Rob Williams - My Sex Supplement Problem

This is an interesting and extremely honest article on the issues men face with sexual performance. Turns out that the best sexual performance enhancer is intimacy.

My sex supplement problem

It started with Viagra in my 20s, but sex became a performance. Could I ever find intimacy without a pharmacy?

Rob Williams
Monday, Sept 1, 2014


(Credit: Piotr Kowalski via Shutterstock)
“There’s something serious you need to know,” I said, pulling my pretty, ambitious 25-year-old girlfriend, Rachel, aside as we walked home from work. I was 33, trying to play the role of confident older man, but I was a wreck. I lit a cigarette. “Sometimes I take supplements — to help myself perform.”

“You mean like Viagra?” she asked. She looked totally calm, even relieved.

“Lately it’s just over-the-counter things, stuff you can buy at the Vitamin Shoppe: ginseng, L-arginine, maca root,” I confessed. “But the side effects keep getting worse. I get a headache every time, no matter how much I cut the dosage.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” she said. “I thought you were going to tell me something awful. If the headaches bother you that much, stop.”

Her nonchalance made me even more ashamed. “You don’t understand. Without the supplements, I may not be able to do it.”

She touched my arm and said, “It’s going to be fine.”

I tried to smile. Too often in my 20s, when I’d gone to bed with a woman, I couldn’t perform. Even if I did become excited, I usually got thrown off my game moments later. A touch I didn’t like, a word or glance I couldn’t interpret. Anything that made me think made me wilt.

Everything made me think.

The first time I enlisted pharmaceutical help, I was 28. I had become infatuated with a sexy mortuary science student, a sardonic redhead just emerging from what she called her “drunkenly whoring around New York” phase. Some men might have been irritated by their poor timing. I was actually relieved to get a chance to get to know her better before humiliating myself in bed.

We went slow at first, holding hands on the street, kissing on the subway as the train approached the station. Our chemistry was natural, undeniable. But alone in her bedroom in Park Slope, I fumbled tragically.

I gave up and rolled onto my back, staring at the ceiling. Neither of us spoke or moved. To my surprise, her pheromones in the dark and the stillness of the moment excited me. Maybe I wasn’t doomed after all. I went for it, thrilled that I’d salvaged the situation. But afterward, as we got dressed to go downstairs for dinner, she said, “Phew, we finally got that out of the way. Next time, we can do it properly.”

She was trying to be funny, but it sent me into a neurotic tailspin. At home, I went straight to the computer and ordered a bottle of Viagra from an online pharmacy. I couldn’t let another relationship be spoiled by my body’s unreliability.

I never told her the source of my newfound sturdiness. For a while, I was convinced I’d fixed everything. But she had a confusing tendency to create problems where I thought none existed. She complained that because we both had roommates, we never had enough privacy to be completely intimate. I moved to a one-bedroom apartment in her neighborhood. She began to fixate on abstract considerations, questioning my sincerity. Months and several terrible fights later, she confessed she had borderline personality disorder. I insisted that it didn’t matter. I loved her, and I hoped she would still love me if I ever revealed my own flaws. But I never did. She was already obsessed with the idea that I didn’t really love her. I worried that if I revealed there was a chemical component to our sex life, she would doubt my love more. Instead, we fought. I broke off contact.

I blamed my upbringing for my intimacy problems. My parents were both shy. My father was a Christian theology grad student from upstate New York. My mother, a beautiful painter from Connecticut. Their way of teaching my brother and me about sex was simply to ignore the subject. I was insulted by their vague, sentimental statements about how pregnancy “happens when two people are in love.” Did they really think I was that naive? By the time I was 20, I attributed my own difficulties with women to the timid way they had glossed over “the talk.” Now I knew what I’d always suspected was true: Love was not enough.

I enjoyed dating, but as soon as our clothes came off, I felt like I was standing outside of myself. I was too trapped in my head — all my girlfriends had pointed that out. But what was harder to articulate was that I was also trapped in her head. Of course, I couldn’t really know her thoughts, but I desperately wanted to. So I created my own version, concocting a story about what she was thinking. In it, she never truly desired the same things I did. The woman I invented was either offended, ambivalent or humoring me.

The drugs helped, but sex still seemed like a charade. Not only was I being dishonest with the women I dated, I was also being dishonest with myself. I’d always had fantasies of being totally in control in bed. Instead, I was timid, obsequious. With a woman who identified as submissive, I thought I’d have the freedom to be myself, although part of me feared I was a pervert. I had spent years believing pornography excited me in a way that was impossible in the real world. The voices of feminists I’d read reminded me: “Porn is not reality. It’s degrading. Real women would never enjoy it that way.”

I needed to reinvent myself — and my understanding of women. A month before my 30th birthday, I created an erotic online profile advertising myself as “a copy editor by day, burgeoning dom by night.” I told myself it was an experiment, but it was conceived out of desperation. After 12 years of dissatisfaction in the bedroom, it was either that or celibacy.

After creating my kinky alter ego, I was astonished by the number of women in New York having the same fantasies. In the past, I had worried about “using” women as sexual objects. But in terms of the dominance/submission game, that was not only permissible, it was desirable — for both partners. Having clearly defined roles freed us from the awkwardness of egalitarian lovemaking, so that deeper desires could emerge.

Outwardly, I was happier. I was finally enjoying myself, with more partners. But it was as someone else. At the core, my view of myself had not changed. I still saw sex as a performance. I was an actor, and I relied on a spectacular array of products to ensure I didn’t get stage fright.

Vigorplex, Capatrex, Ejaculoid, Python, Python Extra, Tribulus Terrestris Extract, L-Arginine, L-Ornithine, L-Citrulline, maca root, ginseng, zinc, Super Energy Up. I preferred these so-called natural products because they helped me believe the problem wasn’t that bad. Although I bought Viagra over the Internet, it embarrassed me that it was a prescription drug, even if I was the only one who knew about it. Over-the-counter treatments were easier to rationalize.

No matter what I took — Viagra or ginseng or anything in between — I got subtle, distracting headaches, either that night or the next day. In a way it was worse than if they’d been extremely painful, as if Poe’s telltale heart was throbbing in my head. I experimented with different pills and dosages, always searching for the perfect drug in the perfect amount that would give me the desired result without any side effects.

After three years, I had to admit it didn’t exist. Then I met Rachel, a petite, curly-haired brunette at the office. I gave up my Internet conquests to pursue her instead. She was quiet, slinky, catlike — different than the brash, emotionally unstable women I had dated in the past. We flirted for months. Usually, I considered dating co-workers verboten. The likelihood that my secret shame would be revealed was too great. But with her, I thought, perhaps I would risk it.

We circled each other slowly. I told her about my kinks, my double life on the Internet, the tumultuous way my past relationships had ended. I wanted to be understood. She accepted it all. More than that, she seemed charmed. But for months I stopped short of revealing my deeper anxiety and addiction, because I still feared some things were too embarrassing to talk about.

Even after finding the courage to speak honestly with Rachel, I stuck to my routine, taking a bit of L-arginine before she came over. I didn’t want her to know when my new drug-free life was going to start, in case it changed her attitude in some small way, which might throw me off.

Finally, I switched my L-arginine for sugar capsules. To my surprise, the sugar pills were just as good. Does the placebo effect actually work when you administer the medications to yourself? But after having repeated success with the sugar pills, I couldn’t rationally put the true test off any longer. The next time Rachel came over, I didn’t take anything at all.

My body didn’t know the difference. Everything was as good as it had been with the pills. I was amazed but didn’t tell Rachel yet. I needed to replicate the results to believe it. A week later, as we were lying in bed, I turned to her and said, “I finally did it. No supplements of any kind.”

She rolled onto my chest, smiling at me through long lashes. For the first time, I could believe what Rachel had already known: It was going to be fine. Being vulnerable and accepted by her was more powerful than any drug.

Rob Williams is a writer and editor who lives above a meat market in New York City. Read more of his stories at itmustbebobby.com.

More Rob Williams.

Would you like to feel more focused? More emotionally aware? More confident? Be a better lover?

If you answer yes to any of these questions, then you can benefit from taking up a mindfulness practice.

Elisha Goldstein, PhD, is the editor of A Mindful Dialogue: A Path Toward Working with Stress, Pain and Difficult Emotions (Kindle only), The Now Effect: How a Mindful Moment Can Change the Rest of Your Life, co-author of A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook, Foreword by Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of Mindfulness Meditations for the Anxious Traveler: Quick Exercises to Calm Your Mind.

Five Reasons Why Men Should Start Practicing Mindfulness

By Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D.
June, 2014

From my experience the gender that is overwhelmingly attracted to mindfulness is women, men aren’t quite as attracted to it. Why is this? In the early days, the man’s greatest responsibility was to protect the tribe. Our brains have been crafted over thousands and thousands of years to guard against vulnerability. The problem with mindfulness for men is that the practice of it asks us to look toward and open up to vulnerability because that is where the gold is. We are also asked to relate to it in very feminine language like with “warmth,” “tenderness,” and “gentleness.” However, the physical threats that men were guarding against in the past, in most cases, are no longer the threats of modern day. But the brain hasn’t figured this out yet and treats emotional vulnerability as a threat, keeping men from truly reaching our highest human potential.

But things are changing! There is an evolution afoot as more men are starting to see the benefits of integrating mindfulness into daily life.

If you’re a man or you know one, here are five reasons why I think men should give mindfulness a try.

1. Increase Focus – George Mumford taught the Chicago Bulls and the Lakers mindfulness enroute to their string of championships. Sports psychologist Michael Gervais stepped in to the Seattle Seahawks locker room and taught them mindfulness giving them a boost to their first Super bowl victory. AETNA embraced the Mindfulness at Work® program that thousands of employees have taken because Mark Bertolini, the CEO, knew the value it could bring to their organization and corporate clients. Other companies including Google, Apple, Edmunds, McKinsey, Yahoo, and so many others now have meditation rooms in their offices). Now the military is on board to stay calm and focused out in the field. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, when we intentionally practice and repeat paying attention to an intended object of awareness, of course, it would follow that we would get better and better at paying attention to what matters.
2. Improve Performance – Usually if we’re able to focus better this would increase our performance as is evident by the integration of mindfulness into business and sports. A study in the Journal of Occupational Health showed that The Mindfulness at Work® program saved employees 69 minutes per week in productivity. In a world where we’re trained in multitasking with a continuous fractured attention it’s a slippery slope to get confused between what is urgent and important and what’s not. What’s more important, the Facebook notification on the phone or the project in front of me? Is it the recent sports score update or listening to my coworker? My brain seems to side with the updates, but in reality it’s likely the least urgent and important. There’s nothing mystical about why we can be more effective at what we do if we’re training our brains to pay attention to what matters over and again.
3. Build Emotional Intelligence – Emotional intelligence has been shown to be a cornerstone of effective leadership (not to mention an essential component of mental health and healthy relationships). If we’re constantly guarding against vulnerability, guess what? We’re also guarding against the most critical decision maker in our brains – our emotions. The brain makes decisions based on our emotional state most of the time, so we don’t want to be in the dark about what is happening in our internal world. Our brain goes particularly haywire when it comes to uncertainty and fear. Mindfulness teaches us how to approach these triggering emotions in a particular way so that we not only no optimal responses, but the emotions themselves become our greatest teachers. It’s incredibly important to lean in and start to get curious about our emotional lives, understand the information they are conveying and develop the courage to embrace vulnerability. In doing this we start to feel more grounded, stronger and ignite a sense of trust and self-reliance.
4. Be a Better Lover – The practice of paying attention, on purpose, also has to do with getting increasingly better at tuning into other people in our lives. There is a lot of dissatisfaction that occurs in relationships because people are not tuned into the needs of each other. As we learn to focus and cultivate emotional intelligence we also build the strength of empathy. This is the ability to put yourself in your partner’s shoes and better understand his or her needs. You can learn to be less defensive, more receptive, a better listener and more physically present and responsive which also makes for a better sex life. The insula is a part of the brain that makes us more able to tune into the sensations of our bodies. We learned a long time ago (9 years to be exact) that mindfulness is correlated with a larger insula. In this case, bigger is better. As we learn how to tune into our bodies and are more present for our partners, everyone is more likely to get their needs met emotionally and physically. If you’re not in a relationship, this is good for the future and a fantastic reason to start practicing.
5. Train Confidence – It feels good to get increasingly better at something. We’ve all experienced this with walking, talking and driving a car (to one degree or another). This a part of the brain that records procedures in life and it gets stronger as we practice. This is no different. In Outliers Malcolm Gladwell noted it takes 10,000 hours to experience true mastery. What if you could get increasingly better at all of the benefits of mindful awareness? We can learn to experience more confidence with our focus, performance, emotional intelligence and in our relationships. Of course as we intentionally practice and repeat all of this, the changes that we experience begin to open up a much greater gift than any of this. We start to realize that mindfulness is about far more than this, it’s about experiencing the insight into who we truly are and a sense of freedom arises.

As we practice, something else wonderful happens, we begin to inspire others and this continues to have ripple effects across all the people around us. This may even be the most important motivation to practice.

Why not get started now?

Be well,

Elisha Goldstein, PhD

PS - One way to get started, reconnect or deepen your mindfulness practice is to take the 28 Day Challenge with the new online program Basics of Mindfulness Meditation: A 28 Day Program. Enjoy!

Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D. is author of The Now Effect, co-author of A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook, Foreword by Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of Mindfulness Meditations for the Anxious Traveler: Quick Exercises to Calm Your Mind, the premier eCourse Basics of Mindfulness Meditation: A 28 Day Program, the Mindful Solutions audio series, and the Mindfulness at Work™ program currently being adopted in multiple multinational corporations. Join The Now Effect Community for free Daily Now Moments, Weekly Updates and tips and free access to a Live Monthly Online Event with Elisha Goldstein, PhD. He is a clinical psychologist in private practice in West Los Angeles.

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Is the New Lamborghini Veneno the Most Bad-Ass Super-Car?

I'm not what you might call a "car guy" - I can't fix the damn things (other than minor things like an oil change or belt), I don't watch NASCAR, I don't go to car shows, and I don';t feel the need to own a car that costs nearly as much as my house.

But I do like a beautiful machine, like the new Corevette ZR1 (638 hp, 0-60 in 3.4 seconds, 205 mph top speed).

The Corvette ZR1 was designed, in part, to compete with some of the European heavyweights - Lamborghini, Ferrari, and McLaren. Considering it's a fraction of the price, it competes pretty well for the middle income driver who wants speed and performance.

But the European cars, especially the new Lamborghini Veneno (only three being built, at $4 million each), are still the archetype of high performance cars. Personally, the McLaren looks pretty awesome.

Is the New Lambo the Most Bad-Ass Super-Car?
By Nate Hopper

Lamborghini

There is no car that looks like it just dropped its gloves and is ready to bare-knuckle your jaw more than the newly debuted Lamborghini Veneno, a three-of-a-kind, nearly $4 million, beautiful monster of a car. Road & Track sums it up well:

Based on the Aventador [LP700-4] chassis and powertrain, the Veneno sports carbon-fiber bodywork that makes the Avantador look like a wallflower. It is all the brashness, daring, and machismo that we've mentally associated Lamborghini with since the wall-poster-era Countach, the O.G. Alpha Male Supercar. Yes, Lamborghini's newer cars are its best ever, but one look at the Veneno confirms that it has that old-school, '80s-style gunslinging swagger. The car on display in Geneva wears its Italian bravado right on its sleeve, so to speak, in the form of the tricolor stripes running across the door. Oh and yes, it's named after a fighting bull.

The car can definitely kick. The specs: L539 6.5-liter V12; 740 horsepower; seven-speed; 220 mph, at top-speed. But is it the most bad-ass super-car in this year's auto show?

 

Its two competitors for the title are the McLaren P1 and the Ferrari LaFerrari, which, between the two, comprised the bout that most auto guys looked forward to before the show began. And the breakdown is hit or miss. The Veneno's top speed is slower than the LaFerrari (about 230 mph) but faster than the P1 (217); its horsepower is below the both of them; and it also costs a ton more than the P1 (about $4 million compared to the P1's $1.15M) — though that's because there's only three of the things getting made.

But for the average man, the point of super-cars is the gazing. There's no denying the Veneno's jags and ribs over the P1's curves and the LaFerrari's classicism. It just looks angry, like it's snarling. And that's what we want for our day-dreams of escape: a testosteronic speedster. And so — with due respect to the others — we've got to raise its winged door in victory.

For reference, here is a picture of the McLaren P1:

And one of the new Ferrari LaFerrari: