During the discussion on last week’s Is He Hiding Erections? post, I realised I’d made the false assumption that women would know erections are involuntary. My bad!

Since I just know this as a man, I’ve never actually studied it. So I did some study.

First, you need to understand that erections are not all or nothing, on or off. A penis can get half-hard, or a third hard and never go past that. The man will know it’s happening, but the odds are no one else will notice if he’s clothed.

Erections are controlled by the autonomic nervous system which regulates the functions of our internal organs. This means a man can no more control an erection than he can change his heartbeat or slow his kidney’s production of urine. But that’s not the whole story. There is limited ability to make an erection less full.

I actually found a study that looked at this. The study authors said, “Participants, on average, were somewhat able to regulate their physiological and cognitive sexual arousal, although there was a wide range of regulation success. Whereas some men were very adept at regulating their sexual arousal, others became more sexually aroused while trying to regulate.” This means the ability to control arousal, and erections, varied from man to man. Suppression of erections varied from nothing to very good, with the majority being only partially successful. On average, men managed “a 25 percent reduction in erectile response“. That might or might not be enough to prevent a visible bulge. What is really interesting is that 16% of the men got fuller erections when trying to suppress them than when not trying to suppress them. Talk about can’t win!

What I found particularly fascinating was that men who were better able to suppress laughter when watching a comedian were also better at suppressing erections. They also found that men who are more easily aroused were less able to limit their erections.

So ladies, at best your husband can somewhat limit erections. A few men have almost total control, but more have little control or make it worse by trying to control it. Judging him on his erections is unfair.

~ Paul – I’m XY, and I’ve always been good at not laughing when I work at it.

A post worth reading:

Resource:

Conscious Regulation of Sexual Arousal in Men | JOURNAL OF SEX RESEARCH

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