Desire and satisfaction

One of the things I learned from The Ultimate Guide to Prostate Pleasure is that orgasms and ejaculation are not the same thing. The authors of the book, Charlie Glickman and Aislinn Emirzian, explain that because they are two distinct processes – orgasms happen in the cerebral cortex of the brain and ejaculation is a spinal cord reflex – it is possible to have “non-ejaculatory orgasms” – that is, orgasms without ejaculating. I’ve written a lot about how prostate orgasms feel, but what is also interesting is how you feel afterwards. What I’ve realized is that you can be satisfied and still feel desire – a feeling I’d never experienced before I explored prostate pleasure and didn’t even think was possible for a man.

Until I experienced prostate pleasure – that is, when what that meant ejaculating, i.e. a regular orgasm – I’d always assumed that after you have an orgasm you experience a sudden drop in sexual desire. That’s always how it had been for me when I had an orgasm . I now know that that refractory period is from ejaculating, not from the orgasm itself. “If you learn to orgasm without ejaculating, there is no latency period and you can keep going!” Glickman and Emirzian write. Even after you finally stop, though, you don’t have that sudden drop in interest in sex that you have after a regular orgasm. You feel satisfied – actually I am way more satisfied than after a regular orgasm – and yet still turned on. It’s crazy!

This feeling may be what women experience after sex – if so, it's another way in which male and female pleasure are amazingly similar – but I until I experienced prostate pleasure I hadn’t realized it was possible for a man. In fact, it was something I couldn’t even really imagine. I’d always assumed that what I had experienced – you have an orgasm and then that’s it – was just the way male sexuality was. I’d never even really questioned it. The great thing about it, of course, is that it means that, if you are having sex with a female partner, you can keep going even after you have had an orgasm!