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8B Wednesday December10.204 The Statement
Personal Statement: Lasting
by Yardain Amron

ILLUSTRATION BY MEGAN MULHOLLAND

W~4
1:

Author's Note:I will use the word "caboot"
to refer to ejaculating prematurely.
W hn I started having sex in high
school, I used to last about one
minute on a good day. I was 16
and simultaneously felt like the 10-year-old
kid in Billy Madison who pissed his pants,
and the 60-year-old impotent man in every
Viagra commercial.
This lasted for a year and a half with one
girl, who I'll call Dara. Thankfully Dara,
who was sensitive to my cabootion, never
showed a glimpse of frustration with my
unruly penis. If she had said something like

"Are you serious?" - or worse, laughed - I
might have thrown in the towel and applied
to Brigham Young University.
I became so hyperconscious about lasting
that sex became this self-fulfilling fuckery:
the more I wanted to last, the less I lasted.
We would be on mybed, just hooking up and
my focus would gravitate to pole like it was
actually magnetized.
To conquer this problem, I turned on pri-
vate browsing, and Google searched "sex
problems." I drowned myself in studies and
articles on cabootion:
"the most common sexual problem facing
men under 40."

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"as many as one in three experience it..."
"the average man lasts about 14 minutes..."
I explored sex forums, and found people
like me.
Qwerty4521: "Hello. Me an my girlfriend
startedhavingsexaroundtheend of October.
We are both 18 and we were both virgins. We
have had sex probably around twelve times
total now. At first I could last a few minutes
before coming but now literally the second
we starthaving sex I come. I don't know why
it got worse. I usea condom every time. This
is especially wired to me because if she gives
me a handjob or a blowjob I can last for liter-
ally hours. Please help me."
I'll admit I felt a little better knowing
men all over the world, with dicks of all col-
ors, shapes and sizes, were dealing with the
exact same fucking problem. But the stress
was so real, and so mine.
Confession: A part of me feared I would
die the master of one-minute sex.
There was also just no chance I would
ever ask anyone for advice. This was by far
my most humiliating secret.
Instead, I went to the Internet for help.
I tried numbing condoms. I tried Kegel
exercises to strengthen my pelvic region. I
tried Viagra (my mom's boyfriend's recom-
mendation - "you'll bust and be hard again
in minutes!"). I tried thinking about wrinkly
grandmas.
Nothing worked. Sex became stress,
orgasms became guiltspasms, pleasure
became pressure.
Dara and I broke up after high school, and
I was left to cope with the manhood-shatter-
ing fact that not once during sex did I ever
make her orgasm.
Confession: A part of me didn't under-
stand why she stayed with me until the end;
whether she felt leaving someone over bad
sex was shallow? Or whether sex was actu-
ally less important to her? I worried she pit-
ied me.
For a little while, I avoided sex out of fear

A
of being shamed by some insensitive girl
who didn't understand what I was going
through. Uncle Sam was breathing down my
shoulder: "Be a man, son."
But a libido eventually gets what it wants.
Flash forward to freshman year Welcome
Week. I'll call her Tina. I made the first
move, taking the open seat next to her on the
bus in the morning, asking her something
flirty and stupid, probably like "How do you
like the campus?" I liked her green eyes, and
her long Hawaiian middle name that I don't
remember. We hung out in the grass in the
afternoon, and she invited me along to her
cousin's place that night.
When we got back to South Quad, Tina's
roommate wasn't there. Eventually we were
in our underwear - the point where with
Dara, my anxiety and apprehension would
already have been building inside my pres-
sure-cooker brain for quite some time. But
this time, I felt like Austin Powers. "Do you
have a condom?" I did havea condom.
I lasted - at least longer than ever before,
and while I don't remember if Tina came, I
do remember the satisfaction on her face
afterwards, and I do remember how she
said, "We should keep hanging out."
Confession: Until that moment, I felt like I
wasn't a full man yet.
Tina and I never had sex again (just one
of those things), but I was-cured, and it was
lasting. Something finally clicked. I'm not
saying I don't think about lasting anymore;
no, those thoughts are still very real. Now,
they just don't control me.
It's pretty absurd looking back at how
much my cabooting harmed my psyche. How
much lasting means to my manhood. Why
do I feel a pressure to perform and pleasure
her? Is it more a selfless or prideful pressure?
Out of all pieces of existence, shouldn't sex
be the most absent of worry? Maybe it's that
the orgasm becomes an afterthought and it's
just free feeling, so by the end of it all, you've
turned into a hippie.

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