Short Comings, Nice Guys, and Grandmas

Dear Dr. Frank,

I need to know what to do about premature ejaculation. Please hurry!

--On the Go

Dear Go,

Premature for whom? People used to "pet"--which is really just a form of what sex therapists call sensate focusing--in cars, and it was great. Then they would marry and screw and it was awful: quick and dirty for the guy, high and dry for the gal. In their frustration, they called one another names like "frigid" and "premature ejaculator."

In recent decades we have thrown back the sheets and brought sex out into the glaring light. We have established women's equal rights to orgasms. But we soon declared it to be potentially rude, sexist, and politically incorrect for men to ejaculate--men of conscience stopped doing so without feeling shame and a sense of sexual inferiority.

Men who are tempted to have orgasms have been urged to watch baseball during sex and think about batting averages. Sex experts like Masters and Johnson, James Semans, and Helen Singer Kaplan touted techniques for making intercourse so uncomfortable or even painful that men would lose their ability to ejaculate until the woman granted permission.

We have not yet figured out scientifically, legally, or socially just how long sexual intercourse should last (ejaculations that occur prior to insertion are premature only if the sex stops then). But we have certainly learned that sex is about the workings of two bodies and two minds, not just one scared, hard-working little penis.

Modern sex experts like David Schnarch encourage couples to screw less and make love more, to stop making such a big thing over such a little thing as a penis. The penis may be the point man but he isn't the whole team. The basic skill of sex is masturbation, not screwing.

Dr. Joycelyn Elders understood: We need to teach people to masturbate better--slowly, grandly, proudly--learning all there is to know about their genitals and the rest of their totally erogenous bodies. In time they must teach someone else to touch them in the right places, in the right way, for the right time for their stage of arousal. Nothing improves a couple's sex life more than giving up screwing altogether until they know themselves and one another so intimately that they can play one another's body like an organ, with hand pedals, foot pedals, mouth pedals, and all the stops.

So if you want to get good at sex, put away the stopwatch, baseball cards, and pincers; just stay home and beat off--make an evening of it.

Dear Dr. Frank,

I want your opinion on this letter I wrote to my boyfriend. We started going out a year and a half ago, are presently living together, and are talking about marriage. This is the first time either of us has lived with someone.

We are both 25. My problem is that I know we are not ready for this major step in our lives. I don't know how he feels about anything; we just can't talk to each other, and when we do, we end up not talking at all. I don't know how we got this far. If I try to talk to him, he gets so defensive and won't admit that whatever problem I want to talk about even exists.

Please don't misunderstand me. I am not the kind of person who needs to discuss everything to the hilt. I keep most things to myself, but when I do speak out, he cuts me off, puts up a wall, and leaves me out. This makes me so depressed it literally drains all the life out of me. I sometimes feel the only solution is to just end it, but I feel guilty because he is a good person, and I feel like I am giving up without giving him a chance.

Do you think this letter expresses my feeling that if we do not get help, we are going to self-destruct? If he still does not believe we have a problem, should I just deal with my guilt and get out before we scar each other with all the hurt? He doesn't lie, cheat, or beat me, but we don't share anything either. We pretty much live separate lives, and I think a relationship should be more than that. I am just so utterly confused.

Here's the letter:

"D.,

I don't want to bore you with my thoughts and feelings so I am going to make this straight to the point. We have a problem that goes much deeper than either one of us being stubborn. It is not all you, and it's not all me. I won't play the psych major and pretend I know what's wrong with us or act like I know what to do to fix it. I can't say what it is, I only know it's there, and it's not going to go away by itself. We can let things go on like they are, but I honestly believe the tension is unhealthy for both of us.

I believe we really care about each other or we never would have lasted this long with so many things between us. I believe that we do want to be together. I think we should talk to someone else. We have a lot of plans for our lives together, but I don't think we will just go on happily ever after by ourselves. There is a wall between us and I know part of it is my inability to communicate with you. If we talk to a professional, maybe we can get through that, and anything else coming be-tween us. I think we should invest some time and money into our relationship. It is worth it.

Love,

S."

Dear S.,

Instead of sending D. the careful, self-deprecating letter you wrote him, send him the straight, desperate letter you wrote me. You can't marry someone with whom you must be that cautious, someone you firmly believe would be bored by your thoughts and feelings, or someone who bores you so much it drains the life out of you.

D. surely knows there's a problem, and he may be even more afraid than you are of the necessary conflict of a relationship. D. may be trying to handle the deadness in the relationship by minimizing and avoiding the problems you see. He may naively believe that he can make a marriage work by solving problems or avoiding them, when actually marriage is a lifetime process of dealing with them by comparing your reactions to the enlightening messiness of life.

You mustn't marry people just because they are nice guys. I'm glad D. doesn't lie, cheat, or beat you, but that isn't enough to make a guy a good first husband. (I know some tired, bruised women would choose just such virtues in a third husband.) Many a woman will stick with a man who does lie, cheat, and beat her because he has the overriding virtue of caring about his and her emotional lives.

D. needs to learn a new language. If he is too afraid of clinical problem-solving, a group setting may be less threatening. Churches and mental health centers often offer free or inexpensive quasi-clinical communication courses for couples. Take him to class where they will teach him the language of life and emotions. Don't be ashamed of it: go on and speak it yourself. Read books together; go to movies about something more emotionally complex than broken glass and car crashes. Refuse to live at his emotional level.

Break it off if you like. Breaking off a relationship at this stage (before children) is nothing to feel guilty about. For his sake as well as for your own, stop protecting him from knowing he's alive and learning to talk about it.

Everyone--even an emotionally silent man--deserves a marriage partner he or she can please. He may pull back from the life you offer him now, but he'll need to catch on eventually--there are not enough emotionally deaf women to go around for all the emotionally dumb men out there. In time, any woman will want a response.

And please stop apologizing to him for not being happy. Until he cares how you feel and tells you how he feels, there is nothing between you to be happy about.

Dear Dr, Frank,

My 24-year-old daughter crashed emotionally at the age of 14 and has called herself "Mouse" since then. For seven years she has been with a man of a different race and culture. They have an 18-month-old son together. She drives a truck and leaves my grandson with his father, who has never held a job, drinks beer, and gets money from his gambling buddies.

Recently, I noticed that the baby's tongue and lower lip were swollen. He was acting out a lot of anger by hitting things. My daughter said, "His father wouldn't hurt him. He takes good care of him." I believe my fear is justified. The father is unfit to be a parent and my daughter is unfit for leaving the child with him.

But the Arizona Child Protective Service has been written up in the newspaper because their foster care system has generated 10 deaths in two years and there is high turnover of management. I cannot bring myself to feed my grandson to a system that is impersonal and has received so much bad publicity. I want the child with me, but my daughter doesn't believe he is in jeopardy, though he is sick with a cold most of the time and survives on soda pop and junk food.

Is there any option other than reporting the situation to a system that wouldn't care about my grandson?

-- Mouse's Mom

Dear Grandmouse,

I know you're not pleased with how your daughter's life is going. She's taken a rough road. But she dearly considers herself lucky to have this man as a partner and father to her son. He seems to give her the opportunity to develop her own competence. Incompetent men are useful if they inspire mousy women to roar. And ordinarily, I can think of nothing more ideal for a little boy than to be raised at home by his domesticated, underwhelming father.

I understand your concern if the child's father is drinking on the job. Parenting is too important to be done by people who are rendering themselves brain damaged as they do it.

But even so, you just don't describe anything in your letter that would warrant Child Protective intervention. Toddlers fall and hurt their lips routinely. Of course, if there is more than you have told me, or if you have any doubts, call Protective Services and talk it over with them. If then the time comes when the child is more clearly in danger, they will already have been alerted.

You know that a child is going to get more love and more personal attention with his or her own family than in an institution or a foster setting. Still, when the family fails, someone must step in. If abuse is a certainty at home, then the possibility of abuse elsewhere is a gamble worth taking. The beleaguered state agencies do a yeoman's job most of the time, especially if stable relatives stay involved. You may be less distrustful of them after you have talked with them. Of course, you may be less distrustful of your grandson's father after you have talked with him.

I don't think you are going to gain more influence with Mouse by blaming and criticizing the mate she has chosen--especially if you have been squeamish about his race and culture in the past. People who seem prejudiced tend to be dismissed as credible witnesses.

A loving grandmother, overseeing her grandson's welfare, can surely find some way to be more helpful than calling the cops on his daddy. Can't you find a cooperative way of being involved with the boy and doing more of the child raising, short of accusing the father of being unfit?

Your grandson is lucky to have you. But have you convinced your son-in-law that he is lucky to have you too? Does he trust you with his son? A helpful, supportive grandmother is worth more than a dozen state agencies.

Dear Dr. Frank,

I don't want to do harm. How can I know if a repressed and recovered memory is valid?

--Conscientious Therapist

Dear Connie,

You can't.

Dear PSYCHOLOGY TODAY,

I'm shocked that Dr. Frank would make such a flippant response to the paranoid who wrote to him complaining about queers and Asians: "In this country many people are uncomfortable around people of other races and sexual orientations: we call them Republicans."

Now some Republicans, especially the religious ones, have very strange attitudes, but liberals are just as disgusting and irrational in their own way as Republicans; they tend to romanticize criminals (but oppose the right of law-abiding citizens to own firearms for self-defense); they're engaged in a witch-hunt against so-called child molesters and sexual abusers, accepting the absurd testimony of people who recall all kinds of fantastic things; they're for freedom of expression as long as it's politically correct, but don't mention anything not conforming to the list of correct attitudes. I used to be a liberal, until they lost all common sense and decency.

Dr. Frank should be relieved of his duties at PSYCHOLOGY TODAY and his license to practice psychiatry as well.

-- Unprejudiced Republican

Dear Pub,

We've gotten many letters from unprejudiced people like yourself, all calling me to task for my flippant little effort to normalize, without embracing, xenophobia. I am relieved to learn that not all Republicans are homophobic or otherwise biased, and do not want to silence dissent. (Have Newt Gingrich, Jesse Helms, and Dick Armey been told?)

As you point out, it's not easy being a liberal these days. The soul of liberalism is the right for everyone, however foolish, to be heard--even you and me.