Premature Ejaculation – Survival of the fittest – or fastest?

Premature ejaculation is a condition in which men have difficulty controlling their sexual response and orgasms, and some reach climax within just 1 to 2 minutes of stimulation.

Understandably, many men feel embarrassed by this condition. Our society puts a great emphasis on male virility and sexual performance, and men often think that if they don’t last a long time, their partner is dissatisfied or even judgmental. All of this anxiety and shame ironically only makes a man even more likely to have an episode of premature ejaculation. After all, it’s hard to stay present and control your sexual response if you are feeling overwhelmed and anxious. One of the biggest problems that many men find is that the more they focus on NOT trying to ejaculate too quickly – the more prevalent the premature ejaculation becomes.

But what if premature ejaculation isn’t a curse after all, but simply “survival of the fastest”? According to Mark Jeffrey Noble, M.D., a consultant to the Cleveland Clinic Glickman Urological Institute, “One might find some logical sense, from an evolutionary point of view, to the idea that males who can ejaculate rapidly would be more likely to succeed in fertilizing a female than those males who require prolonged stimulation to reach climax.”

So in that sense, maybe PE isn’t a sexual dysfunction at all—it’s a completely normal way of functioning, based on male physiology. That’s why we should stop calling it “premature” ejaculation and come up with a new, more accurate term: “immature ejaculation.” Because, frankly, that’s what it is: an immature way of doing things that largely stems from the way we’re taught, or rather, not taught, to masturbate in childhood.

Most young men, fearing discovery, masturbate furtively and quickly, unwittingly exploiting, and simultaneously hard-coding, their natural propensity to rapidly achieve gratification. Weight lifters talk about “muscle memory.” I believe that premature ejaculators experience “penis memory.” No wonder the pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey observed in his book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male that the average man can maintain penetrative thrusting for only about 2 minutes. (However, Cosmo readers said the average guy lasts 10 to 15 minutes.) We’ve trained ourselves to ejaculate quickly, and we need to relearn the process of sexual response in order to last longer. (Worried about ejaculating too quickly? Check out these 10 ways to last longer in bed.)