His dick is hard but he won’t cum, and suddenly, time is suddenly moving slowly — very, very, very, very, very slowly. You’ve tried out all your favorite orifices and already used the sexual techniques proven effective in the past, spending so much time with the finicky dick that the extended blowjob starts to feel like a devotional practice.
What you’re both experiencing is called delayed ejaculation (aka tardy climax or sluggish peaking). While conversations about erectile dysfunction are often focused on men who can’t get or stay hard, delayed ejaculation is a case of “concrete cock.” Or, if you’re into rhyming: “Rock cock.” These guys have no trouble obtaining a hard-on, they just have trouble losing it — no matter how much they’re enjoying the sex meant to unburden their erection.
For those of us who sleep with cis men, delayed ejaculation can be a lot of fun, especially at the onset of a new relationship. The marathon sex is fresh and can be flattering, the hour(s) of fucking feeling like a testament to the strength and endurance of his desire. But eventually, this gets old — or just painful — and is most unpleasant once the guy’s frustration with his lack of ejaculate becomes evident, whether that’s communicated through a displeased facial expression or an unceremonious yank of his own dick as you look on, wondering if you should be doing something differently.
“Orgasm and ejaculation are two separate physiologic processes, even though they both occur at the same time or at least back-to-back,” says Jamin Brahmbhatt, a urologist with Orlando Health in Florida. “However, people can have one and not the other. Sometimes, orgasm is experienced but the person doesn’t ejaculate. As urologists, we call this injaculation, or ‘bliss without the jizz.’”
“Medication is a common reason men experience delayed ejaculation,” Brahmbhatt continues. “Another culprit is alcohol, which can make it difficult for men to achieve orgasms. Also a cause — how frequently a guy masturbates, often associated with how much porn he watches. It’s not that he necessarily finds porn performers more attractive than his partners or is any more turned on when he’s alone, it’s just that he’s conditioned himself to be more familiar with this particular stimulus and reward pattern. It’s like training for a marathon. If you’re constantly training for a marathon, you’re going to have increased stamina every time you run. Frequent masturbation can make it easier for men to run a marathon in bed, desensitizing them to the vaginal or anal walls because of their relationship with their hands.”
“Of course, there are psycho-social components to most medical problems,” Brahmbhatt adds. “Sometimes men don’t want to finish because they want to seem like porn stars, unaware of how brief the length of a man’s standard sexual experience really is. Other times, there’s abuse or trauma at play that they’re not dealing with.”
Admittedly, I’m not as much of an expert as Brahmbhatt — scientifically speaking at least — but I’m also not unfamiliar with the rock-cock affliction. And so, allow me to offer a couple of pieces of advice.
First, talk about it. “You probably won’t be able to make me blow my load” isn’t a great pick-up line, but it should probably be mentioned sometime before or during your first time having sex with someone. A little heads-up always helps, especially as a preventive measure against someone thinking they’re just not pleasing you enough. Unfortunately, the male orgasm is given so much cultural attention that a lot of us think it’s a given, meaning it gets us in our heads when our partner doesn’t cum and makes us feel shitty, which is guaranteed to ruin sex more than anything else.
Second, don’t make overcoming (overcuming?) this issue the focus of any one sexual encounter. The more you want to cum, the less you can. Duh. A watched pot doesn’t fucking boil, so chill out and go about sex with a more meditative spirit. You don’t need to go full-on tantra, but experiencing sex as a journey instead of a destination will definitely do you some good.
After all, sex isn’t some romantic comedy with a tightly zipped three-act structure designed for dependable audience comprehension. Only super conventionally boring people think that. Sex is more like James Joyce novel, yielding to different whims with the passing of each second. So get lost in that syntax and enjoy the ride. And remember: Just because you spew cum at the end of one encounter doesn’t necessarily make it better than another encounter. It probably means you relaxed enough to let it happen.
Tierney Finster
Tierney Finster is a journalist, screenwriter, actor and model from Los Angeles, California. She is a contributing writer at MEL, specializing in love, sex, mental health, drugs, queer culture and the cannabis industry. She has written for publications such as Playboy, Purple, Dazed and Confused, Jezebel and Broadly and was the key researcher behind Sex On, HBO’s revival of its iconoclastic docu-series Real Sex.
