The Performance Trap: Why Pressure Is What Actually Stops Men Getting It Up

Having covered the effect of culture, society and expectation — implicit and explicit — and the bewilderment of the partner on the receiving end of the penis owner's ministrations, the spotlight now turns to the owner of the prodigious implement himself: men.

And "spotlight" is the right word, because under that harsh light, with nowhere to run, a penis finds itself centre stage, performing for an anxious audience of one. Unlike a theatre stage, though, there's no interval, no understudy for the nights the leading man is tired or stressed, no sharing the billing with other characters. Just a long, solitary monologue that's expected to end in the grand finale of intercourse. Fluff that, and the audience goes home disappointed.

That's the kind of pressure an erection carries — an absurdly disproportionate weight of meaning for what it actually is. Meanwhile, the receiving partner reads every quiver, every flutter, every slight softening like a glass slide under a microscope, taking mental notes and drawing wild conclusions about the future of the relationship. None of this is something either partner ever auditioned for. I mean — yikes, who would?

Well, men do. Under false pretences, though most don't realise it at the time.

From birth, boys are handed a script based entirely on the piece of flesh dangling between their legs. It's not a script they wrote, read in advance, or agreed to. It arrives as a sort of manual on what it means to be a boy, with a second edition, released around puberty, on what it means to be a man. The first edition is a few thousand years old, and it's remarkable how little it's been revised since. Performance isn't a nice-to-have running alongside masculinity — performance is masculinity. It starts almost innocuously, from birth. The moment a baby boy begins to crawl, the expectations start crawling right along with him — there's evidence that even before their first birthday, parents expect a little boy to out-crawl a little girl racing towards the same toy. After that it's sport, work, wealth, wit — anything measurable gets ranked, and, ideally, won.

So, it's hardly surprising that the penis — the most visible, exposed, occasionally mortifying and inconveniently public organ a man owns — gets dragged into a race he never entered and never wanted to run.

An "off" day is entirely normal — even porn stars get the occasional thanks-but-no-thanks night, whatever the industry would have us believe. Erections aren't light switches. There's a mechanical element, sure, but the real powerhouse is the mind. They behave more like England's penalty record: wildly unpredictable, prone to missing at precisely the moment everyone's watching, and utterly indifferent to how badly you want it to go well. Form on the night depends on sleep, stress, money worries, health, one too many pints, age, the weather, whatever mood the football gods are in — a hundred variables that have nothing whatsoever to do with how attracted a man is to the person in front of him. We're quick to forgive the player who fluffs a penalty in front of eighty thousand people. We're strangely reluctant to extend men the same grace in the bedroom.

This is where the real damage happens — not in the bedroom itself, but in a man's own head, well before he ever gets there. Much like the "receiver" I wrote about in the previous instalment, the same fate befalls the "giver." Once you're stuck in your own head instead of stuck in the sheets, it's remarkably hard to find your way back out.

Psychologists call it "spectatoring" — mentally hovering above your own body during sex, monitoring performance rather than actually being in it and enjoying it. The moment a man starts watching himself instead of feeling what's happening, arousal — which depends on a relaxed, almost unselfconscious state of mind — quietly clocks off. Anxiety and erections are biological opposites: one runs on the sympathetic nervous system, the one gearing you up to fight or flee; the other needs the parasympathetic system to relax enough to let blood do its job. Like a car, you cannot floor the accelerator and stand on the brake at the same time. The engine revs, and… goes...hmmm... nowhere.

So here is the cruel, elegant trap: the fear of losing an erection is one of the most reliable ways to actually lose it.

In my next post, I'll walk through exactly how to get out of the trap.

Sources:

Bancroft, J., & Janssen, E. (2000). The dual control model of male sexual response: A theoretical approach to centrally mediated erectile dysfunction. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 24(5), 571–579.

Mondschein, E. R., Adolph, K. E., & Tamis-LeMonda, C. S. (2000). Gender Bias in Mothers' Expectations about Infant Crawling. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 77(4), 304–316.

Beck, J. G., & Barlow, D. H. (1986). The effects of anxiety and attentional focus on sexual responding: II. Cognitive and affective patterns in erectile dysfunction. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 24(1), 19–26.