Premature ejaculation is one of the most common sexual complaints. Scroll through any sex-related forum online and you’ll see people fretting about it from all angles. Many people want to extend their sessions so they can satisfy their partner better, while many also care about their own pleasure (as they should!) and feel they’re being shortchanged when a perfunctory orgasm hits before they’ve had time to really enjoy themselves.
Medically speaking, there are lots of different ways to come at the problem (so to speak). Condoms and lubes containing numbing ingredients can be a useful stopgap measure, as can taking certain kinds of antidepressants, which can famously reduce your sexual sensitivity and make it harder to reach climax. But if the whole reason you’re trying to delay your orgasm is so you and your partner(s) can feel more pleasure, do you really want to replace the frustration of coming too quickly with the frustration of having a numb dick?
For this reason, it makes far more sense to me to address this issue with awareness, rather than numbness. Some of the medically recommended treatments for premature ejaculation focus on increasing your level of knowledge about your own body and sexual response, so that you can detect when an orgasm is approaching and slow your roll. Others encourage specific behavioral strategies, like practicing the “stop-start technique” (a fancy name for edging) or doing Kegel exercises to gain more control over the muscles down there.
While these interventions might seem annoying at first — who wants to pause right when things are feeling awesome to count out muscle squeezes, or wait until the pleasure subsides? — the hope is that they’ll eventually become second nature, so that you can concentrate on the good feelings, instead of on tamping them down. (Practice makes permanent, right?)
Some sex-tech companies have taken a crack at the premature ejaculation problem, too. Morari, for instance, recently created a patch you can wear on your skin (set to release in 2023) that disrupts the nerve signals between the penis and the brain. But if you’d rather learn to control your ejaculations in a way that’s more about pleasure than denial, maybe the MYHIXEL TR stimulation device and climax control app would be more your speed.
What Is the MYHIXEL TR Stimulation Device?
The MYHIXEL looks like a Fleshlight (albeit a particularly 1970s-looking one), but it’s much more than a sex toy. Designed by sexologists and based on research-backed principles, this vibrating stroker works in tandem with the MYHIXEL smartphone app to lead you through a multi-week training program for extending your “intravaginal ejaculatory latency time” — i.e., time until ejaculation during sex. (Side note: Why do they assume vaginal sex is the only kind you’d want to extend? Gay people exist and so does anal, but okay…)
Rather than encouraging you to mentally block out the pleasure you feel, or physically inhibit it with numbing agents, the toy is designed to feel good — so that you can pay attention to, and eventually achieve more control over, the muscles involved in ejaculation. The app essentially “gameifies” this process, hopefully making it feel fun — not embarrassing or annoying — to learn more about your sexual responses and get your premature-ejaculation problem under control.
My Experience with the MYHIXEL TR Stimulation Device
To be honest with you, I find the whole notion of “premature ejaculation” a bit baffling, for two reasons. One: Like most women, I don’t get off from penetrative sex alone — there’s gotta be some clit action going on or it just won’t happen — and so the vast majority of my pleasure during sex comes from other acts, like oral, fingering and using toys together. Luckily, I happen to be married to someone who is very good at all of those things, and this all adds up to form my opinion that extending the length of P-in-V sex isn’t necessarily the holy grail of mutual orgasmic pleasure it’s made out to be.
Two: It’s actually a huge turn-on for me when my partner comes fast during sex. It makes me feel like my pussy is so bomb that orgasming inside it is an undelayable inevitability. Sure, occasionally my spouse comes before I’m ready to stop — but then they can just pull out a dildo and use it on me while I fondly reminisce on what it felt like when they lost control inside of me.
So, if we’re defining premature ejaculation as “coming sooner than you and/or your partner would prefer,” my spouse doesn’t meet the criteria, even though they usually come in under three minutes once penetrative sex starts — by which time I’ve typically already gotten off and am totally satisfied. But we’re both nerdy about sex, so we were curious about this MYHIXEL device nonetheless. Could an app really help users delay orgasm, or was it a gimmick?
The app setup was relatively straightforward and took only a few minutes. It asked us to rate my partner’s ejaculatory time, their control over it and how distressed they are about it, among other things. Then it issued the first “mission” of the MYHIXEL training program: Masturbating with the device while remaining aware of which muscles you tense when you’re being sexually stimulated.
The app times you while you jerk off with the toy, and asks you some questions after you finish. Once that first session concluded, it asked my partner to identify which muscles they tensed in the lead-up to orgasm. This can feel a bit odd because it’s like taking a pop quiz about your penis while the cum is still drying, but ultimately, it does promote the bodily self-awareness that MYHIXEL’s inventors say is vital to their method.
One perplexing thing about the MYHIXEL is that there’s no Bluetooth connection between the stroker and the app. For example, I once reviewed a Kegel exerciser toy and accompanying app in which sensors in the toy transmitted data to the app so it could track your muscle strength over time. Likewise, the app sent signals to the toy so that it would vibrate in time with your squeezes. To me it seems that MYHIXEL should’ve done something similar, so that the toy’s vibrating and warming functions would activate at the directed times in your training sessions, rather than needing to be enabled manually when the app tells you to do so. The product costs a whopping $229, and at that price point, I don’t expect to need to push buttons myself in addition to setting up an app.
Meanwhile, the warming function of the toy, which is meant to replicate body temperature so it feels more like “the real thing,” also takes an absurdly long time to work. Several times, my partner pressed the button that starts it up, observed no changes whatsoever and tried to troubleshoot the problem — but eventually we learned from the MYHIXEL website that it takes 15 full minutes for the toy to reach “the optimum temperature.” I mean, I guess the whole purpose of this product is to teach you patience and self-control, but are you really gonna have time to work this training regimen into your schedule three times weekly (as recommended) if you have to preheat it like an oven? I’ve owned vibrators with heating functions, and they usually warmed up in a couple minutes or less, so I find this mystifying. Again: This thing costs $229.
The vibration function, which some of the training sessions direct you to use, is kind of disappointing too. It only has a single, weak speed that seems remarkably unstimulating compared to something like the Lovense Max stroker. I know that pleasure isn’t the foremost purpose of the MYHIXEL, but it is one of its purposes — and in that regard, it’s far behind what other companies like Tenga and Fleshlight are producing.
It’s weirdly hard to clean as well, considering that it’s a device you’re supposed to ejaculate into. You have to slowly remove the sleeve and take the vibrator out of its little pocket, taking care not to damage the wiring, and then rinse the sleeve while it’s inside-out. You can clean inside the casing with a damp cloth, but you have to be ultra-careful to avoid the mechanical parts inside so you don’t damage the product. Once again, for the high price point, I expect better — especially since the aforementioned Lovense Max is fully waterproof and only costs $129.
My partner didn’t complete the full 8-to-10-week MYHIXEL training regimen because we were just trying it out for review purposes, but both of us felt overall that this device doesn’t bring much to the table beyond what you could do yourself with a regular ol’ Fleshlight and some self-education on the cognitive-behavioral techniques used to treat premature ejaculation.
MYHIXEL offers a few online courses, some of which focus on addressing ejaculation dysfunctions, and I’d honestly recommend those before I’d recommend dropping $229 on this device. (You can’t use the MYHIXEL app separately from the toy, sadly.) Paired with a decently stimulating stroker like the Fleshlight Stamina Training Unit — which admittedly doesn’t vibrate or warm up like the MYHIXEL — it seems like you could use the stop-start technique and mindfulness of your pelvic floor muscles to achieve similar results to what MYHIXEL claims their device can do.
What Other People Are Saying About the MYHIXEL TR Stimulation Device
I was gratified, though not surprised, to see that some folks in the r/PrematureEjaculation subreddit agreed with my assessment. “Literally any (good) fuck toy will help you improve your stamina because the stimulation these [toys] provide is way beyond the quality of hand stimulation,” one person wrote in a thread on toys designed to help you last longer. “Well-thought-out sleeves are designed to stimulate all parts of the penis, bringing you to a high level of arousal. If you learn to resist that, you’ll automatically increase your stamina in bed.”
“You’re better off getting a cheaper masturbator toy and just working on behavioral advice you find in this sub,” another poster agreed. “The evidence [for the effectiveness of the MYHIXEL toy] was more supportive of the behavioral therapy itself than for their device.”
Meanwhile, a different user wrote a mournful post about their experience trying out the MYHIXEL for several weeks. “Not adding any value to me at this stage. [A Fleshlight] is much more stimulating with the textures etc., and since I’ve already been practicing with a Fleshlight to identify my muscles, this felt not-so-useful,” they lamented. They also had issues with the MYHIXEL’s build quality, complaining of loose wires and a torn sleeve.
For the sake of premature ejaculators everywhere, I deeply wish MYHIXEL offered their app as a standalone treatment for this problem. The stroker that pairs with it just isn’t nearly good enough to justify spending $229, especially when you can get other strokers for much cheaper that would work just as well with this training program, and that feel more pleasurable, are easier to clean and don’t require you to wait 15 minutes for them to heat up. (Any waterproof stroker can be placed in a bowl of warm water for a few minutes if you want to introduce some realistic heat.) The app alone could be a game-changer for many who suffer from premature ejaculation, guiding you through exercises that teach you sexual self-awareness and self-control — but it’s essentially paywalled behind the purchase of the overpriced stroker that goes with it.
My advice? Get yourself a stroker that appeals to you — whether that be a hyper-realistic Fleshlight, a space-age-esque Tenga creation or anything else — and read up on the start-stop technique and the muscles involved in ejaculation. The MYHIXEL costs hundreds, but taking your sexual health into your own hands? That’s priceless.
Kate Sloan
Kate Sloan is the author of the books '101 Kinky Things Even You Can Do' and '200 Words to Help You Talk About Sexuality & Gender,' and has reviewed over 300 sex toys on her blog at GirlyJuice.net, to the chagrin of her high school guidance counselor. She also cohosts the podcasts 'The Dildorks' and 'Question Box.'
