I spent five hours learning about erections and pleasure.

Image: Priapus depicted with the attributes of Mercury in a fresco found at Pompeii

Most people wouldn’t give up a whole day to sit in a room and learn about erections for five hours. But I’m not most people. This is the thing I think about when I’m gazing into the distance, and the thing I can’t shut up about at dinner. So when my friend and colleague Chant Malan announced a workshop on erections and pleasure, I immediately signed up.

Chant’s a clinical sexologist and counselling psychologist. They called the session “From Performance to Pleasure,” and by the end, I understood exactly why.

We usually think about an erection like it’s a switch. On when you want it, off when you’re done. And if it misbehaves, there must be something wrong with you.

But it’s nothing like a switch. It’s actually one of the most complicated things your body pulls off. Blood, nerves, hormones, brain chemistry, whether you feel safe, whether your head is in the room or three days away at work. All of it has to line up at once.

So I guess the real surprise isn’t the times it doesn’t work. It’s how reliably it does.

And the times it doesn’t? That’s not rare. It gets more common as the years go on, which means most men meet it sooner or later. It’s not a flaw or ruling on whether you count as a man. It’s just a human body behaving like a human body.

And somewhere along the line, we’ve decided an erection is evidence of something totally unrelated to physiology.

Like proof you want her, proof you’ve still got it, proof you’re a real man. We took a fragile bit of biology and turned it into a scorecard for your worth as a human being. So of course, it feels like everything is riding on it. You’ve been told it is.

We’ve been obsessed with the erect penis for a very long time. Chant showed us evidence of erections in ancient art, sculpture, and poetry dating back to at least the 7th century BC. Symbols of power, fertility, the divine. We’ve been piling meaning onto this one part of the body since before we could write it down.

Chant laid out the script that most of us follow without critical thought. Sex means penetration. It’s led by a hard penis. It’s over when he comes. Everything else is a warm-up or a consolation prize.

And the way out of this trap is almost boringly simple. Make pleasure the point, not performance.

Then the erection stops being the bouncer at the door deciding whether anything is allowed to happen. It’s welcome when it turns up. But it’s not the whole point.

The moment you open your mind to exploring pleasure, regardless of what the penis is doing, you get to ask better questions.

What do I like?

What have I been curious about for years and never said out loud?

What would I try if nobody was keeping score?

And one more thing, because I care about the whole of you and not just your sex life. If your erections have turned unreliable, see a doctor. Your penis is sometimes the first place your body raises a flag about your heart, your circulation, and your blood sugar.

Five hours on one small subject, and I walked out feeling like it was never really about erections. It was about permission. To be a whole man in a whole body, allowed to feel things, instead of a machine being marked on whether it performed on cue.

That’s the work. That’s why I love it.

If any of this landed, my free audio is the easiest way in.