What is premature ejacuation?

Premature ejaculation is one of the many sexual-related conditions that can either impair or diminish the quality of a person’s sexual life, either for a specific period of time or in a permanent fashion. Compared to other similar complications, premature ejaculation is not as severe, as it doesn’t completely ruin a person’s sexual experience. It can be very unsettling, specially if the person becomes too self-aware because of it and develop psychological insecurities. In that case it can lead to erectile dysfunction, which then in many cases completely ruin a person’s sexual life. Or it can make someone completely avoid having sexual relationships, trying to avoid the embarrassment resulting from it.

Since there are many personal and subjective reasons for someone to think that their ejaculation is happening too fast, the International Society for Sexual Medicine standardizes the condition as when someone ejaculates on the first minute after penetration. For reference, information is available that says about three-quarters of men ejaculate within two minutes of penetration in over half of their sexual encounters, and the more general categorization says that the typical process of ejaculation takes between 4 to 8 minutes. Of course ultimately the partner or partners of each person is supposed to communicate if they feel that ejaculation is happening too quick, and anyone who experiences this can and should be looking into ways to deal with their situation, since mutual pleasure is essential to any healthy sexual relationship. But what that standard serves for is to diagnose when a medical intervention would be necessary. Still, that diagnosis can only properly happen after dialogue with the patient, and a specific analysis of their particular case.

With that many variations of cases, it is very hard for doctors or health professionals to establish a cause for premature ejaculation

There seems to be a strong correlation between excessive masturbation and complications with sexual sensations in general, including in some cases premature ejaculation. Psychological reasons can come from all sides, and can only be useful in individual, case by case, appliances. The most radical, and somewhat rare cases, may be an indication that a person has prostatitis, an inflammation of the prostate gland which requires medical intervention for many other reasons, beyond the symptomatic effect on ejaculation.

In some cases, people are able to perform self-treatment, and just ‘re-educate’ their psychological processes during sexual intercourse, since naturally the mental processes are as responsible for those processes as the physical ones. Although some people report managing to delay their ejaculation, this type of procedure tends to make the sexual act feel unnatural or disrupted, and so they are not recommended as truly capable of improving the quality of sex life someone would be seeking.

Usually, for those who want to cure themselves, the method with a higher success rate and that feels more natural is to explore the physical sensations, along with the partner, and try to find the sensations, rhythms, touches and ways of having sex that make the most sense for each person.

For those who are not able to sort their situation in these manners, there are treatments, some of them quite easy and without dangers, and, even better, with a very high success rate

Out of those, the one that has the most striking record of improving people’s sexual performance, even if they do not feel they ejaculate too fast, is the set known as Kegel exercises. Those consist on movement that strengthen the muscles of the pelvic floor by doing repetitive movements with their genital apparatus and related regions, in order to work the muscles the same one would do with their arms and legs. Another techniques that are mentioned as having helped people looking to deal with premature ejaculation are called Master and Johnson’s “stop-start technique”, which consists in creating very short but constant intervals that make the sensitive responses more controlled, and the “squeeze technique” one, which consists in squeezing one’s penis in a moderately aggressive way until the arousal is reduced.

Drugs can also have a similar effect, such as the substances known as paroxetine, dapoxetine or clomipramine. They are able to increase the time one takes to ejaculate even 10 times more than before the treatment started. Those are intense substances and can bring about many undesired effects, and should be considered a last case scenario.