<< Time Involved >>

Petting not infrequently begins at a high level of erotic arousal and reaches orgasm within a minute or two. More often it is deliberately extended to a quarter or a half hour or more if the situation permits. Sometimes it may be carried on for hours or through the whole of a night. Sometimes both individuals may be completely nude throughout the whole of even such a prolonged performance, although neither of them is willing to accept any sort of genital union.

Among the females in the sample, the petting which had preceded the pre-marital coitus had often been more extensive than the petting which preceded marital coitus. Of those who had had extended experience in pre-marital coitus, only 9 per cent reported that the foreplay was ordinarily restricted to something between one and five minutes, while 23 per cent of the married females reported such limitations of the foreplay. For the pre-marital activity, 75 per cent of the females reported that something between eleven minutes and an hour or more had regularly been involved in petting before any genital union occurred, while only 53 per cent of the married females reported such extended play. Certainly the data do not justify the general opinion that pre-marital coitus is, of necessity, more hurried and consequently less satisfactory than coitus usually is in marriage.

There must be courting if the male intends to secure or continue pre-marital or extra-marital coitus, but such courting is often absent from marital relationships. In marriage the male more or less assumes that coitus is his privilege, and the law confirms him in this interpretation. Moreover, the higher frequencies of marital coitus, and the ease of obtaining it, may in time reduce its attraction and its capacity to stimulate. In consequence, many of the females and males in the sample had found the foreplay in pre-marital activity, common-law marriages, and extra-marital relationships more stimulating than similar activity in legal marriages.

Speed of Male Orgasm
There may be a considerable amount of intercourse which is had without orgasm for the female, and some males may fail to reach orgasm in pre-marital or extra-marital coitus or in some other types of sexual activity; but failures to achieve climax are almost never found among married males in intercourse with their wives.

Throughout the population it is customary for the male to reach a single orgasm and not to attempt to continue intercourse beyond that point. Exceptions are found chiefly among younger married males who are still in their teens. At that age 15 per cent of the population is capable of experiencing two or more ejaculations during a limited period of time and during continuous erotic activity (Table 48). The number of males who are capable of such multiple orgasm decreases with advancing age. Not more than 7 per cent remain so capable by age 35.

At lower educational levels, it is usual for the male to try to achieve an orgasm as soon as possible after effecting genital union. Upper level males more often attempt to delay orgasm. For perhaps three-quarters of all males, orgasm is reached within two minutes after the initiation of the sexual relation, and for a not inconsiderable number of males the climax may be reached within less than a minute or even within ten or twenty seconds after coital entrance. Occasionally a male may become so stimulated psychically or through physical petting that he ejaculates before he has effected genital union.

This quick performance of the typical male may be most unsatisfactory to a wife who is inhibited or natively low in response, as many wives are; and such disparities in the speed of male and female response are frequent sources of marital conflict, especially among upper social levels where the female is most restrained in her behavior. Nevertheless, the idea that the male who responds quickly in a sexual relation is neurotic or otherwise pathologically involved is, in most cases, not justified scientifically. There are clinicians who insist that ejaculation should be considered premature if a male is incapable of delaying until the female is ready to reach orgasm. Considering the many upper level females who are so adversely conditioned to sexual situations that they may require ten to fifteen minutes of the most careful stimulation to bring them to climax, and considering the fair number of females who never come to climax in their whole lives, it is, of course, demanding that the male be quite abnormal in his ability to prolong sexual activity without ejaculation if he is required to match the female partner.

Interpretations of human behavior would benefit if there were a more general understanding of basic mammalian behavior. On the present issue, for instance, it is to be emphasized that in many species of mammals the male ejaculates almost instantly upon intromission, and that this is true of man’s closest relatives among the primates. Students of sexual activity among chimpanzees, for instance, report that ten to twenty seconds is all the time which is ordinarily needed to effect ejaculation in that species. Far from being abnormal, the human male who is quick in his sexual response is quite normal among the mammals, and usual in his own species. It is curious that the term “impotence” should have ever been applied to such rapid response. It would be difficult to find another situation in which an individual who was quick and intense in his responses was labeled anything but superior, and that in most instances is exactly what the rapidly ejaculating male probably is, however inconvenient and unfortunate his qualities may be from the standpoint of the wife in the relationship.

A portion of the upper level males do deliberately learn to delay ejaculation, and it is probable that most males could learn to control urethral convulsions, primarily through a tightening of anal muscles, so they could prolong sexual activity before orgasm. But it is only a portion of the male population that would consider the acquirement of such an ability as a desirable substitute for direct and rapidly effected intercourse.

In the female, variations in the speed with which orgasm is achieved are much greater than in the male.

Diversion During Coitus
Effective female responses during coitus may depend, in many cases, upon the continuity of physical stimulation. If that stimulation is interrupted, orgasm is delayed, primarily because the female may return to normal physiologic levels in such periods of inactivity. This appears to be due to the fact that she is not sufficiently aroused by psychologic stimuli to maintain her arousal when there is no physical stimulation. We have pointed out that the male, on the contrary, may go through a period in which physical activity is interrupted without losing erection or the other evidences of his erotic arousal, primarily because he continues to be stimulated psychologically during those periods.

Similarly, because the male is more strongly stimulated by psychologic factors during sexual activities, he cannot be distracted from his performance as easily as the female. Many females are easily diverted, and may turn from coitus when a baby cries, when children enter the house, when the doorbell rings, when they recall household duties which they intended to take care of before they retired for the night, and when music, conversation, food, a desire to smoke, or other non-sexual activities present themselves. The male himself is sometimes responsible for the introduction of the conversation, cigarettes, music, and other diversions, and he, unwittingly, may be responsible for the female’s distraction because he does not understand that the sources of her responses may be different from his.

It is a standard complaint of males that their female partners in coitus “do not put their minds to it.” This is an incorrect appraisal of the situation, for what is involved is the female’s lack of stimulation by the sorts of psychologic stimuli which are of importance to the male. Such differences between females and males have been known for centuries, and are pointed out in the classic and Oriental literature. From the most ancient to the most modern erotic art, the female has been portrayed on occasion as reading a book, eating, or engaging in other activities while she is in coitus; but no artist seems to have portrayed males engaged in such extraneous activities while in coitus.

Various interpretations may be offered of these differences between females and males. Many persons would, again, be inclined to look for cultural influences which might be responsible. But some sort of basic biologic factor must be involved, for at least some of the infra-human species of mammals show these same differences. Cheese crumbs spread in front of a copulating pair of rats may distract the female, but not the male. A mouse running in front of a copulating pair of cats may distract the female, but not the male. When cattle are interrupted during coitus, it is the cow that is more likely to be disturbed while the bull may try to continue with coitus. It explains nothing to suggest that this is due to differences in levels of “sex drive” in the two sexes. There are probably more basic neurologic explanations of these differences between females and males.
As examples of the fact that the female is more easily distracted, see: Beach 1947b:264 (bitches will eat during coitus, most male dogs refuse food in this situation; female cats may investigate mouse holes during coitus). Robert Bean, director of Brookfield Zoo, reports (verbal communie.) females of various species eating during coitus.

Discontinuity in Sexual Activity
The sexual activities of females are often very discontinuous. Between periods of activity there may be weeks or months and sometimes years in which there is no activity of any sort. This is true of masturbation in the female, of nocturnal dreams to the point of orgasm, of pre-marital petting, of pre-marital coitus, of extra-marital coitus, and of homosexual experience. It is most strikingly true of the female’s total sexual outlet. Some females who at times have high rates of outlet, may go for weeks or months or even years with very little outlet, or none at all. But then after such a period of inactivity the high rates of outlet may develop again. Discontinuities in total outlet are practically unknown in the histories of males.

These differences in the continuity of sexual activities may depend upon a variety of factors. They certainly depend in part upon the differences in the way in which females and males respond to psychologic stimuli. Because males are so readily stimulated by thinking of past sexual experiences, by anticipating the opportunity to renew that experience, and by the abundant associations that they make between everyday objects and their sexual experience, the average younger male is constantly being aroused. The average female is not so often aroused. In some instances the male’s arousal may be mild, but in many instances the arousal may involve genital erection and considerable physiologic reaction. Nearly all (but not all) younger males are aroused to the point of erection many times per week, and many of them may respond to the point of erection several times per day. Many females may go for days and weeks and months without ever being, stimulated unless they have actual physical contact with a sexual partner. Because of this constant arousal, most males, particularly younger males, may be nervously disturbed unless they can regularly carry their responses through to the point of orgasm. Most females are not seriously disturbed if they do not have a regular sexual outlet, although some of them may be as disturbed as most males are without a regular outlet. The failure to recognize these differences in the needs of the two sexes for a regular sexual outlet may be the source of a considerable amount of difficulty in marriage. It is the source of many social disturbances over questions of sex. In establishing sex laws, in considering the sexual needs of females and males in penal and other institutions, in considering the need among females and among males for non-marital sources of sexual outlet, and in various other social problems, we cannot reach final solutions unless we comprehend these considerable differences between the sexual needs of the average female and the average male.

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