Jack & Lita: Male Orgasm and Ejaculation Control

I decided to introduce you to this next couple because my interview with them touched on two important questions:  How can couples manage if the two people feel very different about the spiritual or religious side of Tantra? And how important is the role of “sacredness” in what is often called “sacred sexuality”?

The other reason that I wanted to write up this interview for the blog is that Jack is the only man I talked to who had been able to go beyond the kegel clamp method for having multiple orgasms, to being able to trigger a complete orgasm without ejaculation by an act of will.  We’ll get to his account of what that learning process was like at the end of part one of this interview.

Each of the three couples we’ve met so far consists of two people who see Tantra in pretty much the same way. They have a few differences, but they’re minor. Indeed, my reaction as I think back on the interviews with those couples, is that, in many ways, each of those couples seems like a matched pair.

Hans and Anna are the most visibly alike, in age, height, and build. Cabot and Marla are the most physically different, but their social, educational, and psychological outlooks are just as similar to each other as Hans and Anna’s are, or Don and Cammie’s are.

What all three couples have is an indefinable sense of being each other’s obvious partners. Once you see them together, it’s hard to imagine them with anyone else. When each of these three couples got engaged and married, I doubt that a single person who knew them was surprised by their choices.

Our next couple, on the other hand, is a perfect example of “opposites attract”!

Jack and Lita

Jack, 51, is the safety officer on an offshore oil rig. When you first meet him, he gives off an immediate impression of tremendous solidity and authority. At 5’10, 220 lbs, he could be called overweight, but the bounce in his step and the muscles on his arms and shoulders suggest otherwise. He retired from the Navy as a master chief in explosive ordinance disposal [EOD], and has a masters in engineering. His nose looks like it’s been broken a few times. When he’s smiling, he looks like the good ol’ country boy he calls himself. When he frowns, your first reaction is that you wouldn’t want to be the person he’s mad at.

Lita, 44, owns and manages a small strip center that includes a Subway shop, a nail and beauty salon, a discount store, and her own studio, where she teaches yoga, meditation, judo, Taekwondo, and Tai Chi. She married for the first time at 19, got divorced at 25, and has a son, now in college. She’s around 5’3” and claims to be exactly half Jack’s weight, but she looks both taller and slimmer than that, almost elfin in appearance. Her long black hair, creamy skin, and dark, almond-shaped eyes reflect her half-Vietnamese ancestry, and make an interesting contrast to Jack’s blond crewcut, pale eyes, and weathered and sunburned complexion.

They’ve been married and doing Tantra for eight years.

I started by asking how they met.

Lita: Jack just showed up at the dojo one day after classes, and asked me if I knew anyone who needed a sparring partner. I asked him about his MA [martial arts] experience, got him to run through some moves, and told him flat out that he could probably whup anyone who lived around here. Then, you know, we just started talking, and ended up going out to dinner, and talking half the night away.

Jack: What she’s not telling you is that I got lazy doing the baby stuff and she knocked me on my ass!

Lita: Yeah, I love it when a big guy thinks I’m made of glass! But he’s exaggerating. I got him off balance, but he recovered. He’s just too fast and strong. Then I tried for a lock and he used an escape I’ve never seen before because it involved lifting me clear off the mat with one arm at a bad angle.

Jack’s more of a mixed martial arts guy than a purist, anyway. The military’s always been more interested in winning real fights than in winning contests or looking pretty, so he cuts corners a lot. I make him come and do classes with me every now and then so my best students can find out that pure technique only wins tournaments. Unless the other guy doesn’t know anything at all, size and strength do matter … a lot!

Jack: Anyway, we talked about martial arts, and her yoga classes, and what I did in the service, and where we grew up, and it turns out we both love sailing and fishing and stuff like that. Her dad’s a skipper, owns a couple of shrimp boats, and I grew up working on boats, so we both know what it’s like hanging around the docks and being out on the water. And, you know, one thing led to another and we made a date to go fishing.

Lita: He invited me out to his fishing shack and took advantage of my innocence!

Jack: Well, we did do some fishing, eventually! But I’d already decided I was going to marry her if she gave me half a chance.

Lita: Poor deluded boy! He still thinks it was his idea!

Beginning Tantra

What got you interested in Tantra?

Lita: I studied yoga and meditation for years, with a lot of different teachers because I moved around a lot when I was younger. I was raised as a sort of lukewarm Theravadan Buddhist and I majored in Eastern religions, so I was looking for people who actually knew something, not the usual supermarket New Age instant guru crap. So I ended up studying with people who came out of many different traditions, mostly Hindu, Tibetan Buddhism, and Tao.

Tibetan Buddhism is part of a long Tantric tradition, but not in the sense we’re talking about. I mean, you know the Dalai Lama is a Tantric master, right? But that doesn’t mean he’s good at Tantric sex, it means he’s a master of the spiritual side of Tantra, the tantrayana path. So I got a lot of the purely religious side of Tantra from meditation classes and my interest in Mahayana and Vajrayana, which are completely different from the Buddhism I was raised with, but what was strange was that I didn’t actually learn anything about what we think of as Tantra until I studied Taoism.

Jack: Tell her about the sex gurus.

Lita: They had a nice little gig teaching people how to have bigger orgasms. A girlfriend of mine went to one of their workshops and came back babbling about seeing a guy actually demonstrating live in front of the class how to rub a girl’s clit. Then his wife gets a guy up there and demonstrates how to give a guy a handjob! This was back in the 90s, and she just couldn’t believe that they would do that in front of other people.

Anyway, I figured out that she was talking about something that had been borrowed from Tantric and Taoist rituals, so I bought a few books, and then a few more. I had a boyfriend at the time, and he got interested in all the promises about great sex, but he was never willing to do the work to actually learn how. Same thing a few years later with another guy, but he was a dud anyway. He already thought he was God’s gift to women, so why should he learn to do anything different? So I had experimented a little bit, and had read a lot, but never found anyone to share it with.

Then this big lunk here came along, and I figured I’d missed my last chance at “sacred sex,” because you’d have a hard time finding a less spiritual guy. But he surprised me! I gave him one of my books, and he read it and asked me a lot of questions about it, so I gave him some more, and he suggested we give it a try.

Jack: What she means is that she brought them out to my place and left them behind for me to find, so I read them out of curiosity. And when I started asking her to explain what all this Sanskrit and Hindi and Tibetan and Chinese meant, she lit up like it was Christmas morning! Well, you know, I’m really not even half as dumb as I look, so I decided to play along. When we finally got past all the stuff about chakras and cosmic oneness, it turns out that there was some good stuff there, so I was glad I did.

Lita: What surprised me at the time was that he was an absolute natural at it. The first time I asked him to meditate with me, he sat down and was deep into it right away. I didn’t know then how much of that he’d already learned in the Navy.

Jack: I’ve been doing martial arts since I was nineteen, so I know how important it is to be able to clear your mind and find your center. And EOD teaches you the same thing, but it’s a thousand times more important. You don’t want to let your mind wander when you’re taking a bomb apart, and you absolutely don’t want to freeze or panic if something goes wrong! So a lot of guys in EOD learn to meditate.

Of course, I’d never done it with an incredibly sexy woman sitting next to me stark naked, so it was just a bit more challenging!

Lita: We fumbled around a lot, trying different ways of doing things, until we met Al and Ali [Alan and Alice, the couple who introduced me to Jack and Lita]. They gave us some practical suggestions and answered some questions we had, and we were able to figure out the rest on our own.

The biggest problem we had at the beginning was that Jack just wasn’t comfortable with the language. Every time a book talked about kundalini energy, or chakras, or the importance of controlling spirit through breathing, he wanted to argue, or at least to pin down what they meant by it. So many questions! Is it electrical? Or chemical? Is it in the body, or just in the mind? How can you tell the difference between spirit breathing and just air?

Jack: I think the hardest parts for me to deal with were where these guys just go completely nuts about doing magic and curing diseases. The Kundalini yoga books are the worst. You read them and it’s obvious that they think no one ever needs to die of cancer. All you have to do is meditate real hard, clear the blockage in your chakras, and, presto, you’re healed!

Plus, they’re always saying that if you do it wrong – meaning if you listen to that other guy over there – you’re gonna make yourself sick as hell, maybe go crazy or have a “spiritual crisis,” whatever that is, and commit suicide. Of course, the other guy down the road is saying the exact same thing about how this guy’s version of nirvana is deadly poison! It just sounds to me like a bunch of really slick conmen trying to out-hustle each other.

Lita: It took me a while to figure out that I wasn’t going to be able to explain something like Kundalini to Jack in a way that he would ever accept. I’ve seen this in my yoga and meditation classes. The language makes perfectly good sense to me. I can feel my chakras. I know when my energy is moving well and when it isn’t. I can feel when it is flowing in my nadis and when it’s blocked.

I know how hard it is to work through a problem when things aren’t going right, and it really helps me to know what’s going on at a spiritual level as well as a physical level. And a lot of my students respond really well to that language and to the fact that I can explain things from my own personal experience.

But then there are some people who come to my classes, and instead of helping them, the language of yoga and meditation is like a wall of pointed sticks, making a barrier. Even if they try to climb over it, it catches them and pokes at them, and you can’t learn to meditate, you can’t find inner calm or peace, if you’re constantly being poked with words that are like sharp sticks in your brain. So I have to be able to set my experience aside and explain things differently, in words that make sense to them. And that’s how it was for Jack.

Jack: And, you know, I still can’t decide whether she’s so used to her way of describing things that it just seems real to her, or whether I’m the one being blind to this whole other level of existence.

But I already know from my own experience that things like meditation don’t depend on being holy and pure, or spiritually enlightened, or believing in some mystical diagram or ancient scripture or yogic teaching. It’s something anyone can do, no gobbledygook required. All it takes is practice. And not using the right magic words isn’t going to make you sick, any more than using the right ones is going to make you well.

Lita: It also helped that we were reading some of the Taoist books, and they take a different approach to a lot of things. I mean, some of it is just different words – ching and chi for prana or energy, meridians for nardis, centers instead of chakras – but they emphasize how you have to complete the circuit and bring the energy back down to your base, which Kundalini mostly ignores, and I think that’s important.

Jack: Of course, the Taoists also tell you that doing it the Kundalini way will fry your brain and drive you insane. I’m not joking or exaggerating. They say exactly that.

And the Taoists are also nuts in their own special way. Those guys are completely obsessed with this idea that a man is going to make himself sick if he ejaculates more than a couple of times a month. And after you turn 60, you’re not supposed to ejaculate ever again! I mean, they get crazy on the subject of how unhealthy it supposedly is for men to ejaculate! I first read that, and I was going, WTF? What planet do these dudes live on, anyway? What species are they talking about? Because it sure ain’t human beings!

Multiple Orgasms for Men

Lita: Okay, but they had some good ideas on multiple orgasms, and you can’t do that if you come every time.

Jack: Well, yeah, but why do they have to take everything to extremes? It’s like boys having a pissing contest, or comparing dicks. Once they figured out that you can come without ejaculating, it’s like this big competition. “I can have umpty-zillion orgasms, screw a bazillion women, and never squirt, so I’m a bigger holy man than you are!” What kind of screwed up nonsense is that?

Lita: Is this a surprise? Men are competitive! You know that! Everything they do becomes a competition. If it gets them power or money or sex, they’ll say and do anything. You guys can’t just fish without turning it into a fishing contest! You can’t just sail without turning it into a race! You always want something you can strut about!

What makes you think a bunch of Chinese monks are going to be any different? Especially if the winner gets to brag about having the longest-lasting hard on and gets all the girls because they think he’s great in bed!

What did you find out about male orgasms? Was it helpful?

Jack: Well, yes and no. The basic ideas are pretty simple. Most of the actual information in one of these books would fit in four or five pages, but that doesn’t sell books, so it has to be mixed with page after page of mystical stuff and bad advice about relationships, along with quotes from ancient texts, and what this teacher or that guru said, and why all the other books are crap. I was about to give up when Alan lent me a copy of The Multi-Orgasmic Man, which has a lot of good info, mixed in with a lot less junk than usual. I mean it still has all the Taoist crap about how ejaculation is bad for you, and it’s got some BS about reflexology and homeopathic medicine, but it’s mostly about practical techniques.

Lita: It helped that Jack had done it as a kid.

Jack: Well, that’s weird, because I just assumed that all boys did that. Don’t they? I mean, I don’t ever remember not playing with myself! And boys can come as many times as they want until they start to ejaculate. I’ve never asked other guys, but I’d think most guys would remember jerking off three or four times in a row when they were nine or ten.

Lita: Well, I’d never heard of it, and none of the guys I knew ever mentioned it, so I don’t think it’s universal. And, you know, most girls never have multiple orgasms when they’re young because they stop after the first one. I don’t think it ever even occurred to me to keep masturbating after I came once. I bet most boys are the same way.

Was it hard to learn how to do it again?

Jack: It took a few months to figure it out, and a lot longer than that to get to where I could do it reliably. In a way it was easier for me because of being out on the rig. Counting transportation time, I’m home for twelve nights and away for sixteen. So Lita and I get our fun time, but then I have two weeks on the rig, which is a great time for practice. My cabin is really nice, and it’s private, not a bunkroom, so I can lock the door, meditate, and then do the control exercises.

Lita: He means he can look at porn and jerk off!

Jack: Who needs porn when I can think about you and what we’re gonna do when I get home? Or just call you and cyber for a bit? But, seriously, porn would make it way harder to learn control.  I really don’t recommend it.  In fact, I think most guys would benefit from having a strict “no porn” policy the entire time they’re trying to learn this stuff.

So, what’s it like? In a way, it’s like learning to raise only one eyebrow instead of two. You have to pay attention until you can figure out how to separate these two things that usually go together. An orgasm is not that same thing as an ejaculation. It doesn’t feel the same and it doesn’t have to happen at the same time. But because us guys are so used to having them happen together, it’s hard to separate them.

Now, of course, that’s all old news, and I wouldn’t go back to the old way for anything.

Can you describe what you did as you were learning to do this?

Jack: Hmmm. Well, I can try. It starts out with just masturbating as slow as you can, really stretching it out. No jerking off, but lots of open-handed stroking all around the area. Really, I’m trying to do for myself what Lita does during a lingam massage. And I would bring myself up as close as possible to an orgasm, but not TOO close, and then back off, over and over.

It’s really hard to do this more than three or four times. Or it was for me. Your monkey brain keeps coming up with all sorts of reasons why you should just get on with it!

Sometimes I would give in too soon, or I would misjudge and come too close to the brink, and in cases like that I’d usually start over again an hour later. And it’s usually easier to stretch it out and control it the second time. So sometimes I’d come back to the cabin and have a quick jerk the old way, then read for a bit or talk to Lita, and then spend an hour practicing before going to sleep. Sometimes, if I was really tired, I’d just practice for an hour and go to sleep without coming the second time.

What you’re doing is going way down inside and studying your own sensations, watching how the sexual tension builds, and learning to calibrate just where you are on the curve, so you can learn to catch it at the last second before the orgasm becomes inevitable. When you get to that point, you clamp down as hard as you can [with a kegel contraction] and just hold it until the urge to cum has dropped down a bit. And you keep repeating that until you goof and clamp down too late, and then you’re finished, at least for a while.

Eventually, you hit it just right, and the orgasm happens while you are doing the Kegel, but without any squirt, or with just a drop or two. Anyway, you get contractions, but there’s no big pumping action during the orgasm, just an orgasm like the ones boys have before they’re old enough to make sperm.

That’s what you got from the books?

Jack:  Yes, that’s what they teach you to do. So I learned how to do that, and it’s really useful. But what I found out eventually is that there’s a point slightly before that point when you can intentionally trigger the orgasm part without the ejaculation. If the normal kegel point is just a fraction of a second before the point of no return, this is maybe a whole second or two or three before that. It helps if the level of arousal is increasing very slowly, so you need to have a really, really light touch as you’re getting close.

So when I’m almost there, I kind of decide to have the orgasm. I’m visualizing it and anticipating it, and when the time feels right, I sort of flip a mental switch and think go, and it happens. All my muscles tighten, I can feel the ripples moving from my butt to my cock, there’s the same pleasure peak with each surge, but there’s no contraction inside and no spurt. And this happens without having to do the Kegel thing and hold it.

Is it possible that tensing your muscles is what actually triggers it?

Jack:  Hmmm. Yes, I suppose it is, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like the orgasm starts and then the first external symptom is that I tense up all over. But if I deliberately hold off that tensing thing, I’m going to have to do a Kegel or blow my load, so it’s obviously an essential part of the process. It’s possible that what I feel as the start of the orgasm is actually me committing to start that general contraction.

Was your work with bomb disposal a help in learning to do this?

Jack:  You mean because they both involve preventing explosions? [Laughter]

Well, yeah, I suppose it was. You certainly learn to do stuff slowly and carefully and under rigid control! You know, sometimes the protocol is to turn a screw an eighth of a turn and wait, then do it again, and wait, and so on, over and over, maybe 40, 50 times. And you’re hot and tired, and it’s really sweaty inside the bomb suit, and the sweat is dripping off your nose and you can’t wipe it off, and you’ve been at it forever, and you just want to rip something out. But you don’t. So yeah, it teaches you patience and self-control.

But I think it’s also true that the recruiting and training process selects for those things. I can’t tell you how many times I nixed an application or washed a kid out just because he was too jumpy or impulsive for me. And those were all guys that most other people would describe as being pretty calm and deliberate.

So, yeah, if anyone is going to have the patience and control to learn this stuff, I’d say EOD guys are high on the list!

 We stopped the interview here for a break. I’ll post the second half next week.

Happy New Year!