"Delayed ejaculation," said one man bitterly, "So you can't have a child - so what? You can get it up. You can get it in. You can do just about everything else you're supposed to do. If you have sense enough to keep your mouth shut, your wife may not even know the difference!"
Masters and Johnson called delayed ejaculation (also known as retarded ejaculation) the reverse side of premature ejaculation. One group of men do it too early; the other group just can't do it at all. A woman may scorn or get angry at the premature ejaculator, but she is only puzzled and sometimes frightened by the man who can't ejaculate. It seems so unnatural. There is one favorable aspect of the problem; these non-ejaculatory men carry on active, intravaginal pelvic thrusting for long periods of time and their women are often multi-orgasmic. They may not get pregnant, but they have lots of orgasms...or they get very sore and see themselves as unattractive.
So, it's a serious problem for men - and nowhere near as rare as was once thought. Masters and Johnson cited some rather extreme case histories such as:
An orthodox Jew who attempted his first sexual experience at age 24. He was persuaded to desist by the young woman who said she was menstruating. Orthodox Judaism strictly forbids intercourse during the menstrual period and for some days thereafter. He took her straight home and never saw her again. Some years later he married, and he and his wife conformed strictly to the Orthodox Jewish rules about menstruation. But the young man developed such a horror of being contaminated by the vagina that he "dried up" -- he couldn't ejaculate even when the schedule of his religion gave him permission. He just couldn't mix his body fluid with his wife's.
A 36-year-old Roman Catholic man who told how at age 13 his mother was horrified to discover him masturbating. She told his father who punished the boy severely. Then they took him to a religious adviser. The boy was by this time terrified and nearly in hysterics. He was told his act threatened him with mental illness and that he would never be able to "be a man" if he ever did it again. The boy not only never masturbated, he never even had a nocturnal emission. When he grew up and married, he could not ejaculate. The guilty shock at age 13 had indeed unmanned him.
A son - an only child - trained by a rigidly Protestant mother and father to total physical privacy. No sharing of the family bathroom. No showers at school. No dating until age 18 and then only under conditions that would have exhausted a Spanish duenna. All his father told him about sex was that the seminal fluid was dirty, an insult to a good woman, and that intercourse was only to be resorted to when children were desired. At age 26 the young man married a 27-year-old woman who came from the "right" background. The family minister, shortly before the ceremony, warned him that his bride would be in terrible pain at the first sexual encounter. But on the wedding night the young man found that his penis slid into her vagina quite easily. He was immediately angry and suspicious. He withdrew and started to question her. She broke down and admitted she wasn't a virgin. There was a terrible quarrel. She begged for forgiveness. Although he said he forgave her, he couldn't ejaculate. For the next seven years he spent 45 minutes or more several nights a week in vigorous pelvic thrusting. She became multi-orgasmic. But the more sexually responsive his wife became, the more alienated he felt toward her. He was sure her premarital experience was responsible for her sexual pleasure. He subconsciously didn't want to be contaminated by discharging semen into her vagina. He became a totally non-ejaculatory male.
These "freeze-outs" are extreme. To some readers they may also sound outdated. Unfortunately many children are still reared in similar conditions of repression.
Other men are non-ejaculatory with their wives simply because they don't like them. How can you argue with that? In one case, a man was married to a rich and domineering distant cousin. She kept telling him that if it weren't for her father's money he wouldn't amount to anything. So he denied her - subconsciously - his ejaculation.
Another man was secretly homosexual. He married to preserve appearances in his career but really didn't even want to touch a woman. He had a male lover and was able to ejaculate with him but was unable to do so with his wife.
A third man married a woman who was, unfortunately, unattractive. The more sex she demanded, the further her husband retreated. He rarely attempted intercourse and could not ejaculate.
A no less tragic but far more sympathetic case involved that of a congenially and happily engaged pair who married - and the bride foolishly chose her wedding night to tell her husband she had been raped by two men when she was a teenager. Her husband was emotionally overwhelmed. Not, he insisted, repelled, but unconsciously he was struck with such horror that he could not ejaculate. The marriage lasted six years, then broke up. The husband discovered to his real dismay that he could not ejaculate with any woman! He had rejected the whole intravaginal experience, transferring the recoil of rape from one woman to the next.
Another man was married and doing fine until his children, aged six and eight, suddenly entered the bedroom while he and his wife were having intercourse. The husband, rapidly approaching ejaculation, had passed the point where he could stop. He ejaculated in the presence of his calm but interested children. For the next nine years, even though he put a bolt on the door, he could never ejaculate again.
Still another man entered his bedroom to find the classic confrontation - his wife and his best friend. The two begged forgiveness. The husband said he forgave. But he could never again ejaculate.
Non-ejaculators are the victims of complex problems. To sum up there are the repressive influences of religious orthodoxies. (Why religion, which is supposed to be an expression and consciousness of man's love of God and the attempt of God to communicate with man, should concern itself with sexual repression is a mystery. But there it is.) There are men who aren't straight. Men who don't like their wives. And men who have undergone severe emotional stress or shock.
The Masters and Johnson treatment for the non-ejaculator reversed the routine prescribed for the premature ejaculator. The wife was urged to be demanding, to massage her husband's penis vigorously with oil or lotion. She is instructed how to force his ejaculation manually. In treatment, there was a day or two spent in developing increasingly intimate sensate focus. Then the wife was told to masturbate her husband almost to the point of ejaculation. Then she climbed on top of him in the female superior position and continuing the masturbation, slips his penis into her vagina. She was told to move fairly quickly at this point. However, even if she couldn't - and most of the seminal fluid was spilled outside her vagina - it seems as if even a few drops entering the vagina, for some strange reason, makes the mental and physical block against intravaginal ejaculation begin to crumble. Of the patients referred to Masters and Johnson there was a success rate of more than 80 percent, who said that a cure depends in large part on the decency, sincerity, and intelligent cooperation of the partner.