David, a 25-year-old, walked into urologist Dr. Abraham Morgentaler’s office a few years ago with a startling confession: He was faking orgasms. It wasn’t because he wasn’t attracted to his girlfriend; in fact, he thought she was the love of his life.
He was simply trying to please her and make her happy, even when Old Faithful wasn’t quite ready to erupt.
“That was the first I’d ever heard of it,” says Morgentaler, who started researching the phenomenon of men faking orgasms after the meeting and discovered that as many as 30 percent of men have admitted to pulling the old “When Harry Met Sally” scene. “The stories I hear from men behind closed doors are completely different from men we hear about in public. What I hear over and over again is that the key for men to feel good about themselves sexually is to be a sexual provider.”
Or, to put it another way, all men need to feel happy in the bedroom is to see a contented smile on their partner’s face.
The notion that men never “fake it” in the bedroom is just one of the many misconceptions about male sexuality that Morgentaler hopes to dispel with his latest book “Why Men Fake It: The Totally Unexpected Truth About Men and Sex,” coming out Tuesday.
“[My typical client] cares more about his partner’s pleasure than his own. You’d never get that out of the stories of politicians and celebrities cheating.”
Admittedly the reasons behind the faked male orgasm aren’t always altruistic: medical conditions, certain kinds of surgery and medication side effects can all mean that the magical moment remains elusive. But the bigger point Morgentaler wants to make is that men also fake it for the same reasons women do.
“Some men will fake it to put an end to the evening’s activities, to make their partner feel like they’ve done a good job,” he says.
Surprising, huh? Morgentaler thinks men and sex have been given a bad rap and that the concept of male sexuality is in desperate need of an overhaul, saying it’s wrong to see men as the uncaring, wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am archetype.
“Men get their sense of how good they are as a man, at least in the relationship realm, through the eyes of their partner,” he says. “As there are fewer opportunities [now] for men to be providers outside of the bedroom, I think that their ability to be a provider in the bedroom is even more important.”
He gives an example of a 27-year-old paraplegic client of his who was treated for erectile dysfunction with ED drugs. Even though he couldn’t feel anything down there, he told Morgantaler he “felt like a man again.”
“The reason he feels good is that he is providing sexually for his wife,” he says.
The greatest lesson he hopes readers find in the book is that men and women aren’t from different planets.
“In the end, [they] want the same thing. Both want to be in relationships, want to be accepted and valued for who they are.”
Which brings us onto another area that Morgentaler says men need reassurance on: penis size. As many as 75 percent of men say their member is smaller than average, which of course is statistically impossible.
“This means that either men have a skewed ability to assess themselves, or they have a misguided notion of what an ‘average’ penis looks like,” Morgentaler writes. To the question “How long should a penis be?” Morgentaler has a simple response: “Practically speaking, an erect penis needs to be long enough to reach inside a woman’s vagina.”
So men don’t have to fake it, he says, they just need a little bit of confidence that what they’re offering is doing the job just fine, thanks.