is collected – semen has sperm in it but it also has different moisture producing products (secretions) from different organs that are part of the male internal genitalia that help give lubrication and also places for the sperm to swim in and to be comfortable and to be kept healthy - they are all added from the testes and other organs and they all get together in the very base of the urethra, which is at the bottom part of the penis here, the part closest to the body, and the prostate is right down in here. And they’re deposited and trapped at the end of the urethra closest to the body. And from this position, semen is ready to be forcefully shot out of the penis, which you’ve had this experience. So that’s emission. And when men perceive this – at least men who are sensitive perceive this – and when it is perceived it is described by men as a kind of a subtle feeling that signals the inevitability of ejaculation and orgasm. So you know now there’s no turning back. It’s kind of a feeling that a man couldn’t stop ejaculating even if he wanted to, even if he tried.

The second event is ejaculation. And that occurs almost immediately after emission and involves strong spasmodic muscle contractions which propel the semen through the urethra and out the end of the penis, in spurts. Then the third part, of course, is orgasm, that accompanies the ejaculation. Now emission is produced by the kind of muscles that are found throughout the arteries – like the ones around your hair follicles that make them stand up on end when you get goosebumps, the same kind of muscles that are in the uterus, and in the gastrointestinal tract, your stomach, your colon, and so forth. Ejaculation occurs as a result of the kind of muscles that you work on in the gym. That is, like the ones in your arms and the ones in your legs: your gym muscles. So they’re very different systems. Just as erection and orgasm are different nervous pathways, so are different pathways involved in emission and ejaculation. We have clinical cases that also demonstrate that orgasm can be separated from emission and ejaculation, because people who can’t have emission or ejaculation can still have orgasm, depending on what kind of injury they’ve had to their body. In fact, men – and this is the good part – can actually train themselves to have multiple orgasms. You didn’t know that, did you? And maybe we’ll talk about that at another time on the Love and Health channel. But they can train themselves to have orgasms without ejaculation, and in certain parts of the world they do that, in some Tantric yoga they do it, but it’s actually easier to do it as you get older. But men can have multiple orgasms, and they can train themselves to do it, and that’s part of knowing that these systems are separate. In fact, we also know that orgasm has a major brain component and that’s why sexologists like to say that the biggest sex organ, or the most important sex organ, is your brain. Part of that statement comes from the fact that an orgasm, a major part of it, happens in your brain.

So – I guess the moral of this myth-busting session is that if you find yourself in a situation when an erection is not forthcoming because maybe you’ve drunk a little bit too much or you’re sick or there’s something else going on, or you’re taking a medication that at this point in your life is interfering with your erections, now you know not to give up. Don’t give up the ship! This is a time to say to your partner, or even to yourself if you’re masturbating, that the pleasure is still there and that if you keep at it and you do the things that make you feel good, then you will have an orgasm, and of course there are other ways to satisfy your partner. So keep at it, and know that your body wants to give you pleasure and that an erection is not necessary in order to have pleasure.

© 2004