The sexual male, part five: the hard facts

XHE HUMAN PENIS IS ONE OF XHE MARVELS OF XHE ANIMAL KINGDOM — FLEXIBLE, SXRONC AND SUPERSIZED, AS APES CO. IX HAS ALWAYS BEEN XHERE FOR YOU, READY XO PERFORM AX A MOMENX'S NOXICE. BUX HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW XHE JUNIOR SENATOR?

During the boom years of the late 1990s Michael Consoli and his 24-year-old nephew, Vincent Passafiume, hit on an idea. A big idea. A big-penis idea. They recruited Consoli's 72-year-old mother and Passafiume's girlfriend to help out, formed a company called C.P. Direct, copied ingredients from websites selling herbal penis-enlargement pills and found a mixologist to pour the concoction into capsules for about four cents apiece. They filled each bottle with a month's supply—60 pills—and created Longitude, which they guaranteed would lengthen a penis by up to three inches.

Of course the pills did no such thing. The clinical research by a "former Viagra pharmacist" that supposedly proved Longitude's effectiveness did not exist. But that hardly mattered. Soon C.P. Direct was grossing $8 million a month, $2 million of which it spent to run ads on Howard Stern's radio show and in magazines such as GQ, Esquire, Men's Fitness, Maxim and Penthouse (playboy refused them). The campaign enticed hundreds of thousands of men or their partners to pay $59.95 for a product that cost $2.65 to manufac­ture. Consoli and Passafiume kept people on the hook with automatic monthly refills and credit card charges; they would later claim the business grew so quickly they couldn't get phone lines in place to process cancellation and refund requests.

Ultimately this lax attitude toward refunds, rather than the bogus product, caused their scheme to go soft. (The FDA does not regulate herbal supplements unless they are said to prevent or cure disease.) In 2002 the Arizona attorney general charged the partners with fraud and money laundering and seized nearly every asset in their empire. Each man served 90 days in jail. At sentencing, Consoli's lawyer argued that his client had been railroaded, that there had been few,

if any, dissatisfied Longitude customers and that even if there had been, you can't fault anyone for selling hope. "I am reminded of my favorite author, Saul Bellow, who once wrote, 'A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep,'" he said.

Arizona officials estimate C.P. Direct grossed at least $77 million over two years; Passafiume, who later pitched a $97 marketing course called the 12-Month Internet Millionaire before violating his probation and becoming a fugitive, put the figure at $100 million. In July a federal judge in Ohio ordered the con man behind another enlargement pill, Enzyte, to forfeit $500 million. Why do you continue to get spam about supplements that can supposedly make you harder, stronger and longer? That's why. The ability of these placebos (and of similar products that continue to be sold online) to bring in so much cash so quickly is testament to the fact that a man is attached to his penis by more than a band of muscle. Simply, it is a visible

and tangible sign of his masculinity and virility and has been since prehistoric man drew on cave walls. "I tell my graduate students, 'Men are their cocks,'" says Wil­liam Granzig, who trains sex researchers in China and at the American Academy of Clinical Sexologists in Orlando. "The men in class will nod their heads, and the women will ask why. I can only reply, 'It just is.'"

To be told your penis—your manhood—is inadequate, either by a woman or your own demons, is a powerful condemnation. Yet few men can explain exactly what normal is. Most are never taught how their penis functions, what it's made of ("boner" is a misnomer), how it goes from soft to hard and back so quickly or how it manages to propel a column of semen and sperm through a tiny hole at 28 miles an hour. The development of this tubular injection system pushed life from sea to land by allowing for internal fertilization, which keeps the fused sperm and egg in a protected, moist environment. Without the penis, we'd all have gills.

KinG of THe apes

The foremost question biologists have about the human penis is why it's so damn big, at least compared with the pencil dicks of the chimp, gorilla and orangutan, our closest primate cousins. Although a gorilla weighs twice as much as a man, its erection measures only 1.25 inches. By comparison, a five-inch human hard-on is terrific overkill. It sounds like wishful thinking, but some scientists believe we developed oversize penises because early woman's growing love of orgasms led her

to select mates who had thicker, longer and more flexible organs, which allow for a wider variety of positions. "In any gen­eration there will always be some women who favor bigger penises and few or none who favor smaller ones, so a trend toward greater length was established," argues archaeologist Timothy Taylor. (The penis stopped growing, he suggests, when further expansion would have made sex uncomfortable or erections cumber­some.) The notion that horny prehistoric women drew the organ out like snake

charmers "contradicts the view of the penis as a symbol of male domination," says evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller. If men controlled sex as male gorillas do, we wouldn't need to compete for females and could get by with the bare minimum. Unlike apes, human males and females are relatively close in size, so it's easy to imagine how the penis became a clear sign of masculinity as we lost our thick body hair. (Besides being tiny, a gorilla's penis is concealed under a mat of fur.) It may have grown into a symbol of excess in much the same way as a male peacock's colorful but burdensome plum­age: The message is "Check this out, babe. Even though I don't need four extra inches to get you pregnant, I am strong and fit enough to carry them around anyway." Given that the vast majority of modern women insist size is not a priority, phys­iologist Jared Diamond wonders if early man might have better spent the energy needed to evolve a bigger penis to instead create additional brain cells (not that we don't have enough, but who can't use more?).

Even if length is of no special advan­tage, the odd shape of the penis—with its distinctive acorn cap—may be. One challenging idea is that the coronal ridge connecting the head to the shaft developed to scoop out any sperm depos­ited very recently by another male. In 2003 evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup Jr. designed a creative experi­ment to test this premise. Using latex dildos, a fake vagina and a mixture of starch and water, he and his students at the University at Albany re-created the act of intercourse in the lab. The team reported that the ridge could scoop out 90 percent of an existing mixture with one thrust; a phallus with no ridge man­aged only 35 percent. They also noted the importance of depth, as anything less than a three-quarter thrust cleared less than 40 percent of the mixture. Further, they surveyed (continued on page 124)

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(continued from page 112) 600 college students and found both men and women had the impression that a man thrusts harder and deeper when he suspects a partner of cheating or hasn't slept with her in a while. It would be interesting to know, Gallup says, if a man adjusts his thrusts based on a woman's youth, symmetry or waist-hip ratio, each of which can be interpreted as a sign of fertility. If a man's kids don't all look like him, does that affect how hard he fucks his wife? Do circumcised men thrust harder and deeper because they realize their exposed ridge is more effective as a scoop? And how does a guy keep from clearing out his own deposit? Gallup says two mechanisms appear to prevent this. First, after a man ejaculates, the head of his penis becomes extremely sensitive, making it uncomfortable to continue thrusting. Second, he usually quickly loses his erection. If a man continues to thrust, Gallup suggests, the penetrations will be shallow and less vigorous. He wonders if excessive pumping may explain why some couples have trouble conceiving.

A QUICK TOUR OF THE PENIS

Your penis, like that of nearly every other mammal, is essentially a "big reinforced water balloon," says biologist Diane Kelly of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who specializes in what scientists call "inflatable intromittent organs." The bal­loon consists of three spongy rods. As you look down at your erection (go ahead, we'll wait), one is positioned on the upper left and one on die upper right. Known as the corpora cavernosa, they put the hard in hard-on. They are separated by a septum, but it is so permeable that during an erec­tion they essentially merge. The third rod, the corpus spongiosum, lies between and below, extending into the head, or glans. The urethra runs through its center; it stretches from the prostate gland, which can be felt by sticking a finger up your butt (less fun when a doctor does it while search­ing for cancer), to the opening at the tip of the glans (the meatus). Sperm share this exit with urine. This isn't ideal, but some­times evolution has to make compromises, such as using your mouth as the entrance for both air and food, which gives you repeated opportunities to choke to death. Semen protects the sperm from receiving a toxic golden shower, and pre-come pro­duced by the Cowper's glands appears to cleanse the urethra before ejaculation.

Reinforcing the balloon are two layers of collagen fibers, the outer stretching length­wise and the inner wrapping around the shaft. This sleeve, the tunica albuginea, is about the thickness of the cover of this magazine. When smooth muscles inside the penis relax, it rapidly fills with blood, the force of which is distributed evenly by the fibers so your hard-on doesn't bulge in all directions like a pocket full of coins. "An erection is a hydrostatic skeleton,

meaning it needs both a tensile membrane and a pressurized fluid to support itself," Kelly explains. When the penis becomes soft again so it can be stowed, the fibers crimp like drapes. If scar tissue forms on the tunica albuginea, a man's erection may curve, a condition known as Peyro-nie's disease after the French surgeon who first described it, in 1743. It usually cor­rects itself without treatment. The tunica albuginea can also fracture during sex, an injury typically accompanied by a loud pop and grotesque swelling.

Although scientists believe all mammals have vascular erections, some, including rodents, polar bears, dogs and seals, get an assist from a penis bone called a bacu-lum, which sounds terrific until you realize it can break. After dissecting the penises of 65 cadavers, a team led by Dr. Geng-Long Hsu of Taiwan Adventist Hospital concluded that a ligament in die glans that keeps it stiff under the buckling pressure of penetration and prevents the urethra from being compressed may be the last remnant of a long-lost human baculum. Without it, he says, the head would resemble "an umbrella without a stick." Other mam­mals, such as cattle, pigs, dolphins and deer, have fibro-elastic organs, which keep them perpetually semierect. Only humans, equids (e.g., stallions, zebras, donkeys), tar-siers and a few monkeys achieve the grand salute primarily with blood inflation while two muscles lift the erection like volunteers hoisting a Macy's parade balloon. This flexibility is one reason humans are able to achieve more than rear-entry intercourse, although Kelly points out, "to be fair," that other mammals might get just as kinky if they had our range of motion.

HOW BIG IS BIG?

It wasn't until 1939, in experiments with cats, that researchers demonstrated blood is necessary to sustain an erection—it can be induced by manipulating nerves but not maintained. And it wasn't until the 1980s that scientists discovered the key to an erec­tion isn't filling the three sponges—it takes less than two ounces of blood to increase their volume by 300 percent—but keep­ing them filled. To accomplish this, the pressure created by the rapidly expand­ing corpus spongiosum presses almost flat the veins that drain the penis. The system is designed to respond quickly to threats. As David Friedman notes in his cultural history of the penis, A Mind of Its Own, if you are startled during sex, say by a saber-toothed tiger, the body releases adrenaline to instantly contract the smooth muscles and allow the erectile blood—and you—to sprint away. This same process causes you to rapidly lose your erection after an orgasm. In 1992 Dr. Jacob Rajfer, a urologist at UCLA, discovered that when nerve end­ings and blood vessels inside the penis are signaled by touch or erotic thoughts, they produce nitric oxide. The nitric oxide starts a reaction that causes the penile arteries to relax, allowing blood to rush in. However, because nitric oxide breaks down in seconds,

the nerves and blood vessels must continu­ally produce a new supply. "The physiology of an erection is like driving a car," explains Dr. Arthur Burnett, a urologist at Johns Hopkins University. "You can't just turn the key and expect to go anywhere. You also need to hit and hold the accelerator." Some men have trouble staying hard because their penises don't produce enough nitric oxide and the blood drains. Although exercise can make the vessels more efficient (as does lay­ing off the cigarettes), what if a drug could be found to keep more nitric oxide in the erection? As scientists who are now loung­ing on beaches in the Caribbean discovered, sildenafil, better known as Viagra, does the trick. Because the clitoris works in much the same way—during arousal its two corpora cavernosa and glans fill with blood—Viagra has the same physical effect on women. However, female test subjects who took the drug said they didn't feel turned on. They couldn't see it happening.

When you get an erection, it is lifted into position by a suspensory ligament that con­nects to your corpora cavernosa. (Hold out your arm as if snaking hands and spread your fingers. The joke is that the pointer represents the angle of your erection in your 20s, the middle finger in your 30s, the ring finger in your 40s and the pinkie in all decades thereafter.) If you are foolish enough to have "enlargement" surgery, this is the ligament the surgeon slices in half to make the penis droop slighdy lower when soft. There is no way to lengthen the cor­pora cavernosa, so the size of the erection, which will never again rise above half mast, remains unchanged. Surveys have found the vast majority of enlarged men are dis­appointed with the results, especially since their new "monster" cock usually hangs only a third to a half inch lower.

To discourage patients from going under the knife, urologists have in recent years attempted to discover what con­vinces a man he has a small penis. A few suffer from a mental illness known as body dysmorphic disorder, but most get a skewed view as teenagers after compar­ing their organs with those of friends or porn stars. In two surveys of patients who asked about surgery, one in Egypt and the other in Italy, urologists found all 159 men had penises of normal size and function. But what is normal? By all accounts, the vast majority of men are between five and seven inches erect. Alfred Kinsey, who col­lected data mid-century from 2,770 men, reported the average erection, measured along the top from the base to the tip of the glans, to be 6.21 inches. (Only two percent of the men had erections larger than eight inches; at die other extreme are those with micropenis, which is an erection of 2.75 inches or less, although some urol­ogists argue even diat can't be considered too small because its owner can still achieve sufficient penetration to reproduce.) One significant flaw in Kinsey's oft-cited data is that he had his subjects report their own measurements, which certainly biased the results upward, so urologists around the

globe have long chased harder numbers. Although the results include Kinsey's self-reporters, a 2007 review of a dozen studies found the average erection to range from 5.5 to 6.3 inches and the average girth at the middle of the shaft to range from 4.72 to 5.12 inches. The largest and most recent study in which doctors or nurses did all the measuring, conducted in 2001 on 3,300 Italian army conscripts, found the average stretched penis (which correlates well to erectile length but requires no waiting) to be just under five inches.

Before you pull out a ruler, keep in mind that none of these measurements tells the full story. In 1999 Dutch scientists reported the results of an experiment in which three couples, including a pair of street acrobats, had intercourse inside a 20-inch-wide MRI scanner. The images revealed that the unseen root of the penis plays a crucial role during penetration, putting the functional length of the average erection at closer to nine inches.

THE UNKINDEST CUT

The penis communicates with the body through two nerves that run its entire length while branching off into the skin and ure­thra. Drs. Claire Yang and William Bradley of the University of Washington are pio­neers in documenting these pathways: One of their investigations, in 1998, involved numbing the penises of 14 volunteers and then poking them with pins. (Where do we sign up?) They discovered the dorsal nerve processes sensations on the shaft and much of the glans, while the perineal nerve, which skims along the urethra, feeds the frenu-lum, the hypersensitive ridge of skin that connects the foreskin, or prepuce, to the glans. Although it leads the way, the glans is the least sensitive part of the penis, at least to fine touch; it has been compared to the cornea, which can sense when an eyelash is caught under the lid but not its location.

The innervation of the penis is a hot topic in part because for more than a century in

the U.S. a great deal of the organ's tissue has been routinely removed soon after birth. Although many circumcisions are done for cultural reasons (e.g., because of Jewish or Muslim tradition, or so Junior looks like Dad), researchers have discovered a few apparent medical benefits, such as fewer early urinary tract infections, prevention of the rare case of penile cancer and increased protection against HIV. But critics point to less radical defenses against those threats, and today just 56 percent of American newborns are cut on average (the rate is much higher in the Mid­west, at 75 percent, than in the West, at 31 percent), compared with nearly 90 percent in the early 1960s. Still, anatomy texts often take die "penis as lollipop" approach, ignoring the foreskin. In the early 1990s, after learning that two of his American grandsons would be circumcised (as a Brit, he is not), pathologist John Taylor of the University of Manitoba decided to read up on what they would be missing. He found litde in die medical litera­ture, so he undertook his own investigation, dissecting 22 adult foreskins recovered from autopsies. He was surprised to see under the microscope that the mucous membrane of tissue traditionally thought to be disposable is rich with blood vessels and nerve endings. "It wasn't quite a eureka moment," he says, "but I have since tried to educate intact men about what they have."

Because chimps and bonobo monkeys do not have a glans, the corpora cavernosa and prepuce are die only parts in every pri­mate penis that have survived over 65 mil­lion years, a fact diat suggests some essential function. "The penis is basically an internal organ in nearly all mammals," says padiolo-gist Christopher Cold, who has confirmed Taylor's findings widi hundreds of additional dissections. One of the foreskin's key func­tions is to provide lubrication during inter­course, widi a secretion called smegma, which allows for easier penetration and thrusting (circumcised men must rely on the female to provide lubrication, Cold notes). Taylor,

now 76 and retired, proposes that when an accordion-like ridged band of skin under the prepuce stretches during penetration, it triggers a reflex at the base of the penis. This contraction, which is highly erogenous and encourages the man to keep thrusting, compresses the corpora cavernosa, making the penis harder. The contraction also con­stricts the corpus spongiosum, which "has always been dismissed as having no function besides supporting the urethra," Taylor says. "But it's a large structure for such a trivial role. In fact, when compressed it appears to act as a hydraulic conduit, causing the glans and coronal ridge to expand," increasing sur­face area and pleasure. "The penis is prob­ably designed to bring on ejaculation quickly once a man reaches full penetration," he says, which happens to be the point when the ridged band is fully extended.

If the prepuce is heavy with fine-touch receptors, do circumcised men feel less pleasure? The science here appears to be of the no-such-thing-as-bad-pizza variety, especially since most men are cut as infants and so never know what they're missing. Taylor and Cold believe a loss of sensation necessarily occurs, given the number of nerve endings removed, although a 2006 survey found that only 20 percent of 255 Korean men who had been circumcised as adults said it had harmed their sex lives, and other studies have found that the glans and shaft, at least, are equally sensitive in cut and uncut men. In 1997 sociologists at the University of Chicago investigated circum­cision's effect on behavior by parsing data from a government survey of 1,511 men. They found that circumcised men engage in oral and anal sex and masturbate more often than uncut men do. The difference was greatest for masturbation—47 percent of the circumcised men reported masturbat­ing at least once a month, versus 34 percent of intact men. Are cut men chasing lost plea­sure? The sociologists noted the irony that circumcision became popular in the U.S. in the late 19th century because doctors felt it would discourage boys from jerking off. Apparently, it has the opposite effect.

POCKET GUIDE: YOUR BALLS

For the record, no man has ever scratched his balls, only his scrotum, inside of which two slip­pery, inch-wide testes hang from fibrous bands of muscle. Typically the right testis is five per­cent larger than die left, though in 85 percent of men the left hangs lower. When you are cold, the tunica dartos, which lies just below the scrotum's thin skin and is responsible for its wrinkly appearance, tightens and pulls the bag up to warmer confines. If your testicles get too hot, the scrotum sweats to release heat. When you are aroused or anxious, a muscle below the dartos called the cremaster tugs the scrotum up like Tarzan pulling Cheetah to safety. You can trigger this reflex by strok­ing your inner thigh or, better yet, having a woman do it. Some scientists believe testis size is a reflection of how often a primate gets laid, because that determines how much sperm it needs to produce. As monkeys go, our balls are mediums.

If you're trying to protect your genetic leg­acy, dangling the testes in front of your taint like a pair of clackers doesn't seem like the

best strategy. But it's certainly cooler down there, and most scientists believe it's easier to produce and/or store healthy sperm at lower than body temperature. Anything that heats your testes higher than about 93 degrees can be trouble; studies have found degraded sperm in men who wear tight underwear, rest a laptop on their knees, carry a cell phone in their pocket or work as long­distance truckers or cabdrivers. Yet if scrota are so important, why do so many mammals not have them? One biologist suggests they evolved in humans to toughen up sperm for their trip through the hostile vagina by mak­ing it harder for blood to reach and nour­ish them. Another wonders if the bouncing sack stimulates the clitoris during rear-entry penetration, increasing the chances that the woman will climax, which may push the sperm along. Others have asked if animals that jump and gallop have scrota because abdominal pressure would otherwise make them leak sperm.

Earlier this year a team of scientists led by biologist Teddy Hsu of Stanford inves­tigated the path of genetic mutations that led to human scrota, a development that allowed us to take over the world by keep­ing our heat-sensitive sperm at cold-blooded temperatures while we reaped the benefits of a warm-blooded existence (e.g., greater agility, faster reflexes, the ability to survive in the cold). The team found vital clues in the genome of the platypus, which has fur and milk glands but lays eggs like a reptile. This oddball mammal has a gene similar to Insl3, which in humans causes the testes to drop into the scrotum shortly before birth. But because the platypus's body temperature is about nine degrees lower than ours, it has no need to cool its testes, and they stay near its kidneys. This suggests the first scrotum appeared sometime after 170 million years ago, when monotremes (e.g., the platypus and spiny anteater) broke off from other mammals. Notably, a version of what became the ball-dropping gene exists in frogs, reptiles and birds, pointing to its origins some 315 million years ago in our common fishy forefather.

PULLING THE TRIGGER

In 1990 Danish researchers attached needle electrodes to the pelvic muscles of seven

men, then asked them to ejaculate into a sus­pended aluminum pan. The scientists hoped to document the force generated by the bulbocavernosus (BC) muscle, which sends semen spurting out of the urethra. (It's also the muscle you use to squeeze out the last few drops of urine.) A second, smaller muscle, the ischiocavernosus, also fires at climax, but its primary function is to stiffen the erection to prevent injury during thrusting. The inde­pendence of these two muscles explains why you can ejaculate without being hard, such as happens during a wet dream.

While scientists have learned a great deal over the past decade about ejaculation, they are still at a loss as to what triggers the point of no return. For many years researchers believed the growing volume of semen cre­ated a pressure chamber that stretched the base of the urethra enough to fire the BC. But volunteers given drugs to block semen production can still climax, though nothing is expelled. It could be that semen volume and other factors each play a role but that none is essential. For instance, scientists can make the BC contract by applying a vibrator to the glans. Researchers are now looking to the spi­nal cord for answers. In 2002 neurobiologist Lique Coolen and a colleague discovered that when a bundle of neurons in the lower spinal cord of male rats is deactivated, they still pur­sue, mount and thrust inside females but can­not ejaculate. (Many go on to work in porn.) Studies of paralyzed men suggest a similar mechanism in humans; if a man is paralyzed above the middle of his rib cage, he can still stroke himself hard and ejaculate (without pleasure, since the brain is not involved). But if the injury is lower, a man can get hard but not ejaculate. If an ejaculation generator exists in the human spinal cord, it probably coordinates erotic sensory input until, at the crescendo, a signal is sent to get the semen-sperm mixture into position, close both the bladder neck and a urethral sphincter to pre­vent backflow, and trip the BC. At the same time, a burst is sent to the brain, triggering la petite mart and a long, happy moan.

RAPID FIRE

Every guy would love to have more control over his ejaculatory reflex, which, accord­ing to a four-week study involving 1,587

couples armed with stopwatches, kicks in after an average of 7.3 minutes of hot penis-in-vagina action. But some men blast off much sooner, and sometimes the rocket explodes while being rolled to the launch-pad. (One therapist, writing in the book The Psychophysiology of Sex, recalls a jumpy patient who would ejaculate while remov­ing his underwear.) While frustrating, this is usually a temporary setback, often brought on by anxiety about pleasing a new partner. However, the anxiety can feed on itself: The more a man frets about coming too quickly or the more pressure he feels to last longer (his aggravated lover may even be yelling at him to hold on), the more agitated he becomes. The psychological underpinnings of many cases of PE are reflected in the results of early trials of dapoxetine, a failed antidepressant being tested as a treatment, in which patients taking placebos doubled their stamina. For cases that don't involve a medical dysfunction, such as an overac-tive thyroid or a prostate-gland infection, therapists have traditionally prescribed breathing exercises, "cognitive distrac­tion" (e.g., thinking about baseball or your grandmother) or clumsy "stop-start" and "squeeze" techniques.

Sociologist Lawrence Hong wonders if modern male angst about coming too soon is misplaced, if perhaps we descend from a long line of Quick Draw McGraws. After all, once the erection is in position, nature doesn't care how long you take—we're the only creatures on the planet concerned about stamina. Hong, who teaches at Cal State, presented his hypothesis in a 1984 Journal of Sex Research paper, "Survival of the Fastest." Based on observations of monkeys. Hong suggests that early men who came quickly were less likely to be pulled off by a rival male (meaning they lived longer and could reproduce more often) or repelled by the female, who is vulnerable during sex and hopes to avoid injury from aggres­sive mates. With the exceptions of dogs, foxes and wolves (with genital locking), and minks, sables and some rats (without lock­ing), sex in mammals is usually over in sec­onds. A female chimp in the wild has never been observed talking dirty, giving head or wearing a nurse's outfit, which may explain

why chimp sex lasts about as long as it takes to read this sentence. If PE is an adaptation, Hong says, it should be a concern only when it happens prior to penetration. He writes, "Evolution did not endow males with greater staying power when they first arose from the savannas as an erectus, but with better dex­terity," so they could fondle and satisfy the female with hands and fingers.

The chief problem in treating rapid ejacu­lation is that it has never been well-defined. A few researchers suggest counting thrusts— six, eight or 15, take your pick—but most watch the clock. Last year 21 members of the International Society for Sexual Medicine met for three days in Amsterdam to estab­lish a standard. They agreed that the most serious cases of PE involve a man who comes just before or within a minute or two of pen-

etration nearly every time he has sex, from his first to the most recent. Such cases may be hereditary, says neuropsychiatrist Marcel Waldinger of HagaHospital Leyen-burg in the Hague, who has found fami­lies in which the father, brothers, sons and grandfather all share the problem. He believes men with lifelong PE may have abnormally low levels of serotonin or prob­lems processing it, which may explain why antidepressants that elevate the hor­mone, in particular Paxil, often provide relief.

PLEASE COME AGAIN

In 1994 the sex researcher Beverly Whipple received an unusual phone call. A 35-year-old father of four claimed he could climax repeatedly with­out losing his erection. Most males do not have this ability; once a man ejaculates, his

erection disappears for minutes, hours and sometimes days, depending largely on his age. Masters and Johnson called the time it takes a man to get hard again after an orgasm the refractory period. Women apparently do not have downtime. As physiologist Roy Levin writes, "Using ditoral stimulation with a vibrator, they can have orgasm after orgasm until they weary of them." The economic value of the refractory period is reflected in an observation, in Andy Bellin's Poker Nation, by a 29-year-old masseuse who provides the occasional happy ending: "The great thing is that after the guy is finished, he's finished— you know, totally done. He doesn't want to be massaged anymore." Notably, researchers have found that the refractor)' period can be shortened, at least in rats, by presenting the male with a new female.

Whipple invited the man to her lab at Rutgers University, where on January 15, 1995 she and a colleague, Barry Komisa-ruk, monitored his blood pressure, heart rate, pupil dilation and ejaculate volume as he masturbated to a video he had compiled of his favorite porn scenes. He achieved his first orgasm (and ejaculated) after stroking himself for 18 minutes. Two minutes later he came again. The man reached orgasm and ejaculated four more times in the next 14 minutes without los­ing his erection. He said later he stopped only because the lab grew stuffy—at home he usually continued until his balls started to ache. The subject, a swinger who would come to see his ability as divinely inspired and call on modern science to "eradi­cate" the refractory period, said he had

been having multiples as long as he could remember and typically each climax was more pleasurable than the last.

Scientists have studied multiple male orgasm since at least 1939, though with different ideas on how to define it. In one study from 1978, researchers interviewed 13 men who said they usually had three to 10 dry orgasms (although one over-achiever claimed 30 in an hour), with the ejaculatory final climax being the most intense. Each man said he had realized one day he could stop thrusting, breathe deeply, concentrate and have an orgasm without emission. The scientists wondered if some men are able to control the usu­ally involuntary muscles that open and shut the sphincters regulating semen flow. Notably, however, they eliminated from

their study men who ejaculated with each of their rapid-fire orgasms, apparently viewing this as a series of climaxes with unusually short refractory periods, rather than as multiples. It's a distinction most men would not find important.

In the mid-1980s a psychiatrist and a sociologist spoke with 21 multiorgasmic men, most of whom said they had no idea that not every male had the ability, until a stunned partner informed them otherwise. Five of the 21 men said they continued thrusting or stroking to "ride out" the refractory period, while the oth­ers had quick, successive orgasms. Most reported having two to nine orgasms at a time. Three men had multiples without ejaculating, two came the first time but not again, and 16 had a variety of pat-

terns. Although the refractory period is thought to lengthen as you get older, about half the men in the sample had their first multiples after the age of 35. What is their secret? Scientists at the University of Essen in Germany wonder about the role of prolactin, which is known to temper the dopa-mine high that comes with arousal. Studies have shown elevated levels of the hormone in both men and women for as long as 60 minutes after climax. Peak levels have also been linked to erectile dys­function. In 2002 the Essen researchers discovered their own repeating rifle—a 25-year-old with abilities similar to those of the Rutgers volunteer. He climaxed with ejaculation in the lab twice in two minutes and a third time 30 minutes later, all

without losing his erection. Nine other men used as a control showed a spike in prolac-tin after each of two orgasms; the multior-gasmic subject did not. Could prolactin be the key to unleashing man's sensual poten­tial? As a follow-up, another Essen team gave the prescription drug cabergoline to 10 men to lower their prolactin levels, then asked them to masturbate to climax twice within an hour. As the researchers reported in the Journal of Endocrinology, the results were telling but not dramatic: The volun­teers reported feeling hornier and had a somewhat shorter recovery. This suggests prolactin is just one of a number of factors that regulate the refractory period. The next sex-pill revolution will have to wait.