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.