The Ultimate Guide to Male Sexual Health by Dudley Seth Danoff

Author:Dudley Seth Danoff [Danoff, Dudley Seth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780983199885
Publisher: Beyond Words Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2017-08-18T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Extenuating Circumstances: When Sex Becomes a Chore

Larry, a fifty-one-year-old man, came to me for a prostate examination. His prostate was enlarged and would require treatment, possibly even surgery. When I told him, he was relieved. I asked him why he was so happy to hear this. “Because I’ve been having problems getting it up lately, Doc,” he confessed. “I thought maybe I’d become impotent.”

“Larry,” I said, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but if you’re having problems with your penis, prostate surgery won’t change anything.” After all, the prostate’s role is to supply seminal fluid to the ejaculate and is unrelated to penis performance.

Larry and I had a long talk, and I learned he had been married to the same woman for nearly thirty years—raising children; dealing with hassles day in and day out; watching each other sag and wrinkle; and having routine, habitual sex. Nothing was wrong with Larry physically. He was suffering from the Coolidge effect.

Researchers studying animal sexuality originally coined the term for a unique behavioral pattern. If you put a male mouse in a cage with a female mouse in heat, he will quickly mount her. After he ejaculates, he will rest before going at it again. This refractory period is predictable. It varies from one species to another but is consistent among all mice, rats, roosters, rams, rhinos, and humans. After the second ejaculation, the refractory period is longer. The same is true after the third, fourth, fifth, and so on. The animal takes longer and longer to recover until it reaches exhaustion.

Here is the interesting part. If at any point you replace the female mouse with a different one, it’s back to square one for the male. No matter how many times he has ejaculated, introduce a new female, and his refractory period bounces back to nearly what it might have been after one or two copulations. This is the Coolidge effect.

Why that name? Legend has it that President Calvin Coolidge, the austere conservative they called Silent Cal, once visited a farm with his wife. Noticing an unusually large number of chicks and eggs, Mrs. Coolidge remarked that the few roosters in the barnyard must be prodigious studs. The farmer proudly replied that the roosters did their duty dozens of times a day. “You might point that out to Mr. Coolidge,” said the First Lady.

Silent Cal, evidently not as prudish as reputation suggests, asked the farmer if each rooster had to service the same old hen every time. When the farmer said the roosters could mate freely with any hen they wanted, the president responded, “You might point that out to Mrs. Coolidge.”

The story may be apocryphal, but it certainly deserves to have an effect named after it.

I have seen Larry’s problem in hundreds of men. The situations that cause temporary penis weakness are often so obvious that I am surprised patients don’t recognize them. Men are so vulnerable to self-doubt when it comes to penis performance they immediately assume something is wrong with their anatomy when boredom and habituation is to blame.

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