Why Some Men Come Faster Than Others

If we take a look at the two largest studies about the average sex time, we find out that the median time of vaginal penetration is around five minutes and a half. That means that 50% of men habitually come in less than five minutes.

As you might notice, I don’t mention the mean, but the median. The median is preferred to the average by researchers because, when we talk about ejaculation latency, the standard deviation is quite high.

In simpler terms, that means that there is a lot of variation between how men last during PiV sex. You can find men that ejaculate before they enter the vagina and other that simply can’t ejaculate during sex. Between those two extremes, you have a wide range of sexual responses.

Based on the surveyed mentioned above, The International Society for Sexual Medicine (ISSM) developed an evidence-based definition of premature ejaculation. The ISSM set the bar at the one-minute mark. If you ejaculate most of the times before one minute, you are, statistically speaking, at the end of the spectrum.

There's a lot of misconception about premature ejaculation. First of all, we often hear in the media that around 20% to 30% of men suffer from premature ejaculation. This 20% to 30% represents the proportion of men that think they are premature ejaculators. If we take the ISSM definition, premature ejaculation is less common.

Another misconception about premature ejaculation is about its causes. In the 70s, famous sex therapists Masters and Johnson proposed a behavioral explanation for premature ejaculation. They thought that premature ejaculators learned to come quickly because of lousy masturbation habits. They never learned to control their arousal level during masturbation and developed a quick ejaculatory reflex.

Although learning to modulate your arousal level is a psychosexual skill that will help you to last longer, it's not the root cause of premature ejaculation (at least not the ISSM medical definition of premature ejaculation). However, it may explain why some men think they are premature ejaculator even if they don't fit the ISSM criteria.

It’s possible to learn how to last longer. Sex therapist use, with success, different exercises to help men develop a slower, more controlled sexual response. However, initially, how you learned to masturbate can’t explain why some men last a handful of seconds and others need hours of intense stimulation.

Some men come fast since the first time they masturbate. Recent findings pointed out a lot of different factors that can influence ejaculation control. For example, the level of some neurotransmitter (like serotonin) or some hormones (like TSH or Testosterone) affect how long you last. Even some anatomical difference can play a role in ejaculation latency. Slowly but surely, those biological explanations become more and more known.

Even if there are psychological aspects to rapid ejaculation, premature ejaculation is not “in your head.” Neurobiological factors define how long a man last in bed. And those neurobiological factors, we have more and more reasons to believe that they are hereditary. In the end, the reason why some men ejaculate faster than other is probably the same as why some men have red hairs. It ’s merely because of your genetic profile. You’re quick because your ancestors were quick.