What Men Want In Bed by Bettina Arndt

Author:Bettina Arndt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522859782
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

I provided what stimulation I could for as long as I could manage each time, until my wrists and hands felt strained and I felt like I was developing RSI [repetitive strain injury]. After doing what I thought was my best effort and being told that wasn’t adequate, I certainly began to feel fed up with trying, as though it wasn’t worth the effort.

What was in her head at the time? ‘This is becoming bloody hard work … I’m fed up with trying to please him … I’m fed up with being blamed … This is no fun … I feel like giving up on sex.’

If the blaming had not stopped, Harriet said she would have been put off engaging in sex permanently. ‘Jonathan’s dissatisfaction with me sexually seemed to flow over into his feeling less than satisfied with me in general. So I felt unloved and unwanted and inadequate and annoyed with him. There was a mild undercurrent of dissatisfaction, disappointment and less than harmonious relating between us.’ But luckily Jonathan eventually came to terms with his erectile problems and got some Viagra, which worked well.

There’s some intriguing cross-cultural research showing that men in some countries are more likely to shift the blame for their erection problems onto their partners. Psychiatrist Michael Perelman and colleagues from Cornell University studied attitudes of men with ED in six different countries (not including Australia, unfortunately). While most men don’t blame their partners, in Italy 32 per cent of men with ED felt they wouldn’t have a problem if they had a different partner, while 30 per cent of Spanish men felt similarly.14

It was interesting reading what my female diarists had to say about being with a man who can’t get an erection. Many said they simply didn’t know what to do. Do you keep stimulating him in the hope that something happens? ‘It’s humiliating to keep beating a dead horse’, one woman grumbled. Do you murmur words of sympathy and encouragement, try to get him to talk about it? Some say it is better to pretend not to notice and carry on as if all is well, but that often isn’t possible.

Partners of men with ED do tend to wait for a signal of some kind from their men before raising the subject themselves, according to Canadian psychologist William Fisher, who coordinated an international study looking at how couples deal with this issue. The researchers found couples ran into all sorts of miscommunication problems. ‘Partner expressions of empathy and support were often seen as rejection and humiliation by men, who interpreted empathy as conveying that the partner perceived ED as a profound problem’, said the researchers. When the women told their partners that the problem did not matter, the men felt the women did not value their sexual relationship.15

This is mighty touchy territory. Fisher reports that both the men and women simply did not know how to begin a discussion about the issue, or were too embarrassed to have one. Sadly, more

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