I think I need to swear off reading press releases for scientific studies. Most of the time I’m left either confused or angry and either way I find myself flinging granola at my monitor in the morning, which, considering I eat granola with yogurt, is getting pretty messy.
This week’s culprit began like this:
Premature ejaculation can be embarrassing, but a new study suggests that it might be a genetic disorder.
The release is for a study that claims to demonstrate that premature ejaculation is linked to a particular gene expression, and not environmental factors. Despite a lot of grandiose claims in the release, the study doesn’t prove any of this, it only guesses and justifies. But I couldn’t even get to the study; I couldn’t get past the first sentence.
I wasn’t sure at first what bugged me so much about that sentence. Was it the implication that if only men realized that premature ejaculation was genetic they’d no longer be embarrassed by it? Does anyone believe that guys who aren’t able to maintain an erection as long as they think they should be able to are going to be happier or feel better with this knowledge? Those who believe this argue that once something is understood to be outside our control, call it a disease or genetic, there’s less stigma. But that, frankly, is bullshit. Try living with a disease, any disease. It’s a truckload of stigma and frankly living with a disease usually comes with other drags that take precedence over dealing with the social stigma.
I may have been bothered by the sentence because of how easily it took a rich, complicated experience like premature ejaculation, something that offers a portal into a new way of thinking of sex and experiencing ourselves as sexual and transformed it into a on/off switch, with a simple definition and a simple solution.
Or what might have bugged me the most was that being neurotic and a fast reader, I unconsciously skipped ahead to the last paragraph of this three-paragraph release, the one that read:
...the increasing evidence for a genetic cause of premature ejaculation opens the way for the development of new drug treatments - something that many men might benefit from...
Yup, it was probably that.
Read more - A genetic link to premature ejaculation
Completely agree with you here, what a ridiculous statement to make.
Saying something is biological is a gateway to saying it needs to be treated with drugs. Even if something is biological, it still has a psychological component. Duh!
Now you know how women feel.