So I am reading my Men's health book and suddenly I ran into the chapter on premature ejaculation (PE).
You asked me to look at this thread because you wondered if it would have gone better on the Linguistics board. So insted of reading all six steamy pages I'll just comment on the O.P., and try to keep my remarks in a linguistic vein.
First, let's make a logical assumption: The whole phrase was most likely created by a woman!
A reasonable assumption. In the monotheized West with its pathetic one-dimensional model of the human spirit, sex was relegated to the "evil" end of that model and was a taboo subject. It's only the last two or three generations (of Americans anyway) who could talk about it with any seriousness and it would naturally have been women who made the first comments about premature ejaculation, since most men had only a vague understanding of female sexuality and would not have even understood the context of the complaint.
Second, the phrase "making love" is a big fucking misnomer, because it is not love that you are making but (yes, you guessed it right again) babies!
You're certainly giving a linguist plenty of material to comment on.
Your analysis is precisely those same two or three generations out of date. Improved contraception and, later, availability of abortion freed humanity from the tyranny of biology (in the West anyway) just at the time when modern medicine made it not only unnecessary but downright bad citizenship to have large numbers of children. People were suddenly free to consider sex as anything but procreative. "Making love" was already a euphemism for hugging and kissing between lovers, so extending it to intercourse at the beginning of the Sexual Revolution was no stretch of the language.
So if the object of "having sex" is making babies. . . .
But it's not, in the majority of instances. I have a vasectomy and before that my girlfriends and first wife used prescription contraceptives, so in all the thousands of times (hehe) I've had sex since 1963, with all the hundreds of partners (hehe) NEVER was the objective to have babies. In fact NOT having babies was always a primary goal of the activity!
"Premature ejaculation (PE), also known as, rapid ejaculation, rapid climax, premature climax or early ejaculation, is the most common sexual problem in men, affecting 25%-40% of men." OK, it is not a definition yet, but we have a problem of characterising it as a sexual problem. Now if it occurs in almost half (40%) of the men, could it be that it is actually NORMAL?
Again you're in desperate need of linguistic assistance. "Normal" and "problem" are not mutually exclusive. High blood pressure is common enough to be considered normal. Does that mean it's not a problem? There have been periods in the history of civilization when war was the "normal" state of affairs.
"It is characterized by a lack of voluntary control over ejaculation." Excuse me? Unless you are a pornstar and have to save it for the moneyshot, as long as your penis makes it into the vagina, you are good naturally speaking and forget about voluntarism.
This sounds like a man of my grandfather's generation talking, except I don't think men talked about such things 100 years ago. There are all kinds of things a man can do to delay climax and it's hardly unpleasurable for either party to have the activity last a few minutes longer. Even more common is performing oral sex first, either to give your partner a head start on an orgasm, or simply to give her one that way first so it's no longer an issue.
"Masters and Johnson stated that a man suffers from premature ejaculation if he ejaculates before his sex partner achieves orgasm in more than fifty percent of their sexual encounters." This is the biggest load of crap I ever read as a definition. Mind you an important part of this definition is not your ability to voluntarily control ejaculation, but your partner's ability to fucking achieve it!
Of course there are a significant number of women (some of them tell me it's a whole lot more than we think) who simply can't get off from standard coitis and we have other fun things to do with them. But for most women it does happen, after five minutes or more, and it's impossible for them to "speed it up." You've got three choices: 1. "Slow it down" yourself so you can stay in there long enough to get them to it; 2. Do a lot of one of those other "fun things" first so they're nine-tenths of the way there when you start; 3. Don't give a damn and let her decide what to do about the real "problem," which is the one named "you."
"Other sex researchers have defined premature ejaculation as occurring if the man ejaculates within two minutes of penetration. . . . however, a survey by Alfred Kinsey in the 1950s demonstrated that three quarters of men ejaculate within two minutes of penetration in over half of their sexual encounters." And here we have another mathematical problem!! if 3/4 of men do it, than it is actually the norm and not the exception!
The same linguistic fallacy. No one said that something has to be exceptional to be a problem.
Imagine the bull screwing one female and a dozen other females waiting in line, and the bull looks at his watch and turns towards the rest of the herd: "Sorry ladies, but this lady still has 90 seconds left until the 2 minute limit, so I have to hold back for a while longer!"
Using cattle as a metaphor for human sex is just the sort of thing that makes a man not very attractive to women.
I won't say much about your clinical knowledge of sex beyond, "Geeze dude, I hope you're being sarcastic and are not a representative sample of modern American manhood." But as far as language goes, you've made quite a few errors.
The point is: Because of advances in technology and other aspects of civilization, women now expect intercourse to be enjoyable, rather than merely a means of increasing family size or of subserviently making their men happy. Anything that interferes with that is perceived as a problem, no matter how common or "normal" it may be.
