Male Menopause

Male Menopause

(n.b. I’m just doing hetero here, cuz I am one and don’t feel like wrestling with pronouns.)

They say men don’t have menopause, but they do. This is a little acknowledged fact, mostly by men since they don’t want anybody to know. It’s very important to a man to see himself as virile and studly. As ever ready to go.

And this is mostly true, of all men from a very young age. Experts differ on exactly what age that is. But having raised not one but two male children I can say without fear of contradiction that the days they found their willies were the second happiest days of their lives; the first being when they found the titty. Little boys will wank away at that thing with a look of such idiotic elation on their faces you feel like the biggest killjoy on planet Earth putting the diaper back on.

But once males get older there is no stopping them. They will do virtually anything to insert said willy into any unsuspecting female they can talk into it. This creates a definitive gendorial, (is that a word? It should be) rub, so to speak. Girls are acculturated with all kinds of lies about both men and sex. Our bedtime stories full of handsome princes riding up on white stallions and sweeping us off our feet with only our best interests at heart. These men will love and protect us from all the evils of the world and having sexual congress with them is defined as a sacred, almost magical act. Cinderella’s prince ministers at her feet, and it fits just perfectly. Sleeping Beauty is awakened only by her true love. Beauty’s womanly kindness and understanding transforms The Beast into an uxorious and faithful prince. Ad infinitum, or to those non-Latin speakers: it goes on for fucking ever.

So by the time most women actually have sex, it’s like biting into a hamburger and finding a slab of cold spam. It isn’t what we thought it would be at all. And of course, they never call us in the morning, even though they promise they will.

How do I know all this? Women talk. They talk about size, they talk about technique. They talk about curves, to the left and to the right. They talk about stroke and duration, about scent and hygiene. Nothing’s worse than going down on a guy who pays insufficient hygienic attention to his southern equatorial regions. And for all of you who complain about truncated and halfassed blowjobs, physician heal thyself. Nobody wants to suck on something that smells like a Mexican train station.

But there’s one aspect of female sexuality that men don’t understand, at least when they’re young. Generally, a woman is incapable of orgasm without some level of emotional involvement and trust in her partner. This is true from the time she becomes a sexual being.

And it creeps into male sexuality at about the age of forty. Of course, western sexual enculturation being what it is, vis a viz: boneheaded and shallow, men have never been informed of this eventuality. So when they’ve had a hard day at work: say they’ve had to fire somebody they really like, or the power point presentation they’d planned so very meticulously, goes caddywhompas because the computer crashes, at the end of the day when their partner wants to get close and cuddly, they can’t get it up, or if they do manage that, they can’t come.

This freaks them out. They feel disappointed and inadequate. They feel as if they’ve failed. Nobody ever told them this would happen.

Women, on the other hand, have had it happening their entire lives. But unlike men, woman can fake both arousal and orgasm. Most women know that when they’ve had a really stressful day, it is going to effect their ability to come. But they don’t want their partner to feel as if it is his fault so they fake it. Sally was right. Harry was wrong.

What often happens at this point in a man’s life is that he buys a sports car, motorcycle, or takes up with a younger woman. He doesn’t know what has happened to him, ergo, it must be his partner’s fault. She is just not sexy anymore.

The other thing that happens, all part of male menopause, is that the nature of a man’s erection changes. It simply doesn’t get as hard as it used to. This is particularly bad in men with reduced peripheral blood flow often caused by smoking or shitty, too many buffalo wings and ribs, diets. But even a comparatively healthy man can find his erections less hard than they used to be, occasionally resembling a loaf of damp French bread.

This is normal.

As is alcohol creating problems. When a guy is young, a few beers gets him all hopped up and raring to go. When he’s a little older the anesthetic effect of too much booze can not only knock him off his game but like nicotine, it constricts peripheral blood flow. Not good if you’re looking to play the stud.

Henry Miller, AKA, the most sexually pretentious western writer to ever gum up his typewriter, used to bemoan the fact that he was sex obsessed as a young man and that his greatest wish was that with age, it would wane. Alas and alas, it did not, he wrote, and he was hounded by Priapus all the way to the grave.

It is my considered opinion, though obviously I can’t really know, that he was a liar liar, pants not-really-on-fire. He just wanted googly eyed female grad students to continue jumping into his bed. Even if he wasn’t going to get around all the bases, at least he was still going to give it the old college try, so to speak.

The ironic and truly absurd thing about all of this is that, while I can’t speak for everybody, I’ve talked to a lot of women and for the most part, they don’t care. A woman’s own menopause creates a profound change in her own sexuality and therefore a tendency to be more understanding of others. Nothing stays the same. Not steel girded bridges, not mountains, not the sea or the sky. The human body if full of erogenous zones and at the risk of sounding hackneyed, the greatest is the mind. (although the palm of the had, the armpit, and of course nipples, can be good too.)
And if that doesn’t work, hell, a stiff dick can be purchased at the sex toy store for, like, fifteen bucks. And if that fails, there’s always Viagra, although, I’d save that for the twenty year old girlfriends. Not many women I know over forty want to be banged away at for four hours.