Libido Science

It's time to do science! Don't worry, this is amateur science. However, do be forewarned that it's rather explicit.

The first year that I could masturbate to completion, I conducted on myself a series of experiments. It was through these experiments that I learned how the male libido works. First, I will explain my overall findings. Then I will get into the specifics of my self-experimentation.

To understand libido we must first define some terms:
Orgasm is self-explanatory, but for the purposes of this discussion, it will often be used interchangeably with sexual satisfaction. I know you Taoists out there will grumble about this. Deal with it.

Having sex is mostly shorthand for "having sex with yourself" for the purposes of this discussion, because while masturbation and two-person sex are very similar in theory, two-person sex is harder to study because there are more variables at play.

Sexual desire/drive is a person's momentary suggestibility towards sex. It's analogous to hunger: if a person suddenly thinks about food they can determine how hungry they are by how delicious food sounds and if their stomach grumbles and their mouth salivates. Just like with hunger, sexual desire is depleted or sated by acting on your desires.

Continuing this depletion metaphor, in some ways sexual desire acts more like charge on a battery than hunger. If you fast for two months, your body will spend the next few months recouping its fat reserves, but your body won't demand you have twice the sex for two months after any amount of celibacy. The battery of sexual desire has a maximum charge that can be held and leaving a cell phone plugged in after a certain point won't make your battery last any longer.

As you can imagine, sex is more gratifying if you have a lot of pent-up sexual desire. You get turned on more easily, it feels better when you get turned on, it feels better when you're having sex and orgasms tend to be more intense. The corollary to this is the more gratifying sex is, the more it expends your sexual desire.

Sexual desire is affected and often masked by a hierarchy of needs effect. If you feel like crap, you won't want to have sex, even if as soon as you feel better you suddenly feel like a sex-crazed maniac (hence why the word is masking and not reducing). This happens to me a lot if I've been sick, but the masking effect is more obvious (if less dramatic) with shorter-term things like being cold, hungry, in pain or in a bad mood. In my self-study, I measured sexual desire based on how I felt when I was more-or-less copacetic.

Libido is sexual desire's "recharge rate". Just like with real batteries this rate isn't linear, but the longer you go without orgasm, the more you want sex. Libido is analogous to metabolism. Libido varies from person to person and in a given person varies based on long-term circumstances (like depression, constant visual stimulation or how much sex you "feed" it).

Libido is a little more complex than a simple recharge rate, because it has got some elasticity to it. It kicks up to partly compensate if you're holding down your sexual desire with oodles of self-gratification. It eases back somewhat if you stage a sex boycott. None of these effects is terribly strong, though, so that if you have lots of sex the sex will still be muted by relatively low underlying desire/drive and if you severely limit yourself you'll still be gritting your teeth when the local hottie walks by in a mini-skirt.

This is a pretty straightforward model. Libido recharges sexual desire which makes you want to have sex and is depleted by actually having sex. Unfortunately, my own post is the first time I've seen it explained online. Every time I've explained it to a girl, they seem mystified. This is for you, girls.

Now, let's get into the specifics of my experiments while also revealing the specifics of my personal physiology.

The most general fact of libido is a person's preferred rate of sex per week or as I call it, your PRSPW. You can remember that, can't you? Don't. I was kidding. That acronym is retarded. I'm never going to use it again.

When I've been on my own, I've averaged about five times my whole adult life. I've also found that the rate falls modestly when I don't use porn and that the rate can be kicked up substantially with porn or other stimuli, it is also probably depressed by the length of time I typically devote to a session, but more on that later. My preferred rate doubles when I'm in a relationship, which is a confirmation that libido is susceptible to the quality of present stimuli and, again, possibly the session length (so far girls don't seem to want to go over twenty or thirty minutes).

The first actual experiment we'll discuss is zero-to-sixty time or the time it takes to get from an untouched erection to orgasm, by hand, as quickly as possible. During that year of experiments I found that it was typically about five minutes and my early record was three minutes. Later that year, I would improve upon that zero-to-sixty time under highly irregular conditions. More on that later.

The second experiment was the experiment of celibacy. This was the most massive and demanding scientific undertaking of my sexual career. You see, quitting cold turkey would have been too simple. I decided that I would ween myself off masturbation. I started by restricted myself to masturbating once every three days. I didn't have a calendar, but something this important was easy to keep mental track of. When I decided I was almost comfortable with that rate, I'd reduce it. Over the course of a couple of painstaking months I eventually stopped masturbating entirely. I forget how long I lasted. It was between two and three weeks. On that fateful night when I decided to call an end to the experiment, I set my lifetime zero-to-sixty record of thirty seconds flat.

By then I'd learned a lot about myself from the experiment. I'd gained a suspicion that masturbating up to orgasm without actually orgasming (which I'd decided not to count) did in fact dampen my sexual drive. I learned that trading frequency for quality did not pencil out and that celibacy was incredibly hard and impressively inconvenient. I had a lot of wet dreams (which threw a wrench into the works of my scientific stoicism). When I realized that it would be normal to get a boner from merely sitting in math class thinking about math, making it very inconvenient to go up to the chalk board, I decided that nature, God, whatever, clearly had no desire for me to starve myself thusly.

The last experiment I did was the natural flip-side to zero-to-sixty time: stringing things along for as long as possible. Part of the goal was to teach myself control and partly it was in the interests of science. I quickly realized that there was no real upward bound for how long you could string yourself along, merely an upward bound for how long you'd want to, so this wasn't a matter of record-setting.

Up to a point (~20 minutes), holding yourself on that teetering ledge for awhile can dramatically increase the intensity of orgasm, but it can also do the opposite. As I've alluded to previously, sex without orgasm can potentially satisfy sexual desire, so if I held myself on that delicious precipice for long enough, all the wind would be taken out of the big finale. This emphasis on "journey over destination" has its own charm and I've spent a lot of my life enjoying it. There are other considerations, though, because this makes it much more likely you'll get blue balls, even if you do eventually orgasm. I eventually worked out that around forty-five minutes was the ideal maximum for me, as the payoff declined and the potential penalty rose rapidly around the one hour mark.

As you can probably tell from this post, I am proud of having applied the proverbial ruler to myself. This represents a case study of the properties and preferences of one person's libido. I know for a fact that things like "preferred rate" vary considerably from person to person, but I believe that the general principles I've set forth hold true for the male libido and possibly, after additional factors have been taken into account, the female libido. At the very least the principles I've outlined are useful as a model. I also have reason to believe that the numbers I've given are not unusual for my sex and age.

I would be remiss to conclude this discussion without providing this link (for those of you out there who find this enlightening, know that the characters in the clip are Jewish and consequently their anatomy has slightly different demands than, say, the children of liberally-minded gentiles). Weeds is consistently excellent, but this particular moment brought a smile to my face and got me thinking about how much easier things would have been if I'd been informed on the details. I got the core facts, but a discussion of the nuts and bolts (the other nuts and bolts) and that overt declaration that masturbating is good would have been nice.

Few of us will ever be able to pull off "the talk" with as much charm as Andy from Weeds, but the best first step towards eliminating silly ignorance is creating a dialogue. The internet is a fantastic, private resource for learning the facts of life that slipped through the cracks. It has improved by leaps and bounds since my early days of self-experimentation, but that knowledge still has gaps and room to grow. So comment, email me if you know my personal email and write your own posts. I'd love to hear how your experiences have differed or if you have alternate theories.

Romantic Calculus

I remember thinking in college, after the rare promising, mutually interested girl didn't pan out, that the odds were against me.

50% of people are male and consequently unavailable
50% of women are spoken for
40% of women are either out of my league or I'm out of their league
     (let's say 20 and 20)
50% of women are only interested in men that share their religion
     (closer to 20% in college, though)
98% of women aren't intelligent enough to interest me
     (closer to 95% of my school's undergrads, but still extremely high)
80% of people are incompatible with my rather strong personality

I calculated that I would meet one compatible woman for every 800 students. I'd have to not only meet 800 undergrads, but talk with them long enough to know whether they were a romantic possibility or not. Since I'd just met and dated somebody who fit all those qualifications, I figured I'd blown my wad for my whole college career.

By the time I graduated, I'd realized I needed to add that approximately
70% of women don't want enough sex to make me content
and
80% of women were either too old or too young for me

So out of college, the numbers were even more daunting. One in 83,000 people I met should be romantically compatible with me. I stand by these numbers.

Fortunately, sometime in college I had an important epiphany: prehistoric humans had to make due with what they had. They lived in bands of 50-150 people and at most had a dating pool of 500-2000 people (a dozen culturally similar bands might meet or interact with one another). Even worse, our ancestors 500 years ago had arranged marriages. Their partner was picked largely for economic reasons, yet divorce rates hovered around 2% and I have to assume that they grew to love each other and were more or less content with their lot. This is all to say that we can love practically anyone. Some may be easier to love than others, but humans are far more romantically flexible than modern society would suggest. This is largely because the modern concept of monogamy is more emotionally and personally intense than 500 or 10,000 years ago. We want our spouse to be our best friend, our partner, our roommate and our only lover. We are the victims of our own high expectations.

While recognizing that our society is plagued by terrifyingly high expectations didn't change those expectations, it did go a long way toward calming me down. Humans, ultimately, have a proven ability to happily settle with far less. I thought to myself, probably everybody goes through this calculus and comes up with similarly alarming numbers, yet somehow the human race continues to multiply. There was a disconnect between those numbers and reality. This was partly because I'd stated my "bare minimum" based on my concept of what I needed rather than on my experience and partly because the very environment we choose to place ourselves in drastically improves our odds.

Living in a major city? Not in a slum? The average IQ there is much higher than 100 and hardcore religiousness is much lower than 50%. Ever date friends of friends? They are far more likely to be culturally and intellectually compatible with you. Did you count other men as people you have to "search through"? How about women who are spoken for, too young, old, ugly or pretty? These things aren't hard to determine quickly. Have you ever thought about how easy it is to judge a book by its cover? On the bus do you ever find yourself categorizing people? Immigrant, punk kid, gay guy, neohippy, educated couple, not-quite-homeless bearded old guy (probably an old hippy), second gen immigrant kids in high school, well-dressed nerd who's probably a programmer, tourists, crazy cat lady, scene kid, etc, it's so easy it's practically unconscious. How they're dressed, their facial expression, how they sit... like it or not we also fit into these categories. Only rarely (and certainly more rarely than we think) do we qualify as "genuine iconoclast" and even when we do it's usually clear what sort of people we're most likely to get along with or date.

Of course, the biggest turning point in my approach to "romantic calculus" was precipitated by finding my first girlfriend. I was forced to reconcile that I had found a compatible person against the supposed odds. If life had doomed me to a life of loneliness, it certainly wasn't acting like it.

The thing is, --and I cannot stress this enough-- there is no mathematical way to predict your likelihood of finding somebody in a given year based on established preferences. Predicting your likelihood based on past experience might have some bearing on reality, but that assumes that you, your lifestyle and method of finding people remains constant. For somebody in their twenties, this is never the case. For somebody in their forties, this is only rarely the case.

None of this is to say that thinking about compatibility calculus is necessarily a bad thing. Thinking about how you are rendering candidates with perfectly-good hearts, minds or genitalia ineligible is a good way to address systematic ways you are placing yourself out in the cold. In practice, though, it is more common for such calculus to be misused. Wallowing in dooming numbers is self-defeating, childish and oh-so-common. Everybody likes a good pity party.

Then again, pity parties are unpleasant from the outside looking in, which is why I'm here to rain on all the pity parties that you, my readers, are undoubtedly indulging in at this very moment. There is hope for all of you. Actually, there was this one lady I saw on the bus the other day who was probably hopeless... but you're not her!

Eraserhead

In the spirit of October, I'd like to discuss my scary movie experience of note, namely of watching the David Lynch classic: Eraserhead. I watched it partly on the recommendation of my girlfriend, who said it scared her shitless. She had to turn on all the lights in the house and was terrified for the next two days until her roommates got back from a trip they'd been on.

So obviously I watched it alone and with all the lights off. I also watched it stoned. This made the movie make A LOT of sense. The symbolism that struck me while watching it continues to hold critical water under the pale glare of sobriety. I suggest to anyone who hasn't watched it stoned to do so at your earliest convenience. You have two weeks before the end of October, *ahem*.

Eraserhead didn't scare me shitless, but it did compel me to reconsider how soon I want to have kids. By the following day after watching the movie I'd moved that hypothetical date back three years.

Eraserhead was my introduction to David Lynch and his entrancing brand of intuitively sensical nonsense. Though I wouldn't recommend watching any or even most movies stoned, I expect that David Lynch's work generally goes pretty well with the ganja because of his peculiar sense of logic and story flow. In and of itself, that's neither a good thing nor a bad thing, but Eraserhead was definitely excellent.

Aliens in my Dreams

For reference, M is my exgirlfriend and L is my present girlfriend. I'm away from home for the summer, hence the emotional turmoil.

While I was away, L had drifted farther and farther away from me emotionally. M moved in with her, and lived on the bunk above her. My former roommate lived in a bed next to theirs, and I didn't know him at all anymore. M got into keeping aquarium fish as L got over fish-keeping. The two of them became friends. M's boyfriend moved in with her and shared her bunk, but the bed was only a couple of feet above L so when both M and her boyfriend were in bed together, there was hardly room for L, let alone me. I wanted to be upset about that, but I had no power. M would dismiss me with that knowingness that indicated she was bored of me. Meanwhile, L would listen to her. M had gotten into jewelry. She was protesting some famous jewlery designer who she thought was a hack. She'd bought a few of his pieces for one eighth of the retail price, because she'd bargained him down, and she thought that was proof that he was a hack subsisting on hype. She'd berated somebody for buying his jewlery. I said, "It's a free country, shouldn't people be allowed to buy whatever they want?" M said no. I argued with her about it for awhile. Really, she was the only person who was willing to talk to me, but she wanted to talk just to show her disdain for me and for that phase of her life. L had some new life plan that did not include me, and I couldnt convince her to run away with me. I realized that L was just as flawed as M had been and our relationship had been just as doomed. M's hostility proved how flawed that really was and would be.

I woke up feeling like the world was coming down around my ears.

After a few minutes, I calmed down, but I won't forget how doomed I felt.

A Tenuous Compromise

I'm dredging the vaults and this turned up. It's something I wrote about a year and a half ago. It was one of those moments where after nursing a horrifically bad mood for a while, I got up and the words just kind of flowed.

sometimes i feel i am falling through life
i am falling through life with the ease of a doll.

a moment of bright
tarnished by imperfection
but still beautiful.
then goodbyes
then spiral sucking swirl into blackness, screaming
blackness colored with shades of brown and flecks of white
but blackness all the same, so heavy i cant cry
blackness so heavy my head can't fit in my shoulders,
my shoulders cant fit into my knees, my knees cant fit in my shoes.
swirls of evil thoughts, pernicious, impossible thoughts
they shouldnt be allowed to exist,
much less have this free reign over me

there is a dim light on the horizon,
if it werent, my head would fit in the floor,
in negative space
the dim light keeps me here in the inky wind,
keeps me suffering,
keeps that tenuous compromise afloat, under strain.
but assuring that winds wont rip me to shreds
does nothing to assuage that they feel as bad as if they were about to
i turn to the only friend left to me,
and believe me that never have you seen him so tainted, thin and cold as he is now before me,
a cruel joke of what he once was,
but i curl up and close my eyes and try to think of nothing
as i'm buffeted by blackness,
and eventually nothing comes.

Puke Time

I've been writing quite a bit of poetry. To use the word of my friend H, I have been on a poetry writing "tear". I've decided it's time to share, even if it's nowhere near time to call any of the following poems finished or even, in most cases, "roughly complete".

I said from the start, this blog would be subject to lower quality standards than anything else I do. Part of that includes an inconsistent post rate, but it's been awhile and I'm feeling impulsive. Also, I'm becoming less apologetic about my poetry's quality or lack thereof. These were all written within the last few months and I've only revisited about half of them since puking them out.

Theoretically these will be improved upon and I will write music for them and then I'll record them and when the demo gets picked up by a label I'll be forced to start a band and become a rock star. Ha.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy.


This one is the only one hammered into verse-chorus, so far. Gold star if you correctly guess the subject (and haven't talked with me about it already).

(intro)
moving slowly, so slowly
dipping my toe
lapping at my heels
love how the breeze feels

sweet dawn
take me to the ocean

(chorus)
you go down, i get high
i'm so glad, you are mine
sweet dawn
take me to the ocean

(verse 1)
licking under my chin
licking at my ears
i'm out to far, i'm out to deep
horizon looms like death

(chorus)

caught on the inside
going for a spin
in the washing machine
but it feels alright

(chorus)

waves throwing me around
thrashed by sea
in the most loving way
and it feels alright

(chorus)

(closout)
i am adored
i am adored

Now for a couple of short ones.

face draws early lines
questions like razors
harsh laugh at odd times
he's mr. sharp


she stings like honey
she burns like electricity
there are a lot of flowers in this world
she is a honey bee

Now for a wistful one. By the way, don't read anything into the lack of capitalization. That's just my laziness.

had a dream that i'd found my place
eucalyptus in my nose and salt in my mouth
but i cant go back to the sunkissed days

did i ever tell you
you're so beautiful it makes me ache

i don't ever want to be alone
please hold me to your breast

i don't ever want to be alone
tears trickle down your chest

I'm no good at secrets
and I'm sick of playing tough
I'm so bored of the knowing wink
I'll hide everywhere that's pink
I'll go everywhere that's pink.

Now for one about new love.

it's a beautiful morning
even if the sky's still dark
walking home from her house
yeah, walking home from her house

seems a time since i have felt like this
kisses drying on my face
gliding home on clouds
the future seems so clear

the universe impelling me along my misted way
the universe is pulling me along my blissed out day
the universe is sucking me along the path of grace
and i hold within myself the beauty of the world

Now one for February.

fluffy cloud sunshine sky
damp sidewalk

yesterday i saw a mushroom standing
like he'd always owned the world

jewels hang from trees
with gilded leaves

wind smells earth and flowers
everything is green and yellow

Now one about longing.

there's dirt beneath my fingernails
there's dust coating my teeth

and i want to go home
and i know it will be soon
and i can't wait to be home

the girl who sleeps in my bed
in my home so far away
my girl keeps my bed warm while i'm away

and she is my ocean
and she's my shining sea

And lest this get too sweet.

squishing roaches underneath my feet
popping bubble wrap
ripping tendons with my teeth
i don' wanna be a veg-e-tar-i-an
i get satisfaction
it's not the best but
if you're not doing anything otherwise
its really kind of nice

And in case somebody still thought that was strangely precious.

don't call my name
don't call my name
don't touch my face
you're not welcomed
you're uninvited
you stupid bitch
you nasty witch
don't call my name

And now a celebration of blind rage!

You thought I'd take this sitting down
but i'm gonna stomp your face
and i won't be satisfied
till i've ground you to a paste

i liked you because you
held my friend's affection
but i was never blind

you liked me because
i held your friend's affection
but after you screwed her

you thought you'd do me for good measure
you don't know who you messed with
you barked up the bitter-bark tree
you cornered a mean old cat

and i won't be satisfied
till i've ground you to a paste