I was at dinner with an old physician colleague of mine who happens to be French. Despite living in the Midwest for decades, he continues his lifetime subscription to Le Monde and preserves–no, cultivates–his accent so efficiently that I miss about ten percent of what he\u2019s saying. Given we were both well into our second martini, it was inevitable that issues of male sexuality would find their way into conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cDavid,\u201d he began (and don\u2019t bother to read this in your fake French accent), \u201cas we grow older, and unfortunately not all that much older, sex becomes\u2026(he paused, seeking the right word, which he knew all along, but his pause enhances the profundity of his statement)…memory.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMemory? You mean that at a certain point sex is no longer an active verb?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cOnly memory. Think Proust, sitting in his cork-lined room obsessively reviewing his sex life. Think The Three Musketeers<\/em>. Well, the four of them (remember, there are really four musketeers) start out in their 20s, though D\u2019Artagnan is still in his teens, having sex with everyone in sight. But by the time we\u2019re in the third and fourth novels, decades later, they\u2019re mainly into politics, chatting about their younger hypersexual sexual days (what is the word?) wistfully.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAnd you think there\u2019s nothing to be done? There\u2019s a new study\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n He was still deep into literature. \u201cOh, and your Saul Bellow! Read his novels? Everything is in the past tense. I once sat next to him at some fundraising dinner. He dominated the conversation, listing the famous women he\u2019d been to bed with. Sex, David, is a memory, nothing but a memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although it\u2019s challenging to change the mind of an erudite Frenchman, he did let me finish my point. I began, \u201cJust let me quickly review how our bodies change and why you feel compelled to rely on your erotic memoirs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Levels of your male sex hormone testosterone drop slowly and relentlessly. Yours peaked at D\u2019Artagnan\u2019s age–late teens, early 20s. A list, called the Psychosexual Daily Questionnaire (PDQ), lets you know how much testosterone is involved in your life. Enrollees in studies are given this list to be filled out at the end of every day, a sort of \u201cAt any time today, did you experience?…\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over the years, the PDQ has been administered to thousands of men. The results correlate strongly to blood levels of testosterone (mainly) and estradiol (to a lesser extent).<\/p>\n\n\n\n An important research study, published just last month in the prestigious Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism<\/em>, measured the testosterone levels and tracked the PDQ responses every three months in 470 men. Half were given testosterone, the other half a placebo. In this particular study, all the men were over 65, but certainly men as young as their 30s can have both low PDQ scores and low testosterone levels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The study has gotten a lot of publicity because, after one year, among those men receiving testosterone, ten of the 12 PDQ questions showed statistically significant improvement. The only two that did not change after T treatment were flirting by others and daytime spontaneous erections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a bonus, just about every man taking testosterone enjoyed two additional orgasms every month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However–always a big however–what also didn\u2019t change was erectile dysfunction (ED). Testosterone does not help ED.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHa\u201d snapped my physician-friend, \u201cNothing like being horny and<\/u> helpless!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I put my hand up to object.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Next, of course, is dealing with the unreliability of your penis. Now that you can move your testosterone to a respectable level, you need Viagra, Levitra, Cialis, or Stendra within reach. But even this may not be enough. There\u2019s more to sex than a tent pole in your pants and the testosterone of a 20-year-old. You also need to consider:<\/p>\n\n\n\n My friend acknowledged that all these possibilities–raising testosterone, enhancing erections, managing sex-killing meds–undeniably offered hope. But he couldn\u2019t leave it alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDavid, memory is easier. And you can enhance memory with your imagination. No one ever said that sexual fantasies as rich as any Marseille bouillabaisse need be truthful. We go through life relentlessly kidding ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Okay, so I\u2019ll never get anywhere with my Gallic friend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For you, here\u2019s a better sex bucket list<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019d like to add that I didn\u2019t discuss this bucket list with my dinner companion. He\u2019d started sipping a Charentes cognac and was recalling some philosophy student he\u2019d seduced while at the Sorbonne. He was probably about 25 at the time, when concepts like low libido and erectile dysfunction were the stuff of dystopic science fiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Be well, I was at dinner with an old physician colleague of mine who happens to be French. Despite living in the Midwest for decades, he continues his lifetime subscription to Le Monde and preserves–no, cultivates–his accent so efficiently that I miss about ten percent of what he\u2019s saying. Given we were both well into our second […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2087,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,187,62,246],"tags":[1045,425,1414,764,1882,1194,217,171,1145,428,1048,1279,432],"class_list":["post-7845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-knowledge-base","category-mens-health","category-t","category-thyroid-adrenal-sex-hormone-issues","tag-erectile-dysfunction","tag-hormones","tag-lack-of-sex-drive","tag-loss-of-interest-in-sex","tag-male-hormones","tag-male-menopause","tag-prescription-drugs","tag-sex","tag-sex-drive","tag-sex-hormones","tag-sexual-performance","tag-side-effects","tag-testosterone"],"yoast_head":"\r\nI wasn\u2019t buying it<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The downside: ED<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Better sex bucket list<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
David Edelberg, MD<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"